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
