To see or be seen? The grounds of a place-based university

Figure 1. Old Government House and lawn from the grove of oaks planted for the 1869 visit of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.

The first paragraph of a new essay by Stephen Turner and me:

We ask after the grounds of knowledge in the place now known as “the University of Auckland” (or Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau). We take as our starting point the literal grounds of our University, which establishes the parameters of what counts as knowledge through the grounding provided by its faculties, schools, and disciplines. We ask about the University’s provenance, about the grounds it has secured for its functions—teaching, research, and service—and about the “built pedagogy” of its architecture and environs (Sturm & Turner, 2011). To do so, we read into the University the history of its own construction, in order to get at the grounds of university-based knowledge more generally. The remit that Spinoza gives us to do so is partly supported by the University of Auckland’s own aspiration to world excellence, which makes it a university just like any other aspiring world-excellent university, one which can stand in for the university in general, for the “idea of the university” today (Newman, 1996; Jaspers, 1959; Habermas, 1987). Indeed, the world-excellent university opens itself to the generic drive of all-inclusive or “transcendental capitalism” (de Cauter, 2002: 273). We argue that the optics of a Spinozan radical enlightenment enables us to ask after the grounds of knowledge, to ask what the university makes visible, and what, at the same time, is occluded by this visibility. 

The full essay appears in an Interstices special issue on Spinoza in the Pacific: https://interstices.ac.nz/index.php/Interstices/article/view/673/623

Advertisement

A Third University Is Possible by la paperson

Even when they are dangerous / examine the heart of those machines you hate / before you discard them —Audre Lorde

Within the colonizing university also exists a decolonizing education. Occupying the same space and time are the colonizer’s territories and institutions and colonized time, but also Indigenous land and life before and beyond occupation. Colonial schools are machines running on desires for a colonizer’s future and, paradoxically, desires for Indigenous futures. In this respect, paraphrasing the words of Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, the present of school is permeable to the time now (colonization), the time before that (precolonial), and the time beyond of all of that (decolonial). Regardless of its colonial structure, because school is an assemblage of machines and not a monolithic institution, its machinery is always being subverted toward decolonizing purposes. The bits of machinery that make up a decolonizing university are driven by decolonial desires, with decolonizing dreamers who are subversively part of the machinery and part machine themselves. These subversive beings wreck, scavenge, retool, and reassemble the colonizing university into decolonizing contraptions. They are scyborgs with a decolonizing desire. You might choose to be one of them.

Read: https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third-university-is-possible/section/ba50806d-ff18-4100-9998-784aecb42ae4

Buy: https://www.bookdepository.com/Third-University-Is-Possible-La-Paperson/9781517902087

New article: The Playable University

A bunch of us wrote something for ephemera on a game we used to help players understand the university game (link):

Academics, students and other workers in the university are expected to play the ‘university game’ – which includes the playful work of protest and published critique. If there is already engagement with play-as-critique in the NLU, here we aim to explore play-as-agency. Play-as-agency relies on making room for a certain play, or ‘give’, in academic and administrative processes in the NLU, in order to reveal what the university might otherwise be.[2] This play allows for both the collective re-imagination and reconstruction of the rules of the university and ‘playful’ participation in university gatherings (meetings; courses and classes; orientation and training sessions, and so on). In particular, we ask about the value of games in the university, what games can tell us about the values of the university, and how the rules of the university game might be changed by playing it differently.

In the wake of the quake: Teaching the emergency

A new article by Stephen and me in Educational Philosophy and Theory:

The university today finds itself in a global state of emergency, at once financial, military and ecological. Teaching must assume this emergency as premise and responsibility: it must consider the grounds of the classroom, both figurative and literal, and generate emergent lines of inquiry that address the pressing global and local situation. For us, that means that teaching must take the university’s grounds of supposedly universal knowledge to be constitutively unstable and to require a reflexive teaching method that puts in question disciplinary fields and discursive modalities of knowledge. And it must take in the physical grounds of the university too—because local space is increasingly articulated by technocapital interests that are fully implicated in this global state of emergency. Thus, we do not seek stability amidst such turbulence, but rather a seismotic overturning of the grounds of the university or, rather, a returning to its ground, through the deepened sense of purpose and place that ‘teaching the emergency’ provides.

