[-empyre-] engineering the university

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

I think the question Murak posed, about the demands of the state, and the demands of the university's corporate management in many first world institutions, was  a very good one,
deserving of more debate, also after what Edward posted on the weekend:

>>
"Now You See It" frames the relentless current emphasis on multitasking as stemming from our investment in digital technologies. This, of course, has direct ramifications on scholars as they work through different vocational boundaries and social identities. But Davidson also discusses how industrial efficiency dictates the structure of educational settings and how curricula must now promote bodies of knowledge that apply to digital production. This latter point is another way in which the utility of the university gets emphasized over its ideals toward the pursuit of knowledge.
>>

It's not just an investment in digital technologies; it the increased compromises and deprecations of selling knowledge, and how it's now spelled out, namely as employment "skills,"   for students who face precarity and a harsh global capitalist market and a racialized state and war-State (first world), and who will enter the postindustrial world in heavy debt already or with no assurance that their creative knowledge (in the arts and humanities, for example) is of relevance or needed.

This also, one would suspect, affects older models of reproduction, no?

>> The university reproduces itself by producing scholars who in turn produce the conjunctures by which we construct the stability of the university over time.> [Edward]

what stability then? 

Murat's question about the demands of theocracy or fundamentalist nationalisms is a fascinating one, as are experiences that I was told, for example, by artists and teachers who work in occupied territories and conflict zones; a former MA student just wrote me that she is trying to run a small theatre program in a Turkish university near the Syrian border, and she's developing a participatory form of devising that had been practiced in Boal's theatre pedagogy or in some verbatim theatre projects that rely on witnesses (the "temporalities" of war, Edward).  The first week discussion between elizaBeth  and Mimi did not directly address the politics of witnessing but brought up "self-care" under "neoliberal management.'  What if you extend that to the racial-State war-State managements* under which most of us live?

respectfully
Johannes Birringer


* (my terms are partly adapted, here,  from Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić ferocious and timely critique in Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)