ジェンダー、カルチュラル・スタディーズと論理実証主義

If I Had A Hammer: Why Logical Positivism Better Accounts for the Need for Gender and Cultural Studies

20世紀前半ウィーンの論理実証主義者たちによる社会に関する発言は見直されてもいいのではないかというSteven Gimbelさんによる論考。特に大学の役割などを考える上で示唆に富んでいるとの指摘で、法人化まで秒読み段階に入った日本の国立大学には、なおさら身近な話題です。

“[w]e demand that all academic rights be made independent of class, party, church, sect, race, sex, or citizenship.”

Industrial development has increasing deprived capitalists of peaceful enjoyment of their surplus value, forcing them to frenetically increase their capital, so they have had no spare time for the pursuit of intellectual occupations and have abandoned education and culture to their children and their children’s teachers. Gradually, capitalists and culture have become alienated; the administrators of education have become functionaries of the capitalists and have, generally speaking, been the architects of the ideology proclaimed and upheld by capitalism as the necessary form of society, yet in this process a part of the social stratum dispensing education have themselves become proletarians, that is, have become workers who are paid no more than the minimum required for subsistence. This intellectual proletariat, which is gradually becoming conscious of its position, will join the industrial proletariat wage class struggle to the end along with them.

これらはこの論文の考察対象である、Hans Reichenbachが1918年に著した「大学の社会化」からの引用。まるで去年か今年、日本で書かれたものと言われても信じてしまったりして。いや、今は大学の中も元気がないし、もっと状況が悪いか。

Reichenbachのことは恩師の太田朗先生の時制に関する研究を通じてぐらいしか知らなかったので、こういう考えの人だったとは、かなり新鮮な感じがしました。