First 50 downloads free through this link.

New article by Stephen and me rereading NZ creative educationalist Elwyn Richardson

Sturm, S., & Turner, S.F. (2015). The tyre-child in the early world. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Incorporating ACCESS.

The abstract:

This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/New Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings’. Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation – of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson – conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the child’s – and, by implication, other settlers’ – relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own – and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology (as every settler is a technological settler), for whom creative errors – acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres – reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling.

First fifty reads free for non-subscribers apparently at http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KQuDv3esAIskrMgiiwkK/full

The University Beside Itself

Out now, a new essay by Stephen and I, “The University Beside Itself,” from Re-imagining the Creative University for the 21st Century, ed. T. Besley and M. Peters (London: Routledge, 2013) 49-59:

[I]n and through seismotic construction, which is to say through attention to the unstable ground of the university, the nature of the class and classroom is reconstructed to form a new disposition. Such a practice, we suggest, places teaching – education, in fact – at the centre of the university, rather than research or management. Construction is not just a matter of learning learning; it makes the ability to ask after grounds the basis of being educated, and it makes being able to question a key social value of education. Without it, we think that a society lacks the wherewithal for self-transformation. The experience of transformation, or being transported, is to be beside oneself. And to be beside someone, as one is in a classroom, is to find one’s thinking transposed through a dialogic doubling. This is why classrooms matter, and cannot simply be replaced by downloaded notes or lectures. The “live” classroom, animated by open-ended dialogue rather than end- stopped programming, offers a creative and collaborative capacity that is chancy and risky, or, in any case, uninflected by the discursive consistency of the university template – how it is that you are supposed to meet the aims, objectives and outcomes of a course, or at higher levels, the mission statement and strategic plan of the university. (53-54)

It’s available through SpringerLink: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-6209-458-1.

Erratology and the Ill-Logic of the Seismotic University

A new essay by Stephen Turner and myself, “Erratology and the Ill-Logic of the Seismotic University”:

With the tertiary education mantra of creativity, critical thinking and innovation in mind, we consider the critical-creativity of error. Taking the university to model social orthography, or “correct writing,” according to the norms of disciplines, we consider the role of error in the classroom. Error questions the norms governing norms and the instability of disciplinary grounds; it involves a mis-taking, or taking another way. By tracing the origin of error, we are able to reconstruct the social world in terms of which it is conceivable for a mistake of any kind to have been made. The university, we find, withholds worlds which are not new but are sources of creativity, and constitutes a pluriversity or poly-versity.

In short, we learn by making mistakes.

Download here (subscription required).

“Off with their Heads!”: Un-Mastering the Masters of the University

An abstract for an upcoming talkfest on Lacan and the Discourse of Capitalism at Massey University in Wellington . . .

The matheme-atics of Jacques Lacan’s four — or more — discourses can enable us to account for changes in the university, and the place of dissent within (or outside) it. If, to misapply Lacan, we take the discourse of the university to represent the University 1.0 (the national university that exists to create good citizens), his fifth discourse, that of capitalism, can represent the University 2.0 (the transnational university that exists to generate transcendental, or global, capital).[1]

Both discourses, Lacan might say, serve the hidden truth of the master: the mathemes that occupy the position of agency (top left on the quadripode) are “fake masters,” to use Slavoj Žižek’s term,[2] namely,

1. in the University 1.0, knowledge (S2) — or learning, embodied in the professorate, and
2. in the University 2.0, the subject ($) — or consumers, including managers and academics as well as students.

The shift from a ruling discourse that produces a certain subjectivity (learning producing learned subjects) to one that is driven by a certain subjectivity (consumers producing profit) can account for changes in the university.

