|
April 19, 2007
As blogging will be light for the next few days, as I am off on a five day holiday to Kangaroo Island. I've linked to this discussion at Culture Machine between Simon Morgan Wortham and Christopher Fynsk about Christopher Fynsk's The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities I posted on this book here.
I thought that this material is dense enough to take a few days to work through. Some background material is Samuel Weber's The Future of the Humanities and The Future Campus.
The discussion initially takes up Fynsk's the counter-institutional ‘possibility’ which arises in the name or on the grounds of the humanities. Wortham says that this calls to mind Sam Weber’s powerful critique of Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins, and perhaps helps us to move ahead in its terms. He says that in his essay ‘The Future of the University’, Weber takes a close look at the way in which Readings presents the concept and practice of corporate-style ‘excellence’ as a characterising feature of contemporary academic institutions. As Readings puts it, in a passage quoted by Weber in his own essay,
the appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather that the idea has lost all content. As a non-referential unit of value entirely internal to the system, excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self-reflection. All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information. (1996: 39).
Wortham says that Weber detects a problem here. The ‘self-reflection’ implied in the movement and measure of excellence—albeit of an apparently extreme technocratic and bureaucratic kind—constitutes a certain sort of reference? Perhaps even the very kind of self-reference found in that which inaugurates Enlightenment thought, rather than in a 'post-historical' present to which the Enlightenment tradition is irretrievably lost?
Wortham says thatWeber goes so far as to tie the formation of 'excellence' described by Readings to the determination of the Cartesian cogito itself, thereby suggesting that the supposedly 'posthistorical', 'dereferentialised' university which emerges from the pages of The University in Ruins in fact repeats and reinscribes longstanding formations, modes and processes of knowledge, representation, reference and self-identity.
On Weber’s view, then, it is as though Readings, in the very attempt to apprehend what is distinctive about the contemporary university (i.e. its ‘excellence’), nevertheless unwittingly repeats a longstanding tendency to view the university as an institution that is essentially self-grounded and self-contained. Far from exposing and confirming the radical transformations to which academic institutions have been exposed and which they have undergone in recent times, Readings might therefore actually be seen to resort to habitual thinking as a defence against the violent shock of change.
This critique allows Weber to suggest that Readings’ analysis (which he views as resting on an idea of the pure self-reference of the contemporary university) in fact fails to take into account the complex play of virtualisation which constitutes contemporary reality in the world today—a play (or, indeed, an economy) in which dynamic relations of spatio-temporal dislocation fundamentally rule out ‘self-contained realms or fields’.
|
gary....yeah, that interview is quite interesting to be sure.
I find the questions about language per se to be the germane question. And Fynsk touches on heidegger and Wittgenstein both -- which is fascinating. I think this a much needed pair or refrence points for a lot of the *spatio-temporal dislocation*etc talk. To talk about it...to use language (the technology of language?) is to almost create a future it seems....at least in the sense that techology as we usually understand it, and cyber technology, isn't really able to...or doesnt want to. What gets de-legitimated with this post structuralist world of virtualization? I dont know....but I suspect the whole encounter with virtualization masks something, or obscures something basic about language.