Administered lives: scholarly research, accountability, and the "public".

Szeman, Imre

THE PREFACE TO THE SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) strategic plan for 2006-2011 makes an interesting (if somewhat startling) claim for an organization that distributes research money so that scholars can extend the range and depth of our knowledge. (1) "We already possess, or can develop, the knowledge required to build a just, prosperous, sustainable and culturally vibrant world" (2), it asserts. It's not basic know-how--understood in the Preface to be mainly the domain of science and technology--or even clear ideas about justice and prosperity that we lack and which might thus need further research support. Rather, "our problem, as a civilization, is one of values, of economic and political priorities and of social organization" (2). This is where the humanities and social sciences come in and why they are needed: to help us to sort through the moral, political, and social blockages that impede the implementation of scientific knowledge, technological know-how, and (one suspects) a fully articulated liberal-capitalist state form. The scientists know (for instance) that global warming is a threat to humanity. The social scientists and humanists are needed presumably to tell us why politicians aren't implementing policies to address global warming, or why people continue to complain about smog or traffic even while driving, or why we worry about carbon emissions but still thrill to news about the dynamism of Canada's resource economy and the newfound strength of the dollar.

That these are questions of politics that in many ways exceed the domain of scholarship is one thing; what is also worth noting is the way in which the call to relevance repeated throughout the document connects scholarly research with the increasingly efficacious state administration of populations from cradle to grave (Foucauldian governmentality in a nutshell). But it should not really come as a surprise that research monies distributed by the state to the human sciences are intended primarily to help the state sort through the complexities of contemporary social systems, even if it also envelops itself in the easy rhetoric of the defense of civilization and commitment to the promulgation of the Canadian good life. The practice of targeting increasing amounts of research monies to 'strategic areas" and to university-industry-community "joint initiatives" is but one sign of this fundamental aim of state-sponsored research. (2) Even if it has proven to difficult to stop the slide of research monies toward its uses to biopolitical ends, as scholars we have become adept at identifying and challenging this particular re-definition of our research practices.

What has constituted an even greater challenge when it comes to the question of the relevance of research is a related idea-an idea both seductive and dangerous, which circulates broadly within recent SSHRC documents and press releases, as well as within the academy and public discourse more generally: the connection (implicit and explicit) between making research public and research accountability. A key component of SSHRC'S vision of itself as a "Knowledge Council" is improved connections between scholarly research and the public. It is assumed from the outset that to date humanities and social sciences knowledge has largely failed to "get out into the world where it can make a difference" (23). Community organizations and the "Canadian public at large" form two of the five nodes of network of relationships within which SSHRC functions (ig), and the mobilization of knowledge from academic environs outward is central to how SSHRC imagines retooling research in Canada. The Preface says it all: "Canada needs humanities and social sciences research; and Canadian researchers and research institutions, SSHRC among them, must do a better job of getting hard-won knowledge out into the world, to families, community groups, policy-makers, legislators, and the media" (2). In turn, as they have already increasingly had to do, researchers in the human sciences have to account for the ways in which the result of their activities will "inform real world debate, enrich intellectual and cultural life, and invigorate the economy" (7).

Editorials are by their nature often as heavy on rhetoric and opinion as they are thin on facts and sophisticated argumentation. If we take into account these differences of form, the positions taken by Robert Fulford in his attack on Jes Battis and on humanities research in Canada and those articulated by SSHRC itself are not that far apart. The subtitle to Fulford's article says it all: "Your tax dollars at work:" Fulford speaks of the triviality and "chronic irrelevance" of much SSHRC-funded research. His dutiful tallying up of the sums expended on Battis's research is meant to increase the onus of scholarly responsibility to the public, in a way that makes "accountability" the task of accountants to ascertain. By way of contrast to the irrelevance of the research topics he identifies, Fulford offers not even the barest hint of the kinds of research he does see as publicly relevant and thus financially justified. And why should he? The weight of public discourse and recent social and political history is on his side. In an era in which the involvement of the state in any aspect of the social has been challenged repeatedly, all he needs to do is evoke that gravest of public sins: the wasting of tax dollars, monies which could presumably be put to better use in that holiest of holies--the act of private consumption.

It is hard to resist the idea that research funded by public monies should find its way back to that selfsame public. The counterfactual position--that there is no need for scholarly research to connect to the public--is as ethically unpalatable as it is politically and pragmatically insupportable. As scandalous as Fulford's editorial might be, the terms in which he speaks bear more than a passing resemblance not only to SSHRC'S vision of itself but also to the political and ethical demands that many of us place on ourselves as researchers. Yet as soon as we consent to the dominant terms and frameworks in which "the public" has come to be invoked and described, it becomes impossible to defend, justify, or explain the work of the human sciences--and not to that massive, unvariegated public to whom we are supposed to speak but to those elites who want the state to get out of the business of creating social opportunities or pursuing social and economic justice. (3) As soon as one speaks of the "public"-an abstract figure, empty of content-the distance and separation of our work from the communities in which we live is assumed; it is a distance that is imagined as constitutive and structural, such that overcoming it would mean to do entirely different kinds of research, writing, and thinking. In this discourse on and of the public, the long history of humanist inquiry is figured not as evidence of its central place (for better and for worse) in the world that we have generated for ourselves but, rather, as a further indictment of the inaction and unwillingness of scholars over centuries to relate to the giant mass of non-scholarly others. Only the most positivist and utilitarian forms of research can count as public on these terms--which is exactly the kind of research that has sealed off hope for a better future and established cynical reason as the dominant modality of everyday life.

There has never been a public of the kind to which both Fulford and SSHRC appeal. It is an empty rhetorical figure haunting the ruins of Enlightenment thinking and animating the nostalgia for a Keynesian moment that was itself less than we imagine it to be. The difficult task of our research is to bring the public into existence for the first time, while keeping alive the state funding without which we probably could not imagine doing so. Disentangling ourselves from the endlessly-invoked figure of the public while remaining true to the vision of equality it sustains is challenging, but we could expect nothing less given the impoverished mental and physical landscapes we have the misfortune to inhabit today.

Imre Szeman

McMaster University

(1) Knowledge Coin-1c& SSHRC, 2006-2011 is accessible at www.sshrc.ca/web/about/ publications/strategic_plan_e.pdf. Site last accessed 6 December 2007.

(2) Such targeting occurs both in and outside of SSH RC. in the 2007 Federal Budget, the Council received an increase of sit million to its base budget; this entire amount was directed to research funding in the areas of business, management, and finance.

(3) Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: Me Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Knopf, 2007) offers a detailed and astute account of this decades long attack of private capital on the functions of political state.

IMRE SZEMAN is Senator McMaster Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He is currently working on a book on the cultural politics of contemporary expressions of anti-Americanism worldwide.