My Own Intellectual Life

Trevor Pateman

1. INTRODUCTION

This essay has been extracted and edited from an application I submitted in 1999 for the award of the title of Professor in the University of Sussex, where I had taught since 1979. In effect, it was an application for a purely honorific title, since I had taken early retirement in 1997 from my post as Reader in Education and by 1999 was coming to the end of a three-year part-time "buy-back" contract, standard in British universities for those who retire early. The application got no farther than my Head of Department's In tray, but it does provide a biographical context for the essays published on this website. Those essays which are actually available here are hyperlinked in the text.

2. FIRST CRITICAL WRITINGS

I graduated in 1968, year of the Student Revolt, and my first writings show the impact of that movement on me. In the first year I spent at the University of Sussex as a temporary Lecturer in Philosophy (1970-71) I completed the editing of a Penguin Education Special, Counter Course. A Handbook for Course Criticism, published in 1972. My own particular interests led me into studies of existential psychiatry (R D Laing: see on this website "R D Laing: Sanity, Madness and the problem of Knowledge"), educational sociolinguistics (Basil Bernstein) and Frankfurt School critical theory, notably Herbert Marcuse. I responded to this material from within an institutional base in Philosophy. The principal outcome was my book Language, Truth and Politics. Towards a Radical Theory for Communication, completed in 1973 and published in 1975 (second enlarged edition 1980). This was widely reviewed and, for example, Professor Jacob Mey of the University of Odense, Denmark, wrote that, ' A book like the one Pateman has written deserves to be read by all who mean something with their talk about a pragmatic or even a "socialist linguistics" . Pateman is not only a fascinating writer with a wealth of good ideas; he is a stimulating debater and mainly: he writes about things which are not academically indifferent or safely abstruse'. Steven Lukes of the University of Oxford said that, ' Pateman has written a valuable and refreshing work that is worth the attention of all those interested in either the theoretical or practical aspects of his theme'.

3. COMMUNICATION STUDIES AND MEDIA STUDIES

I had begun to see my critical work as falling within the substantive area of the emerging field of communication and media studies, as well as having a more philosophical aspect. Initially, I developed this substantive side within the semiology of Roland Barthes, with whom I was enabled to study in 1971-72 by the award of a Leverhulme European Studentship. Later (1973-74), I held a Research Fellowship from the British Film Institute from which resulted my study "Television and the February 1974 General Election". As I began to study contemporary linguistics and cognitive science more carefully, I became critical of limitations of the semiological approach. This criticism is set out in its most developed form in my essay, "How is Understanding an Advertisement Possible?" which appeared in a 1983 collection Language, Image, Media edited by Howard Davis and Paul Walton.

4. EDUCATION

On my return from Paris in 1972, I had chosen to pursue my interests in education by teaching Liberal Studies in a technical college (Exeter College, Devon), and then History and Social Studies in a comprehensive school (Launceston College, Cornwall). Subsequently, I was a full-time Youth and Community worker at the South Reading Youth and Community Centre in Berkshire. My appointment to a Lectureship in Education at the University of Sussex in 1979 occurred against this background. By that time, I had already worked with Professor Tony Becher, writing an essay, ' Accountability, values and schooling' for a Social Science Research Council symposium published as Accountability in Education edited by Tony Becher and Stuart Maclure (1978).

At Sussex from 1979, I involved myself intitially with Philosophy of Education and Philosophy of Social Science, publishing an essay "Can Schools Educate?" in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (1980). But I had also begun to study seriously contemporary linguistics and cognitive science, and this was reflected in such papers as "What I tell my Students about Noam Chomsky and Seymour Papert" (1982). Partly as a result, I came to co-direct with Professor Aaron Sloman an early research project - funded by the Rennaissance Trust - on the possibility of developing Expert Systems for use in teacher education.

My involvement in education is also reflected in the short book What is Philosophy? (1987) I was commissioned to write and aimed at an audience of pre-University students.

