Scholarship and Policy: Against the Motion II (Stefan Groth)

The affirmative speaker rightly alluded to the question why society takes upon its shoulders the burden to finance and maintain the sciences. The obvious answer to this question is that the sciences are beneficial for society, and yet, in this constellation where technically speaking the maintaning society has an interest in maintaining, there is the problem of accountability and sometimes also that of transparency: how can we measure if what we pay to upkeep universities – let alone the humanities – is balanced out by the contribution the sciences make to society?
This notion of the relation between science and society as one between principal and agent as an ex-post-facto argument presupposes a crude historical understanding of the social functions of the university. One could, of course, with a coup de main swipe away the Humboldtian tradition within which European universities stand, and just as easily subordinate the sciences to financial calculation. But the way in which this question is posed misses the point, as it takes a symptom of post-modern society to be an universal and moreover primordial context of justification – a symptom that should rather be the object of investigation and scrutiny than be taken as a guiding principle. Horkheimer termed this the “critique of instrumental reason” – a social constellation where the effectivity of the means is valued more than the reasonability of the purpose; where the immediate – often monetary – gains trump the project of the enlightenment that has the flaw of the metaphysical.
Given its ubiquity, the doctrine of effectiveness and its materialization in the German university system can easily be understood as being without any alternative. From a pragmatistic point of view – think of LOM and third-party funding – this logic is efficacious indeed. Yet, if one subscribes to the notion of the sciences or scholarship as something that tries to think beyond the given, i.e. not within the socially inherent logics of effectiveness and not within a positivist scientific system, this approach has to be discounted as – in the last instance – uncritical, and thus not able to take into account social totality.
This coincides with an apparent different use of terminology and the interrelated conceptions of normativity and positivity. By no means are the disciplines described by the affirmative speaker as “positive” – specifically European Ethnology and Social and Cultural Anthropology – positivist in the way the term is used in the history of thought. These disciplines by no means shy away from the “normative sphere”, i.e. do not concern themselves with questions of normativity. It is rather the other way round, as their scholarship to a great extent combines descriptive and hermeneutic approaches with socially and culturally articulated norms and values – thus measuring ideational social values, standards and goals against their realizations. These disciplines well-nigh call for discussions of the normative; and the description of social grievances, problems, and inequalities is not not-normative when it does not propose normative guidelines and policies. Critique, to stress this term again, does in this sense not have to be constructive in order to be productive. It can well be only negative and acknowledge that there are certain situations where solutions to particular problems cannot be found on the level of the particular.
This is, in a way, the crux of modernity: that the bourgeois promises of freedom, equality and fraternity – at least for some – has been followed up on, and that in the same moment the individual is burdened by an enourmous bundle of constraints and grievances. Especially with regard to Cultural Property legislation, this void between the normative standards and their implementation (and realization!) is gaping so wide, that this inconsistency and asynchrony downright coerces the view away from the particular to the general. In the face of immense (global and social) inequalities, treating the Cultural Property conundrum as an isolatable phenomenon that can be solved for the better by adjusting exiting legal mechanisms and policies seems fairly optimistic. It neglects the fact that the best solution for Cultural Property rights reproduces social and political inequalities. The norms used as a tool to draft these recommendations are, after all, not manifestations of universal values without contradictions, but the result of social, political, and economic struggles.
Some anthropologists – among others – call the resulting social constellations asymmetric power relations, and they are one of the reasons why the market alone cannot really function properly. If asymmetric power relations exists – and they barely fail to do so – the task for scholarship should be to analyze these situations, point to inconstistencies, uncover problems, implications, broader contexts and social wrongs. This then is indeed normative as well, and it is indeed a valuable contribution to social problems. Yet, it differs from policy recommendations in the way that it acknowledges its limitations.

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