At the moment I am thinking through a series of questions which I hope to produce proper, well thought through blog posts on. Here they are:
Why am I for re-thinking some aspects of the university? Why am I for thinking about autonomous spaces? Why am I slightly disillusioned with the university system? Why am I concerned about increasing bureaucracy at universities, why am I concerned about corporatisation of the universities?
These stem from other, broader questions which I am also grappling with at present:
How can we create dialogue that does not alienate or exclude? How can we communicate on shared terms whilst still being conceptually ambitious? Is there a reason that our academic study stays inside the university system? How can we expand or extend what might be called “intellectual” or “academic” practices? In our own practices as ponderers, writers, readers and cultural analysts, how can become creative, take wild risks and explore new terrain with verve and ambition, all the while producing precise, honest and incredibly discerning work of integrity?
I want to bring all of you into a conversation about alter-academic practices. I use the word alter-academic because I want to refer to creative ways of doing “academic” things that do not immediately depart from the connection to education and scholarship. I want to try and conceptualise innovative and alternative ways of catalysing some of the (already pretty damn wonderful, in my opinion) things that we do as members of the broad university community.
Last night Thijs and I attended a seminar at the splendiferous Schijnheilig, somewhat ambitiously titled “Toward a Global Autonomous University.” The evening was centred around a group called Edu-Factory; this is how they are described on the Schijnheilig website:
Edu-Factory is a transnational collective engaged with the transformations of the global university and conflicts in knowledge production.
Several issues regarding the university system and capabilities for effective student movements were discussed…..
- For me what was most significant was the discussion about breaking down the false binary between anarchism and reform. One strategy which was mentioned, which I found quite thought-provoking, was to recognise that serious attempts to become completely autonomous might actually influence politics and law. What might initially seem like a perversion or contradiction (i.e. to link autonomous anarchist movements to legal reform is surely blasphemous) actually quite unexpectedly knits autonomous projects to a social fabric which is altered by these projects. This obviously involves complex questions about militancy and lobbying which I do not have the space to go into here.
- How do student movements connect with the working class, precarious workers, activists in other parts of the community? There was also a lot of discussion about precarity that actually really opened up the concept for me.
- What was also important was the remark (I cannot remember whose it was…) that in student movements and activism centred around the university there is often a nostalgia for something that never existed, or a project that we might think of as deeply problematic: an kind of Enlightenment institution producing rational, free-thinking beings. I certainly unwittingly subscribe to this Enlightenment rhetoric to uphold the university as a place of free thought and innovative education. What type of subject does the university produce and exclude? How does the university “construct” “free” thought? Is this bound up with a certain construction of authority, a certain type of “proper” academic practice? Do the two actually contradict each other? Does this combination of authority and free or analytical thought sever the university from its ties to community?
- A few audience members also mentioned that the point of critique of the university is not to claim that the university is not a valuable knowledge centre, but that the structuring relationship between university and society means that there is a whole sphere of knowledge that is denied. In relation to this, another question was asked: “What happens when events outside the university render it the institution ineffective or meaningless?” Do we need to reconceptualise the university’s role in relation to knowledge and society in order for the institution to actually become important and effective?
I also wanted to draw your attention to a program of lectures and events that I think is pretty interesting. A group that flies under the banner of The Usual Suspects: the Art of the Non-Lecture organise somewhat unorthodox sessions where the advertised plenary speaker [deliberately] never arrives, but a discussion is facilitated nonetheless. I think what these seminars try to “re-mix” is the somewhat false divide between speaker and audience in these kind of events – often the audience are as well-informed as the speaker, and have equally valuable perspectives and contributions. What happens when this is the case? Does the “Art of the Non-Lecture” program go some ways towards answering this question?
I think that we each have unique perspectives on the university generally, and on what we do at the Uva, or at ASCA, in Amsterdam. I would love to hear your perspectives and your thoughts on change, ideas for new possibilities, events, or research or education practices.
Diana Soto De Jesús
Rubato
Dea
Rik Fifis
How is truth constructed in our society, assuming for a moment that truth is a construct. A large part of this construction of truth takes place on the university. It consists in the education of young people like us. In our culture one gains access to ‘truth’ through knowledge, and most importantly through educational institutes. This seems strange because our education, or at least the first 4 years of my education on the university, can be summed up rather aggressively by stating that it was a bunch of people telling me there is no such thing as a truth. So we might say that in the postmodern climate, the access to truth is constituted by a certain debasing of this notion of truth. Certainly people who move on from the university (with all its relative values) to a job are deemed knowledgable in their field of expertise.
What has this all got to do with the post? First I would say that it is very difficult to conceptualize a university that does not support this construction of truth through knowledge (of the self and others). Still, if we stick to Foucault’s work, there might be something that is missing from the university system: the care of the self. Maybe the university should also teach a certain way of life, maybe education should lead student to care for themselves in diverse ways. This would transform writing into a rewriting of the self. In education, the self should be at stake with everything you write.
With respect to Foucault’s know yourself and the care of the self, the university occupies a strange position. Almost completely focussed on the know yourself, it still provides many students with texts that might lead more to a care of the self kind of philosophy (Zarathustra, Foucault’s texts, Some Greek Philosophy, Gnostic tekst and many more).
