Universities in the Flux of Time

An exploration of time and temporality in university life

Paul Gibbs, Oili-Helena Ylijoki, Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela, Ronald Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317574903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Higher education and the institution of the university exist in time, their essential nature now continually subject to change: change in students, in knowledge, in structure and in their own communities and those they service. These changes are accompanied by a quickening of time, leading to a heightened intensity of academic life. Yet the nature of time in all the contemporary work on the university has been largely overlooked. This is an important omission and Universities in the Flux of Time has gathered leading academics whose contributions to the volume raise a debate as to the influence and use of time in the university. They do this in an exploration of how these changes are perceived in higher education and how these affect its temporality from local, national and global perspectives. By dealing with the time within the university, the book opens new spaces for the development of the university and civic society.

The book develops an interdisciplinary understanding of the temporal issues of engaging with the past, present and future of higher education and its institutions, through consideration of the increased speed demanded for the production of able students and innovative research, to the accountability pressures from central governments and commerce. Reflecting on these issues in the higher education sector, Universities in the Flux of Time is split into three parts, with each one addressing time and its multiple relationships with the university:

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• Past, present and future

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• Knowledge and time

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• Living with time

This volume will provide essential reading for those on higher education studies courses as well as a wider audience of managers, practitioners, policy makers, academics and students and from many disciplinary perspectives including sociology, organisation studies, social psychology and the philosophy of education.

Part 1
Past, present and future

1
The University in the Epoch of Digital Reason

Fast knowledge in the circuits of cybernetic capitalism

Michael A. Peters

‘Time is money’ . . . ‘speed is power’: We have moved from the stage of the acceleration of History to that of the acceleration of the Real. This is what ‘the progress’ is: a consensual sacrifice.

Paul Virilio (2008); ‘Paul Virilio on the crisis’ in Radical Perspectives on the Crisis, https://sites.google.com/site/radicalperspectivesonthecrisis/news/paul-virilio-on-the-crisis

Introduction: the university on speed

The French urbanist and philosopher Paul Virilio is one of the principal theorists of speed. After many years pursuing the relationship between concepts of velocity and the paradox of being in a virtual world – of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time – Virilio explains how real time has supplanted real space such that ‘A synchronization has taken place of customs, habits, mores, ways to react to things, and also, of emotions’, exemplified in the hysteria that followed the global financial crisis. He maintains: ‘Since speed earns money, the financial sphere has attempted to enforce the value of time above the value of space and while this has led to massive profits for the few and increasing inequalities, to truly understand the phenomenon of an economy of speed, the left has to jettison its old framework that insists capitalism is dead, and all we need is more social justice. This is a false deduction that proceeds from adopting the same old materialist analysis.’¹

Whether one accepts Virilio’s analysis or his predictions, it is clear that speed and velocity are two of the main aspects of a new finance capitalism that operates at the speed of light based on sophisticated ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ algorithms. Already researchers have demonstrated that data transfer using a single laser can send 26 terabits per second down an optical fibre and there are comparable reports that lasers will make financial ‘high-frequency’ trading even faster.²

The game has changed permanently. Now universities are ‘engines of innovation’ for ‘fast capitalism’ dealing in ‘fast knowledge’, ‘fast publishing’ and ‘fast teaching’ (e.g. massive open online courses (MOOCs)) where ‘knowledge’ (confused with information) is seen as having a rapidly decreasing shelf-life. We have passed the bedding-down stage of neoliberal universities that occurred with the transformation of the public sphere during the Reagan–Thatcher decades of the 1980s and 1990s. We have passed the stage of the adoption of principles of New Public Management and the emulation of private sector management styles to enter an era of universities in the service of finance capitalism where universities, increasingly reliant on student fees (especially international students) and independent research funds, serviced by high-speed networks and MOOCs, operate as a part of global finance culture.

Increasingly universities are instrumental in generating and managing a burgeoning student debt.³ They have become loan institutions that gamble with endowments and make investments in futures markets. They prioritize research that generates income, develop global partnerships with like institutions and consortia to act as powerful actors in the global higher education market, often overly concerned with branding, institutional image, positioning and global marketing. In this new context the university is increasingly preoccupied with finance, with financial global partners, imbued with a finance culture that permeates the institution substituting at every turn for academic leadership and academic culture, downplaying the very sources of self-criticism that used to characterize the university and playing up the financial and reputational stakes.

