APRENDIZAGEM BASEADA NO SERVIÇO À COMUNIDADE (Community-Based Service-Learning)

O Grupo da Piedade formado por porfessores e alunos da Faculdade de Economia da Unversidade Federal passa a admitir que o processo de aprendizado da  teoria e prática da economia dá-se de forma situada e que a exploração deste frame abre uma ampla janela de possibilidade não só de novas estratégias de aprendizagem, mas também de pesquisa.

Em função disto, a estratégia do Grupo passou a privilegiar a aprendizagem baseada no serviço à comunidade (community-based service-learning) e, em decorrência decediu-se que a absorção de estudantes inclinados a prestar serviços à comunidade, em especial aos movimentos sociais envolvidos na luta pelos direitos as serviços públicos essenciais, com o destaque para o transporte.   Nesta direção, foi estabelecida duas linhas de ação: i) uma de natureza mais convencional passa a tomar como objeto de estudo, os envolvidos com a Aprendizagem Baseada no Serviço à Comunidade (Community-Based Service-Learning), criando as condições para que seus trabalhos desenvolvidos e apresentados durante o curso, sempre que possível sejam situados neste universo, e ii) uma outra linha menos covencional orienta-se pela ação e estrutura sua pesquisa em duas etapas, inicialmente, parte de um diagnóstico rápido participativo para extrair da comunidade suas questões, que são em seguida formuladas como objeto de uma pesquisa-ação.

Neste novo contexto, o  Grupo da Piedade está absorvendo novos membros que deverão trabahar nas duas linhas, já que elas se complementam, embora por necessidade de focar numa questão a ser desenvolvida no bojo do Projeto Permanecer (para os estudantes da UFBA), a principal fonte de recursos para as bolsas dos membros, estes deverão privilegiar uma questão e elaborar uma proposta de trabalho em torno da mesma, a ser desenvolvida ao longo do período da bolsa.

Os interessados não só da Faculadade de Economia, mas também de outras unidades da UFBA e, até mesmo de outras insutituições, podem solicitar um encontro com o Prof. Ihering Guedes Alcoforado, sempre as sexta no período da tarde, através de ihering@ufba.br

A MUTAÇÃO DA DEMANDA POLÍTICA

A MUTAÇÃO DA DEMANDA POLÍTICA

Ihering Guedes Alcoforado  

Esta comunicação trata das implicações políticas da transformação da incerteza no nosso destino e, tem como objetivo mostrar que tal fato i)  desloca o foco da política da convivência para a política da sobrevivência e, ii) cria as condições de possibilidades para novas modalidades de políticas que se coloca como causa de boa parte dos processos institucionais e organizacionais associados a globalização dos problemas.   Com este propósito o trabalho consta desta introdução mais duas partes e uma conclusão. 

Na primeira parte mostro como a incerteza emerge no âmbito da política a partir da tomada de consciência  das conseqüências das ações humanas potencializadas pelas técnicas, já que a própria sobrevivência da humanidade passa a ser objeto de decisões políticas; ainda na primeira parte,   apresento como nesta nova situação gera-se uma “angustia antropológica” que cria as condições para uma nova representação e, em decorrência para  novas modalidades de política.      Na segunda parte, mostro que estas novas modalidades de políticas se apóiam no deslocamento do foco da política:  da convivência enraizada na tradição do realismo filosófico para a sobrevivência que se apóia na tradição vitalista.  Na conclusão,  chamo atenção para a impropriedade, nesta nova situação, da celebração existencialista-nilista do livre arbítrio e, para as possibilidades em latências nas heresias seculares associadas a Ética da Responsabilidade de  Hans Jonas e ao Direito Natural neoplatônico de Leo Strauss, na definição de uma estratégia de enfrentamento dos desafios de natureza do tempo presente que emergem no rastro das incertezas.

 

1. Incerteza  e Política

 O nosso ponto de partida é a constatação que a incerteza tem se transformado em nosso destino, a partir do que entramos em uma nova época na qual  o lugar até então ocupado pela política da convivência passa a ser ocupado pela política da sobrevivência que informa tanto nossa relação com o coletivo como nossa inserção na natureza.  A emergência da incerteza acompanha a potencialização da ação humana pela técnica, a exemplo do que se dá com a energia atômica e, mais recentemente o aquecimento global,  partir do que a própria sobrevivência da humanidade passa a depender de um conjunto de  decisões políticas.   É sintomático das ameaças  desta  nova realidade o rápido consenso que se estabeleceu em torno do principio da precaução que, a despeito das suas restrições a exploração dos recursos  técnico-científico,  rapidamente migrou do âmbito do debate social para o da  controvérsia política, onde estruturou  em seu  entorno um consenso que,  tendo como referência a problemática da  sobrevivência   orienta nossas preocupações e nossas escolhas, configurando um novo  espaço público.

Atente-se que  a nova  relação na qual se ancora a política da sobrevivência  se articula a partir de uma “angustia antropológica” diante de uma nova incerteza manufaturada pelo homem e que passa a informar nossa  representação, por meio do   que põe a preocupação pela vida e a sobrevivência no centro da política.  Agora, ao  contrário do que estabelece a tradição do realismo filosófico que considera a convivência, o estar juntos, a harmonia sincrônica real ou virtual como o objetivo prioritário dos seres sociais, o novo  campo político que se estabelece nos rastros das novas incertezas associadas as decisões políticas de uso dos novos recursos tecnológicos  se encontra invadido por uma duvida  no concernente a incerteza e as ameaças que contém o futuro (porvir) que leva a “angustia antropológica”.  Esta angustia é despertada pela incerteza que nos faz perceber as ameaças a perenidade da própria  humanidade, a qual passa a ser  percebida como precária em razão dos perigos que a ação humana potencializada pela técnica.     É esta  a angústia antropológica  focalizada na sobrevivência que  remodela de forma duradoura não só nossa representação do mundo  mas também as modalidades de ação política, modificando as prioridades  políticas o que se reflete no deslocamento da política da convivência para a política da sobrevivência.

 

2.  Da política da Convivência à Política da Sobrevivência

Em função do exposto acima, admite-se que o  surgimento no âmbito da política de um novo cenário transnacional no qual se manifesta uma parte dos novos espaços públicos, é antes que nada o resultado,  não a causa,  de uma mudança sem precedente  em nossa relação com a política que se expressa pelo deslocamento do foco da política na convivência para a sobrevivência. 

A política da convivência que tem sua origem sistematizada pelo realismo filosófico a partir do binômio caracterizado por uma harmonia nas relações internas e uma desarmonia nas relações externas e que foi sistematizado de forma emblemático por Thomas Hobbes,  começa a deixar rapidamente o  centro de nossas preocupações, a despeito dos fortes indícios de uma insegurança interna crescente.  Isto porque, atualmente, o foco do interesse está na problemática da sobrevivência da própria humanidade e é isto que explica o fato que    “[...] a aparição de novos espaços políticos transnacionais somente adquirem sentido desde esta abertura das práticas a problemática da sobrevivência.   As idéias de justiça e de direito que prevalecem neste universo somente adquirem sentido na perspectiva do risco e da precaução.   (ABÉLÈS,2008, p.13)

3. Conclusão

A prolbemática da sobrevivência é o coroamento de um processo de modernização, o que se estabelece a partir de uma solução de continuidade com a  teologia e a mitologia, as quais até então forneciam o quadro normativo,  a partir do qual se publicizava o que era ou não autorizado o homem fazer. Mas desde que a liberdade para o artifício humano  foi autorizado, este tipo de enquadramento inviabilizou-se, gerando o  problema de uma auto-autorização nilística.   Esta nova situação, do ponto de vista teológico pode ser associado a   heresia gnóstica, segundo a qual Deus abandonou  sua criação, o que torna imperativo o homem compreender e seguir a lógica inerente a esta criação.  Ou seja, com o deslocamento da mitologia e da teologia, emerge o problema da legitimação da ação humana num ambiente cultural dominado pelo nilismo e pelo agnosticismo.

Este desafio é magnificado recentemente com o deslocamento do foco da política da convivência para a sobrevivência e pode ser  enfrentado, a partir dos insights de  dois pensadores judeus: Hans Jonas e Leo Strauss.  Hans Jonas propôs uma Ética da Responsabilidade fundamentada na  biologia filosófica, a partir do que configurou uma  numa apreensão neoaristotélica do mundo como um organismo vivo e, assim colocou uma alternativa a vontade de poder a partir de ponto de referência normativo apoiado na ecologia, a partir do que fornece os fundamentos filosóficos para o Principio da Precaução. Enquanto que Leo Strauss formulou uma concepção diferente da natureza como uma referência normativa para  ação humana liberada das amarras do mito e da teologia: uma concepção neo platônica do direito natural que precede a ação humana, por meio da qual e, tendo como referência o Princípio da Precaução se pode extrair virtualidades que forme o núcleo de um Direito natural focado na  sobrevivência, um elemento do novo ambiente institucional necessário ao atendimento da nova demanda política.  

