Negligent Forms of Academic Life

If you took Social Studies 10: Introduction to Social Theory, you, like me, may have been told that Durkheim’s use of “primitive” was simply an “objective” descriptor of aboriginal religion. You may have questioned Jefferson’s slavery, only to be told that although these failings were regrettable, they should not “impede” scholarly engagement.

Such qualms were likely deemed tragic yet forgone facts, immaterial to theoretical production. Western modernity’s underside was presumably extraneous to Tocqueville and Locke, germane only for Fanon or Chakrabarty. Questions of global significance were probably dismissed in favor of the West’s grand narrative of self-constitution, its great myth that its so-called progress was the product of truth-discerning rationality rather than historically-specific (and undeniably limited) approaches to the world.

In truth, these dismissals belie complicated realities: Kant’s racial hierarchies would guide race science — and fuel Euro-American capitalism — for centuries. Locke emphasized the extent of his religious tolerance by including even “Mahometans.” Tocqueville, meanwhile, championed brutal French colonization of Algeria. Rather than seeing these truths as they are — consequence and concomitant of theory — we push them aside, failing to acknowledge the assumptions and limitations of our own intellectual tradition.

I am not alone in this argument: Scholars from Said to Mbembe have discussed how depiction and domination of others was definitional for the modern West. The history of the Western intellectual tradition, then, is not only history within Euro-American borders — it’s also history outside them. Just as we read domestic politics as theoretical backdrop, the West’s systematic otherizing must also be read as intertwined with theoretical production.

This is not to argue that we discard our tradition, nor to indict it wholesale. But it is to say that Western self-definition has never been solitary, never separable from centuries of global south exploitation casually dismissed in our classrooms. Only by recognizing these linkages as fundamental can we understand the Western tradition as it is — limited and historically-mediated — and appreciate it as only one of many ways of interpreting the world. Only then can we destabilize our claims to universality, weaken the theoretical and political monopoly we self-impose on a world repeatedly signaling its insufficiency.

But we continually fail to do so at Harvard and beyond, instead divorcing social theory from impetus and impact. Moten and Harvey describe this failure as “negligence” endemic to academic professionalization in the modern university. In becoming modern scholars, they argue, we are trained into “negligence that disavows the possibility of a thought of an outside.” We accept our bounded fields, our limited language, and it alienates us, destroys the sociality essential to transformative work. Rather than theorizing “a movement against the possibility of a country,” for example, we find ourselves theorizing “just a people’s history of the same country.” Put simply, we run in different directions within a given circle, but our negligence keeps the circle itself intact — presuppositions, limits, and all.

In attempts to diversify and “decolonize,” Social Studies — like academia broadly— has failed to leave this circle, or even identify its existence. Responding to complaints about Western-centrism, we parade faculty of color, critical or not, as excuses to avoid instituting programs that reveal the circle’s existence. To really try, we add theorists of color to syllabi and sit back, as though slavery is Jacobs’ story and not Jefferson’s, or as if Muslim women’s agential rationality in Mahmood isn’t tied to a Weberian capitalism rational precisely in its opposition to the Orient. But just as it has failed in the White House and on Wall Street, this politics of representation will not solve our inability to understand global south histories as fundamental rather than contingent to the Western tradition. It will not allow us to escape our circles of negligence, to disrupt our presuppositions and find courage to build anew.

Recognizing this, some have argued for deeper engagement with non-Western traditions in hopes that comparison may unveil our own negligences. They are certainly not wrong; in my own work, engagement across traditions has been incomparably generative. But the truth is that if we hope to learn from others, we must first cultivate an understanding of our own limits. Otherwise, we risk sampling writers from non-Western traditions as nothing more than interesting but antiquated curios (or, as this year’s SS10a lecturer said of Douglass, as a “break” from theory).

If we want to create generative, transgressive scholarship that pushes the bounds of the possible and breaks us out of theoretical and political quagmires — scholarship worthy of the universities we want to inhabit — we must identify our negligences and challenge them. And we must do so not only as academic endeavor but also as expression of our “concern for sociality,” as recognition of interlinked histories and responsibilities we collectively bear. Jefferson is not disconnected from slavery, nor is Hegel from African colonization. Algeria continues to suffer from Tocqueville’s imperatives, just as the Muslim world does from Lockean characterizations. Our world is dying of catastrophes we ourselves have sown, and our self-satisfied asociality — from classroom to public square — can no longer sustain us.

To recognize this, to recognize limitations and consequences of our modes of thought and to consider what it may mean to learn from those of others — this must be our scholarly project. To do otherwise is at best deluded and at worst complicit, and, regardless, produces irresponsible scholarship that fails to give us insight into our past and our present while also keeping us from our possible futures.

Anwar Omeish ’19 is a Social Studies Concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.