One might also add that at the very heart of a permanent change of regime is the relationship between global capitalism and the new information and communication technologies, a relationship that has developed quickly in the post-war context to create what I call ‘cybernetic capitalism’, a term I introduce to emphasis the new circuits and forms of global capital and new mode of capital accumulation. At the same time, the social and communicative acceleration that results from this relationship at the heart of cybernetic capitalism can be understood in philosophical terms that change the basis for temporality, for subjectivity and being: being a student, being a professor, being a university.

In the first part of this chapter I introduce the notion of ‘digital reason’ and describe main features of the university in the epoch of digital reason as a philosophical basis for understanding so-called ‘fast capitalism’ and ‘fast knowledge’ and various theorizations of cybernetics in relation to the university.

The epoch of digital reason

Global finance capitalism (and ‘financialization’) is but one prominent and rapidly growing aspect of ‘cybernetic capitalism’. Western modernity and the developing global systems spawned by western (neo)liberal capitalism exhibit long-term tendencies of an increasing abstraction that can be described in terms of long-term modernization processes, including the ‘formalization’, ‘mathematicization’, ‘aestheticization’ and ‘biologization’ of everyday life (Peters, Britez and Bulut, 2009; Peters, 2011). These cybernetic processes are characteristic of otherwise seemingly disparate pursuits in the arts and humanities as much as science and technology and have been driven in large measure through the development of logic and mathematics, especially in the world architecture of emerging global digital systems. In this respect we can talk of the emergence of digital reason and of the university in the epoch of digital reason. By this description I mean principally a set of developments in foundations of mathematics and the algebra of logic that predate the founding of cybernetics as a discipline, with the 1946 and 1953 conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation in New York City on the subject of ‘Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems’ (Umpleby, 2005). The prehistory of cybernetics that results in the problematic history of the development of digital logic, including Boolean algebra, gates that process logic signals, switching theory, flip-flops and memory elements that store logic signals and in general the representation of binary information in physical systems. In this tangled genealogy George Boole (1847) wrote The Mathematical Analysis of Logic that provided the calculus for a two-valued logic, applying algebra to logic, representing true or false within assertion logic that is the basis for all modern programming languages and digital electronics. Claude Shannon discovered that the rule of Boolean algebra could be applied to switching circuits and introduced switching algebra in order to design circuits of logic gates. (The algebra of 0 and 1 was applied to electrical hardware comprising logic gates to form a circuit diagram.)⁴

Digital reason is a wider and a more philosophical notion than digital logic, named here in the tradition of Kant and Foucault. It governs the historical emergence of a techno-epistemological epoch that is so recent but indicates a deep transformation of economy, society and the university. Its concepts are the concepts of speed and velocity – involving limits of the physics of light – as well as system, feedback and control. Much of this rapid transformation of digital logic and the properties of systems can be captured in the notion of ‘algorithmic capitalism’ (Peters, 2012a; 2012c; 2013) as an aspect of informationalism (informational capitalism) or ‘cybernetic capitalism’, a term that recognizes more precisely the cybernetic system similarities among various sectors of the post-industrial capitalist economy in its third phase of development – from mercantilism to industrialism and finally to cybernetics – linking the growth of the multinational info-utilities (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Amazon) and their spectacular growth in the last twenty years, with developments in biocapitalism (the informatization of biology and biologization of information), and fundamental changes taking place in the nature of the market with algorithmic trading and the development of so-called ‘financialization’. This chapter examines these trends and makes an assessment of the long-term effects of them on universities.

