The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University

Carl A. Raschke

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134201006
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

In recent years, the powerful social, cultural and economic changes wrought by digital technology have led many to forecast the end of the university as we know it. This book employs extensive research and case studies to explain why these predictions, even if perhaps somewhat premature, are on solid ground.
The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University shows how the internet, high-speed electronic communications and personal computers necessitate a radical rethinking of what is meant by 'higher education'. The book calls into question both the traditionalist's scepticism about the benefits of new technology, and the corporate e-learning advocate's failure to grasp that education is more than what happens on a computer screen. The author provides concrete data and models for more democratic, restructured systems of instruction that not only take advantage of advanced learning technologies, but promote the globalisation of higher education.
This is an essential read for anyone concerned about the future of higher education.

Chapter 1

Higher education and the postmodern condition

The university is in ruins.

(Jean Baudrillard)

The university described by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, a doyen of today’s so-called ‘postmodernist’ philosophy, is certainly on the eve of an enormous changeover. Regardless of whether the university is ready or prepared, it is about to embark upon the postmodern epoch. Higher education, whether it likes it or not, must respond to what the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard has termed ‘the postmodern condition’.

The postmodern condition is decisively the condition of living in digital times, the time of networked communications. It is what we conventionally, if not all too conveniently, call the information age, which is actually a new ‘knowledge age’. It is an age when the boundaries of everything from art to philosophy to literature to economics are rinsed out, when their historical hierarchies are flattened, when their very definitions have become suspect.

What exactly do we mean by ‘postmodernism’? The meaning of the term has been argued and threshed in untold popular periodicals and scholarly books and journals. It has been affiliated in the popular mind with everything from unintelligible monographs in French philosophy to trendy styles of painting and architecture to antinomian forms of belief and morality. Yet, as Hans Bertens observes in his detailed history of the concept, postmodernism is really, for better or for worst, the long-lasting intellectual legacy of the ‘1960s social and artistic avant-garde’. Such a sensibility is not only ‘eclectic’; it is ‘radically democratic’.²

The postmodernist revolution that began in the late 1960s was initially a cultural revolution. It was a ‘youthquake’, as social commentators at the time called it, that rapidly manifested itself as an intellectual pole shift. It began as a wave of Bohemian protest in the arts districts of California in the summer of 1967, exploded like a political meteor shower in the streets of Paris during May 1968, then immediately emitted a shock wave through Eastern Europe with the so-called ‘Prague Spring’, which would set off the tsunami that toppled the Soviet Union and international Communism not quite a generation later. Once the Berlin Wall, a lowering symbol of the divide between East and West, fell in the autumn of 1989, the way came open for the thorough transformation of the economic and social structures of those regions of the planet that were hitherto called ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’.

For at least a decade theorists on both sides of the old line proclaimed the triumph of the market economy and a new golden age for the partisans of Adam Smith, as opposed to the now discredited prophets of Marx. The market indeed had replaced the inefficient, and politically repressive, command economies of the old Communist bloc and its allies. But something far more significant was boiling up beneath the surface. Whereas ‘capital’ in the past had signified the accumulated savings of institutions and individuals that was redeployed into new investment in technologies of production, the new global economy was coming increasingly to be driven by technological innovations that in themselves generated wealth without savings. The paradox of America’s steamrollering ‘capitalist’ economy with a negative savings rate that showed itself in the late 1990s masked a trend that old ideologues of both left and right could not fathom or comprehend. The trend was toward the blurring of the final distinction that had defined economies, and the ‘science’ of economics, since the philosopher Aristotle coined the phrase oikonomia twenty-three hundred years ago.

