I will start with the commonly shared notion of freedom as ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’.¹ This is a reasonable fore-understanding of freedom, especially since it is commonly operative in the academy and outside it as well. It might be necessary, at a later point, to give up these two notions but equally, it is necessary to begin with these.

Academic freedom, then, is freedom to produce new ideas, concepts, analyses and descriptions (roughly called ‘knowledge’), and these must be institutionalizable.² Within the humanities, this would mean new ideas, concepts, analyses and descriptions of the processes of being human. If we are to think in terms of ‘freedom from’, it is necessary to state that academic freedom is freedom from god, faith, belief and dogma, though not necessarily in that order. In this context, I cannot but remember an aphorism of Kierkegaard’s: ‘People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.’ With this fore-understanding, we could proceed with our inquiry.

In every inquiry, there are those who make the inquiry and there is that which is inquired about, and there is the specific entity to which the inquiry can specifically be addressed.³ In our inquiry it is clear that academic freedom is that which is inquired about, and we as academics are the ones making the inquiry. The academy has three kinds of persons: teachers, students, and administrators. We cannot immediately address our inquiry to administrators, since in our fore-understanding we might have to see them maximally as agents who assist in, or minimally, as agents who catalyze, the manifestation of our unfreedom as teachers and analysts. That leaves us with teachers and students. We could leave out those teachers and students who are administrators as well – as people who are necessarily divided between academic work and administration, and thus will provide divisive answers – especially those who also control distribution of funds. I shall come back to administrators in a little while. We could then say that the inquiry could only be addressed to students-as-academics, and also to teachers-as-academics.

 

We might initially inquire into unfreedom as a step towards an answer to our inquiry. This is also necessary, I think, because more often than not, unfreedom is fundamentally assumed in notions of freedom.⁴ A particular operative notion of freedom responds to a particular operative notion of unfreedom. For the purposes of this paper, I will suspend a possible discussion of the logical or chronological priority of unfreedom, and suggest that we usually work with both freedom and unfreedom.

I suggest that students work with their unfreedom during examinations in which they have to sit and write answers to questions for an hour or three hours. These examinations test their memory, and writing speed. Their careers depend on these examinations. It seems to me that one of the defining moments of unfreedom is failure in these examinations. It is an instance of failure to work effectively with unfreedom. It is when I do not remember what I have memorized, but I want to; or I cannot write fast enough to answer all the questions, but I want to; that I fail to operate my unfreedom, fail the examination.⁵

Another instance would be incomprehension, and this is qualitatively more interesting: it is when I do not understand a large part of what is being said by teachers or fellow students that I feel as if there is something wrong, something incomplete in me. I want to understand, but my history and my ‘intelligence’ prevent me, in advance, from understanding. This struggle – and subsequent failure to understand – should not be underestimated. It is a little like how stone gathers a human face under a sculptor’s hands, but the sculptor leaves it incomplete. As a student, that moment when I desperately grope for comprehension is a moment of unfreedom.

 

It is necessary to think in terms of comprehension and understanding because this is the main business of the academy, upon which ideas, concepts, analyses and descriptions are premised. It follows that freedom is that which happens when I comprehend something: an equation, a relation of similarity or difference, a concept, a word, a pattern, an argument etc. This moment of comprehension enhances my comprehension of the world that I inhabit, either quantitatively, adding a new piece of knowledge, or qualitatively, by intensifying or broadening an already existing piece of knowledge.

It is clear that these moments of comprehension will vary in quality and quantity, and might relate to one another in varying qualities and quantities. These moments of comprehension are transitive, by which I mean transitory and transitional. This ambivalence cannot be seen if we think of freedom as substance or attribute of some substance, or as a structure of continuous inherence (or invariable concomitance). It is also to be noted that this moment of comprehension reconfigures earlier moments of comprehension. This description is necessary to distinguish academic freedom from freedom in general.

 

We thus obtain two processes of what we could call academic freedom: one is that such freedom happens when we are able to operate our unfreedom – that is to say, to pass the examination; and the other is that freedom happens when we comprehend something. It seems to me that the ability to operate our unfreedom can perhaps be acquired as an ability, a potentiality, making it less transitory than the other feature. I would submit that this is more like acquiring the skill to acquire skills, and yet we cannot predict which specific skills will be acquired: constancy without prognosis, continuity without substantive inherence. Transitive moments of comprehension, on the other hand, are discrete and far more unpredictable. While it is true that acquiring the skill to acquire skills is strictly non-trivial, it seems to me that one can neither acquire nor continually maintain the skill to comprehend.