How are we, then, to understand the place of dissent within the university (or outside it, given that the university is now taken to be captive to and of a piece with capitalism)? The discourses of the hysteric and the analyst can be read as dissenting: the hysteric questions the hidden masters of university and capitalist discourse to protest against them;[3] the analyst works with the subjectivities that are produced in university discourse and drive capitalist discourse to transform them. But it struck me, when reading Alice and the Cheshire Cat’s ripostes to the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (link), that I might instead construct a sixth discourse: of dissent, or dissensus, to use Jacques Rancière’s term.[4] (The Cheshire Cat hystericises and analyses the Queen; Alice dissents.)

Dissent takes the discourse of the university as its starting point, but swaps the “covert” mathemes (the bottom two mathemes) $ and S1, such that its truth becomes the subject and its product, a new kind of mastery. It is a “subjectification” of the university and a re-mastering of its universe; how so, my talk will explore.[5]

---

[1] Before Lacan added a fifth discourse, of capitalism (“On Psychoanalytic Discourse,” 1972/1978), he took the discourse of the university, the historical successor to the discourse of the master, to represent capitalism (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1968/2007).

[2] Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, 2004.

[3] For this reason, Lacan came to take the discourse of the hysteric to represent science, which offers — or ought to offer — an implicit critique of the status quo of knowledge (e.g., in Television, 1974; 1990).

[4] Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” 2003.

[5] Note that Alain Badiou (Philosophy for Militants, 2012) argues by way of Lacan’s discourses for a re-mastering of philosophy: for him, philosophy has for the most part been co-opted by the discourse of the university (it has become antiphilosophy); to find its rightful place, it must re-appropriate the discourse of the master.

Workplace: The New Academic Manners, Managers, and Spaces

Check out Workplace 20 (2012): The New Academic Manners, Managers, and Spaces (link).

Workplace is a refereed, open access journal published by a collective of scholars in critical higher education promoting a new dignity in academic work.

Stephen Turner and my “Cardinal Newman in the Crystal Palace: The Idea of the University Today” appears here.

Excellent Universities, Here, There and Everywhere

A draft of an essay with Stephen Turner. See the finished version at Inquire.

University of Auckland Owen G. Glenn Building (a.k.a. the Business School)

We are asked to address the university today in the local context of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where we live and work. On the one hand, this is an educational setting at the ends of the earth, exotic and exciting (perhaps); on the other, and rather more apropos, this is a university much like any other. Very much wanting to be Melbourne, it is probably also rather more like Minnesota (no disrespect intended). In any case, the difference between all three, in terms of their globalising design-drive, is negligible. The league tabling of universities worldwide has produced an uncanny genericity — universality, even — of aims, objectives and outcomes, which is to say, university mission statements (UMSs): excellence, enterprise and efficiency. And it has greatly increased the importance of the measures (“econometrics”) that assure us that these ends, to which all who work in universities are now thoroughly devoted, willingly or not, have been achieved.

Econometric education (what David Weinberger calls “accountabalism”) is often couched in terms of the word “experience,” as the emergent property of the three E’s, so to speak, and as if it too were simply measurable (and as if universities actually cared about their clientele). It describes a “good” at our university in the same way that the word permeates the prospectuses of our (league-table) poor city cousins AUT University and Unitech: that is to say, our “experience” is better than yours because league tables say it is so — or, rather, make it so. Actual experience of an institution, a community and a place is systematically devalued. Class warfare has not so much migrated to the tertiary sector as embedded and enhanced age-old discrimination. The trick is that “discrimination” today refers to “improved” systems of measure — their increased ability to slice and splice space, time and value (see Hoskin and Frandsen on “space/time/value machines” [p. 1]) — rather than to social status, so making university environments appear class-free. (The capping of student intakes — by raising entry criteria — at our university has greatly nonetheless affected the ability of those most poorly-off in our society, in particular, indigenous Maori, to participate.) What we can report, therefore, is that our university here looks very much the same as your university there and indeed universities everywhere. This sameness, for us, spells the death of education in any non-cosmetic sense of “enhancement,” which is to say transformation by collective imagination, or “democracy” (Rancière 2010 45ff.). The word enhancement itself is now metricised (as are many of its synomyms: “improvement,” “growth,” “evolution,” etc.). Imagining itself is subject to systems of measure, such that it is difficult to imagine things being different; this is the ascriptive force of systems of measure at work: what isn’t measured, or strictly measurable, doesn’t count for anything.

Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man (c. 1487)

If anything, the New Zealand university is more generic in the world-excellent sense, though this may be special pleading (New Zealanders are notoriously modest in their narcissism). Our colonial past, however, makes us super-globalisers (settlers are avant-garde in their capitalism): we act out the historical design-drive of globalisation in our “fast-following” tendencies — our inherent slavishness to metropolitan models (Skilling and Boven 40-41) — and consequent genericity and “B+-ness.” The Occupy movement, and accompanying student unrest at the University of Auckland throughout 2011, which ran alongside a protracted dispute between unionised academics and our corporate-minded Vice-Chancellor, begs the question of the deeper “occupation” of the country by Pakeha (non-Maori) settlers and its radical transformation by colonising capital. In the context of on-going educational “reforms” (a.k.a. restructuring of university units and programmes for the sake of greater efficiencies), it cannot be surprising that Maori stand to lose most. What connects our colonial history to globalising imperatives of enterprise and has affected universities everywhere is a logic of replication that is as old as the nation itself but that now assumes a pedagogical guise. Given that knowledge itself, or more properly information, has became the commodity of commodities, and immaterial labour has displaced material labour, colonisation today takes the form of pedagogical “enterprise,” with the university as its flagship.

A little history is unavoidable if we are to understand the local development of the university, and not simply replicate the imperatives of globalisation (enterprise, excellence and efficiency). Historically, the globalising design-drive of settler capitalism initially worked to subsume the long history of indigenous inhabitation to the short history of the settler’s make-over of place (Turner ); we inhabit its continuous present (or future anterior: its always-already-will-have-been [Hill 193]). To retool some Marxist terminology, “formal subsumption” may be considered the formal alignment of the new country with the capital interests (in land, population and export) that its settlers represent, and the extension in and through their enterprise of an imperial economy (see Marx 1019-38). Those “forms” include land titles, property rights and wage relations. “Real subsumption” makes such forms the actual content of lived local relationships. So settlers replicate the propertied society of the mother country, but also, over time, adopt a local identity in terms of which the interests of the colony and the metropole have been fully aligned. (That settlers consider themselves not to be English simply masks the unexceptional nature of their settlement, and the fact that local public culture largely comes from other Anglo-settler societies, with Maori called upon to fill the local uniqueness deficit [Fairburn].) The result is a political economy of identity — an identitarian economics — in which to be a “New Zealander,” or “Kiwi,” itself signals the success of the enterprise of settlement. Local universities are not just determined by this logic but are its flag bearers.

Today, the logic of replication drives the production of local knowledge, and explains the country’s highly generic fast-following tendencies, albeit masked by our Asia-Pacific branding. The transformation of the older brick and mortar university (the Oxbridge University 1.0) into the steel and glass — and fibre — university (the transnational University 2.0) has been enabled by the new econometrics of knowledge. The technical capitalism of “improved” measure, delivered by a raft of business school devices (like Total Quality Management), drives the “universalising” of world-excellent universities. Due to the new infrastructure of managerialism, the content of education — indeed the very “idea” of the university — has undergone a process of abstraction, making enterprise the sole horizon of human possibilities, and thereby limiting different imaginings of our collective future. It is not that the economy has become more productive but that systems of measure have reoriented its operation, likewise the mission of universities: academics are incentivised to research rather than teach, to network globally, and to post outputs in world-leading journals, mostly outside New Zealand, while students are incentivised to gain the transferable skills that match openings in the market. Teaching merely ensures that the aims, objectives and outcomes of courses, properly aligned with those of the department, discipline, faculty and university — the nested capitalism of its micromanagement — are ticked off by student evaluations. Altogether more important — for universities and other “stakeholders” at least — is the national measure of academic performance (PBRF or the Performance-Based Research Fund), which has us academics competitively discriminating and counting outputs, googling for peer esteem — and discounting non-countable activities.