I would like to lay bare another tention of of the emplacement of the university alongside this first one: the problem of having to write. On university, sometimes, students do not write because they really want to write about something, or better because something has to be written, but because they just have to hand in a paper for a course. On one hand, I feel that this ‘must’ is absolutely neccecary to learn how to write, while on the other hand I feel that we should only concern ourselves with texts that had to be written.
If we then combine these two tensions, another problematic becomes clear: How do we get students to apply themselves so that they put themselves on the line everytime they write, and should they? I would say: not every time, but certainly when writing their thesis.
I guess what I am saying about the university is that (first) one cannot expect something such as free knowledge or an autonomous university. The construction of knowledge and truth is always a product of the discours and the institutional surroundings. This does not mean, however, that there cannot be a kind of optimalization of the university’s position. Such a optimalization could take place on the level of education by bringing in certain aspects of the care of the self at the same time as one introduces that writing should be a contest with oneself (writing becomes one of the ways to care for the self). From the perspective of the university as an organization one can only try to minimalize the bureaucratic impact on education as much as possible, but never with the mythical goal of a free university.
The most positive thing about my perspective is that in the end, the student himself can facilitate this change within himself. Not very rebellious I agree, but mass protests in Amsterdam look like scenes from Goodbye Lenin anyway. The above post is right in stating that protest, since the student riots in the seventies has not been what it was. How could it be? How can resistance repeat itself? It must always find a new way to out itself. Maybe this new way is a resistance of the self towards the self, maybe it will start there.
NOTE: Fucking hell, just typed a huge response but it all disappeared when I tried to upload it… Can’t be bothered to retype it all, but I do want to share a link to an interesting interview between Tiziana Terranova & Marc Bousquet:
http://www.metamute.org/en/Recomposing-the-University
it contains all my main points, and rearticulates the above discussion in its actual main problematics, which I would sum up as the dangerous conflation of commodification with knowledge that is increasingly becoming part and parcel of the neoliberalized university agenda.
You know, I am all for disseminating the construction of truth, but for that purpose I have wonderful books to read and fellow students to speak to. What we need to account for here is the innate precariousness that is has pervaded the university as institution. Brief examples which I won’t elaborate further: the fact that we have to do research MA but then won’t be funded for PhDs despite our efforts and high grades, the fact that most universtity staff never get tenured and have to work on temporary contracts…
I’m all for creating more autonomous spaces and am a believer in the claim that this might actually suture constitutional change in the (corporate) make up of the academia. But for this we need to acknowledge that in fact, the university has never been truly autonomous to begin with. Yet, arguing this only to foreclose the potential of creating more autonomy is highly cynical and unnecesary I believe.
Anyways, I had a whole lot more to say but am too frustrated to retrace all my previous thoughts. The interview will do just fine I gues!
Thanks for responding, Rik!
I guess I am asking what is perhaps a naïve question: What happens when we take the claim that the university is only one – of many – sites of truth production, or more pertinently knowledge production in our society? Do we have to think the university differently when we realise (or assert) that everyone is of equal intelligence, when we take equality as undisputable? The university then emerges instead as a privileged site of knowledge production. This privileging creates a power relation; creates hierarchies of knowledge.
A third of my education occurs in classes and in the set work for classes, another third in the “academic” other readings, explorations and meanderings that I embark on on my own, and the rest is out of class – in the café, or in whatever other encounters when the conversation flows slightly differently. This is leaving aside the rest of life, and perhaps even leaving aside non-analytical, theoretical knowledge. And perhaps this dispersed kind of learning, differently kind of learning, is good in the sense that we do not want the institution to colonise every waking moment. We need to retain spaces of other existence.
On the other hand, I am torn because I agree that there needs to be some sort of deference, some putting aside of ego in order to learn; one needs to be pushed, demands need to be made. Yet I am torn because I find that, possibly as a result of this education structure, most people assume that the learning is over when the papers have been submitted or the exams written. People say: “I am finished studying.” Moreover, whilst it is true, as you say, that “in education, the self should be at stake with everything you write” – I wonder how often that really happens, though? Is this a utopian thought, because the self is at stake precisely because we will eventually be graded, as opposed to in the sense of a genuine intellectual or existential philosophical risk taking?
Does the university somehow have a responsibility to extend knowledge practices outside itself? I like the conception of care of the self that you speak of, but how does this practice endure, how does this practice become relevant and remain open and vulnerable to re-writing?
Do we need to throw out the cumulative and progressive model of education, and somehow institute something that could be dynamic and continuous? (I.e. if concepts can travel, why can’t education?) The practice of learning itself may have to be changed in order to actually cultivate the care of the self that the content (Foucault et al) so attractively theorises. Am I just asking after a utopian de-bureaucratised, de-heirachalised, de-centralised communal process of learning?
I do not, in fact, know what a free university might be – or an autonomous university. I think I understand what greater autonomy within the university might be, and what a university with autonomy from the state might be (this could be either a radical separatist university, or an absolutely libertarian one), but the workshop left me wondering about exactly what an autonomous institution of knowledge production and education might be, especially since there seems to be so much rhetoric about “community” and “equality” in activist approaches to the university, whilse surely we mean to say “integrated” or “egalitarian”? Is our society in such a state of decay that, when we want to evoke communal and egalitarian education practices, they must be conceived under the banner of “autonomous”?
I just discovered this great initiative from across the Atlantic:
http://beneaththeu.org/Beneath_the_University/home.html
They have a video archive plus a detailed and well-written page on the history and thoughts behind the conference series. Worth checking out!