This is not to suggest that it is some natural talent, but that a different operation is involved: I shall call the operation ‘friendly reception’. I call it that with a sideways glance at the cluster of words that is thrown up by an etymological query into the word ‘free’, in its consonant relationship to the etymologies of ‘friend’.⁶ Through various layers of various languages, one reaches a Proto-Indo-European root, *prijos. The word-cluster indicates an ancient excess, a reaching out that does not expect, want, need, or exact anything in return, least of all reciprocity or exchange. Yet this excess is productive. One could thus say ‘to love, to befriend, is a setting-free’, and in a syntactic chiasmus ‘to set free is to love, to befriend’. Or again, one would say ‘one befriends freely’. This allows us to see relationships between friendship and freedom. This one example is sufficient, I think, to indicate the various semantic strands that are present in the word-cluster. I mention these etymologies not in order to invoke some ancient truth hidden, or revealed, in a hypothetical language, but to indicate the word-cluster. This cluster will, I think, take us in many interesting directions, expanding the semantic domain of the word ‘free’. Freedom could now be said to be a region of meanings, rather than a state of being free, or something that someone possesses, a substance.

 

With this sideways glance at the word-cluster one could say: the moments of comprehension (when our mind unexpectedly opens, with love and friendship, to something new) give us discrete glimpses of this region called ‘freedom’: like in astronomy stars give us a glimpse of the vastness of the universe, and yet we refer to these regions by the ancient names of constellations. These moments necessarily remain discrete since their transitivity prevents them from becoming constant or continuous. This would suggest that one can inhabit the region of freedom, but in a sporadic and intermittent manner. The discreteness gives a different temporality to such freedom: there is a burst of comprehension, and then a wait for the next moment of comprehension. I might have to wait until death for the next moment, or it might come sooner than I can expect.

 

It is clear that the academy as academy is one of the few places where the region called freedom is glimpsed more frequently than most other places.⁷ The academy as such has been, traditionally, a place for free thinking, free knowledge, and very often knowledge that was not immediately useful for anything at all. It seems to me that the production of knowledge that is not immediately useful should be constantly kept in mind. Radio astrophysics or literary studies could serve as examples: the knowledge that is produced is very often not immediately usable in any sense of the word. Calculating the movement of the stars, or listening to the big bang cannot be put to technological or industrial use – not within the foreseeable future, not in the present state of knowledge. Similarly, the study of literature cannot be put to any immediate technological or industrial use. The relationship between knowledge production and techno-industrial use is very different in such knowledge, as is the temporality.

To think in international terms,⁸ one would first have to think about the ‘inter’ of ‘international’: this space between (inter) nations, which presumably is the space that is left all over the globe as a remainder of nationalisms, national territories, nationalist delimitations of local cultures etc.; this is not to be confused with any interstitial space between nations, nor is it to be confused with the no man’s land that is a marked territory, marked precisely as specific space that belongs to no particular nation, yet always only falls between two nations.

It would follow I think that academic freedom must necessarily be international in the sense that such freedom functions in that remaindered space. This space again, is not to be confused with intellectual bonds that academics form across nationalities and cultures. It should be possible to suggest that local operations of academic freedom – say, me attempting to design a new syllabus at my university – are premised upon a local notion of the operation international academic freedom.⁹

 

It follows I think that once the local operation of academic freedom is informed by an internationalized operation of academic freedom, the teaching in the humanities changes, and this ties in with the fact that humanities teach, study, analyze and describe various processes of being human. In as much as most forms of restricting academic freedom use local mechanisms of power and administration and legal provisions, the internationalized notion of academic freedom might prove minimally ameliorative. This ties in again with the notion that the academic freedom has something to do with that space/time which makes possible a loving reception of new and/or different processes of being human. I do not mean to suggest that all these operations are easy or that the local practice of academic freedom is not fraught with all manner of venomous polemics, including ad hominem arguments, victimization, religious dogma, and plain domination and coercion. Without doubt, a local discussion of local internationalized academic freedom, and an internationalization are necessary precisely because it is fraught with these.

 

One of the major interactions in the academy is the interaction between teachers-as-academics, and students-as-academics. We have already seen the kind of freedom these might experience: we have anchored it by the notion of comprehension of the new or the different. However, as in all interactions between two parties, there exists the fundamental possibility of non-comprehension. It is this non-comprehension that, in a certain sense, produces unfreedom. Non-comprehension can occur in many ways, but it seems to me that one privileged mode of non-comprehension is the expectation of instantaneous comprehension.

