Abstract

This paper argues that central to the formation and orientation of ethical and politicised academic subjects is the notion of intervention. It argues that the aim of ethical political intervention is fundamental to the orientation of a diverse range of figures and fields, particularly those from the leftist Marxist and Gramscian traditions. Through a brief survey, the paper shows the extent to which the aim of achieving effective, reorientating, consequential intervention is shared in common by Marxisms of all orders, as well as by deconstruction, Deleuzean theory and practice, leftist liberal humanism, and beyond. Focusing specifically on the theoretically-informed work in cultural studies of Hall, Grossberg, Spivak, etc., it assesses the prevailing conceptions of what intervention is and how to achieve effective intervention; describing the spectrum of interpretations that have come into currency and ascendancy. It argues that, ultimately, the prevailing notion of how academics and intellectuals can ‘intervene effectively’ relies on a rather vague, untheorised and nebulous faith in the value of ‘critique’. The paper argues that this investment in the power of ‘critique’ both regresses from and contradicts the post-structuralist insights and post-Marxist theory of hegemony that otherwise orientates these academic subjects’ interventional efforts. It argues, in short, that recourse to faith in ‘critique’ is under-theoretical, broadly metaphysical, subject-centred and a regression from poststructuralist-informed theories of the political. By revisiting the implications of post-structuralist theories for academic work vis-à-vis intervention, the paper proposes that what is required is more thoroughgoing attention to the place and character of disciplinarity in the pragmatic mechanics of culture and society’s discourses and hegemonies. It argues that the conditions of possibility for intervention are indissociable from the institutional and disciplinary character of modernity. In other words, it argues, the academic ‘condition’ is one of unavoidably heterogeneous language games in a web of disciplinary differences, and in the face of disciplinarity and disciplinary difference, what has arisen is disciplinary enclaving, mutual unintelligibility and disarticulation. In this situation, it often appears that the only possible form of ethical and political intervention is ‘critique’ – either within one’s own discipline or ‘publicly’, journalistically. However, this paper argues that the interventional effectivity of any ‘critique’ is dubious at best. Instead it proposes a theory and practice of ‘alter-disciplinarity’. Grounded in post-structuralism and deconstructive discourse theory, alter-disciplinary practice is that which seeks to alter other disciplinary discourses and their productions not by critiquing them but by intervening into the disciplinary spaces of their production and legitimation – that is: getting inside knowledge and undoing other methodologies as an alternative practice of consequential intervention