Sub-brand to go here
Understanding the
University
Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, London
Seminar, Faculty of Education, University of Waikato, New
Zealand, 1 August, 2013
Centre for Higher
Education Studies
Starting points
• A falling away
• The passing of the liberal university
• Privatisation; corporatisation (neoliberalism, NPM, surveillance,
measurement …)
• Postmodernism; philosophy of incoherence; no stable place; just
alternative ‘lines of flight’ and ‘re-territorialisation’
• A double undermining – sociologically and philosophically (and these
have run into each other – in a social theory of spaces)
• Q – how now understand the university?
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Two planes (for the inquiry)
- Gap between institution and its possibilities
- Tension between particularities and universalities
(These two planes intersect)
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Idea and institution
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So the university presents problems both as institution and as idea
But even more problematic
For ideas enter the university as an institution
And a sense of the university as an institution enters ideas of it
A morass of interconnected ideas and social dimensions
- and on local, national and global levels
(So not a matter simply of isolating ideas (matters of thought) and social
facts)
The limits of realism
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A revival of realism
Does this help?
Bhaskar’s critical realism; Peters’ post-postmodernism
Anchors us in a real world
Talk of ‘digital labour’; ‘cognitive capitalism’
But the university keeps breaking out of its social facticity; it seems
always to be ‘more’; a ‘beyond’
• (cf why do private institutions veer towards the very term ‘university’?
If ‘universities’ are so impoverished, so deficient, why hang onto the
term?)
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The idea of the idea
• Ideas of the university are still important but:
• We cannot resort to an idea-in-itself
• It has to be anchored in the real world; or at least take its bearings from
the real world
• But what is to count as the real world?
• And what is the relationship to be between the idea and the real world?
• What kind of idea? Where does it/ should it reside?
• ‘Head in the cloud but feet on the ground’?
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The possibility of possibilities
• The university now has possibilities before it
• The possibility of possibilities
• The idea of the idea gives rise to the possibility of
possibilities
• Possibilities – projections; imaginative creations
• Now the university can become itself for the first time
• - and realize its utopian potential.
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The big ditch
• Not (here) idea and institution as such
• But between empirical institution and its possibilities
• Here enters the imagination – in identifying possibilities
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An inevitable remainder
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The university is always less than it can be
Always short of its possibilities
The concept – now imagined – opens a gap
Always a beyond
A double remainder
- between ‘reality’ and idea
- between ‘reality’ and possibilities in the future
Beyond postmodernism
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What kind of ‘beyond’?
Complexity?
Not just multiple perspectives
Sets of contradictions within the university …
Limits to plasticity?
But/ and to imagination?
What/ where is the real; the real thing? - the idea, the
institution, their tensions, their contradictions …?
Universities as/ in spaces
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UCL – hopes/ projects of a/the university
‘wisdom’ as a universal theme
‘Non-representation’
‘Space of reason’ (Bakhurst/ Sellars)
Closing/ opening
Where is the university? It slips away, elusive
The university as (a) squid (abandon the metaphor of ‘rhyzome’!)
‘Thinking spaces’ (Thrift) – in ‘new time-space arrangements’ –
‘spaces of inspiration incorporating many possible worlds’
• But still within a set of universal categories – is it possible?
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Textures of the university
• The perniciousness – and the limits – of measurement
• Will the university surrender its possibilities – of poetry,
beauty, graciousness, hope, spirit …?
• ‘The lightness/ heaviness of being …’
• ‘parallax’ – ‘where the two elements never meet precisely
because they are one and the same element in two different
spaces’ (like two sides of a Mobius strip) – SZ, 159
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Appearance or reality OR appearance as
reality?
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The event is the thing
(When I teach, how is a teaching session to be understood?)
(But) the event is unlimited
It contains within itself both the seeds of its destruction and the seeds of
its epiphany; of its transfiguration
– ‘an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a
fragment of being’. (Badiou in Zizek)
– ‘what if the emergence of thought is the ultimate Event?’
The fragile university
• Fragility suggests liable to break apart
• But it also suggests something of beauty
• to be treasured, vouchsafed, safeguarded
• ‘.. This ontological ambiguity-fragility of the “thing itself that
is difficult to express …’
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Schizophrenic university
• 1st position: The university lives in the space between its facticity and its
possibilities (reality and idea)
• 2nd position: its facticity and its possibilities are not separate realms but
are part of the totality of the university (its members live their (academic) lives
partly through their ideas and hopes of the university)
• 3rd position: The university is both pernicious and ideal at once. The
critical university gains its force by being pitted against its opposite (‘the
entrepreneurial university’; ‘the corporate university’; ‘the bureaucratic
university’ …).
– position of inherent schizophrenia
 Not the case that sunny uplands await, if only …
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On living with negativity in the university in
(the company of Zizek (and Hegel))
• Zizek’s idea of ‘an insurmountable parallax gap’ – two closely linked perspectives
between which no common ground is possible’
• ‘a fundamental antimony which can never be dialectically “mediated/ sublated” into
a higher synthesis’ (TPV, 4)
• ‘noncoincidence of a thing in itself’ (30)
• ‘Universality is not the neutral container of particular formations, their common
measure … but this battle itself, the struggle leading from one particular formation to
another’ (30).