It is here that we find a kind of similarity between what happens outside the academy and what happens inside. Outside the academy the value of knowledge is gauged by its immediate applicability in terms of business or technology that might enhance business. A similar trend can be observed in the humanities as well: knowledge that is immediately usable is encouraged, funded, rewarded; knowledge that is not is seen as unproductive. Psychology could serve as an example: in some places psychology is reduced to designing various kinds of aptitude and intelligence quotient tests, and Freud’s texts are pushed onto the back-shelves in the library, since no one is reading them.

In English studies it is quick-fix language teaching that is encouraged, and rhetoric harnessed to marketing and advertisement. A very large number of students of English have found employment as language and communications skills trainers, especially within IT related business firms. In such a situation time seems to contract, everything that is to be done has to be done now, instantly. It seems to me that there is a relationship between the notion of exchange and this contraction of time. The abstract equivalence of the exchanged commodities too seems to be a matter of the instant.¹⁰

 

Exchanges of commodities are instantaneous in principle, though in practice, with mutual agreement, a delay might be introduced in the exchange of actual goods. The temporality of the instant drives most technological changes that have taken place in the world: faster travel, instant messaging, transfer of money at the speed of radio frequencies, or optical fibre.

Texts or events or phenomena that require a slow, long engagement begin to seem useless, and the deliberate or chance encounter with the uncomprehended begins to seem pointless. That which made freedom inhabitable – that moment when we comprehended something uncomprehended – comes to seem to take too long a time. It begins to look as if we cannot ‘afford to spend that much time’ on these moments of freedom. Once the slow engagement with an argument or intellectual position that we have not yet comprehended is agitated by the temporality of the instant, the uncomprehended can be easily stigmatized or transmogrified. The un-understood can thus be rendered unintelligible, and the unintelligible rendered unintelligent. This allows a quick trivialization of anything that is not comprehended quickly.

 

The not so distant echo of this almost surreptitious, almost unconscious expectation of instantaneous comprehension constitutes the decline of the humanities. This is assisted by administrators who demand executive summaries of departmental or individual achievements and similar quickly comprehensible results of research and thought. Anything that seems to pre-empt such quick comprehension quickly becomes anathema. A conversation with administrators might be necessary: however, the terms of the conversation – that is to say the terms that would be useful in the conversation – need to be carefully established. One might say the paradigms are different enough to pre-empt a friendly reception by either academics or administrators. In fact one could further say that it is not merely the terms of conversation, but the language itself that needs to be established first.

I started by describing academic freedom as the freedom to produce institutionalizable analyses, descriptions, and so on, of processes of being human. Perhaps it is in the conditions of possibility of the institutionalization of new knowledge that it might become possible to open a conversation with administrators, especially because they, in a certain sense, manage the infrastructure of academic institutions. It might even be the case that the decline of the humanities begins with the attempt to loosen strict norms of knowledge, and replace them with affectively charged and coded opinions; coupled with an opinionated recalcitrance about new knowledge, often common to academics and administrators.

 

If we address the issue of institutionalizability of new knowledge, we might approach a ground on which administrators may not feel discomfort. In a certain sense, this is the heart of academic work as well, collectively and historically to decide which knowledge is worth maintaining within the academy. Quite a few academics might be unwilling to allow administrators into this area. It might seem galling, but there is a relationship of similarity here between academics and administrators, in the context of new knowledge and administrative reforms: both meet new things with reluctance and resistance. Therefore it is this ground which might be suitable for both parties to meet and discuss and learn from each other.

One of the best ways in which one can learn and teach the practice of freedom is by studying ways of being human, and this is the primary area of knowledge in the humanities. I would argue that even more than the natural sciences, it is the humanities which are particularly entrusted with the learning and teaching of the practice of freedom. It is to be noted that in times of social conflict, it is usually knowledge produced within the humanities that becomes crucial, rather than knowledge produced within the natural sciences. In India and Maharashtra in particular, an historical knowledge of incidents in the life of culturally significant figures and places has become crucial. This can be seen in the debates about the Babri Masjid and about Shivaji, as in the James Lane controversy. It is the historical knowledge produced by traditionally Brahmin/Brahminical scholars that is being contested. This can also be seen in various anti-colonial¹¹ approaches to the colonizers’ cultural texts.

These considerations also enable us to interact with increasing social vigilantism, where self-appointed social groups take upon themselves the burden of ensuring that their own ideology or dogma or belief system is perpetuated by the academy. This was attempted, for example, in the state of Gujarat in India, and to a certain extent, in a few academic institutions in the state of Maharashtra as well. There was a time when it became necessary to analyze Hinduism in classrooms, and the belief system of students then was such that even an attempt to analyze was seen as an insult to Hindu gods and goddesses, and the rather well advertised pride in being a Hindu, as well as the euphemism of ‘hurting religious sentiments’.

