This text was originally presented as a lecture in the framework of the project »Education Acts«, at the invitation of Krassimira Kruschkova and Arno Böhler.

Today, I would have written it with a different focus, and with a different tone; more solidly political, and more pragmatic, in the sense of political practice, in opposition to the economically grounded pragmatism of contemporary institutions. But at the moment we are experiencing a tendency to reduce knowledge to mere pragmatism everywhere in Europe: the current situation in France comes immediately to mind as an extreme example, where the government’s project for reform of higher education could lead to the collapse of all abstract and objective knowledge, reducing researchers and university professors to the status of low-level bureaucrats. So perhaps it is even more important to persevere in an abstract philosophical idiom, which indeed is the language of this text, thus reclaiming the right to existence of the concept, as an expression of the irreducible singularity and complexity of thought. Every restatement of this endangered notion appears today to be an act of resistance. Let us then persist in our resistance: in continuing to think.

[b]An institution of thought?[/b]
Knowledge without education is impossible. Education without institutions is impossible. And knowledge is also impossible without an ethos of knowledge, without freedom of thought and a community of thought. Is there a contradiction between these axiomatic conditions? Is it possible to find a balance between education and the common work of conception, co-thinking and invention? In other words, can we strike the right balance between the »community« of knowledge and the »institution« of knowledge?

To answer this question we must first consider the conditions for the existence of such an institution. It presupposes an uncompromising defense of the thesis that knowledge is neutral. Interest or pragmatic use, application, social realization and so on cannot be either grounds for, or a telos of, knowledge. They are a means of the social existence of knowledge, which is taken for granted as self-evident and does not need defending. On the other hand, powerful arguments definitely need to be made against the dominant reduction of knowledge to its pragmatic value, to its utility. In other words, it is necessary to object to the dangerous positing of pragmatism as the telos of knowledge. This ideology of pragmatism, which seems to reduce the meaning of knowledge to its immediate application, is based on an implicit metaphysical premise. Pragmatism always presupposes an orientation towards a specific point on the horizon: it presupposes an »Orient« of meaning, which directs our thoughts and actions based on the conditions for accumulating goods and »good«. But what could this meaning be if the transcendent guarantor of meaning – or the infinitude of meaning itself – has been rejected? Ultimately it could be nothing but the finitude of existence. But finitude is the very meaninglessness of existence. As a consequence, experience of finitude means, above all, a failure of meaning; a rejection of every haven or guarantee of meaning. Pragmatic reduction of meaning – or the reduction of existence »to« meaning, meaning as utility, as usability – appears then as tantamount to reduction of life. Indeed, this reduction is entirely determined by the logic of contemporary biocapitalism: the new logic, form and practice of production. Biocapitalism claims to be an infinite opening up of space for the actualization of new forms of life, but in fact represents a reduction of the very condition of life, of its irreducible unconditionality. All of this necessitates radical opposition to the thesis that education must be bound to economic reality, which transforms education itself in a process of pragmatic reduction of knowledge.

This uncritically asserted, common-sense thesis is dangerous. In the first place, it reduces those disciplines that are not directly relevant to production, economics, finance, public regulation or social reproducibility – i.e. the disciplines that are directly necessary for the reproduction of economic and political structures – to secondary disciplines We only have to compare the resourcing of »pragmatic« disciplines with the resources provided for disciplines that do not have a direct application. But this pragmatic criterion threatens the entire system of knowledge, marginalizing the human sciences in general, but particularly the abstract disciplines, such as philosophy, which constitute the foundations of knowledge.

Secondly, this thesis calls into question the fundamental principle of the autonomy of the university, because it has profound implications for its structural dynamics, for the overall economic functioning of a university as an institution. Moreover, accepted uncritically, and relying on the easy doxic pragmatic model, the thesis that education is the process of the pragmatic reduction of knowledge not only reduces the inviolable autonomy of the university, but also tries to encroach on the principle expressed by this autonomy. Yet this principle concerns the overall structure of something that has been sought after as central to the democratic political project for two centuries.

