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Review article Received: 7. 11. 2016. HUMANITIES AND Accepted: 2. 1. 2017. DOI: 10.15176/vol54no105 SOCIAL SCIENCES IN UDK 378.4:0/3:316 THE MAELSTROM OF 378.4:7/8:316 HEGEMONY OF THE SO-CALLED TRANSITION: PERFORMATIVITY OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL TODAY1 HAJRUDIN HROMADŽIĆ Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Rijeka This article deals with several problem areas concernin! structural issues related to the contemporary social position of the humanities and social sciences, the nature of today’s he!emony and present articulations of critical thinkin!. The primary focus is on the problems of the hi!her education system resultin! from the Bolo!na process and the social role and importance of the fi !ure of the public intellectual today, whereas the secondary focus is on connectin! these issues with the characteristics of today’s he!emony and the so-called transition. The text ar!ues that the public intellectual should be considered and analyzed as a performative fi !ure belon!in! to each period articulatin! and presentin! public intellectual narratives, in other words, it is claimed that the public intellectual echoes the period itself as one of its mirror refl ections. Keywords: the Bolo!na reform of hi!her education, he!emony, the so-called transition, the public intellectual 1 This article is to appear in the edited volume entitled Stranputice humanistike (Bypaths of the Hu- manities) (Institute of Ethnolo!y and Folklore Research, 2017), and is published here with the permission of the volume editors. 87 HAJRUDIN HROMADŽIĆ | HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MAELSTROM… NU 54/1, 2017. pp 87–99 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS The main topic of this article mentioned in the title – the disputed aspects of the relation- ships between the humanities and social sciences, the he!emony of transition and the fi !- ure of the public intellectual – requires startin! with common issues relatin! to the status of the humanities and social sciences today. More specifi cally, we will be!in with a short critical overview of the infl uence of the Bolo!na process on education within the liberal capitalist system – !iven that we claim that the “Bolo!na reform” si!nifi cantly contributes to the de!radation of the humanities and social sciences – and we will continue with a discussion of issues re!ardin! the nature of he!emony today, i.e. what we mi!ht, from today’s socio-historical point of view, refer to as the so-called transition, emphasizin! its role within the so-called post-Yu!oslav areas. In the second part of the paper, the resultin! systemic perspective will be applied to the fi !ure and fate of the public intellectual, his/ her place, role and si!nifi cance in today’s world. The performative fi !ure of the public intellectual will be examined from two points of view. Firstly, the public intellectual as an archetypal, nearly trademark-like voice of the humanities and social sciences in the clas- sical sense of the word. Secondly, the social place of the public intellectual as a refl ection of the dominant political, economic and cultural contexts of the period in which we live. THE BOLOGNA HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM, HEGEMONY, THE SO-CALLED TRANSITION Let us start with a reminder of some well-known !eneral characteristics of the Bolo!na declaration. It was si!ned by ministers of education of the European countries in June 1999, initiatin! comprehensive reform of the hi!her education system in Europe. The core princi- ples and values of the Bolo!na process espoused in the Declaration include: establishin! a comparable system of studyin! and evaluatin! achievements (ECTS credits), improvement of European participation in hi!her education quality assurance, increase in competitive- ness and cooperation, !reater student and teacher mobility and the like. Croatia si!ned the Declaration in 2001, and the Bolo!na process has been implemented in the past ten or so years. However, the true nature and e" ects of these reforms would soon become apparent. In short, it turned out that this was a sort of an “Americanization” of traditional European educational and scientifi c models, an abandonment of the “idea of the university” from the European educational tradition built on the Enli!htenment herita!e (for more on this see Kant, Schellin! and Nietzsche 1991), and a way of panderin! to the market and capitalist lo!ic so as to maintain European competitiveness on the !lobal scale. The practice soon shaped the dominant social trends in education and science. We are witnessin! the ascendancy of the application and project lo!ic of the so-called ap- plied knowled!e at the expense of fundamental theoretical insi!hts, constant pushin! for a close connection between education, science, the economy and business, the commercialization and commodifi cation of education (as seen from