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Instructors: Prof. Dr. Armen Avanessian; Prof. Dr. Jan Söffner; Prof. Dr. Karen van den Berg
Event type:
Seminar / exercise
Org-unit: Communication & Cultural Management
Displayed in timetable as:
RV
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
6,0
Note: In your exam regulations, differing credits may have been specified.
Location:
Campus der Zeppelin Universität
Language of instruction:
German
Min. | Max. participants:
5 | 35
Priority scheme: Standard-Priorisierung
Course content:
Lecture series
Academic Cannibalism - Evaluation, Evolution, Extinction
What could a university look like that does not consume itself, but is resolutely oriented towards a planetary future? How much Apollonian order would it need and how much Dionysian energy? How could the members of such a university dwell in it? And how radically democratic could it be?
As early as the 1980s, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard made the observation of an unstoppable "mercantilization of knowledge". "The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so," he summarized at the time. In the 21st century, professors and students are now primarily practicing a kind of over-regulated pseudo-entrepreneurship, preferably raising their own funding. At the same time, however, their members operate in a highly bureaucratized academic routine in which the constant expectation and demand for self-evaluation and external evaluation has become ubiquitous practice. Evaluation, which promises to advance the development of individual researchers and institutes, equips students with the power to evaluate without empowering them intellectually. As a result, writes historian Joan Wallach-Scott, students become customers and professors become bureaucratic service providers. To paraphrase Friedrich Kittler's famous formula of the “exorcism of spirit from the humanities” (Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften), this de facto promotes an expulsion of the critical spirit (Geist), and it does so far beyond the humanities.
Are universities therefore possibly places that raise false expectations and leave them to a toxic existence? Are they places that, as the Australian management professor Peter Fleming said, have become a psychological hell, "darkocracies"? If one reads the literature of recent decades, universities are in ruins (Bill Readings) or appear as places of white oppression into which critical minds should only sneak in order to steal as much as possible from them; at least this is what the American cultural theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moten suggested.
Many self-descriptions of professional academics tend to lament the situation of universities from an (imagined) position of victimhood. In the context of the lecture series, however, we want to ask to what extent it is not external constraints or a cannibalistic capitalism that undermines its own foundations - as Nancy Fraser has recently described it - that is to blame for the current academic misery, but rather a central element of late capitalist ideology that has been part of the self-image of academics for much longer as a phantasm of sovereignty: the assumption of being creative, innovative, free and flexible.
In a lecture series, we want to discuss which ideas lead to a kind of self-sabotage of critical thinking and which alternatives can be developed.
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