5. POLITICAL THEORY / POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

At Sussex in 1970-71 and at Brunel University in 1976-77 I taught political philosophy/theory and my Sussex M Phil is a study of Rousseau, Condorcet and J S Mill, entitled How Is Political Knowledge Possible? (1978). The chapter on Mill in this thesis I feel to be one of the best things I have written, but I had great difficulty in getting any of the material published. The core of the argument about Mill appears on this site as "Liberty, Authority and the Negative Dialectics of J S Mill" and the work on Rousseau and Condorcet is very briefly summarised here in the essay "Majoritarianism" , which abridges a fairly lengthy study of Condorcet's work.

6. THE FOUNDATIONS OF LINGUISTICS

...it is a striking fact that despite the constant reliance on some notion of "community language" or "abstract language" there is virtually no attempt to explain what it might be. In fact, I know of only one attempt to face the problem, by the British philosopher Trevor Pateman...'

Noam Chomsky (1993)

Chomsky is here referring to my 1987 Oxford University Press book Language in Mind and Language in Society. Studies in Linguistic Reproduction . This is an amplified version of one half of my 1983 Sussex D Phil thesis Language as an Object of Social Theory. (For the other half, see section 7 below). In that book I sought to show how Chomsky's linguistics and linguistic metatheory could best be made sense of within realist philosophy of science; how Chomsky's programme is substantively plausible; how Wittgensteinian criticisms are misguided (Wittgensteinians and Chomskyans); and how Chomsky's nativism is compatible with a social theory of language, which I sketch. The book was very extensively reviewed. There are now discussions in a number of books. The chapter by Professor Andrew Collier in his book Critical Realism (1994) is a good summary of the realist aspects of my study.

This 1987 book is probably my major academic achievement.

7. FROM SEMIOTICS TO PRAGMATICS

I mentioned in section 3 how I had become critical of the semiology of Roland Barthes. As time went by, I developed a broader critique of semiotics from within the traditions of Anglo-American pragmatics, both philosophial and linguistic. Half of my D Phil thesis dealt with these issues, and resulted in a number of publications more or less ending with "Pragmatics in Semiotics: Bakhtin/Volosinov" published in the Journal of Literary Semantics (1989).

8. THE ARTS AND AESTHETICS

Through the 1980s, my work at Sussex involved me increasingly with teachers of the Arts - literature, drama, dance, music, the visual arts. My teaching drew on my early studies with Barthes, my readings in analytical aesthetics (which I occasionally taught within the Philosophy BA at Sussex), and my own substantive artistic interests. My teaching repertoire up to 1990 is more or less distilled in my book Key Concepts: A Guide to Aesthetics, Criticism and the Arts in Education (1991). Revised versions of many of the essays in this book have been and continue to be published on this website

In a number of other essays and articles - for example, "Aesthetic Engagement" (1998) - I have tried to develop a distinctive aesthetics, both in terms of an understanding of the nature of art and as evaluation. Many of these essays are now published for the first time on this website. Several of them are connected to my interest in psychoanalysis.

9. THE ARTS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

The main elements of a general approach in this area are set out in my essay "Space for the Imagination" , published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education (1997). Other published material is in a group of articles and essays, two of which - "Psychoanalysis and Socratic Education" and "Lifelong Unlearning" - are concerned in a more general way with psychoanalysis in relation to notions of learning.

10. CONCLUDING REMARKS

As I have got older, I appear to have become more reclusive and unclubbable. I do not belong to any learned societies, subject-based associations or promotional groupings for particular theories or theorists. Nor do I sit on any editorial boards. I do not operate within any obvious academic networks. I submit articles to journals, and otherwise rely on unsolicited invitations from editors of collected works for outlets for my writing. In any case, the range of interests manifest in this sketch of my intellectual career record leaves me puzzled as to which clubs I ought really belong.

This website version first published 2006