increasin! scholar- 88 NU 54/1, 2017. pp 87–99 HAJRUDIN HROMADŽIĆ | HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MAELSTROM… ships, advanced privatization processes in the hi!her education and the like), and a rapid decrease in the !eneral level of knowled!e acquired throu!h education (for critical reviews of the Bolo!na reform see Hromadžić 2008a; Hromadžić 2008b). What is at work, in e" ect, is what Konrad Liessmann, followin! the line of thou!ht from Humboldt throu!h Adorno’s “theory of half-education”, called “the theory of non-education”, criticizin! the conceptual ideolo!eme of “the society of knowled!e”. Liessmann states that the society of knowled!e, despite its smu! title, “is by no means a particularly smart society” (2008: 23). This society of knowled!e is not characterized by classical values of knowled!e or wisdom acquired throu!h mental e" ort, !enealo!ically woven into the tradition which started with classical philosophy throu!h modernist insi!hts to contemporary critical theories of society; rather it is a mere spectacle-like reenactment of a media-and-market- constructed reality, with an abundance of actively involved extras that feed its matrix (for a criticism of the ideolo!y of the society of knowled!e see Hromadžić 2015a). The nature of this process, of course, has a clear business rationale within the framework of what, in the spirit of the contemporary Italian neo-Marxist criticism of political economy, can be called co!nitive capitalism, as done by e.!. Carlo Vercellone (2007: 29–42), or an economy based on the exploitation of knowled!e in the era of post-Fordism, as a relatively new form of appropriation, accumulation and profi t perpetuation of capital. The question that intri!ues us in this process is the current position of the humanities and social sciences. The Bolo!na process, in addition to the ambitions of promotin! the acquisition of innovative business and mana!erial competencies, declares and prescribes the promotion of Enli!htenment herita!e elements such as the critical spirit, which has a very similar profi le to that from the era of Yu!oslav socialism (as refl ected in the ada!e: “Comrades, we must learn from our own mistakes.”) but, of course, with the opposite ideolo!ical a!enda. Still, its purpose is not the chan!e the dominant ideolo!ical matrix and the course of the liberal democratic capitalism – this he!emony machine that is disinte- !ratin! as a model before our very eyes2 – towards developmentally-dialectic principles of critically-based thinkin!.3 In contrast to the declarative rhetoric of liberal capitalist he!emony of our time, knowl- ed!e and education in the so-called Bolo!na process are characterized by, amon! other thin!s, anti-Enli!htenment elements. For instance, the Deklaracija o znanosti i visokom obrazovanju (Declaration on science and hi!her education) drawn up in 2012 by the 2 The closest examples of this can be seen in Hun!ary, Poland and Croatia, where, with some di" er- ences, trends that certain analysts and publicists refer to as neoliberal democracy, liberal non-democracy and antiliberal nationalism are at work. These terms refer to social phenomena which are the result of puttin! to!ether neoconservativism (with relation to identity and ideolo!y), quite radical political ri!htist parties in power, and the technocratic-neoliberal model in the sphere of economics. 3 Perhaps a more recent example from Japan can be indicative of the place, role, importance and perspective the humanities have in such a social world. On 8 June 2015, all deans of national universities in Japan received a notifi cation from the Ministry of Education to either abolish the humanities and social sciences or to somehow reformulate them as “more utilitarian” sciences. This directive is part of a new plan of the Japanese !overnment for a totalitarian (or total) turn to sciences that are “more utilitarian” (more on this in Kovačić 2015). 89 HAJRUDIN HROMADŽIĆ | HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE MAELSTROM… NU 54/1, 2017. pp 87–99 Akademska solidarnost (Academic solidarity) union is clearly marked by a Humboldtian vision of what education could and should be, and cautions about the social processes of economic reductionism, the need to establish an education for society and not for the market, the equality of all scientifi c areas, education and science as a public !ood, and free and inclusive hi!her education. We are also seein! indicative, and certainly desirable, investments in the refurbishment of schools, faculties, libraries, in equipment, buyin! expensive software licenses, but we are simultaneously seein! continual de!radation of workin! conditions in these same schools, faculties and libraries. This casualization of the profession should be analytically examined from the wider perspective of social and class issues that si!nifi cantly determine the nature of the capitalist system.

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