BIBLIOGRAFIA

 

 

BIBLIOGRAFIA

ABÉLÈS, Marc, Política de la Supervivencia. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA. 2008

LAZIER, Benjamin, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imaginatio nbetween the World Wars. Princeton . Princeton University Press. 2008

 

 

PESQUISA-AÇÃO, AS NOVAS MIDIAS E A LUTA EM DEFESA DOS TRANSPORTES PÚBLICOS

O Grupo de Economia e Política de Transporte da UFBA tem um compormisso com a defesa dos transportes públicos de qualidade e acessível a toda a população.   Em função disto adota como metodologia de trabalho a pesquisa-ação, a qual reconhece que se manifesta das mais diferentes formas, indo das expressões  convencionais as mais inovadoras, mas sempre apoiada em fatos e processos relevantes do ponto de vista ação, o que leva a considerar-se a pesquisa-ação geradora de subsidios as politicas de transportes baseada em evidências (objeto de uma outra nota).

Entre as versões convencionais da pesquisa-ação temos os relatórios que sistematizam evidências extraida por meio dos diagnósticos rápidos-particiaptivos (o que será objeto de uma outa nota) que justificam as políticas baseadas em evidências e, no âmbito das iniciativas inovadoras temos os “diários de campo” que de uma técnica etnográfica, por excelência, pode ser deslocada para outras areas, assumindo uma conformação distinta, a exemplo do que acontence com sua assimilação no âmbito da pesquisa-ação.   O uso deste recurso, quer com os requintes metodológicos qu caracterizam os bons tabalhso antropológicos, ou não, sempre  permite o  registro do proprio processo de luta no front, criando as condições para que  a exeperiência imeditada possa  ser objeto de uma reflexão a posteriore que  retroalimente  o próprio processo de luta.  O filme A  Revolta do Buzu, se inclui neste último.

O Grupo de Economia e Politica dos Transportes Público considera que o  cinema e, em especial as novas mídias tem oferecido recursos que, por sua vez mesmo sem a intenção implicita de fazer pesquisa-ação, pode ser considerado como tal, a exemplo do trabalho feito pela rede  The Livable Streets Network, por meio da sua produtora StreeetFilms, [ http://www.livablestreets.com/about#streetfilms ],  cujo  catalogo é composto de  uma serie de documentários que difunde experiências exitosas de política de transportes, fornecendo evidências para politicas alternativas de transportes baseadas em evidências, em especial as baseada nos transportes não motorizados.

O Grupo da Piedade, pretende explorar as  possbilidade das novas mídias tanto no sentido apontado pela StreetFilm, isto é, como evidência que justifique as propostas alternativas de enfrentamento da deterioriação dos sistemas de transportes;    ou  por meio do próprio registro imagético pelos menbros do grupo, registrando seus diagnósticos rapidos participativos (DRO) por meio de videos.     A porposta de integração destas duas metodologias de pesquisa ação através da produção e uso das imagens é um dos eixos que começa a se delinear no interior do Grupo de Economia e Politica dos Transportes Públicos.

Nesta direção a primeira atividade será um seminario que tratará dos registros imagéticos (cinema, video, fotos) como evidência para a política pública dos transportes e, em cuja abertura se fará uma homenagem ao cineasta  Carlos Prozato e se   exibirá seu filme a Revolta do Bizu.

 

O PAPEL DOS JOGOS ELETRÔNICOS

El proyecto Molleindustria  explora la potencialidad de comunicación social y política a través de los videojuegos.  Videojuegos en contexto: industria, mercado, pùblico y la superación de la frontera del entretenimiento.
¿Existen videojuegos underground?

http://www.molleindustria.org/en/home

 

GT TRANSPORTE PUBLICO – “Video Vernacular” na Luta por uma Política Alternatva de Transporte Público

 

O Grupo de Transporte Público tem um compromisso com a pesquisa e a ação.  Na pesquisa estimula-se nãao só o uso de metodologias alternativas de pesquisa, em especial na fase de diagnóstico, a exemplo da ênfase nos Diagnósticos Rápidos Participativos (DRP), mas o uso de novas ferramentas de pesquisa,  a exemplo do vernacular video, a qual poderá inclusive vir a ser utilizadas em outras etapas da pesquisa-ação.       O vernacular video é teorizado no artigo abaixo, o qual com  muita satisfação transcrevemos e pomos a disposição de todos os particantes  do Grupo da Piedade e, em especial do GT Transorte Público.

Ihering Guedes Alcoforado

 

VERNACULAR VIDEO
Tom Sherman twsherma@syr.edu

Video as a technology is a little over forty years old. It is an
offshoot of television, developed in the 1930s and a technology that has
been in our homes for sixty years. Television began as a centralised,
one-to-many broadcast medium. Television’s centrality was splintered as
cable and satellite distribution systems and vertical, specialised
programming sources fragmented television’s audience. As video
technology spun off from television, the mission was clearly one of
complete decentralisation. Forty years later, video technology is
everywhere. Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely
decentralised digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous
utility and power. Video gear is portable, increasingly impressive in
its performance, and it still packs the wallop of instant replay. As
Marshall McLuhan said, the instant replay was the greatest invention of
the twentieth century.

Video in 2008 is not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists
or journalists or artists — it is the people’s medium. The potential of
video as a decentralised communications tool for the masses has been
realised, and the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video
age. Surveillance and counter-surveillance aside, video is the
vernacular form of the era — it is the common and everyday way that
people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events
and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become every
person’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence
and identity.

There are currently camcorders in twenty per cent of households in North
America. As digital still cameras and camera-phones are engineered to
shoot better video, video will become completely ubiquitous. People have
stories to tell, and images and sounds to capture in video. Television
journalism is far too narrow in its perspective. We desperately need
more POVs. Webcams and videophones, video-blogs (vlogs) and
video-podcasting will fuel a twenty-first-century tidal wave of
vernacular video.

What Are the Current Characteristics of Vernacular Video?

Displayed recordings will continue to be shorter and shorter in
duration, as television time, compressed by the demands of advertising,
has socially engineered shorter and shorter attention spans. Videophone
transmissions, initially limited by bandwidth, will radically shorten
video clips. The use of canned music will prevail. Look at advertising.
Short, efficient messages, post-conceptual campaigns, are sold on the
back of hit music. Recombinant work will be more and more common.
Sampling and the repeat structures of pop music will be emulated in the
repetitive ‘deconstruction’ of popular culture. Collage, montage and the
quick-and-dirty efficiency of recombinant forms are driven by the
romantic, Robin Hood-like efforts of the copyleft movement. Real-time,
on-the-fly voiceovers will replace scripted narratives. Personal,
on-site journalism and video diaries will proliferate. On-screen text
will be visually dynamic, but semantically crude. Language will be
altered quickly through misuse and slippage. People will say things like
‘I work in several mediums [sic].’ ‘Media’ is plural. ‘Medium’ is
singular. What’s next: ‘I am a multi-mediums artist’? Will someone
introduce spell-check to video text generators? Crude animation will be
mixed with crude behaviour. Slick animation takes time and money. Crude
is cool, as opposed to slick. Slow motion and accelerated image streams
will be overused, ironically breaking the real-time-and-space edge of
straight, unaltered video. Digital effects will be used to glue
disconnected scenes together; paint programs and negative filters will
be used to denote psychological terrain. Notions of the sub- or
unconscious will be objectified and obscured as ‘quick and dirty’
surrealism dominates the ‘creative use’ of video. Travelogues will
prosper, as road ‘films’ and video tourism proliferate. Have palm-corder
and laptop will travel. Extreme sports, sex, self-mutilation and drug
overdoses will mix with disaster culture; terrorist attacks, plane
crashes, hurricanes and tornadoes will be translated into mediated
horror through vernacular video.

From Avant-Garde to Rear Guard

Meanwhile, in the face of the phenomena of vernacular video,
institutionally sanctioned video art necessarily attaches itself even
more firmly to traditional visual-art media and cinematic history. Video
art distinguishes itself from the broader media culture by its
predictable associations with visual-art history (sculpture, painting,
photography) and cinematic history (slo-mo distortions of cinematic
classics, endless homages to Eisenstein and Brakhage, etc.).

Video art continues to turn its back on its potential as a
communications medium, ignoring its cybernetic strengths (video alters
behaviour and steers social movement through feedback). Video artists,
seeking institutional support and professional status, will continue to
be retrospective and conservative. Video installations provide museums
with the window-dressing of contemporary media art. Video art that
emulates the strategies of traditional media, video sculpture and
installations or video painting reinforces the value of an institution’s
collection, its material manifestation of history. Video art as limited
edition or unique physical object does not challenge the museum’s raison
d’etre. Video artists content with making video a physical object are
operating as a rear guard, as a force protecting the museum from claims
of total irrelevance. In an information age, where value is determined
by immaterial forces, the speed-of-light movement of data, information
and knowledge, fetishising material objects is an anachronistic
exercise. Of course, it is not surprising that museum audiences find the
material objectification of video at trade-show scale impressive on a
sensual level.