Yet the thesis of education as a pragmatic reduction of knowledge can, and must, be challenged – in the first instance, from the position of critical economic thought. If cognitive capitalism itself is based on the models of production of knowledge, as analyses by Stengers, Corsani, Moulier-Boutang and Lazzarato show¹, and if immaterial labour (in the university research laboratory) turns out to be a model of the new forms of production, then the idea of the pragmatic use of knowledge, of the reduction of knowledge to economic reality, is retrograde and practically ineffective, especially in the long term. And also true today, as the crash of financial capitalism plunges the world into a terrible »crash-test«.² The university not only has the task of resisting the economic reduction of knowledge, and the potential to do so; it is also called upon to be the pioneering institution in inventing new modes of production, as well as building new models of social interaction and work ethics, of reinventing justice.

[b]The unconditional task of the university[/b]
The prime task of the university is therefore to ensure the radical autonomy of the practice of knowledge. Firstly, this means the radical autonomy of education. This is not a utopian project, but an absolute necessity. It is an absolute necessity because the radical autonomy of knowledge and education are conditions, structural conditions, for the realization of a radical democratic political order. Without the autonomy of knowledge and education, the social world would of necessity be limited to mechanisms of brutal reproduction of power and brutal economic coercion.

In other words, the university must be driven by political logic, not by economic logic. The university must be the very locus of the unconditional priority of the political over the economic. This certainly does not mean that the university should be aligned to political realities in the sense of political goals, interests or projects. The university is not a political institution, it is an institution of the political; it is not grounded in political actuality (to which it must always react critically, and in which it is necessarily involved, but which does not determine its condition), but it is a realm of its very possibility. The university has to be a locus of the unconditional political, precisely because the university is the institution whose calling is to watch over the critical realm, the critical core of the public sphere and, consequently, of the political.

Hence the university must be an inviolable territory of critical thinking. A place where education and thought must not only be defended but also challenged: a place of the praxis and ethos of thought. This certainly doesn’t imply withdrawing from actuality and contact with the world; on the contrary, it means a space where the actuality of the world can be considered in a disinterested or, in other words, critical way (meaning that any critical position must be a disinterested position par excellence). Consequently, in forming a capacity for critique, the creation and development of critical instruments are a compulsory, immanent element of education. They are the second main task of the university as an institution of critical thinking. The university is therefore the institution whose calling is to defend the critical realm. This critical realm – a realm of discernment, judgment and crisis (according to the etymology of »krisis«) at the heart of the public sphere – is by definition void. It is the non-appropriable void at the heart of the public sphere, not belonging to any private interest, in which political existence sets conditions. It is the intense but empty, belonging-to-nobody, heart of democracy. It does not appropriate, but possesses immanent resistance to any appropriation. And the university is the modern institution which has the supra-political function of defending and realizing this void.

If critique – and therefore crisis – is the core of the political, then this means that the university, as an institution of knowledge and education, must not at any cost reduce the crisis of knowledge and education. Knowledge implies more than simply self-sufficiency and progress. It must also carry a potential for crisis and, therefore, for plasticity, for transformation. In other words, along with the technologies of knowledge, the space – the immanent space – of the exterior must be defended too. The awareness that the irreducible exterior inhabits the heart of knowledge is the critical awareness that allows not only »skepsis« and »polemos« but also any invention: it is the inherent rhythm of thinking.

(From this perspective, it is arguable that »peripheral« human sciences, especially philosophy (i.e.those sciences that have least pragmatic use) are fundamental not only in terms of the typology of sciences but also in terms of political and critical potential. They are fundamental precisely because they have no fundament, because they are a place of experimentation, of »thought« and its critical potential, of the plasticity of existence.)

[b]The task of those who teach[/b]
The prime responsibility of critical intellectuals is education or, in other words, the capacity to communicate knowledge and critical reflection. This work of communication (not in the sense of communication theory or in the sense of Habermas, but understood as radical exposition of singularities between themselves, which suppresses the rigid normative borders and opens up space for invention and plastic acts of actualization of transformability) must have an exemplary status for society. The university is or must be a locus for inventing new forms of sharing, inventing new languages and, ultimately, a new kind of co-existence. As well as critique, it must also address itself to the plasticity of thought; an openness to other types of expression, other languages, other forms of thinking and of life, an openness to their potential.