That was the distinction between production and consumption, or between making and desiring. In one, slightly misleading sense, the high-tech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley in California, who once worked 150 weeks without sleeping or going home in order to sell out for a fantastic price, then recycled his or her talents into a new startup company, was a latter day parody of the now extinct, hard-working Calvinist Max Weber had described as having inadvertently created capitalism. But while Weber’s capitalist exhibited a lifestyle of ‘worldly asceticism’ in order to accumulate the financial sources to produce more and more, the new, postmodern ‘capitalist’ simply engaged in feverish technological creativity while living a totally hedonistic, and in some cases, orgiastic lifestyle that he or she rarely had time to enjoy. Money in the postmodern economy no longer was a sign of privilege or control; it was an index of hyperactivity.

The university in the postmodern economy

The abolition of the proprietary and coercive ethic that had characterized the ‘old economy’ – capitalist as well as socialist, in other words ‘industrial’ – called forth an entirely different set of values that are now firmly in place for the postmodern economy. The postmodern economy is characterized by a process which the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard terms ‘symbolic exchange’. In the old industrial economy, the market, and the system of exchange that accompanied it, involved manufactured things, or commodities. In the post-industrial, or postmodern, order the market is in intangible vehicles of meaning. In Baudrillard’s terms the sign replaces the commodity. Contemporary cultural theorists constantly bring to our attention examples of how the new economy is ‘symbolical’ rather than material. Commodities are not only symbols or ‘signs’; signs are also commodities.³

But this insight is rarely fleshed out with regard to its most important ramification – the recognition that the ‘business’ of knowledge within the context of what we traditionally understand as ‘education’ is the most important business. While the average business guru chatters on about the ‘information economy’ and the promise of online commerce, more discerning analysts understand that the convergence of digital technologies foreshadows an entire new way in which the human mind itself develops, and experiences the world. John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems, manufacturer of the routers that propel data throughout the internet, has proclaimed that so-called ‘e-learning’ is on the verge of becoming the next frontier of internet applications. ‘Education and the internet must go hand in hand’, Chambers said in the autumn of 1999 during a speech before Comdex, the enormous annual gathering of computer industry manufacturers and sellers. ‘It will serve as one of the great equalizers.’⁴

What will the coming of digital learning ‘equalize’? Like the postmodernist revolution in thought and culture over the past twenty years, it will impart a hurricane force that reshapes the educational system as a whole. To date educators in general, and higher education in particular, have largely resisted the digital onslaught, or savvily co-opted it in a fashion that so far has absorbed its transformative energy. Teachers have replaced paper syllabi with web pages, or encouraged the use of email for out-of-class communication with the instructor. Increasingly they are employing presentation programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint with their lectures. But they have not allowed the changes in courses and classes, which the world wide web will inevitably accomplish. They have ferociously resisted the process that has taken hold by now in all other sectors of the digital society, whereby centralized management and ‘top-down’ authority is replaced by non-sequential and coactive networks that rely far more on the efficiency of communication than command and control.

Like the age-old Gothic cathedrals that tower over bustling European metropolises, the professoriate seeks to maintain a distinct, albeit archaic, presence amid today’s ‘digital kids’ in the university classroom. But unlike the cathedrals, which centuries ago became historical showpieces rather than the centrepiece of town life they occupied in the late Middle Ages, the professoriate still demands pride of place. The current downswing in the financial fortunes of the high tech sector has given temporary encouragement to the Luddite factions in higher education. But the respite will be short-lived. The tension between the two worlds cannot be sustained much longer.

The obsolescence of ‘teaching’

The dominant issue is not, as critics of higher education in corporate quarters continue to harp, one of educators spending too much time ‘outside the classroom’. The irony is that the classroom as we know it, especially the one valued most by advocates of ‘teachers doing teaching’, is rapidly becoming obsolete in the emerging postmodern, digital culture. Interestingly, both conservative detractors of post-secondary learning and the guild of higher education share many of the same outworn assumptions concerning what ‘instruction’ is all about. The assumption is that learning remains a ‘centred’ activity with large numbers of students routinely focused on the teacher as well as a limited selection of carefully selected repositories of knowledge such as textbooks.