As vernacular video culture spins toward disaster and chaos, artists
working with video will have to choose between the safe harbour of the
museum and gallery, or become storm chasers. If artists choose to chase
the energy and relative chaos and death wish of vernacular video, there
will be challenges and high degrees of risk.

Aesthetics Will Continue to Separate Artists from the Public at Large

If artists choose to embrace video culture in the wilds (on the street
or on-line) where vernacular video is burgeoning in a massive storm of
quickly evolving short message forms, they will face the same problems
that artists always face. How will they describe the world they see, and
if they are disgusted by what they see, how will they compose a new
world? And then how will they find an audience for their work? The
advantages for artists showing in museums and galleries are simple. The
art audience knows it is going to see art when it visits a museum or
gallery. Art audiences bring their education and literacy to these art
institutions. But art audiences have narrow expectations. They seek
material sensuality packaged as refined objects attached to the history
of art. When artists present art in a public space dominated by
vernacular use, video messages by all kinds of people with different
kinds of voices and goals, aesthetic decisions are perhaps even more
important, and even more complex, than when art is being crafted to be
experienced in an art museum.

Aesthetics are a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty.
For the purpose of this text, aesthetics are simply an internal logic or
set of rules for making art. This logic and its rules are used to
determine the balance between form and content. As a general rule, the
vernacular use of a medium pushes content over form. If a message is
going to have any weight in a chaotic environment — where notions of
beauty are perhaps secondary to impact and effectiveness — then content
becomes very important. Does the author of the message have anything to
show or say?

Vernacular video exhibits its own consistencies of form. As previously
elaborated, the people’s video is influenced by advertising, shorter and
shorter attention spans, the excessive use of digital effects, the
seductiveness of slo-mo and accelerated image streams, a fascination
with crude animation and crude behaviour, quick-and-dirty voice-overs
and bold graphics that highlight a declining appreciation of written
language. To characterise the formal ‘aesthetics’ of vernacular video,
it might be better to speak of anesthetics. The term anesthetic is an
antonym of aesthetic. An anesthetic is without aesthetic awareness. An
anesthetic numbs or subdues perceptions. Vernacular video culture,
although vital, will function largely anesthetically.

The challenge for artists working outside the comfort zone of museums
and galleries will be to find and hold onto an audience, and to attain
professional status as an individual in a collective, pro-am
(professional amateur) environment. Let’s face it, for every artist that
makes the choice to take his or her chances in the domain of vernacular
video, there are thousands of serious, interesting artists who find
themselves locked out of art institutions by curators that necessarily
limit the membership of the master class. Value in the museum is
determined by exclusivity. With this harsh reality spelled out, there
should be no doubt about where the action is and where innovation will
occur.

The technology of video is now as common as a pencil for the middle
classes. People who never even considered working seriously in video
find themselves with digital camcorders and non-linear video-editing
software on their personal computers. They can set up their own
‘television stations’ with video streaming via the Web without much
trouble. The revolution in video-display technologies is creating
massive, under-utilised screen space and time, as virtually all
architecture and surfaces become potential screens. Videophones will
expand video’s ubiquity exponentially. These video tools are incredibly
powerful and are nowhere near their zenith. If one wishes to be part of
the twenty-first-century, media-saturated world and wants to communicate
effectively with others or express one’s position on current affairs in
considerable detail, with which technology would one chose to do so,
digital video or a pencil?

Artists must embrace, but move beyond, the vernacular forms of video.
Artists must identify, categorise and sort through the layers of
vernacular video, using appropriate video language to interact with the
world effectively and with a degree of elegance. Video artists must
recognise that they are part of a global, collective enterprise. They
are part of a gift economy in an economy of abundance. Video artists
must have something to say and be able to say it in sophisticated,
innovative, attractive ways. Video artists must introduce their brand of
video aesthetics into the vernacular torrents. They must earn their
audiences through content-driven messages.

The mission is a difficult one. The vernacular domain is a noisy torrent
of immense proportions. Video artists will be a dime a dozen.
Deprofessionalised artists working in video, many sporting M.F.A.
degrees, will be joined by music-video-crazed digital cooperatives and
by hordes of Sunday video artists. The only thing these varied artists
won’t have to worry about is the death of video art. Video art has been
pronounced dead so many times; its continual resurrection should not
surprise anyone. This is a natural cycle in techno-cultural evolution.
The robust life force of vernacular video will be something for artists
to ride, and something to twist and turn, and something formidable to
resist and work against. The challenge will be Herculean and
irresistible.

Venturing into the Broader Culture of Messaging

The culture of messaging is transforming art into a much more extensive
social and political activity. The role of the individual artist is
changing radically as complex finished works of art are no longer widely
embraced enthusiastically by audiences. Attention spans have shrunk and
audiences want to interact with the culture they embrace. Audiences are
consumed by the compulsion to trade messages. Today, messaging is all
that matters. Instant messaging, voice messaging, texting, e-mail, file
sharing, social networking, video streaming and all manner of
interactive synchronous and asynchronous communication are the order of
the day.

The speed and pervasiveness of electronic, digital culture is erasing
the function of art as we knew it. The world of top-down,
expert-authored one-to-many forms of communication have given way to the
buzz of the hive. The broadcast and auteur models, where control of
content remains firmly in the hands of a few, have disintegrated.
Speaking horizontally, one-to-one or many-to-many, now dominates our
time. Our cultures are no longer bound together by the reception and
appreciation of singular objects of thought, but by the vibrations and
oscillations of millions of networked transceivers. Transceivers, those
devices for receiving and authoring messages, the video enabled cell
phones and laptop computers and PDAs with webcams, are erasing the
differences between artists and audiences as both move towards a culture
of messaging.

In the early 1960s the communications revolution, satellite-based
telecommunications, made it impossible to maintain an art separate and
distinct from the culture at large. Boundaries between art and the
broader culture simply broke down due to increased communication.
Abstract expressionism, the zenith of Clement Greenberg’s high modernism
(art for art’s sake) was crushed by a deluge of advertising imagery. Pop
art marked the beginning of the postmodern era. Postmodernism resulted
from a technologically determined collapse of the boundaries segregating
and protecting the art world from a broader culture dominated by
advertising. Chaos has characterised Western art ever since, as for five
decades we have experienced the relative freedom of an ‘anything goes’
philosophy of expanding pluralism. Feminism and many previously
unheralded Others (and content in general — the counterpoint to
abstraction and formalism) took their turns in the spotlight of a
postmodern era churned by the broad, alternating strokes of minimalism
and the ornate. The formal properties of postmodern art and culture
swing back and forth between the classic simplicity of natural forms
(minimalism) and the playfully complicated synthetic hodgepodge of
bricolage (neo-rococo).

If pop art essentially signified the big bang that commenced
postmodernity, an era characterised by cultural diversity and hybridity,
then we can imagine fragments of art mixed with culture flying away from
the centre of a cataclysmic implosion. The postmodern implosion of the
early 1960s resulted in an expanding universe where art and culture
mixed haphazardly. Art remained as a concept at the centre of the
postmodern implosion, recognisable only through art historical
references. Art was pure and identifiable only if it quoted or repeated
its past, an art history crowned by its highest order: abstraction – the
zenith of modernism.

The Second Implosion: Postmodernity Itself Collapses

We have now undergone a second, even more violent and gargantuan
implosion. The second postmodern implosion took place early in the
millennial decade: 2002-2005. The cultural debris of the expanding
postmodern cultural mix, the delightfully insane levels of diversity,
hybridity and horizontality characterising late twentieth century
culture and its fragmented, disintegrated pockets of contemporary art,
had reached a density and weight so disproportionate to the vacuum at
the centre of ‘art’ that a second complete collapse was unavoidable. In
other words, after five decades of relative chaos, postmodernity itself
has collapsed and imploded with such intensity that we now occupy a vast
cloud of cultural disorientation.

If this exercise in cultural cosmology seems unreal and strangely rooted
in a philosophical premise that art has an important function in
creating, remaking and even maintaining order in our increasingly
turbulent cultures, be warned that this text was written by an artist, a
believer in the value of art. Artists believe strongly that it is their
role to push cultures to change as a result of the imposition of their
art. Art is extreme, twisted, marginal culture; a minority report.
Artists believe they are agents of change and act accordingly. Artists
ask embarrassing questions. Artists are ahead of their time. By simply
embracing the present, thereby glimpsing the future, artists lead
audiences reluctant to let go of the past. The principle tenets of the
belief system of art are that art refreshes culture and somewhat
paradoxically that the history of art can anchor culture during stormy
times of disorder. We live in such stormy times.

