Plagiarism is a bad idea [not] …

… but it’s an old idea, an idea that in its defence of the legal copyright of authors is indebted to the western liberal heritage of Lockean individualism and Smithian capitalism based on individual property rights and the Romantic ideal of the author as lone genius that was its inheritance. Of course, depending on our view of this heritage, plagiarism is creative and emancipatory (it’s art), naïve – or culturally relative – but remediable (it’s a mistake), or simply illegitimate (it’s cheating or theft).

Tom Gauld [is awesome]

Most teachers see plagiarism as a mistake by students. But they see it as an educative occasion: a chance to educate students about the ethics and aesthetics of scholarship and thereby induct them as apprentices into their scholarly community. They advise teachers to introduce students to the history, as well as the ethical and aesthetic norms, of academic writing and publishing (and perhaps also how they are culturally relative – and imperialist), in particular, about when imitation is appropriate in academic writing. So far so good. But what most teachers do in practice is default to scholarly norms that recapitulate the western liberal heritage: for example, that copying ideas or phraseology from individual authors is bad (although once upon a time it was expected), unless you cite them to acknowledge your indebtedness to them; and that mimicking generic style is good (unless you are acknowledged a genius in your discipline) because “classic style” (Thomas & Turner, 2011) is the common currency of academia. (For my part, I normally end up holding the line on the former, if not the latter.)

If teachers end up stopping short in their response to plagiarism, it is not – or, at least, not usually – from a lack of will to contest scholarly norms or, indeed, from a lack of good will towards students. Rather, it is because they assume that they are the experts in the scholarly community – and experts in plagiarism. What if they were to see plagiarism as an authentic and adaptive response by students to how they were teaching and thus educative for them as teachers? What plagiarism reveals that teachers tend to ignore how many students actually learn. (I might cite Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster [1991], which argues not that teachers are or should be ignorant, but that students aren’t [Biesta, 2017].) First, students often learn socially, that is, by working together, including by copying each other, and they do so in technology-enhanced ways, that is, by working with the technologies that help them achieve what seems to be required, be that plagiarism services or plagiarism detection software. Second, they learn by adapting to what they are taught to value, which, in the case of plagiarism, as with much else in the unscholarly community that is the neoliberal university, seems to be credentialization, individualism and “stultification” (Rancière, 1991, p. 8). Plagiarism is a bad idea because it undervalues students and cheapens the universitas magistrorum et scholarum.

[An edited excerpt from Peters et al. (2021), “The case for academic plagiarism education: A PESA Executive collective writing project.”]

Biesta, G. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52-73. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210316681202

Thomas, F.-N., & Turner, M. (2011). Clear and simple as the truth: Writing classic prose. Princeton University Press.

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Life and Death and the University

A new paper from Stephen Turner and I on the “built pedagogy” of universities):

The ‘totally pedagogised society’ might be considered an age after pre-pedagogical ancient literacy, the pedagogy of early universities and the utilitarianism of mass education, an age in which education has become a battle over the social futures of a ‘people to come.’ Here we concern ourselves with the neoliberal subjection of university education to systems of economic measure, or ‘econometrics,’ that increasingly determine what is valuable and what is valued. Such systems have ‘ascriptive’ force in that they prescribe criteria for all kinds of educational performance. ‘Scripts’ like KPIs, evaluations, rankings, surveys, reports, reviews and so on, now digitised and constantly self-upgrading, enlist university workers in a neoliberal regime of measured and enhanced performance. More than that, they inscribe a certain ‘distribution of the sensible,’ a way of thinking, feeling and acting, that is not only textual but architectonic. In the same way that writing as mission, strategy and policy models university buildings, these buildings model a new way of thinking, feeling and acting. Education becomes increasingly a matter of ‘built pedagogy’: the idea of education that new university buildings instantiate is that education is about investment – both economic and emotional – that pays, rather than about imagination, which does not guarantee marketable returns. In university environments today, we see a conflict between probable and possible futures: the former occupies itself with what is measurable and thus marketable in education; the latter, with education as the capacity to imagine new and different worlds. In the conflict between the two – probable and possible worlds – lies the life and/or death of the university.

https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182660

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]

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[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.

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.

Learning Drawn and Quartered

(With Stephen Turner.) From We Are the University, vol. 2 (Auckland: WATU, 2011) 6 (slightly edited here).

See also Excellent Universities, Here, There and Everywhere, The Idea of the University, and “Built Pedagogy”: The University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace.

The corporate university makes knowledge a matter of product and patent, performance and measure, technocracy and templates: a matter of knowledge marketing and management. The league tables that ensue make every university’s vision every other university’s vision; critical thinking and creativity become generic and fast-following. Accordingly, the University of Auckland positions itself at the hub of Auckland City’s Learning Quarter (LQ) as “open for business,” “actively commercialising research,” and part of an “innovation ecosystem” that unites “innovators,” entrepreneurs and investors in a capital consensus — or consonance [Learning Quarter Plan].

The real university is not so easily marketable or manageable: it is noisy and problematic. Critical thinking and creativity (those buzzwords of technocapitalism and immaterial labour) cannot be auto-tuned. Critical thinking problematises the world “as it is”; creativity constructs new worlds. They are divergent and dissident, and the dissonance they cultivate is the very basis of public life — of democracy. Thus, “[d]issensus,” as Jacques Rancière argues, “is not a confrontation between interests and opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself,” the demonstration of a possible world (Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics [38; read]). Democracy lives in the gaps.