This also presupposes a responsibility towards language or, more precisely, responsibility towards the preservation of the irreducible multiplicity of the languages that compose a single language or a single culture. Education has the task not simply of transmitting knowledge, but also of building new forms of expression, new attitudes to the world, and a capacity for translating languages, discourses and idiolects. The irreducible multiplicity of expressions is the very locus of the plasticity of thought, and of every culture. The more that languages are expressed in a culture, and the more that these languages interact with each other, the more dynamic and viable a culture becomes. Imposition and dominance of a single language leads to the death of language. A single language means an absence of language, because languages are always a multitude, they always exist in dynamic openness to each other, in their exposition and intersection. At the same time, however, the university as a locus of the plasticity of thought must not totalize the presumption of translatability; absolute translation is non-existent, and translation always involves partial reduction. Consequently, any attempt to give rise to new forms of communication must be premised on the only possible common space – that of the singularity, and therefore of the untranslatability, of singular languages. This is actually the boundary in which the university touches the sphere of the arts, a »sphere« whose prime characteristic is precisely the opening up of homogeneous languages and the multiplication of singular idioms, and through them experimenting with the plasticity of existence.

New forms of communication involve new forms of being-together, or community. Each age in the history of knowledge institutions offers a specific model of the community of thought, which shares codes of communication, a specific ethos, a specific form of life. The ancient school, the mediaeval university, the modern school of thought and today’s university »departments« obviously have very little, if anything, in common. What is today’s community of knowledge? Is it the so-called »academic community«? How can space for community of thought be opened up in the inevitable institutional pragmatism? It is precisely by exposure to the exterior – with the students who come from the world, who are the exterior at the heart of the institution, the exterior without which the institution is impossible – that the possibility of community begins.

An institution of thought must open up space for plasticity of thought. This also presupposes openness to the forms of life and thinking carried by the other, by the »newcomer«, the »student«, sensitivity towards his or her knowledge and specificity of the methods of cognition and reception of knowledge that education so precisely allows as a transformation, as an alteration in which preconditions are not eliminated, but enriched and extended. The university institution is not yesterday’s conservative institution, but if it aims to preserve something from its history, then this must be the capacity for dialogue, debate; a common search for truth.

In this sense, teachers are burdened with a great responsibility, and they must be capable of living up to expectations: education must not only teach or transmit, but also open up thought, education must make sure that thinking will not be locked up in rigid schematisms and automatisms but will always leave an open horizon for new actualizations. But this means that the institution – of necessity a space of power – is immanently inhabited by the other space of thought, immanently exposed to the risk of limitation, of rigid repetition. The question is: how can the institution’s self-limiting tendency be resisted from within? How can the university be prevented from becoming a locus of the »other«, of thought itself? The only solution is constant resistance against the totalizing hold of power and, consequently, against the monolithic totalizing figures of the subject, the homogeneous community and rigid conceptual paradigms. The university and education must not be a locus of solidification of rigid paradigms, of canons of knowledge, but, conversely, of plastic modelling, of the risk of thought, of skepsis and polemos and at the same time of the respect of the common rhythm of thinking.

Yet, to imagine an institution of radical freedom seems to be a contradiction in terms; institutions always presuppose a particular framework or, in other words, a particular reduction. Nevertheless, nothing can stop us from presupposing that there could be an institution which opens up space for the unforeseeable: a framework which does not fit in any framework. The university is precisely this hypothetical institution. Being an institution of knowledge and education, the university is therefore a paradoxical institution by its very definition. It is grounded in paradox.

[b]Can we think together?[/b]
Can we teach without falling into the trap of »educating« – that is to say, without tutoring, instructing, performing authority, imposing norms, surveying and punishing, and enjoying our power? How can we open up thinking without educating? Is it possible to mobilize a »common« (or perhaps it is better to call it »friendly«) way of thinking? And how would it be done?

Is it possible to think together? And if it is, then how can we think together? How can we »open up« the immanent coherences of singular thoughts? And doesn’t such an opening up of singularities towards the common assert the partly metaphysical image of a »common« realm of thinking that precedes every singular thought? A universal potential of thought? No, because the singularity of thought, its singular experience is irreducible to a totality; it is precisely its irreducibility that makes it thought. But how then to consider the common realm of exposition of singularities of thought? The only possibility is to open up the immanent difference of every thought that allows its alteration or, in other words, transformation into the alterity that inhabits it, the exposition of alterity. Consequently, the common realm of thought is its limitless plasticity, a realm I call »transformability«.³ Entry into this realm of the dynamics of singularities is the necessary condition for the creation of a thesis or concept that simultaneously expresses the complexity of a given situation and the singularity of the event.

The university, a locus of unconditional freedom of thought and of critical resistance, has no alternative other than this radical experience of common singularity of thought, of the collective intelligence of the multitude.

 

 

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