Art is a belief system in crisis. At the centre of this belief system we
find art chained to art history, to times before the dominance of
computers and the emergence of networks and vastly distributed
authorship. We find contemporary art that finds security in looking like
art from the early to mid-twentieth century (modern art). While these
historical references have been stretched to the breaking point by time
and technocultural change, the broadest public persists in embracing an
idea of art that remains antithetical to television, radio, cinema,
design, advertising, and the Web. The Web of course encompasses all of
the media before it and stirs the pot to the boiling point with a large
dose of interactivity. Art at the centre necessarily acquiesces to the
parameters of art as have been defined by the history of art, refusing
to be corrupted by interactivity, but for more and more thinking people
art historical references are unconvincing and useless in the face of
our collapsing cultural order. These anachronisms are security blankets
with diminishing returns.

One thing for sure is that levels of uncertainty are up big time. The
speed and volume of cultural exchange is undermining the lasting impact
of ‘original’ ideas, images and sounds, and the economics of both
culture and art are undergoing radical change. In the millennial period,
everyone is looking for a foothold. Artists are just as uncomfortable
with instability as everyone else, but the prevailing myth has it that
artists seek and thrive on uncertainty. But there has to be some order
before artists can break the rules. Seeking order and security, artists
have been moving back and forth between two pillars of thought
throughout the five decades of postmodernity: 1) the history of art is a
source of order and content in a posthistorical era, and 2) culture in
the broadest sense (television, cinema, radio, newspapers, magazines,
music, the Web), has its own mind-numbing conventions in formulaic
programming, but provides access to broader audiences. Artists inhabit
and straddle these opposing, negligibly conjoined islands of form and
order and gaze at the turbulent universe swirling around, under and over
them.

The Immediate Environment following the Collapse of Postmodernism

The immediate environment is a cloud-like swirl of fragmented particles
and perforated strips of culture and art. The second implosion has been
devastating; delightfully so if one is selling telecommunications
transceivers. Isolation and alienation must be countered by real and
potential social opportunities. MySpace, Facebook and YouTube come to
mind. Digital, electronic networks provide the only perceivable order
and stability in the immediate environment. Digital telecom is the
lifeline. This is ironic as digital telecom and the horizontal,
decentralised nature of internet communication has been the major factor
in eroding institutional authority and order. Museums, universities, the
press, religions and the family have all taken major hits. Internet
communication, while having tremendous advantages in terms of range and
asynchronous time, has serious shortcomings in depth, especially
relative to a physical social world. On the other hand, a physical and
social grounding through links with a virtual world are better than
nothing. Nature, we are told, is on its deathbed. The autonomy of the
individual has eroded psychologically to the extent that the body has
become a fleshy temple. We savour our food, go to the gym, have sex and
otherwise push ourselves physically, to the point of exhaustion, in
order to feel our bodies.

The current environment favours messaging, the propagation of short,
direct, functional messages. The characteristics of poetic art,
ambiguity and abstraction, are not particularly useful in a messaging
culture. We desperately seek concrete correspondences between our world
of messages and the physical realities of our bodies and what remains of
nature. While messaging can extend beyond our immediate physical
environment, the body must remain in contact with the earth. Global
telecom, the breakdown of space and time, is balanced by the emergence
of microregionalism. Cities are redefined as manageable neighbourhoods.
Nature is attainable in specific places; say a clearing in a wooded area
behind a graveyard. Messaging often coordinates physical meetings in
particular spots at specific times.

Messaging differs from industrial culture (cinema, television, radio,
newspapers, and the synthesis of these smokestack media through the Web)
in its pragmatic referencing of the body and specific locales. The body
is the last autonomous, ‘original,’ non-mediated physical object, at
least until it is cloned, and its geographical position can be tracked
and noted. A person, a body, may issue voice or text messages, but the
body is referenced physically by photography or video to create a sense
of the site of authorship. Messaging is tied down, given weight and
actuality through references to the emanating body. Disclosures of place
are also key to message functionality. ‘I’m having a coffee at Starbucks
on Marshall Street. (here’s my image to prove it) Where are you?’ This
message from Starbucks differs from art and industrial culture such as
commercial cinema in its brevity and simple goal of placing the body.
Obsessive messaging interrupts longer, more complex objects of thought
like cinema. Movies, television and certainly literature are perforated
as audiences and readers are sending and receiving messages instead of
paying total attention, thus breaking the continuity of narratives.
Cultural objects are perforated by messaging, compounding their state of
fragmentation at the hands of advertising. Longer, more demanding
narratives are being blown full of holes by the apparent necessity of
messaging.

Ambiguity and abstraction fare poorly under the siege of constant
interruption. Explicit, pragmatic short message forms, repeated for
clarity and effectiveness, may survive the perforation effect. This
perforation analogy can be used to describe consciousness itself in the
millennial decade. There is no such thing as an interruption anymore
because attention is defined through the heavily perforated veil of our
consciousness. We give away our attention by the split-second to
incoming traffic on our cell phones, PDAs and laptops. Our observational
skills have suffered as we have mastered multitasking. We now commonly
send messages while we are in the act of receiving information.

The millennial environment is strangely similar to a premodern
environment in that accurate description and literal representation tend
to rule. The authors of messages (texting, voice, e-mail, webcam, clips
for video file sharing networks) have short-term, clearly defined
goals. In this period after the collapse of postmodern industrial
culture and art the environment is ‘stable’ only in the sense that it is
unrelenting in its turbulence and incoherence. There is no room for
small talk in this kind of environment. The behaviour of other species
in environments and ecologies with high levels of uncertainty offers
insights into our current situation. For instance, scientists think that
birds only say two things, no matter how elaborate their songs at dawn
and dusk. The birds say ‘I have a really good tree,’ and ‘why don’t you
come over and have some sex?’ Human messaging follows similar patterns
in terms of directness. I have a body and I am in a particular place.
Use your imagination to figure out why I am contacting you.

The medium of video, and in particular live, real-time video, is the
heir apparent to the summit of messaging. No medium establishes presence
and fixes position as well as video. The development and application of
communications technologies forced the initial collapse of modernism in
the early 1960s. The coming of age of digital telecom in the millennial
decade has created the conditions for an even more complete breakdown of
the meaning of industrial culture and art. We now navigate within a
thick cloud of shifting cultural debris, anchored by networks permitting
us to interact. Most of the messages insist that we exist and insure
that we can sustain ourselves (the business of water, food,
companionship, amusement, sex, shelter within the broader concerns of
economics and politics).

Given the reality and inevitable growth of such a culture of messaging,
there are questions we have to ask about the future of culture and art.
When will poetic work emerge again in a network-anchored culture
dominated by straightforward pragmatic exchanges? And if ambiguous and
abstract messages once again emerge, will there be anyone left with the
strength of attention to read them? And finally if artists cling to a
belief system that includes the potential for transforming culture
through autonomous, strategic interventions, then how will they do so
effectively in a culture of messaging that continues to diffuse the
power of individual messages in favour of an increasingly scattered,
distributed, collective authorship?

—–

Note: Acknowledgment is due to the art historian Arthur C. Danto for the
clarity and utility of his analysis of postmodernity. Danto’s After the
End of Art (Princeton University Press, 1996) served as a springboard
for my scan of the post-postmodern culture of messaging in 2008.

CONFLICTS AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE UNIVERSITY III

EXPERIMENTAL UNIVVERSITY: Conflicts in the production of knowledge

Written by Universidad Experimental of Rosario   

Wednesday, 28 February 2007

 

 

An introduction
There are invitations to which we are indifferent. We forget them immediately. There are, however, invitations that remain. They float in our heads, intertwining with other ideas. When the invitation is to a group, the idea no longer floats in one head but in several. Remaining open to these other heads, it is available to be taken and processed. The invitation to the debate about conflicts in the production of knowledge has affected us in this second way. For us, it is literally a vital problem.

We have tried, then, to think about this problem from our experiences as a group. That is to say, we have tried to list the conflicts that are taking places as our project moves. In schematic form, we have classified these conflicts under three categories:
- our relations with the logic of the State University – our relations with the logic of the Market University – the relations we maintain with our project insofar as it attempts a different kind of instituent wager with respect to knowledge and thought
In this sense, we tried to turn this analytic into a strategic tool – a resource for the project. At the same time, we do not cease to question, modify or revise this analytic. For that reason, this text is only a small part of our discussion.

On the other hand, you will notice that this text lacks some kind of testimonial or chronicle of the experiences of the Experimental University throughout 2006. It seems to us much more stimulating to offer certain theses on the initial debate that also provide a kind of elaboration of what actually happened.
The Experimental University and the State University: conflicts
The Experimental University neither remains indifferent to nor exclusively confronts the State University, since it inhabits another logic.
Its gesture is not so much exodus as camping. This response, before being an ideological question, concerns a specific availability of resources.

The hypothesis of the piqueteros, although not in all its aspects, helps to show the relationship we have with the State University: we do not want to fight over academic positions; we do not want to take over the student centre. We want resources for the self-management of our projects.
The university can digest the works of any thinker but it seems much more difficult for it to digest participatory forms of debate and construction. It seems, then, that with the State University, we can develop ‘contact surfaces’ with regard to reading/writing/interventions but not with regard to management.
It cost us highly at the singular and the collective level to find usable resources for our project in the State University, but in the meantime we were playing and hitting up against the institution all the time.
Our wager is to subtract a fragment of the social interchanges of the university from state and market regulations in order to compose them with other social processes for the production and organization of life.