Fast capitalism, fast knowledge

Filip Vostal (2013: 96) in his paper ‘Thematizing speed: Between critical theory and cultural analysis’ notes (following Tomlinson, 2007) that the issue of social speed and time has been treated as a subsidiary theme by the founders of modern sociology and also by those like Bauman and Castells who theorize globalization. He claims ‘Only recently have some social theorists started to develop systematic theories and analyses that address speed as a self-standing social phenomenon’ (Vostal, 2013: 97) and mentions in this regard ‘Hartmut Rosa’s critical theory of acceleration and John Tomlinson’s investigation of modern cultures of speed’ (ibid.). He goes on to offer the following description under the heading ‘Critique of the ever-faster lifeworld’:

There are several seminal book-length accounts (Agger, 1989, 2004; Hassan, 2003, 2009, 2012) that develop a critique of speed. This body of literature distils, and in a sense systematizes, speed as a modern and above all capitalist imperative with a plethora of negative consequences for the environment, health, self-determination, individual autonomy, democracy, intellectual pursuits and social reproduction. . . . Essentially, the authors . . . the Frankfurt School tradition by identifying speed as the central feature in the capitalist production process, which obstructs ‘mechanisms of reaching understanding’ and thereby ‘colonizes the lifeworld’ and by highlighting the capitalist reification of time as the pivotal cause behind ‘the eclipse of reason’.

He makes the point that Agger and Hassan focus on the mode of capitalist production that they take as synonymous with modernity or with providing the motor for acceleration especially through the labour process. By contrast to this account he profiles Rosa’s differentiation between (1) technological acceleration; (2) acceleration of social change; and (3) acceleration of the pace of life, and he also profiles Tomlinson’s ‘cultural modalities of speed’. Klinke (2012) also provides us with a reading of existing chronopolitics, starting with Virilio’s analysis of speed, acceleration and warfare (rather than capital accumulation) and the postcolonial geopolitical interpretation of political time evident in the work of scholars like Johannes Fabian and John Agnew.

In this chapter I develop an account of cybernetic capitalism that provides an analytical understanding in terms of digital reason of the differences between industrial and cybernetic modes of production in relation to the university. It is an analysis that goes beyond acceleration to understand why cybernetic systems are temporally grounded in digital logic and its application to electrical engineering (so-called switching theory), which has become the engine of new varieties of cybernetic capitalism where the logic of capital accumulation is facilitated by cybernetic systems. By comparison with the industrial mode of production, cybernetics serves as a new logic for accelerated accumulation strategies harnessing the new media technologies to exploit truly massive global markets. Tim Luke (2005) provides us with an account of fast capitalism:

Fast capitalism is a 24/7 reality. Its statics and dynamics require social theorists to delve into dromology, or disciplined discursive deliberations over the new modes of power and knowledge generated by speed itself. As one gains awareness of how speed shapes social practices, it is clear that social theory must consider the power of kinetics as a fundamental force in everyday life. Whether it is defined as ‘dromocracy’ (Virilio 1986), ‘time-space com pression’ (Harvey 1989) or ‘fast capitalism’ (Agger 1989), today’s temporal terrains, as Virilio asserts, are embedded in ‘chrono-politics’ through which ‘speed rules’ over every aspect of life now being reformatted by ‘the dromocratic revolution’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1983:43–51). These effects are both global and local in their scope and impact, although their impact on culture, economy, and society is not fully understood.

www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_1/luke.html

As Robert Babe (2006) notes ‘Fast capitalism depends . . . on the volume, speed, and territorial expanse of digitized communication networks, on reduced time for product cycles, on accelerating speeds of style and model changes, and perhaps most importantly on imagery embedding mythic meanings onto the banality of mass produced consumer items’. As such, post-structuralist thought ‘is the ontology best supporting and depicting today’s fast capitalism’.

It was this kind of characterization that motivated Agger and Luke to co-found the journal Fast Capitalism in 2005, now celebrating its tenth issue.⁵ In the Editor’s Introduction Agger and Luke (2013a) write about the internet as the new public sphere and lay out their rationale:

People use the Internet as a public sphere in which they express and enlighten themselves and organize others . . . We are convinced that the best way to study an accelerated media culture and its various political economies and existential meanings is dialectically, with nuance, avoiding sheer condemnation and ebullient celebration. We seek to shape these new technologies and social structures in democratic ways.

www.fastcapitalism.com

In the recent issue Agger and Luke (2013b) reflect on the possibility of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 Past, present and future
• PART 2 Knowledge and time
• PART 3 Living with time
• Coda: spaces – and rhythms – of time
• Index