Literature Compass 1 (2004) 18C 001, 1–4

© Blackwell Publishing 2004

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLICOHistory Compass© Blackwell Publishing 200320031000000Original Articles

In and Out of Hegemony: Academic Conferences and the ‘Public Sphere’Nicholas Hudson

In and Out of Hegemony: Academic Conferences and the ‘Public Sphere’

Nicholas Hudson

University of British Columbia

Abstract

According to Jürgen Habermas in

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

, the coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century England generated a powerful force of opposition to the political elite,propagating previously restricted knowledge through newspapers and conversa-tion, and honing the tools of rational debate. But to what extent can we claimthat vestiges of the democratizing culture of the Enlightenment survive in thatmajor forum for information and debate in our world, the academic conference?Do our conferences contribute substantially to the

Öffentlichkeit

, a body of opinionand information that exists apart from the levers and priorities of official power?This question has recently gained a special resonance in my mind as the organizerof a major international conference, the twenty-eighth annual meeting of theCanadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in October 2003. My experi-ence has been that organizers of conferences on such themes will perpetuallyreencounter the dismaying drift back towards the ‘exoticising’ of the other – notonly in the sense of making indigenous people objects of exotic display, butalso in our habits of enfolding these cultures back within our own intellectualstructures and assumptions. We find, that is, that our vaunted ‘public sphere’inevitably operates not in opposition, but in covert collaboration, with the

reigning hegemonies we originally sought to challenge.

According to Jürgen Habermas in

The Structural Transformation of the PublicSphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

, the coffee-houseculture of eighteenth-century England generated a powerful force ofopposition to the political elite, propagating previously restricted know-ledge through newspapers and conversation, and honing the tools ofrational debate. But to what extent can we claim that vestiges of thedemocratizing culture of the Enlightenment survive in that major forumfor information and debate in our world, the academic conference? Doour conferences contribute substantially to the

Öffentlichkeit

, a body ofopinion and information that exists apart from the levers and priorities ofofficial power?

This question has recently gained a special resonance in my mind asthe organizer of a major international conference, the twenty-eighthannual meeting of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

2 In and Out of Hegemony: Academic Conferences and the ‘Public Sphere’

© Blackwell Publishing 2004 Literature Compass 1 (2004) 18C 001, 1–4

in October 2003. As the traditions of this society required that we findan appealing and pertinent theme, we came up with one that we hopedwould encourage the exploration of neglected fields and even offer spacefor challenging political orthodoxies – ‘Indigenes and Exoticism/

Indigèneset Exotisme

’. In very many ways, our hopes for this theme were fulfilled:we received a range of proposals that attempted to bring to life theexperience of indigenous peoples, whose story has tended to be drownedout by the histories of European exploration and conquest. Yet, for rea-sons that I will attempt briefly to set out, my own reflections on the statusof the academic conference as a ‘public sphere’ in Habermas’s idealizedsense have remained troubled.

A source of these troubled reflections can be found (not entirely byaccident) in the title we chose for the conference. If ‘indigenous’ originallydenotes inclusion ‘in’ a particular genus or group, ‘exotic’ is rooted in theGreek word denoting ‘outside.’ Slight consideration, however, deconstructsthis opposition. In modern English, we often use ‘exotic’ not to meanwhat is fully ‘outside’, but what has been absorbed from outside and madeinternal, an object of reduced, and usually attractive difference within asystem that remains fundamentally unbreached and hegemonic. Moreover,while the word ‘exotic’ will make us think of eighteenth-century fashionsfor

chinoiserie

and Turkish coffee, we should also remember that Europeanswere no doubt ‘exotic’ to the people we call ‘indigenes’. Our conferenceposter bore George Romney’s portrait of Mohawk leader Joseph Brantdressed in both his nation’s headdress and portions of a British militaryuniform that he no doubt found ‘exotic’. A more serious obstacle to ourattempts to create a democratizing ‘public sphere’ concerned the very roleof indigenous people and their cultures in the conference. For all ourgood intentions to give voice to the voiceless, or to cast light into zonesof intellectual darkness, it is no great surprise that the vast majority ofparticipants were Western-trained academics. As Habermas stressed, therecould be no ‘public’ in a Western sense without widespread literacyand the medium of print. Yet not only were most eighteenth-centuryindigenous cultures without alphabetic literacy and the correspondingmedia, but the descendants of these cultures, as here in North America,remain sparsely represented in academic institutions that they still regardsuspiciously as extraneous to their own values and goals.