The Experimental University and the Market University: conflicts
Since in the mercantile era that which does not self-manage is either dismissed or absorbed by the market, our objective is to plot a ‘contract/contact’ with the participants of the Experimental University that goes beyond this mercantile absorption.
To insist on the ‘contract’ with the different people involved in this experience is to make it clear that our wager is a political wager.
Our wager is to work as a connective machine between those involved in the Experimental University and processes of social self-organization.

If we bet on participatory action, then our wager serves to form a platform of connections with different points of productive self-organization, which will necessarily lead us to redesign the processes of self-education.
The Experimental University and the Market University generate two parallel poles of management of the State University´s resources.
Therefore, the conflict with the Market University does not appear as much in the subtraction of resources as it does within the interior spaces of the Experimental University itself.
The whole strategy of the Experimental University, then, depends on the subjectivity that inhabits it. The subjectivity that produces the Market University is that of the consuming student. If one tries to break with the mercantile ways of life that we inhabit, the possibility emerges for new kinds of relations.

The Experimental University: conflicts
Our project positions us in the middle of a conflict between old and new organizational configurations that have as their agglutinative element the production of knowledge and its relation to other social spaces. What is at stake is the political productivity of knowledge and thought, which we have taken as a criterion that allows us to elaborate strategies.
There does not exist a privileged space for the practices of the Experimental University, but nor does it have a privileged practice. Its importance lies in its political productivity for the construction and support of spaces in which it is possible to decide on all the dimensions we consider relevant to our existence.
The Experimental University attempts to function as an attentive, moving and connective space, not as an auto-referential one. A double cognitive movement seems to install itself in our project: we seek, on the one hand, to invent a defining characteristic, a signature; and at the same time, to approach thinking no longer thematically but problematically.

We thus say it is not only a matter of instrumentalising concepts in relation to problems, but also of not ceasing to question and redefine this same logic of instrumentalisation.
We try to conceptualise knowledge only insofar as it can serve as a tool with which to think and intervene in our realities.
The fact that this form of knowledge can come into being in infinite ways, gives us the possibility to think that any kind of group can innovate constantly in its practice. Language itself is thought as a material that has in its immanence the power of being connective – that is, to assemble itself in unusual ways. On the basis of these connections, new forms of movement can be developed, both in thought and praxis, which are not within the repertoire of the quotidian.

If the traditional free universities [cátedras libres]* generate hierarchical divisions between those who know and those who do not know, between experimental and non-experimental militants, the Experimental University sustains itself on another premise: ‘All of us involved in the project are the possessors of problems, that is to say, we ourselves become permanently problems.’
Today we consider that the dispute within, against and beyond the university must acquire a profile that privileges cognitive, methodological and connective aspects.
Can an institution that produces knowledge be defined exclusively by this triad? Absolutely not. Those are its defining traits, but not its only ones. Since the institution is also management, that is, the ways of managing of these elements. Management conditions the logics of knowledge production from the inside. Command is not purely exterior with regard to the products:  the historicity of these products is integrated in their very constitution.

What did we mean when we spoke about the ‘resources of the university’? Since one of our characteristics is precisely to inquire into the nature of our own collectivity (the very possibility for its existence, as much as the conditions it suffers and the profiles it adopts), we know that ‘a resource is never only a resource.’ To put it colloquially: the essence of any resource is to be a poisoned gift. This ambivalence leads us to a permanent interrogation of the political utility of resources.
* ‘cátedras libres’ (free universities) are open academic spaces usually created by militant student groups and organized in the traditional way: active teachers, passive students, etc.

CONFLICTS AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE UNIVERSITY II

Management’s Dashboard: William Massy’s “Virtual U”

by Marc Bousquet, 23 feb 2007   

 

 

Related links
http://www.altx.com/ebooks/infopol.html
http://www.metamute.org/en/Recomposing-the-University
http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/issue5p1/bousquetinformal.html
http://www.virtual-u.org/