Seismic Section

This kind of join-the-dots education fulfils the design-drive of techno-capitalism and obscures our ongoing colonialism. In this context, it is difficult to appeal to “critical” and “creative” thinking, as this is precisely what the world-excellent university says it does. We prefer vocabulary that sits less comfortably with mission-statement speak, and which suggests a renewed role for such off-mission “arts” like wisdom, charity, idleness, chance . . . just talking. As opposed to the capitalistic consonance (“consensus”) of the “creative”/entrepreneurial class ecosystem, we prefer the democratic dissonance of noise (“dissensus” [Rancière 2010 37-38]) and privilege the classroom as the site of its production. In a university whose architectural template is the “built pedagogy” of its flagship Business School (Sturm and Turner), which also has a one-billion-dollar building programme, which also sits within a Auckland City’s newly devised “learning quarter,” which also dovetails with Auckland City’s vision, which also reflects the National government’s management of the country as investment space, we teach, above all, the university (see Williams).

Against research, at once utopian and utilitarian, we emphasis the enduring value of the classroom, the “factor[y] of the future” (Flusser 49-50) and producer of “publics and counterpublics” (Warner). The pedagogy of corporate capitalism, and its arsenal of econometrics, makes of the university a combat zone. In our own teaching, we cross the science-arts divide that has crippled and isolated “literarity” (Rancière 2000 115), or literary reflexivity (language about language, we stress, doesn’t stop at “literature”). We advocate Writing Studies as an ur-discipline that takes in the entwined history of writing technologies and accounting; we teach “seismotics” rather than semiotics (with a view to our earthquake-ridden local landscape and the recurrent shocks of the world finance), an alertness to the way place and its peoples are shaped by geopolitical rumblings from afar. We have no room here to detail such initiatives, but we are concerned to reclaim place from colonisation: it is our claim that people live in a place, not in the air, or airport lobbies, or the airy conference centres of “transcendental capital” (Hage 2001 4; see de Cauter 273). We are particularly interested in occupying these techno-spaces to pervert their protocols and confuse their logics. To use against itself the apparatus of econometric education, haloed as it is by global technophilia, we seek the commotion of thinking together using whatever technological means our world-excellently equipped classrooms provide.

References

de Cauter, Lieven. “The Capsular Civilization.” The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, ed. Neil Leach. London; New York: Routledge, 2002. 271-80. Print. [Available here.]

Fairburn, A. R. D. We New Zealanders. Wellington: Progressive Publishing Society, 1944. Print.

Flusser, Vilém. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion, 1999. Print. [See Google Books.]

Hage, Ghassan. “The Incredible Shrinking Society: On Ethics and Hope in the Era of Global Capitalism.” Weekend Review: The Australian Financial Review 7 Sep. 2001: 4-5. [Available in edited version here.]

Hill, Christopher L. National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.

Hoskin, Keith, and Frandsen, Ann-Christine. Where is Strategy? APIRA 2010 Conference, University of Sydney, 12-13 July 2010. Web. [Available here.]

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Middlesex: Penguin, 1976. Print. [See Amazon.]

Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. Print. [Available here.]

Rancière, Jacques (w. Davide Panagia). “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière.” diacritics 30.2 (Summer 2000): 113-26. Print. [Available at Academia.edu after login.]

Skilling, David, and Boven, David. We’re Right Behind You: A Proposed New Zealand Approach to Emissions Reduction.New Zealand Institute Discussion Paper 2007/2. Auckland, NZ: NZI, 2007. Print. [Available here.]

Sturm, Sean, and Turner, Stephen. “ ‘Built Pedagogy’: The University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace.” Interstices 12 (2011): 23-34. Print. [Download.]

Turner, Stephen. “Make-Over Culture and the New Zealand Dream of Home.” Landfall 214: Open House (2007): 85-90. Print. [Download.]

Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49-90. Print. [Available here; available in edited version here.]

Weinberger, David. “The Folly of Accountabalism.” Harvard Business Review 10 Feb. 2007: 24-25. Print. [Available here.]

Williams, Jeffrey J. “Teach the University.” Pedagogy 8 (2008): 25-42. Web.