 

The only way to respond to such dogmatism amongst students was to help them understand the texts that they professed to be sacred and valuable. It is to be noted that often such students or students’ groups, and the various political factions which back them do not seem to have a good knowledge of the texts themselves. In the university in which I used to teach, I like to believe, academics won the argument hands down, because they knew the ancient languages, and could quote from texts that the students themselves were proud of, but did not know.¹² It would not be too much to suggest that a good working knowledge of the tradition might be experienced as freedom. It was, for example, an experience of freedom for some students merely to know that there are many Hindu systems of thought that are atheistic.¹³ I do not mean to attach too much significance to the above, I mention it only to indicate one of the possibilities.

 

In this area, so adjacent to ‘the political’, it is easy to lose one’s way, and believe that ‘everything is political’. That is an incorrect statement, like most statements that use hyperbolic metonymies like ‘everything’ and ‘all’.¹⁴ Something that is usually not seen as a political matter can become or be made into one.¹⁵ That does not allow us to state that ‘everything’ is political. Used that way, the word ‘political’ loses most of its power. It seems to me that a humanities education – where we study various ways of being human and agree that they are valid and interesting and worth studying – can afford us different ways of ‘being political’, not just ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’. If we are willing to entertain the possibility of moving away from protest and resistance, we might be able to appreciate the mundane, not very exciting everydayness of ‘being political’ (so different from ‘everything is political’). It seems to me that ‘dissent’ is more interesting than protest or resistance, which are reactive modes that have to, always already, concede agency to oppressive agents before protesting or resisting.¹⁶

Dissent, ‘thinking differently’ in its etymological meaning, is one of the conditions of possibility of protest and resistance. It is as a condition of possibility that it can be discussed in institutions of education, and in fact intensifies the study of various ways of being human. As action to be performed, it cannot be taught, but as the possibility of thinking differently, it might become the prime focus of an education in humanities – even for teachers and students who do not want to learn to think differently – for one cannot think something without acknowledging the possibility of thinking otherwise. It is this acknowledgement that can actually be taught in institutions. This already is part of ‘common sense’, and can be extracted from it and thematized and theorized, as well as practised in the classroom conversation.

 

To conclude, I will very briefly recapitulate: to distinguish academic freedom from freedom in general it might be useful to think of it in terms of moments of comprehension of what could be called the as-yet-uncomprehended. This also allows us not to think of freedom in terms of a substance or attribute that someone, or anyone, might be stated to possess; as well as not to think of it in terms of state of being. Inasmuch as the as-yet-uncomprehended can only be comprehended by a loving and friendly and slow reception, demands for quick comprehension work towards unfreedom rather than freedom. It is such demands for quick comprehension that dominate outside the academy, and the echo of such demands within the academy could be said to be the beginning of the decline of humanities.

 

However, inasmuch as the academy is the place where new knowledge is acquired and institutionalized, we might also have to look at the processes of institutionalization. These processes will show that academics often work in tandem with administrators, who too are interested in the maintenance of existing structures of authority, funding, patronage, opportunity etc. It becomes clear again that the struggle is between the processes of institutionalization of new knowledge, and maintenance of old knowledge.

At the same time, there is a new form of social vigilantism which seeks to replace rigorous knowledge with opinion, often heavily charged with individual or group emotion and this is the second beginning of the decline of the humanities. I think it is possible to counterpose these processes with what I have called a friendly loving reception of the as-yet-uncomprehended. Since the main area of knowledge in the humanities are the various processes of being human, it seems to me that the humanities are particularly suited to learn and teach academic freedom in particular and freedom in general, and thinking differently.

 

* This is a modified version of a presentation in a colloqium at Columbia University, New York, on ‘Academic Freedom and the Decline of the Humanities’ in 2008. I am grateful for the comments I received.

Footnotes:

1. This is trivially true as well, however, it seems hard to get away from these conceptions of freedom. It is obvious that many conceptions of freedom, especially when it is conceived as a political entity or possession, treated as ‘freedom from’ (some variable), often neglecting the future oriented ‘freedom to’ (some variable).

2. Which is to say, it must have the possibility of being stable (at a state of equilibrium capable of change – similar to what I believe is called a dissipative structure in physics), it must be repeatable, it must be communicable. It should also be capable of being taught (repeatable and communicable) in educational institutions. None of these imply that it has to be the same.