Who among us hasn’t longed to be in charge for just one day? Oh, the things we would change! Virtual U gives you that chance—the chance to be a university president and run the show. – William Massy, Virtual U “Strategy Guide”
William Massy’s “Virtual U” is a “computer simulation of university management in game form” (Sawyer 28). Designed by a former Stanford vice president with a $1 million grant from the Sloan foundation, the game models the range of powers, attitudes, and commitments of university administration.
In short, it provides a window into one of the more widespread versions of administrative consciousness and worldview—the ideal administrator in the world of “resource allocation theory,” “cybernetic leadership,” and “revenue center management.” The use of such simulations, models, and games is widespread in bureaucratic, professional, service, and manufacturing training environments.
The “serious gaming” trend has seen the emergence of games designed to promote environmental awareness, armed forces recruitment, white supremacy, religious tolerance, better eating habits, approaches to living with chronic diseases, and so on: wherever there is real-world rhetorical and practical purpose, institutions and activist organizations have commissioned games to propagandize, train, inform and recruit. Both the U.S. armed forces and Hezbollah recruit through downloadable PC-based games. Even public budgeting has resulted in an at least two gaming simulations designed to influence voters by shaping attitudes toward spending, in New York City and the Massachusetts state legislature.
Massy’s game is a budgeting simulation. It draws upon two prominent strains of thought in contemporary university management, the “cybernetic systems” model of university leadership developed by Robert Birnbaum and resource allocation theory, specifically the principles of Revenue Center Management (RCM), of which Massy is a leading proponent. 
It is also signally influenced by the Hong Kong design team selected by Massy and the Sloan Foundation, Hong Kong’s Trevor Chan.  Massy and the Sloan Foundation specifically selected Chan for his prior success with the PC game Capitalism (“The Ultimate Strategy Game of Money, Power, and Wealth,” reviewed by PC Gamer as “good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself”). Massy and Sloane felt Chan’s game represented a “good match” with their “similar” vision of management strategy, and the code underlying Chan’s Capitalism 2 serves as the base for many of the modules in Massy’s game.
There is only one viewpoint possible in Massy’s “Virtual U.” Players can choose to be the president of several different kinds of institutions, but presidency is the only possible relationship to the campus.
One cannot choose to play Massy’s budget game as a student, faculty member, taxpayer, employer, parent, alumnus, or nonacademic staff. The reasons for this design decision are abundantly clear and profoundly ideological. To the audience Massy addresses, only administrators are “decision makers.” Only the presidency offers a viewpoint from which to “view the whole institution.” As a result, every other standpoint in the game has reality only insofar as it represents a “challenge” to presidential leadership.
Faculty, students, staff, and all other constituents are treated in the game as “inputs” to the managerial perspective.  The players have the power to “adjust the mix” of tenure-track and nontenurable faculty, as part of their overall powers to “allocate resources as they see fit.”
The ease with which nontenurable faculty can be dismissed is accurately modeled. Storing hundreds of faculty “performance profiles,” the simulation permits university presidents to troll through the records—including photographs—of faculty in all ranks in every department. As in real life, presidents may terminate the employment of the nontenurable with a keystroke—advancing a great variety of their presidential policy goals with relative ease.
What is actually being taught here? Players have to fire adjunct faculty while looking at their photographs. One thing that’s being taught is the exercise of power in the face of sentiment: players quickly learn that you can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs.
By contrast, the tenured faculty are represented as a much more difficult “leadership challenge.” They cannot be easily dismissed—so many leadership priorities could be swiftly reached if only all of the funds tied up in tenurable faculty were released! But the tenured have to be offered expensive retirement packages to free money for other “strategic purposes.” And as in so many other ways, the faculty tend to act irrationally in response to retirement incentives.
While the tenured faculty may represent a headache for the player-president, they do not represent any real opposition in the world of the game. There are no unions. In fact, as bored gameplayers frequently reported, the game is almost impossible for the player-president to “lose,” because no one else has any meaningful power.
This is particularly significant because it successfully models the virtually unchallengeable legal-political-financial-cultural supremacy underwriting contemporary management domination (in the U.S. model).  The only question is: How much victory can one administrator stomach over ten years? 
Admittedly, Massy’s ambition is to train a leadership cadre in the habits of benevolence. Underlying the game’s approach to the relationship of administrators to faculty is Robert Birnbaum’s “cybernetic systems” model, which synthesizes much of the new organization and management theory of the 1980s into a moderately more faculty-friendly form.
Birnbaum amounts to a “left wing” of the university management discourse. The extent to which this is a “left” wing is highly relative.  On the one hand, Birnbaum genuinely feels that education required a different kind of organizational management than business corporations. 
Within limits he defends the sometimes anarchic and unpredictable nature of “loosely coupled” academic organizations, through which administrative subunits retain conflicting missions and identities at least partially independent of organizational mission. Birnbaum correctly notes that the corporate wing of the leadership discourse decries his moderately more faculty-friendly posture as “as a slick way to describe waste, inefficiency, or indecisive leadership and as a convenient rationale for the crawling pace of organizational change” (39).
Recalling the current popular trope for faculty managers of “herding cats,” he sums up his own view of “effective leadership” by quoting Clark Kerr’s ambition to keep the institution’s “lawlessness within reasonable bounds” (196).
The book with which Birnbaum  launched his retirement was an effort to debunk three decades of “management fads” in higher education, including TQM (discussed in Chapter Two), and Massy’s own RCM.
On the other hand, Birnbaum, together with many in his discipline, is the author of an approving portrait of management’s strategic deployment of faculty committees and faculty institutions as the “garbage cans” of governance.  Drawing on a trope circulated by Cohen and March and enthusiastically adopted by the leadership discourse a decade earlier, Birnbaum notes the utility to “leadership” of establishing “permanent structural garbage cans such as the academic senate.”
He observes that task forces, committees and other receptacles of faculty garbage are “highly visible, they confer status on those participating, and they are instrumentally unimportant to the institution” (171). Their real function is to “act like buffers or ‘energy sinks’ that absorb problems, solutions, and participants like a sponge and prevent them from sloshing around and disturbing arenas in which people wish to act” (165).
As in Massy’s model, for Birnbaum the term “people” ultimately means administrative “decision-makers.”  “People” should keep the faculty garbage “away from decision arenas” (165, emph. original).  Serving as co-editor of the ASHE reader on organization and governance in higher education throughout the 1990s, Birnbaum’s views on the “cybernetics of academic organization” were widely influential, at least among those who were committed to models of university governance as leadership by strong management qua benevolent indulgence of one’s “followers.”
Essentially the cybernetic model is about managing feedback loops in an awareness of systematic interconnectedness. Viewing management as a “social exchange,” Birnbaum emphasizes the extent to which management enters a pre-existing environment “in which there are many ‘givens’ that restrict to a great extent what can be done,” and that while it is possible for a president to transform a “Neil Simon comedy…into Shakespeare,” it requires incrementalism and the willingness to provide others with at least the sense of agency, so that, as Birnbaum cynically notes, “In future years, they can reminisce about how they  transformed themselves”(228, emphasis original).
He concludes that leaders have to listen to the organizational environment—or more accurately, monitor it– and cannot simply command: “leaders are as dependent on followers as followers are on leaders,” and “presidents should encourage dissensus” (23; 216).
This promotion of dissent is not to encourage organizational democracy.
It’s to provide more accurate information to “decision arenas” and reduce “leader error” in the larger service of more effectively inducing changes in the behavior and value of organization members. 
At its core, the cybernetic management model isn’t about enabling speech per se on the part of non-leadership constituencies; it’s about harvesting information. While faculty or student speech can be a source of information, speech isn’t the only or even the primary mode through which presidential “data are collected” (218). (Hence the “assessment movement” sweeping administrations across the country.) 
By contrast, Birnbaum often models the administrator as a speaker, often a very creative one, the author, director, or impresario of organizational saga and myth, with the power to “interpret organizational meaning.” Rather than “inducing the alienation that may arise from giving orders,” presidents should “try to get people to pay attention to matters of interest to the administrator” (207).
This isn’t about faculty democracy; it’s about the usefulness to administrations wishing to create “organizational change” of a sense  of democracy. Where propaganda and the creation of organizational myth or mission fails, leadership can always induce “organizational learning” with funding. Over time: units that fulfill institutional mission receive funding increases; units that don’t, lose funding: “the subunit ‘learns’ through trial and error in a process akin to natural selection” (191).
Both Massy and the Sloane Foundation are explicit in their intention to promote a managerial model of systems theory in Virtual U.  As in Birnbaum’s vision, the arc of the game is fundamentally incremental. Player-presidents get results slowly over time by tinkering with the environment in which other constituencies act, rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others, primarily with funding: “many of the decisions don’t produce explicit reactions, but instead initiate trends and behaviors that evolve toward a desired result by the manager.” 
If Birnbaum might be called an “organizational Darwinist,” Massy is a managerial Malthus. In his essay, “Lessons From Health Care,” Massy praises the system of managed care for insurers’ capacity to intervene in the doctor-patient relationship. Because an insurer’s “denial of payment triggers organizational learning,” hospitals, clinics, and practices “will be less likely to perform the procedure again in similar circumstances.” 
The same principle, of feeding those who collaborate with management’s vision of “institutional mission,” and starving out the opposition, governs every dimension of Massy’s management training game.  The game’s organizing concept is the representation over a ten-year period of  the consequences of presidential adjustments in annual budgeting. 
As Massy’s collaborator at the Sloan Foundation has it, “money” is the “yarn” that knits this vision together: “Every decision translates, directly or indirectly, into revenue or expense. In considering how to convey the university as a system, we concluded that there was no better way than the annual budgeting process. The way the player, or the president, finally sees the whole institution synoptically is through financial flows.” (Ausubel 4)  Primarily employed in education schools (Columbia, NYU, U Kansas, etc) as a teaching aid in graduate classes in educational leadership, the game’s scenarios are generally introduced with a version of the driving fiscal imperative: “Your task…is to maintain steady revenue, at minimum, and preferably grow revenue and spend it in ways that advance the institution.”
The game is meant to bring forth a particular administrative subjectivity. One dimension of the administrative personality it successfully evokes is information overload. The managerial desktop is full of data.  But each datum represents a competing claim on resources. These resources can be translated into livelihoods and potential good deeds, or as Massy has it, “the diversity of values that abounds within any higher education institution”(5).  The overall effect is of fatigue, including moral fatigue: “Each group argues for its view in terms of high principles, often reinforced by the fact that success also furthers self-interest.”
The reduction of reality to revenue flows becomes a solution for the chief feelings of the administrative standpoint, information overload and something that might be called “value fatigue.”  As one USC administrator quipped to David Kirp, “if you don’t have a vision, RCM becomes your vision.” The game teaches a very specific set of feelings and values to potential future administrators. It teaches the utility of maintaining a large disposable faculty both for meeting financial targets and for quick restructuring to meet new presidential priorities. It teaches what I call a “management theory of agency” (see chapter 4), in which managerial decisions appear to drive history.
It even teaches what can be called a “management theory of value,” in which the labor of “decision makers” (a la George W. Bush, “I’m the decider!”), and not the strenuous efforts of a vast workforce, appears to be responsible for the accumulation of private and public good in the university labor process.  As one community college president using the game puts it to his students at Columbia University:  “Senior administrators are the engines that push an institution forward—and like a big train, the larger the institution the more engines must be strung together to drive the institution forward.” (Hankin) 
In the down-is-up world of education administration, it becomes possible for a group NYU students playing Massy’s game to conclude that the game’s “Improve Teaching” scenario would be best served by a massive acceleration in the hiring of adjunct lecturers. 
Ultimately, the game teaches these future administrators the pedagogy that Paul Lauter sees is already immanent in the institutions that it models:
“Universities teach by what they are. When a great university with an $11 billion endowment helps impoverish an already indigent city by using outsourcing to push down dining hall wages, it teaches who counts, and who decides in today’s urban world. When a great university stiffs its retirees at $7450 a year while setting up its CEO for a $42,000 a month pension, it teaches who is important and who is not. When the American city in which a great university carries out its medical research has a higher infant mortality rate than Costa Rica, lessons about priorities are being delivered. When 60-70% of the teaching hours at a great university—and at many not at all great universities—are carried out by a transient faculty, many of them paid below the poverty line and provided with no benefits, offices, or job security, a redefinition of teaching
as a “service industry” is being implemented.” (54)
There are really two distinct worlds of faculty experience being modeled in Virtual U.  There is the world of the tenured faculty who must be more ponderously influenced, involving a fairly strenuous effort by administrators.
Relatively speaking, it takes a lot of administrator sweat and frustration to surmount the obstacles represented by the tenured—who ultimately must be provided their retirement incentives to get out of the way, and require the constant creation of new forums/garbage receptacles for their opinions. Subject to the Malthusian financial discipline and organizational mythmaking of the leadership cadre, as extensively theorized by Birnbaum, Massy and others, the world of the tenure stream is certainly no picnic for most faculty occupying it.
The world that the game models for the “other” faculty, our nontenurable majority, is rather different. These folks can be dismissed quickly and cleanly. Despite representing the majority of the faculty, they require a minimal fraction of management time and attention. The extensive use of them permits game players to advance most dimensions of the institutional mission with greater speed.
And in this dimension of the game-play, the premium  on management’s capacity to swiftly “adjust the mix” of labor to its own changing sense of “mission,” is where we find Massy and the Sloane Foundation’s vision of the future.
At a University of Pennsylvania meeting full of administrators, game engineers and potential users of the game, Sloane project director Jesse Ausubel described his own background in modeling systems used for real-time command and control of complex energy-industry operations (such as an oil refinery). 
Somewhat wistfully, he observed that the current release of Virtual U is for “teaching and learning, not real-time operational control.”
However, he continued: “It would not surprise if some of the people in this meeting help advance the state of the art in university simulation, so that in 10 years, we have models that serve for control, for decisive management. For the present, and it is a huge step forward, we have a game” (3).
In the future, the Sloane Foundation promises us, all labor will act informationally, in the interests of real-time control by a yet more decisive management. There’ll be no more noodling around with even the trappings of faculty democracy.

