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20 Griffith L. Rev. 362 (2011)
Getting from 'Critic and Conscience' to Conscientious Criticism

handle is hein.journals/griffith20 and id is 368 raw text is: GETTING FROM 'CRITIC AND CONSCIENCE' TO CONSCIENTIOUS CRITICISM Warwick Tie* The conditions under which practices of conscientious criticism become available to the academic are the same conditions under which the discourse of 'critic and conscience of society' displays itself as being, in an ideological manner, the imaginary relationship of the academic persona to the real conditions of its production (Althusser 2004). To the extent that 'critic and conscience of society' is not recognised as being an ideological formation of this kind, the subjectivity of the academic is liable to be scripted in accordance with various logics that originate within the prevailing socio-political systems. In Lacanian terms, the academic is liable to be scripted as a split subject: le sujet suppos6 savoir (Lacan 1961). The complicity of the discourse in this particular subjectivation of the academic becomes evident, and the possibility of conscientious criticism emerges, where academic knowledge production begins to operate through practices that do not simply analyse but also enable socio-legal criticism to continually exceed the terms of its own analysis. Bridging the domains of academic knowledge and academic subjectivity, the legal discourse that establishes the New Zealand university as 'critic and conscience of society' operates as an ideological device in the sense meant by the US cultural Marxist Fredric Jameson. The discourse provides a mechanism by which academics can locate themselves - can 'cognitively map' their positions' - relative to a range of coordinates that structure the intellectual field which employs them (including the socio-political contexts that now frame the purposes of the university;' the state of academic knowledge;' the vectors of contemporary intellectual agency,' and so on). The ability of the discourse to operate continually in this facilitative matter depends, as Michel Foucault states, upon the operation of power: discourses circulate only to the extent to which they are propelled by social forces outside of themselves. To reframe the point in this same Foucauldian idiom, there exists an obdurate knowledge-power relation around which the production of knowledge revolves. In the case of 'critic and conscience of society', that supplementary power is legal in kind: the right of the academic to publicly operate independently of each and every site of governance - that Senior Lecturer, Sociology, Massey University, New Zealand. Jameson (2000a). 2 Delanty (2001); McLennan et al (2005); Slaughter and Rhodes (2004). Lyotard (1984); McLennan (2004). Bauman (1987); Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001); McLennan and Osborne (2003).

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