The model further presupposes that in order for instructors to instruct that they must concentrate their time and energy on a direct transmission to ‘students’ of what is either latent or manifest within their own favoured crania.

The postmodern prototype, on the other hand, constitutes, both a de-centred and a dispersive approach, as it does in philosophy and cultural theory, to the creation of knowledge. There is no ‘body of knowledge’ in the postmodern archetype; or at least it is a body, in the memorable metaphor of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘without organs’. That is to say, the body is not a regime of discrete functions, physiologies, and anatomical components. It is a body that remains Protean, constantly shifting in shape and deportment.

The postmodern prototype of knowledge has been a theoretical construct on both sides of the Atlantic for nearly twenty years. But it has taken the coming of digital media and the ubiquity of digital communications to incarnate within society itself the prototype. Now that the prototype pervades the social and cultural order, it will be impossible for the educational establishment to keep it at a distance. European castles, like cathedrals, continue to dot the landscape. But their purpose as fortified structures for military defence vanished centuries ago. The ‘ivory tower’ also is in an analogous position to the castle of the sixteenth century. The munitions that had been developed by that period rendered it indefensible. Those countries in the sixteenth century that relied on castle defences wound up the sad victims of Europe’s sanguinary wars. The same will be the case for higher education if it does not ‘postmodernize’, and do so quickly.

A new knowledge space

The postmodern university – or what we shall call, more technically – the ‘hyperuniversity’ – is an extension, and an extensive ‘knowledge space’, of the culture at large. What do we mean by ‘knowledge space’? Pierre Lévy writes that ‘once knowledge becomes the prime mover’ in the world, a whole new social topography begins to emerge. ‘A new anthropological space, the knowledge space, is being formed today, which could easily take precedence over the spaces of earth, territory, and commerce that preceded it.’⁵

The notion of knowledge space is bound up with our contemporary cultural understanding of space itself. Until the late nineteenth century, the concept of space suggested for the most part what the physicist Isaac Newton three hundred years before had described. Space implied a substance that underlies and supports all matter. The metaphor, of course, came from the human observation of objects in motion through air or water. Just as water buoys and sustains lighter entities, so space is the ‘understructure’ of everything visible and perceptible. Just as objects gliding through water displace the fluid in which they are contained, so bodies in motion dislocate the texture of space itself. This texture physicists up through the late nineteenth century named ‘the ether’. And it was not until the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, designed to measure velocity of light through its ‘fluid’ receptacle, demonstrated the ether did not exist, that the Newtonian concept of space itself began to crumble.⁶ What ensued, of course, was the theory of relativity and the revolution in scientific cosmology that came to be known as quantum physics. The so-called ‘new physics’ of the twentieth century advanced by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and others radically redefined the meaning of the idea of space as it had been employed in both science and philosophy. For Einstein, space was now conceived as the fourth dimension, or part of the ‘geometry’ of space-time. Later advances in theoretical physics and mathematics redescribed space even further in non-intuitive terms.

By the same token, digital learning is radically reconstituting our intuitive, or common-sense, views of the ‘space’ in which education takes place. For most of the modern era the ‘space’ of learning has been closely associated with schools, buildings, and classrooms. Instruction is something conducted by a particular person in a particular place at a particular time. In the new universe of digital learning, on the other hand, the old ‘metaphysical’ notion of learning space shifts dramatically. As we shall discover, even the seemingly obvious idea that education involves teachers and students enters into question. Teaching and learning are not necessarily separate functions or professional activities, but points of co-ordination along the same spectrum. The space of the postmodern university mirrors the space of knowledge within the digital society. This space of knowledge, in turn, reflects the topology of information flows in what increasingly we recognize as a networked world.

