Page 93 - Transformation Indaba Report

keeping function is the reproduction of academic ‘authority’ and its privileges; a
form of operation that seems incapable of cognising ‘black’, unless the latter ‘fits’
in with the dominant culture on its terms and sheds its own identities. Other
practices include closed research networks with associated research funds that
validate scholarly work and legitimate its self-referentiality so as to ensure the
accumulation of privileges. There are many more examples.

g. Socio-cultural economies ensure the flow of beliefs, customs and behaviours that
affirm the status quo. For instance, the logics of this economy steer dominant
arguments that set up a discourse of ‘transformation tensions’ within higher
education; it reduces the transformation project to trade-offs between equity and
quality; redress and efficiency; and change and development (Cloete et al. 2002;
Cloete and Moja, 2007 and Cloete, 2014). Though ‘tensions’ are to be viewed as
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productive within the mandates and roles of universities, the frames used by
these studies are unquestionably linked to images and pictures that are ‘framed’ so
as to organize the interpretations of higher education transformation on the basis
of conceptions of ‘excellence’ within higher education, devoid of any context and
history of injustice and privilege. This is one of the major weaknesses of higher
education transformation studies in South Africa and elsewhere; it has bequeathed
us with racist, sexist, discriminatory, preservationist, brutal and false conceptions
of ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ that have become its own ideology; a point
demonstrated by any discursive analysis of official and public discourses -
marketing materials and media narratives - generated by universities themselves.

h. Affective economies circulate collective emotions and affect. For instance, the case
in which the ‘white subject’ ‘is presented as endangered by imagined others
whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject
(jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject’ , is a case in point.
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The converse, the anxiety of continued subjugation by other means of the ‘black
subject’, circulates its own set of affects. Anger, fear and despair usually
accompany this anxiety as expressions of the ‘unsayable’ effects of institutional
cultures for which a regime of articulation does not yet exist in its fullest.

i. Intellectual economies safeguard the movement and pre-determined transfer of
scholarly authority and credentialisation according to established institutional and
sector-based rules that reproduce the social structure of the academy, by
regulating who has access to the ‘games’ that set up the ‘rules’. The monopoly of
‘scientific competence’ is ensured, so that the agent is socially recognised to speak
and act legitimately (Bourdieu), even if such competence is mythical in real
scientific terms.

9 See Butler, 2009.
10 Ahmed, 2004.
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