http://itrs.scu.edu/mbousquet
additional email: pmbousquet@gmail.com

CONFLICTS AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE UNIVERSITY I

 

THE POST-STATE UNIVERSITY:Hypotheses, tendencies, wagers

Franco Ingrassia, 23 feb 2007

1. This text is made up of a series of brief notes, threaded around a central hypothesis: that we are undergoing the passage from a society with the market (in which the market is part of the set of social relations) to a society of the market (in which the set of social relations is nothing but
an operative part of the market). We give this transition the name of neoliberalism. And we think, in addition, that this process has significant effects on the state institutional network – that is to say, its
depoliticisation and functional adaptation to the prevailing economic rationality. Therefore, and starting off with this hypothesis, this text seeks to ask what tendencies are being developed and what actions might be effective, under neoliberal conditions, to produce not a deceleration of the
process (which would only postpone what appears as the semblance of the ‘inevitable’) but to give rise to a new kind of university experience. Such an experience would be able to evade market rationality and involve the diverse practices for the production of dignity which are being developed today, thus giving back to thought its instituent capacity to create new social relations.
                
2. The state university, which is to say the pre-neoliberal university, was constituted by an act of separation. This act of separation created a certain space and time of the university. And this was lived by the subjects involved in this experience: for academics as much as non-academics and students, part of their life was separated off to become university life. This university life, with its specified social interchanges, was organized according to a certain political rationality. Education policies, designed globally as much as locally, specified methods and times, administered intensities and resources, and organized the sense of the university experience. The reformist fights for the autonomy of the university generated, in some way, the conditions of possibility for this version of the political. And they designed the topology in which university disputes would take place: disputes for institutional spaces, for political control of the rules of investigation, and for the sense of knowledge production.

3. The neoliberal university or market university (MU) constitutes itself by a different act: the reunification or opening of a continuous space between the space of the university and the space of the market. For the MU, any impermeability between general mercantile and university activities is a stumbling block – an obstacle that must be overcome. These stumbling blocks, whether inertial
dimensions of state rationality or the many instances of reactionary or creative resistance that the neoliberal project meets, were and continue to be multiple. In a certain sense, we can consider the MU as a non-trivial materialization of a trivial concept of the university: ‘knowledge is a commodity. The function of the university is to manage its production and effective commercialisation.’

4. This non-trivial materialization had effective tactics of development, organizing the battlefield according to its convenience. It counted on the fact that a great part of the ‘reactionary’ resistance to its development came from the privileged sectors of the state university (the radical party and popular socialism in our case), which tried to produce deceleration only with the purpose of facilitating their adaptation to the new conditions. Moments of negotiation served to fracture the dispute. It was in this way that a set of tactics delineated themselves which were then reunited in a more general strategy: instead of advancing in fee-paying undergraduate degrees, they introduced this in the development of postgraduate schools, which were a kind of virgin ground where the mercantile logic could be implanted with less resistance. In this way, we arrived at the present state of our faculties: a space of massive free undergraduate education that works like a container for average sectors of youth who would otherwise saturate the already saturated labor market – and which the student bureaucracies use to generate revenue through the sale of booklets, photocopies and so on. And a fee-paying postgraduate sector, with sufficient flexibility to adapt to the qualitative and quantitative variations in the mercantile demand for knowledge, and well-paid academics, who are however much more disciplined than the academic proletarians who work in the undergraduate sector (since they have permanent positions rather than being contracted for the length of a course and thus have more resources for struggle and the development of autonomy without endangering their positions).

5. A separate paragraph is required to analyse the distinctions between the types of knowledge that the MU manages. What distinctions are valid from a mercantile perspective? There exist types of knowledge that contribute directly to the valorisation of capital in diverse processes of production (computer science and biotechnology are at the moment the most visible examples but general engineering, administrative and economic knowledge, and the management of human resources can also be understood in this way). In the spaces in which this type of knowledge is developed, the hierarchical management of the MU exercises control over the contents of teaching and research development. But this control does not correspond to a ‘sovereign decision’ of management but simply to the obedience to join these spaces of production to the general practices of the market. They are operations of adjustment between supply and demand.
On the other hand, there are types of knowledge that, not having the capacity for direct valorisation, can serve as merchandise of ‘internal university consumption,’ constructing circuits of auto-valorisation for the MU’s own capital. It is this logic that has impelled, for the main part, the academic activity of the humanities. Papers in the social sciences are like merchandise that has only an exchange-value (credits and antecedents that fall into categorisations, and are also translated into incentives) but no use-value. This guarantees the disconnection of these productions from social practices. A formal control is exerted on teaching and research, regardless of the specific contents. In this way the development of these activities is not only allowed but also encouraged, according to specific fields of interest – on the condition that formal organization of these activities are confined to the parameters set by the MU.

6. But at the same time as this development of the process of transition of the state university into the market university, a third type of university was also forming: the non-state public university, university of thought, or nomadic university. Its operation is constituted by subtraction and composition. Subtraction of the social interchanges of the university from state regulations and the logic of the market. Composition of these subtracted interchanges within other social processes for the production of life outside such norms.  Neither mercantile reunification nor state separation, the nomadic university (NU), obliterates these times and spaces. Its specificity is the generic condition of thinking, understood as a set of procedures of subjective invention that are happening where social practices find obstacles to their development.

7. The end of the state university ceases to be a problem for the NU. The state university subsists in the MU like a kind of remainder or excrescence. The NU, then:

* Organizes the dispute with the MU for the financing of its projects, using the same methodology as the movements of autonomous unemployed workers, who do not seek institutional places for themselves but rather resources to maintain their own productive projects

* Puts to work the remaining infrastructure, the ruins of the state university, recovering them and refounding them as public spaces

* Develops its own activities of thought production, inventing its own devices: the laboratories of thought, free chairs, the publication of interventions and autonomous investigation

8. In the present situation, the NU does not exist, other than through fragmentary practices, maintained by some students, in an unconnected way. It is not yet locatable – it moves around in the corridors of altered faculties, emerges in certain experiences of work in city precincts and communities, it fleetingly appears in the development of certain investigations and meetings of thought. In any case, the notion of the NU presented/displayed here is a wager to compose these practices in a consistent multiplicity, maintained in cross-sectional relationships of mutual
potentiation of experiences.

Franco Ingrassia 

CONVOCATÓRIA DA “LA SAPIENZA” DE ROMA

Convocatoria nacional, Roma 22/10/2008.

A las facultades movilizadas, a las estudiantes y a los estudiantes, a los
estudiantes de doctorado, a los precarios de la investigación.

"Nosotros no pagaremos la crisis", es con este eslogan que hace pocas
semanas hemos empezado las movilizaciones dentro de la universidad "La
Sapienza" de Roma. Un eslogan sencillo pero a la vez claro: la crisis global
es crisis del mismo capitalismo, de la especulación financiera e
inmobiliaria, de un sistema sin reglas ni derechos, de gerentes de empresas
sin escrúpulos; esta crisis no puede recaer sobre la formación, desde la
escuela hasta la universidad, la sanidad, los contribuyente en general. El
eslogan se ha vuelto famoso, corriendo rápido de boca en boca, de ciudad en
ciudad. Desde los estudiantes hasta los precarios, desde el mundo del
trabajo hasta el de la investigación, nadie quiere pagar la crisis, nadie
quiere socializar las pérdidas, en una situación en la que la riqueza ha
sido dividida entre pocos, poquísimos, durante años.

Precisamente el contagio que se ha difundido estas semanas, la
multiplicación de las movilizaciones en las escuelas, en las universidades,
en las ciudades, es el que debe haber suscitado mucho miedo. Se sabe que el
perro asustado muerde, así que la reacción del presidente Berlusconi no se
ha hecho esperar: "policía en las universidades y las escuelas ocupadas",
"eliminar la violencia del país". Justo ayer Berlusconi había declarado que
quería aumentar las ayudas a los bancos y hacer que el estado y los gastos
públicos fueran los garantes en última instancia de los préstamos a las
empresas: en una palabra, recortes en la formación, menos recursos para los
estudiantes, recortes en la sanidad, pero dinero para las empresas, para los
bancos, para los particulares. Nos preguntamos entonces dónde está la
violencia: ¿es violenta una ocupación o en cambio es violento un gobierno
que impone la ley 133 y el decreto Gelmini, pasando de cualquiera discusión
parlamentaria? ¿Es violento el disenso o los que quieren ahogarlo con la
policía? ¿Es violento el que se moviliza en defensa de la universidad y de
la escuela pública o los que tienen intención de eliminarlas para favorecer
a los intereses económicos de pocos? La violencia está de la parte del
gobierno Berlusconi; al otro lado, en las facultades y en las escuelas
ocupadas, está la alegría y la indignación de los que luchan por su futuro,
de los que no se conforman con ser arrinconados o constringidos a callarse,
de los que quieren ser libres.