Networks by their very nature are ‘anti-hegemonic’. That is to say, they prevent the domination of any sector or region of space by a single entity, or agent. For a long while biologists believed the brain was hegemonic and hierarchical. The assumption was that ‘thinking’ took place in certain central or privileged portions of the brain. But brain science is rapidly realizing that human cognition depends on regularly alternating activation of different neural pathways. The internet itself is a marvellous, and actually far more intricate, simulation of the shifting patterns of electrical activity that from a physical vantagepoint amount to the phenomenon of consciousness. As most net users have been told at some time in recent years, this astounding digital communication design was developed by the military in order to protect its command and control system from destruction or disruption at vulnerable spots. In other words, the power of the internet – and its invulnerability to singular or central intervention – is based on the fact that it has no ‘head’, nucleus, or centre. The internet was conceived as a communications architecture that could not be sabotaged, simply because its ‘ganglia’, or nerve centres, cannot be localized.

Hyperspace and non-locality

The theme of ‘non-locality’ also pervades twentieth-century physics. In the old Newtonian picture of space and time, events were regarded as ‘point-events’. That is, they could be described with mathematical precision as taking place at a certain locale at a certain exact ‘point’ along an axis representing what Newtonian thought called ‘absolute time’. In the theoretical physics of the twentieth century, however, the presumption that change could be mapped as a transition from points A to B to C went on the fly. Physicist John Wheeler, in his cosmological model known as ‘geometro-dynamics’, envisioned the universe Einstein had sketched as a flapping and fluctuating membrane that was constantly collapsing, reconstituting itself, and punching out ‘wormholes’ and ‘tunnels’ that connect the different regions of the space-time continuum. Particles that zoom about at the subatomic level beyond our sight are actually manifestations at particular ‘locations’ in space and time of waveforms that are non-local, or which paradoxically exist potentially at any time or place.

According to quantum physics, what allows us to say that a particle ‘exists’ at any particular site at a particular ‘moment in time’ is the fact that we have observed it. Observation determines location, but the unobserved still constitutes the deeper reality of the ‘thing’, in the same way that the magnitude of an iceberg is not visible above the surface of the ocean, or the foliage of a tuberous plant conceals the fact that growth is extensive beneath the ground. In the technical terms of theoretical physics, we claim that the unobserved particle prior to its emergence is a ‘virtual particle’. The observed particle is real.

Indeed, the analogy of tuberous growth that is latent, or potential, everywhere and overt at specific sites has become a guiding metaphor for much of postmodern thinking itself. In their landmark book A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two distinguished French writers and intellectuals who have mapped much of the discourse of postmodern thought, use the metaphor of the rhizome, the agency of such growth, to characterize the new landscape of both language and cognition. ‘Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be’, they write. ‘This is very different from the tree root, which plots a point, fixes an order.’⁷ Unlike the tree root which anchors or ‘grounds’ growth (of knowledge), the rhizome ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains’. A rhizome is ‘a stream without beginning’.⁸ The rhizome is the perfect biogenetic model of what in physics is described as non-locality. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner write in their explanation of ‘rhizomatics’ as a root metaphor for the contemporary condition of the world: ‘[Rhizomatics] affirms the principles excluded from Western thought and reinterprets reality as dynamic, heterogeneous, and non-dichotomous’.⁹ The heterogeneity of the real means that everything that exists is not confined within a simple concept, or assigned to a particular place. Reality itself is non-local.

The postmodern university, like the universe of twentieth-century physics, is founded on the principle of non-locality. It is also resona...

Indice dei contenuti

• Front Cover
• The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern university
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Higher education and the postmodern condition
• 2 The third knowledge revolution and the coming of the hyperuniversity
• 3 From medieval caravan to information superhighway: toward a new epistemology of learning
• 4 The internet protocol and the emergence of a digital learning architecture
• 5 Beyond education: the age of transaction and the ‘scene’ of digital learning
• 6 Hypertextuality and the new terrain of liberal learning
• 7 Postmodernist premises
• 8 The global university
• 9 Knowledge space
• Notes
• Index