The Interpellative Crises of Critical Thinking BY KEVIN CHRISTOPHER CAREY BA summa cum ...

273 Pages·2015·1.06 MB·English

The Interpellative Crises of Critical Thinking

BY

KEVIN CHRISTOPHER CAREY
B.A. summa cum laude, DePaul University 1999
M.A. University of Illinois at Chicago, 2008

THESIS

Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Chicago, 2015

Chicago, Illinois

Defense Committee:
Ralph Cintron, Chair and Advisor
Catherine Chaput, University of Nevada, Reno
Todd DeStigter
Robin Reames
David Schaafsma
To my mom, Sharon Ann Carey, who told me, “Just get it done.”
And I did.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the encouragement, support,
and critical engagement of my dissertation committee. I want to thank Catherine Chaput
for providing me with both a superb model of institutional critique as well as a powerful
historical materialist rhetoric for honing my analyses. I am grateful to Robin Reames,
whose insights regarding the affinities between my project and the long tradition of
receptionist models of rhetoric will allow me to better historically and philosophically
ground my analyses as I turn this longish essay into a book. In many ways this work
began with Todd DeStigter. It was in his class that I realized that the discipline of English
Studies was more capacious than the study of literature, and that my ethical and
pedagogical commitments could actually drive my scholarship, rather than take second
place to them. David Schaafsma has been a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. Besides
having been an engaged and sympathetic reader throughout this work, he was someone
with whom I could share both intellectual and personal struggles, and I am grateful to
him for both his scholarly and emotional support.
Ralph Cintron has been my biggest champion these past six years. Ralph’s
interest in and excitement over the questions I was asking were palpable in our very first
meeting, and his zeal and commitment to helping me hone and develop them have been a
source of inspiration throughout. Ralph has been a generous and exacting critic of my
work, continually encouraging my propensity to think broadly, while helping to reign in
those thoughts and analyses that ranged too far. As a mentor and a friend, he has been
and continues to be invaluable to me.

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In addition to my committee members, I am grateful to Patricia Harkin and James
Sosnoski, both of whom were crucial to the development of my thinking in the early
stages of this project. Patty introduced me to Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, the
scope, structure, and spirit of which provided me a model for this inquiry, while her own
work gave me some of the best examples of institutional interpellation on which to model
my own analyses. Jim’s work was central to helping me articulate the “double-bind” of
academic life: the ways in which our ethical and political commitments are often at odds
with (and even at times antithetical to) our professional ethos. I felt a kindred spirit
animating Jim’s work, one that I can partly attribute to the formative role of Dostoevsky
in our thinking.
I owe a special thanks to Gerald Graff, who was a productive foil to me in
crafting the early stages of my argument as well as a generous respondent to and
supporter of my work.
I would not have been able to complete this project were it not for the love and
support of my family and friends. The debt I owe them is beyond words, so naming them
will have to suffice: Peter Wake, Brian Charest, Sarah Rutter; John, Kate, Rennie, and
Tess Boyd; Adrian Fielder and Cécile Bladier; Bob Fowler; the Chermels, especially
Dan, Ivan, and Sue; and the Cox family (and Amy Killoran). And most especially to
Jordie – We are the champions.
KCC

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction: The Birth of an Inquiry………………………………………..1
1. What Is Critical Thinking?........................................................................14
2. Critical Thinking and Critical Subjects………………………………….59
3. The Liberal Arts: A Value in Crisis or a Crisis in Values……………...109
4. The Market and the University: Frameworks and Sovereignty..............147
5. Autonomous from Whom? Accountable for What?................................195
Conclusion: What Can Be Learned from a Fetish?.....................................242
CITED LITERATURE...............................................................................257
CURRICULUM VITA................................................................................263

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SUMMARY

Both in academia and in the public sphere there is a strong sense that higher
education today is imperiled. While critics from right, left, and center understand “the
crisis of higher education” differently, most agree that the cultivation of critical thinking
is a (if not the) central purpose of undergraduate education. Despite their ideological
differences, these groups understand critical activity to be essentially productive, and that
critical thinking is a skill to be taught or produced. My dissertation challenges what I call
the “production paradigm” of critical thinking, offering in its stead an interpellative
account. I argue that the cultivation of critical citizens entails an ethical and political – i.e.
a material – commitment to providing them with the resources generative of such
development, as opposed to simply access to quality education.
Louis Althusser developed the notion of interpellation in the late 1960s/early
1970s as a way of describing how humans come to know themselves as subjects, and as
precisely the kind of subjects that they are. He locates the shaping forces of identity in a
matrix of material and discursive experiences that give rise to a person’s ideas, desires,
and practices. In examining differing accounts of higher education and its crises, I
illuminate how each of them depends implicitly upon the logic of interpellation in
making their analyses, while at the same time neglecting to address the material and
discursive concerns entailed by such analyses. I frame my understanding of interpellation
within the classical notion of the liberal arts. There, “liberal” did not refer to a course of
study that would emancipate a person; rather, it referred to the condition of liberty (a
material and discursive condition) requisite to pursue and profit from such a course. Thus

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I argue that if we are truly committed to the value of critical thinking, this obligates us to
providing and securing the material and discursive conditions requisite to liberty.