• ‘… the Universal names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a burning Question, and
the Particulars are the attempted but failed Answers to this Problem.’ (38)
• ‘For Hegel, external circumstances are not an impediment to realizing inner
potentials, but on the contrary the very arena in which the true nature of these inner
potentials is to be tested’. (TwtN, 142)
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The antagonistic university
• And so the university is an inherently antagonistic institution
• But what kind of antagonism is this?
• Is it an external antagonism – the university battling against external forces imposed
upon it?
• Or is it an internal battle, the university battling against itself?
• For the former, the standard reading, the battle could be resolved one way or the
other;
• But for the latter, the more radical reading, (to which I want to hold), the battle is
essential; it is part of the university’s being
• No internal battle; no university!
• So the problem becomes one of living with this inherent antagonism
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The end of universality – or the possibility
of universality?
• The empirical messiness of the university; a sea of particularities
• But the (Bhaskerian) ‘real’ just happens – in its globality – to be universal (global
economy/ neoliberalism/ IT revolution)
• And the horizon of ideas that inform the idea of the university is composed of universal
ideas
– liberty, freedom, reasonableness, truthfulness, disinterested inquiry, critical dialogue
– And the idea that persons matter (even behind their particular truth claims)
• The university: a space of universal hopes/ themes
• Zizek – ‘what Hegel has in mind …the inherent contradiction of the notion of form which
designates both the principle of universalization and the principle of individualism’ TwtN
(135)
• Tension between this universal realm and the particularities of the university – both at
institutional and at individual levels
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The authentic university
• Holds conflict/ tension together
• Now, for the first time, the university can be truly radical in
containing both beauty and perniciousness
• The daily round …!
• Bearing in mind that there is a fundamental indiscernability
here, ‘there are no objective criteria that enable us …’ (to
differentiate an authentic university from a non-authentic
university, for they look very alike – at least, to conventional
research techniques) SZ, 78
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Realizing the university’s possibilities
• Assembling the resources for answering the question: ‘how do we
understand the gap between the ‘real’ university and its possibilities?
• A shortfall – deficiencies
• The university is less than its possibilities, less than the sum of its parts
(negative energies)
• (University leadership – a means of energizing the university)
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But which possibilities? Return to
universality/ universalities
• Competing universalities
• Reason/ equity/ public/ wisdom/ ecology/ growth/ liberty
• But these universals are suspect – the voices of Western democracy/ of
stillness and calm
• What of exhilaration/ anxiety/ excitement/ boundary-breaking/ rulebending/ scariness/ hope?
• And what of those siren voices – those other universals – of power/
competition/ of impact/
• Task becomes that of the adjudication of (such) competing universalities
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The liberating power of the imagination
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The liberating power of the imagination
Not to set off against ‘reality’
But to build a new ‘reality’
Tests of adequacy of imaginative ideas
The imagining university
• But this is to remind the university (again) of its own predispositions –
even though now being occluded (by outcomes, impact, knowledge
‘transfer’)
• Hence, the imagining university (cf the ‘university of dissensus’)
• Calls for a new kind of leadership, concerned with the university in the
twenty-first century. (After Newman (C19), Heidegger (C20), …)
• A concern for the university as such.
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Conclusions
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How do we understand the university?
Always a gap between the university and its possibilities
 But which possibilities?
 The more we understand, the more murky things become
 It contains within itself inherent antagonisms – institution and idea(s) of itself;
particularities and universalities
 Understanding the university turns out to be a species of
potholing
- of closure/ openness; of universality/ particularity; of practice/ ideas;
of lightness/ darkness; of struggle/ exhilaration..
 Understanding the university is partly a political matter;
of its political (and empirical) possibilities
 But it is also conceptual matter, of identifying the conceptual and value horizons
against which it might move
 And it is an imaginary matter, of imagining new forms of the university that address
its antagonisms
 The university is behind us, and with us, but it is also before us;
even before itself.
 It is always susceptible to being re-conceived, in being born again,
24 and in being given new life.
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Short bibliography
Bakhurst, D (2011) The Formation of Reason. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bhaskar,, R (2002) From Science to Emancipation: Journeys towards meta-Reality. New Delhi: Sage.
Butler, J, Laclau, E and Zizek, S (2000) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. London: Verso.
Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (2007/1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum: London.
Habermas, J (2001) The Liberating Power of Symbols. Cambridge: Polity.
Irigaray, L (1999/ 1983) The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Austin, TX: University of Texas.
Irwin, A and Michael, M (2003) Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Laclau, E (2007/1996) Emancipation(s). London and New York: Verso.
List & Pettit (2011) Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Murphy, P, Peters, M A, Marginson, S (2010) Imagination: Three Models of Imagination in the Age of the Knowledge
Economy. New York: Peter Lang.
Nietzsche, F (2008/1872) The Birth of Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peters, M A (2011) The Last Book of Postmodernism. New York: Peter Lang.
Thrift, N (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Poltics, Affect. Abingdon: Routledge.
Zerilli, L (2004) ‘This univeralism which is not one’, in S Critchley and O Marchant, Laclau: A Critical Reader. (p99)
Zizek, S (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University.
Zizek, S (2009) The Parallax View. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
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