3. This point is made in some detail by Martin Heidegger in the beginning of his Being and Time. The specific entity to which the ‘Question of Being’can be addressed turns out to be Da-Sein. The methodological importance of positing such a structure of ‘inquiry’ and such an entity cannot be overemphasized.

4. The clarity and coherence of our notion of freedom will depend on the clarity and coherence of our notion of unfreedom. It will not be very useful merely to think of bondage and oppression as the negations of freedom. Unfreedom may not always come in such unpleasant forms. We must constantly keep in mind the everydayness of both the notions, otherwise we will end up celebrating freedom as an exceptional moment and not a commonplace ocurrence, and unfreedom (conceived as bondage and oppression) as equally exceptional.

5. ‘Freedom’ here then is the ability to work on/with one’s unfreedom, over and above ‘freedom from’ and freedom to’.

6. Old English freo ‘free, exempt from, not in bondage, acting of one’s own will’, also ‘noble; joyful’, from Proto-Germanic *frija – ‘beloved; not in bondage’ (source also of Old Frisian fri, Old Saxon vri, Old High German vri, German frei, Dutch vrij, Gothic freis ‘free’), from PIE *priy-a – ‘dear, beloved’, from root *pri – ‘to love’ (source also of Sanskrit priyah ‘own, dear, beloved’, priyate ‘loves’; Old Church Slavonic prijati ‘to help’, prijatelji ‘friend’; Welsh rhydd ‘free’). The primary Germanic sense seems to have been ‘beloved, friend, to love’; which in some languages (notably Germanic and Celtic) developed also a sense of ‘free’, perhaps from the terms ‘beloved’ or ‘friend’ being applied to the free members of one’s clan (as opposed to slaves; compare Latin liberi, meaning both ‘free persons’ and ‘children of a family’). For the older sense in Germanic, compare Gothic frijon ‘to love’; Old English freod ‘affection, friendship, peace’, friga ‘love’, friðu ‘peace’; Old Norse friðr ‘peace, personal security; love, friendship’, German Friede ‘peace’; Old English freo ‘wife’; Old Norse Frigg ‘wife of Odin’, literally ‘beloved’ or ‘loving’; Middle Low German vrien ‘to take to wife’, Dutch vrijen, German freien ‘to woo’. http://etymonline. com/index.php?term=free& allowed_in_ frame=0 visted 29.06.2016

7. For the story behind the word ‘academy’, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademos visted 29.06.2016.

8. The brief for the colloqium suggested that participants also take internationality into account.

9. Over and above the brief for the colloqium, it seems to me that one cannot think of freedom without thinking internationally – whatever imaginative access to internationality we might have locally. This is essential I think because this is what makes for the possibility of being less ethnocentric than others, within and without the academy.

10. It seems to me that the instantaneity of the equality of the value of two things that satisfy our demands in two different ways (in short, exchange value as Marx describes it in the first few pages of his Capital) infects other operations of the mind as well. The increasing demand for quick comprehension – as opposed to slow and patient and loving elaboration of detail seems to be a symptom of such infection. This introduces a different temporality into the processes of understanding.

11. We must remember here that ‘anti-colonial’ is not the same as ‘post-colonial’.

12. This alarming ignorance of the tradition that they are proud of has increased over the years.

13. The Carvaka or Lokayata tradition is the oldest. It is worth repeating one of the famous verses in the tradition: ‘there is no heaven or hell, no soul that is para-worldly/and actions like the chaturvarna are fruitless’. Perhaps ‘non-fideist’ is a better word than ‘atheistic’. I learn this from Krishna del Toso, see ‘The Wolf’s Footprints: Indian Materialism in Perspective. An Annotated Conversation with Ramkrishna Bhattacharya’, AION 71(1-4), 2011, pp. 183-204.

14. This is empirically incorrect because we are incapable of enumerating ‘everything’, and logically speaking, it is a figure called metonymy (whole for part), moreover it is not clear whether we can have a concept of ‘everything’ without a forced totalization.

15. Obviously, the media play a definitive role in this ‘making political’.

16. The point about agency is a minor one. More importantly, while it is true that resistance means to stand firm again and again, I think it is possible to read the word negatively, as an unproductive notion and practice. The argument might go something like this: to resist (oppression), one has to stand firm again and again, in the same place. Inasmuch as it is the same place, no social change has taken place: for it to be able to continue to stand firm (resistance) again and again, (resistance), it must fail. If it succeeds, it becomes unnecessary afterwards. Therefore it also follows that if we are to claim that we are resisting, we also have to claim that earlier resistance has failed. That would include most earlier resistance, alongwith Phule and B.R. Ambedkar. I wonder if we want to make that claim.