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Introduction: The Birth of an Inquiry
When I began writing this dissertation on the crisis of higher education and
critical thinking in the summer of 2012, little did I know that Jeffrey J. Williams had just
christened the field of critical university studies.1 In his now famous Chronicle article,
“Deconstructing Academe: the Birth of Critical University Studies,” Williams describes
this emerging field thus:
“Critical” indicates the new work's oppositional stance, similar to approaches like
critical legal studies, critical race studies, critical development studies, critical
food studies, and so on, that focuses on the ways in which current practices serve
power or wealth and contribute to injustice or inequality rather than social hope.
“Studies” picks up its cross-disciplinary character, focused on a particular issue
and drawing on research from any relevant area to approach the problem.
“University” outlines its field of reference, which includes the discourse of “the
idea of the university” as well as the actual practices and diverse institutions of

1
 Not that I didn’t have plenty of scholarship to draw upon – historical accounts
and institutional critiques of higher education in the US have a long lineage, almost as
long as what we have come to know as the American university itself. (See, for example,
Thorstein Vebelen’s The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct
of Universities By Business Men, 1918.) If we broaden our scope beyond our shores, the
university has been the subject of critical attention at least since the Enlightenment.
While Kant’s 1784 essay Was ist Aufklarung? is most often hailed as a clarion call to the
ascendancy of reason over prejudice, it is no less, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, a
kind of contract proposed to Frederick II of Austria as to the proper relationship between
the university and the state. The centrality of this relationship to the purpose and
functioning of the university was such that in 1798 Kant published a collection of essays
on the topic, The Conflict of the Faculties, wherein he outlined the various relationships
between “the higher faculty” (theology, law, and medicine); “the lower faculties”
(philosophy, which for Kant included what we call the humanities or liberal arts);
government; and political subjects. In all, he insisted on the necessary autonomy and
authority of the lower faculty, which authority is guaranteed and safeguarded by the
sovereign himself, looking after the state’s best interests.

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contemporary higher education.
When I began my inquiry I certainly took an oppositional stance to, as Williams
puts it, “what was happening to higher education,” which at the time I would have readily
characterized, again in Williams’s words, as consequences of “the rise of corporate
managerial policies in place of traditional faculty governance.” In addition to identifying
with the “critical” aspect of this new field, I felt that Williams’s unpacking of “studies” as
“drawing on research from any relevant area to approach the problem,” fit well with my
own method of bricolage. My academic trajectory spans philosophy, literary studies, and
rhetoric, and I use methods and concepts from all of these fields in conducting my
analyses.2 Finally, I had already identified my project as a historical and rhetorical
inquiry into the idea of the university through an examination of one of its key value
terms, “critical thinking.” I also appreciated Williams’s article because it announced a
shift in focus that mirrored the evolution of my own scholarly interests. While I entered
graduate school with a keen desire to teach, my research agenda was wholly literary. But
by the end of my first year, I had serious questions about the projects of both studying
and teaching literature. Williams articulates this transition nicely.
In some ways, critical university studies has succeeded literary theory as a nexus
of intellectual energy. A dominant tenor of postmodern theory was to look
reflexively at the way knowledge is constructed; this new vein looks reflexively at
“the knowledge factory” itself (as the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz has called it),
examining the university as both a discursive and a material phenomenon, one

2 I must note, however, that despite the current fervor for interdisciplinary work,
my experience of this has been less a loosening of the strictures of academic fields to
allow for other voices and perspectives, and more a widening of the circle of those who
can call you a dilettante.

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that extends through many facets of contemporary life.
While my own project is intimately related to both of these questions – how
knowledge is constructed and how the university discursively and materially authorizes
this construction – my focus is distinct from the question of knowledge as I am concerned
with that which is supposed to make knowledge valuable and productive – the faculty,
more or less, of “critical thinking.” While the postmodern turn did much to undermine
our epistemic complacency, and while critical university studies forces us to rethink the
goals, methods, and working operations of higher education, the essential nature and
intrinsic value of “critical thinking” yet remains an unexamined piety by both academic
workers and the larger public. On one hand, contemporary accounts of the crisis of higher
education regularly depict critical thinking as imperiled. On the other hand, these
accounts themselves are often at odds about what critical thinking is and how to cultivate
it. Indeed, Stanley Fish has gone so far as to claim that critical thinking is “a phrase
without content.” I take this claim seriously, and this inquiry attempts to provide a
rhetorical and historical analysis of the conditions that warrant it.
My appreciation of Williams’s article notwithstanding, there are a few aspects
regarding “critical university studies” that give me pause.
First, claims about critical university studies’ interventionism (as Williams says, it
“goes a step further” than “reporting on and analyzing changes besetting higher
education” and “takes a stand against some of those changes”) seem somewhat dissonant
in light of announcing the joyous arrival of it as a legitimate academic field. According to
Clark Kerr, whose seminal work The Uses of the University (1963) might be considered
an inaugural text for what has now become the field of critical university studies,

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