Nos han dicho que sólo sabemos decir que no, que no tenemos propuestas.
Nada más fuera de la realidad: las mismas ocupaciones y asambleas de estos
días están construyendo una nueva universidad, una universidad hecha de
conocimiento, pero también de socialidad, de cultura pero también de
información, de conciencia. Estudiar es imprescindible para nosotros, por
eso consideramos las protestas indispensables: ocupar para hacer que la
universidad pública viva, disentir para poder seguir estudiando o
investigando. Muchas cosas en la universidad y en las escuelas tienen que
ser modificadas, pero lo que es seguro es que los cambios no pueden
conseguirse a través de la de-financiación. Cambiar la universidad significa
aumentar los recursos, sustentar la investigación, calificar los procesos de
formación, garantizar la movilidad (desde el estudio hasta la investigación,
desde la investigación hasta la docencia). En cambio la de-financiación solo
tiene un objectivo: transformar las universidades en fundaciones privadas,
decretar el fin de la universidad pública.

El plan está claro, los instrumentos también: la ley 133 ha sido aprobada
durante el mes de agosto y frente al disenso de decenas de millares de
estudiantes se reclama la policía. Este gobierno quiere destruir la
democracia, por medio del miedo, por medio del terror. Pero hoy, desde "La
Sapienza" movilizada y desde las facultades ocupadas decimos que nosotros no
tenemos miedo y que desde luego no daremos marcha atrás. Más bien es nuestra
intención hacer que el gobierno retroceda: ¡no pararemos de luchar hasta que
la ley 133 y el decreto Gelmini no sean retirados! Y esta vez iremos hasta
el final, no queremos perder, no queremos bajar la cabeza frente a tanta
arrogancia. Por eso invitamos a todas las facultades movilizadas del país a
hacer lo mismo: ¡quieren atacar las ocupaciones, entonces que ocupen otras
mil escuelas y facultades!

Además, después del extraordinario éxito de la huelga y de las
manifestaciones del 17 de octubre, convocados por los sindicatos de base,
creemos que ha llegado el momento de dar una respuesta unitaria y coordinada
en las plazas de nuestras ciudades. Proponemos dar vida a dos encuentros
nacionales: el viernes 7 de noviembre un día de movilización con
manifestaciones en todas las ciudades y el viernes 14 de noviembre en Roma
una gran manifestación nacional del mundo de la formación, desde la
universidad hasta la escuela, el mismo día en el que los sindicatos
confederales han decretado la huelga de la universidad, día que hay que
construir desde la base y viendo como protagonistas a los estudiantes, a los
investigadores y a los profesores movilizados. De la misma manera
consideramos útil aprovechar, con nuestras maneras de manifestar y con
nuestros argumentos, de la huelga general de la escuela convocada por los
sindicatos confederales para el 30 de octubre.

Lo que está pasando en estos días refleja una movilización extraordinaria,
potente, rica. Una nueva ola, una ola anómala que no tiene intención de
pararse, al contrario, quiere ganar. ¡Hagamos crecer  la ola, hagamos crecer
las ganas de luchar! Pretenden que seamos idiotas y resignados, ¡pero
nosotros somos inteligentes y activos y nuestra ola irá lejos!

Desde las facultades ocupadas de "La Sapienza" de Roma, desde la universidad
movilizada.

The Double Crisis of the University and the Global Economy

THE DOUBLE CRISIS OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE GLOBAL ECOOMY

WEDNESDAY 26 November 2008 at 4pm
GOLDSMITHS University of London – Warmington Tower 1210

FRIDAY 28 November 2008  at 3pm
QUEEN MARY University of London Physics 602

with:   Steffen Bohm – Paolo Do – Stephen Dunn – Matthew Fuller – Gerard Hanlon – Stefano Harney – Celia Lury – Noortje Marres – Matteo Pasquinelli – Nirmal Puwar – Gigi Roggero – Tiziana Terranova

For a number of weeks in Italy the entire education system – from universities to elementary schools, from students to researchers and from parents to teachers – has been mobilizing. Marches, occupations, demonstrations, pickets and blockages of the metropolitan flow have replaced the dreary rhythm of school timetables and university courses. The protests are directed against the new budget cuts implemented by Berlusconi’s government last summer, which seriously undermine the public nature of education and research.

The university movement – self-named the “Anomalous Wave” – acts within a specific context, such as the long crisis and decline of the Italian higher education system. However, it also critically underlines common trends in the transformations affecting the university at the European and transnational level: i.e. the Bologna process, the corporatization of education and the changes of the welfare system, the central role of knowledge in the mode of production, the rise of casualised labor, the emergence of a new type of student-worker figure.

Moreover, one of its key slogans is particularly interesting “We won’t pay for your crisis”. It indicates the critical intersection of a double global crisis: the university crisis and the financial crisis. The rise of a “debt generation” is one of the points at which this intersection is clearly observable. But the movement is also an occasion to formulate a deeper, more complex analysis of this double crisis, in order to allow a debate between different perspectives to topics such as the rise of a global university and its various forms of translation, the conflicts in the process of knowledge production, the role of networks in the education and financial markets.

we will launch the new special issue of ephemera on ” discussing the role of the modern university”
(www.ephemeraweb.org)

Goldsmiths university of london
edu-factory collective www.edu-factory.org
school of business and management Queen Mary university of london

DIAGNÓSTICO RÁPIDO PARTICIPATIVO DOS TRANSPORTES PÚBLICO EM SALVADOR

O Grupo de Economia e Politica de Transportes Públicos da Fdculdade de Economia da Unversidade Federal da Bahia vsia capacitar seus menbros na formulação de políticas governamentais baseadas em evidências, entendendo-se por tal, o processo de  formulação de políticas que incorpora, de um lado,  os princípios e  procedimentos das experiências exitosas e, do outro lado, a problemática tal como vivenciada pelos concernidos.

O Diagnóstico Rápido Participativo é uma técnica que permite extrair da vivência dos concernidos os elementos necessários a modelagem do problema (apresentada em outra nota)

BIBLIOGRAFIA

PESQUISA-AÇÃO E OS TRANSPORTES PÚBLICO DE SALVADOR

O Grupo da Piedade, formado por  alunos da Faculdade de Economia da UFBA e coordenado pelo rof Ihering Guedes Alcoforado passa a admitir que o aprendizado configura-se a partir de uma situação determinada, o que tem levado a privilegiar as pesquisas que exploram as possibilidade do  aprendizado situado, o qual por sua vez tem  estimulado entre seus membros a pesquisa baseada na ação.       Em função disto, o Grupo de Pesquisa em Transporte Público, parte do Grupo da Piedade, definiu  uma nova  estratégia  de ensino aprendizado  baseada na pesquisa-ação.     Ou seja, as propostas de  pesquisas em desenvolvimento na area de  transporte público será formatada tendo em mente a ação politica dos menbros do grupo, de forma que as pesquisas serão estruturadas a partir de  insumos extraídos da problemática dos transporte públicos de Salvador, por meio de um diagnóstico rápido participativo (DRP), e deverão ser ser desenvolvidas através  de uma abordagem metodolóigca extraida da pesquisa-ação.  Os produtos deste esforço coletivo serão  disponibilizados para  todos os militantes e interessados na questão como usbsidios a fundamentação de suas lutas.Com esta orientação  o Grupo de Transporte está absorvendo novos menbros interessados no desenolvimento de uma ação política no âmbito dos transportes baseada em evidências.   Para se capacacitrem para tanto os novos membros selecionados participarão de oficinas nas quais serão apresentados as técnicas de diagnóstico rápido participativo (DRP) e de pesquisa-ação (PA), além de ser apresentados a literatura básica sobe políticas publicas baseadas em evidências.     A técnica de DRP será utilizada para extrair da comunidade envolvida com os transportes as questões que ela julga mais relevante, dentre das quais os novos membros escolherão, cada um,  uma questão.  Esta questão será trtada indicidualmente ou em pequenos grupos, tendo em mente elaborar um projeto a ser desenvolvido no bojo do Programa Permanecer pu de outro, de forma a poder-se asseguarar-as bolsas de estudo para os participantes.     O resultado deste processo, como já nos referimos acima,  deverá embasar a luta dos movimento em defesa dos transportes públicos de qualidade e acessivel a todos.Os Interessados não só da Faculdade de Economia, mas também de outras unidades da UFBA e até de outras instituições de ensino poderão obter mais informações com o Prof. Ihering Guedes Alcoforado, às sextas feiras, das 13:00 às 17:00, na sua sala no 5o. andar da Faculdade de Economia da UFBA.