There are, of course, methods of ameliorating this problem: represent-atives of native cultures can be invited to give presentations, and somefeatures of indigenous tradition (such as ritual thanks for the use of landoriginally belonging to these people) can be duly observed. Yet organizersof conferences on such themes will perpetually reencounter the dismayingdrift back towards the ‘exoticising’ of the other – not only in the senseof making indigenous people objects of exotic display, but also in ourhabits of enfolding these cultures back within our own intellectual struc-tures and assumptions. We find, that is, that our vaunted ‘public sphere’

© Blackwell Publishing 2004 Literature Compass 1 (2004) 18C 001, 1–4

In and Out of Hegemony: Academic Conferences and the ‘Public Sphere’ 3

inevitably operates not in opposition, but in covert collaboration, withthe reigning hegemonies we originally sought to challenge.

The inevitability of this collaboration reveals a more profound differencebetween the culture of the academic conference and the idealized eighteenth-century public sphere envisaged by Habermas. Habermas studied a timewhen the middle-orders,

die bürgerliche Gesellschaft

, remained more-or-lessoutside the structures of political power. But this is by no means the caseany longer in Western universities. Those who attend academic conferencesmostly belong to institutions not only supported by government or endowedby the elite but invested with the duty of repopulating and perpetuatingthat elite. We can say of course that we are ‘outside’ the networks of powerto the extent that the system of tenure allows us, at least theoretically,to criticize whom we want without fear of reprisals inflicted on ourlivelihoods. The fact remains, however, that we are in the business ofcoining cultural capital: our brightest graduates usually go on to cash inthis capital in well-paying jobs devoted to the preservation of the social andpolitical status quo. Similarly, the academic conference has increasinglybecome not a ‘public sphere’ for challenging the elite but a job-fair forassessing and recruiting future educators of the elite. Most of us believe,quite reasonably, that we are responsible for training and supportingour graduate students very much as the eighteenth-century master wasresponsible for his apprentices. Unlike that master, however, we cannotclaim easily that we are ‘outside’ the

ancien régime

. Whether we like it ornot, we are deeply implicated in its maintenance.

In no simple or ideal sense, in short, can the academic conference beclaimed as a ‘public sphere’ in the sense meant by Habermas. We who stillbelieve in the need to question and even sometimes undermine structuresof official authority need, therefore, to ask whether there can be anyredeeming political legitimacy in the academic conference or, for thatmatter, in modern academia in general. Perhaps we are finally forced backon the deconstructive dilemma incisively described twenty years ago byJacques Derrida in an address to Cornell University, ‘The Principle ofReason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’. In the wake of trium-phant bourgeois revolution, argues Derrida, it is impossible for us to claimtotal ‘outsideness’ from the reigning hegemonies of our society. But wecan use our positions within the structures of authority, and in ouracademic conferences, to keep alive a culture of constant

self

-questioning,a culture of a significantly different kind from the

Öffentlichkeit

of anearlier time when ‘in’ and ‘out’ still remained fairly distinct. “What ismeant by community or institution,” writes Derrida, “must be rethought.This thinking must . . . unmask – an infinite task – all the ruses of end-orienting reason, the paths by which apparently disinterested research canfind itself indirectly reappropriated, reinvested by programs of all sorts.”

1

In other words, the paradoxes lodged in the title of the conference ‘Indi-genes and Exoticism’ must be kept in visible play. For while we can never

4 In and Out of Hegemony: Academic Conferences and the ‘Public Sphere’

© Blackwell Publishing 2004 Literature Compass 1 (2004) 18C 001, 1–4

claim to be entirely ‘outside’, we must ensure that a place safely ‘inside’can never be securely located.

Notes

Nicholas Hudson is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where hespecializes in eighteenth-century literature, thought and culture. His most recent book is

SamuelJohnson and the Making of Modern England

(Cambridge, 2003).

1

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’. In

Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies

, ed. R.C. Davis, R. Schleifer, andA. Wesley (4

th

ed., New York and London: Longman, 1998), pp. 357–8.

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’. In

Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies

, ed. R.C. Davis, R. Schleifer, andA. Wesley (4

th

ed., New York and London: Longman, 1998), pp. 357–8.