The reduction of the university’s “mission” to entrepreneurial investment in innovation will “create,” if anything, a social deficit. For-profit, for-credit knowledge suppresses the university’s critical-creative capacity to generate a social surplus in the service of a public or political good, in other words, to educate (from the Latin educare: literally, “to lead forth”). What we see in the corporate university is an abdication of the responsibility to educate all for a shared future, to provide a place of learning for all. We in the real university do not teach and learn for profit or for credit; we are not about skills and competencies or about producing portfolio people for a global market. We are about creativity and critical thinking, which for us is being public (see Negt and Kluge, “The Public Sphere and Experience: Selections”).

The LQ needs to be occupied and the University’s mission reshaped by those who care about teaching and learning. Recovering the University’s critical-creative capacity is a matter of engagement in two senses: engaging other people in the noise and problematics of being public — not simply acting privately in public; and engaging the powers that be as guarantors of the order of things — what Rancière calls the “police” (Dissensus). Dissensus — real politics — resists consensus as “the reduction of politics to the police” (ibid. [42]). This is not politics or protest as usual, but calls upon the logic, says Paulo Virno, of jokes, which for him represent the “capacity [for] innovative actions, that is, actions which are capable of modifying established habits and norms” (“Anthropology and Theory of Institutions“; see also “From the Third Person Intruder to the Public Sphere“). What he calls jokes we call critical creativity. Such critical creativity embraces problematisation and construction, but also irony, mockery, contradiction, and so on. It is this that makes us “dangerous” (ibid., after Carl Schmidt, The Concept of the Political 58); it is this that makes us look like criminals to the police order of the LQ. But we would argue that the dissenters, the occupiers, are the University.

The University in Ruins (Not)

The problem

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Harvard UP, 1996), the blurb:

It is no longer clear what role the University plays in society. The structure of the contemporary University is changing rapidly, and we have yet to understand what precisely these changes will mean. Is a new age dawning for the University, the renaissance of higher education under way? Or is the University in the twilight of its social function, the demise of higher education fast approaching?

We can answer such questions only if we look carefully at the different roles the University has played historically and then imagine how it might be possible to live, and to think, amid the ruins of the University. Tracing the roots of the modern American University in German philosophy and in the work of British thinkers such as Newman and Arnold, Bill Readings argues that historically the integrity of the modern University has been linked to the nation-state, which it has served by promoting and protecting the idea of a national culture. But now the nation-state is in decline, and national culture no longer needs to be either promoted or protected. Increasingly, universities are turning into transnational corporations, and the idea of culture is being replaced by the discourse of “excellence.” On the surface, this does not seem particularly pernicious.

The author cautions, however, that we should not embrace this techno-bureaucratic appeal too quickly. The new University of Excellence is a corporation driven by market forces, and, as such, is more interested in profit margins than in thought. Readings urges us to imagine how to think, without concession to corporate excellence or recourse to romantic nostalgia within an institution in ruins. The result is a passionate appeal for a new community of thinkers.

This sounds familiar.

The solution

Jeffrey J. Williams outlines the history of the idea of the university and offers a solution to this ruinous situation: teaching the idea, history, literature and sociology of the university in the university, specifically, in English departments that, as writing zones, are supposed to know well what is ostensibly the language of the university: writing (“Teach the University,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 8.1 [2007]: 25-42).

Jacques Derrida offers a radical—and perhaps utopian—response, arguing for “The University without Condition,” in which the “new humanities” will play a vital role, because they are concerned with humanity, human rights and crimes against humanity, the same concerns that “organise” mondialisation (globalisation), “which wishes to be a humanisation” (Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf [Stanford UP, 2002]):

(202)

(203)

What, then, is the role of the humanities in the university without condition? It is to exercise the right to speak without condition—“to say everything” and “to say it publicly,” as literature does (cf. Jacques Rancière, who might say that whereas the “police” operates via consensus, “politics” operates via dissensus; the university without condition would be “political”—or “redistributed” according to what he calls the “democratic heresy”):

(205)

(So I read Williams as more pragmatic than Derrida—or perhaps he’s just less Continental: for Derrida, literature, the writing of différance, will take over from philosophy as the language of university; for Williams, it seems, it’s writing per se.)

This solution is complicated if we view the historical situation in which we find ourselves as not amenable to humanistic, literary or writerly enquiry, as Vilèm Flusser suggests it is in “The Codified World” (Writings [U MN P, 2002] 35-41). His epochal reading of codes is as follows:

1. premodern/prehistorical: image—the scene (imagination: magic, myths)
2. modern/historical: writing—the concept (conception: explanations, theories, ideologies)
3. postmodern/posthistorical: techno-image—the program (techno-imagination: models, games)

For Flusser, we face a “crisis of values” at the transition to techno-images because the old written “programs,” politics, philosophy and science, not to mention art and history, have been disempowered (41).

I would say: the university is not in ruins—a certain idea of the university might well be: of the university as “literary” research institution, certainly, or, more broadly, of the human university. It is, in fact, in rude good health, not so much in the Crystal Palace of the Business School, the “excellent” (transparent/transcendentally capitalised) university, with its reduction of governance to calculability, but in the face-to-face encounter in the place of learning, wherever it should be.

Said “excellent” university wants to count its students and research outputs, but it does not account for itself (it is non-reflexive); teachers in the university ought to account for themselves—as should students (they should be reflexive). This teachers can do, not by grading students and counting research outputs, but by taking account of the “distribution of the sensible” (a description of what counts) that prevails in the place of learning: affect from below (democratic affect); deformance, intentional and otherwise; decryption; etc. . . . (of which more later).

And because the “excellent” university is also an “exploded” university, it is distributed well beyond the walls of the Crystal Palace through the relatively autonomous—and thus relatively incalculable—nodes of remote learning and other @-universities; and encloses within its walls other similar nodes, such as centres, writing-studies classrooms (!), and (post-)seminars.