Digitalization of the university and its stakes – digital materalities, organology and academic practices

Abstract

Digitalization of (higher) education has been an increasingly important subject in the recent years, spiking especially due to pandemic lockdowns. While many scholars and third parties consider this process to be an improvement or even an inevitability, I argue that there is much to understand about it beyond ‘attending to the materialities of digital education’. This paper aims to do two things: 1) to argue why digital materialities approach (‘attending to the materialities of digital education’) is not enough to grasp the digitalization of the University (and thus, its stakes) and 2) to discuss how combining general organology and an educational-phenomenological outlook offers a more robust way of understanding digitalization of the University and its stakes. I conclude by pointing to the issue of place and placefulness that seems to be one of the most directly affected characteristics of the University and studying, which calls on to be reflected further upon.

Keywords:

• Digitalization
• university
• functionalism
• organology
• sociomaterialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This description of the two modes of digitalization should quite obviously remind of, respectively, real and formal subsumption of work under capital – here, of academic work through exteriorization brought about by digital technology. Both types of subsumption are very much dependent on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of academic use of technical objects – how they are added to or integrated into academic practices or whether these practices are being remodeled after these objects and according to their own, non-academic logic. In any case, introduction of technical objects as a part of improving efficiency and extending possibilities in education is also an introduction of accountability and transparency, which are crucial in capitalist regime of performativity. Digitalization, through its dematerialization and rematerialization processes, allows performativity regime to penetrate, parcel, account for and reorganize educational practices, subsuming all their objects and subjects as resources towards providing better results. What was once an event, an oeuvre of a professor (with a nod to Derrida’s elaboration (2002) of what this profession makes), now is deconstructed and reassembled into a product which might be recorded, analyzed, optimized and streamlined into a catalogue available online. It is also important to consider how other educational buzzwords and trends fit into this picture – what is called student-centered learning (which we might link to a very popular corporate methodology of user-centered product design) is one such example of a consumerist logic making its way into higher education. Such a reshaping of higher education practices might also be very much detrimental to their emancipatory potential (as standardization and consumerization of higher learning products does not go well with free, deep, critical and collective thinking), thus undermining thesis of general intellect that would become a critical mass in cognitive capitalism (see e.g. Moulier-Boutang, 2012; Vercellone, 2007). This particular problematic of learning, studying, teaching and researching made explicit by challenge posed by digitalization calls for a materialist approach to epistemological (and educational) issues such as developed by Sohn-Rethel (1978) or even for a hyper-materialist one, as elaborated by Bernard Stiegler in his last works (e.g. Nanjing Lectures from 2020). Without a doubt, the Marxian perspective on education and digitalization is extremely important. The impact of capitalism on higher education has been a subject of numerous important studies (e.g. Bousquet, 2008; Neilson, 2020; Peters, 2004; Roggero, 2011; Szadkowski, 2015), while Stiegler’s States of Shock from 2015 elaborates a very Marxian-influenced (though very much opposed to the cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour proponents) account of how digitalization and capitalism disrupt and endanger the University. It’s also important to remember that the notion of academic work is itself a heavily loaded concept. Although it certainly falls out of the scope of this paper to discuss it at length, it is important to ask whether studying, understood as a central academic practice that both students and professors perform, is distinct from work. In other words, it is a question of whether it is a part of otium or a part of negotium – and whether it can be clearly assigned to one or another.

2 His formidable lifework has been a subject of rising interest in recent years, also in the field of philosophy of education – just as it has been summarized very recently by Letiche et al. (2022) who note that EPAT has published in last few years an excellent series of formative articles centering on Bernard Stiegler […] (Bradley, 2015, 2021; Bradley & Kennedy, 2020; Featherstone, 2019, 2020; Fitzpatrick, 2020; Forrest, 2020; […] Mui & Murphy, 2020). There is no special need, then, to provide a general introduction to Stiegler’s thought in educational context.

3 Thus, it does not have to bother with the gap between Substance and Subject, as there is none. The movement of differance does not produce gaps even if it leads to further and further differentiations between individuals, nor does a new kind of organization need to arise from a gap. Despite assuming a continuity between science and philosophy, general organology does not entail reducibility between different levels of organization and between different spheres of individuals (psychic, technical, social) while maintaining that they are all mutually interacting with each other. If we take as a starting point the intuition offered by Nail (matter is what it does) and Barad (matter is doing), then we should ask about what is that matters does in fact from the view of general organology. According to Stiegler, matter most often presents itself to us as tertiary retentions, as technical objects and thus as hyper-matter. What is most important here is that it most of all presents itself to us as organized (and organizing). Even if in a given context we abstract from the way it is organized (and thus that it is organized), it does not stop being so. This strongly resonates with the need to go beyond hylomorphic schema – just as Stiegler points to the challenge posited by quantum scale where not even an opposition but even a distinction between matter and form loses its meaning – we never encounter matter that is not organized, even if it is the inert and inorganic matter. It could be then said, very simply, that matter is that which can be organized.

4 It is important to note here that Stiegler’s general organology does not sustain a hard ontological binary of subject/object. However, while it does away with strict dualisms, it claims that ‘distinctions remain necessary, which do not oppose what they distinguish, but which describe evolutionary processes’ (Stiegler 2020a, 84) and that ‘once distinctions are understood outside of oppositional models, then they can be thought as compositional functions – that is, tendencies expressed in a process’ (Stiegler 2020a, 85).

5 Creating new meaning and extending circuits of transindividuation, which also entail adopting new technical objects instead of adapting to them (which means creating new practices around them), are closely related to what has been for a very long time a crux of educational thought, that is bringing forth the new in society. This (understood very broadly) possibility of renewal, progress and emancipation has been seen as the goal of education posited by many diverse thinkers. For example, Arendt has emphasized that ‘our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings and that precisely for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into and old world’ (1996). In a similar vein, Dewey has elaborated extensively on the importance of education for social change as he conceptualized educational process as ‘reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience’ (Dewey 2015). It is precisely this revolutionary reconstruction that can be seen as a foundation of critical and emancipatory pedagogy as discussed by Rancière (1991, 2014) and Freire, (2018). Performativity-driven digitalization steers open-ended and opening education (and studying) towards vocational, or at least purpose-specific, training – even if that training is tailored in order for the learners to adapt to a rapidly changing labor market conditions and requirements. Transparency, which was mentioned earlier in the context of subsumption of educational work, is it at extreme odds with unpredictable, open-ended novelty produced by movements of educational differance. Thus, general organology and pharmacology as materialist perspectives, provide a very helpful framework for grasping how digitalization of educational processes, which entails a non-lossless translation of tertiary retentions and protentions, affects possibility of realizing this abovementioned educational ideal. In a neoliberal capitalist economy which operates not only within the regime of performativity but also within the regime of the Same (see e.g. Han’s Burnout Society), novelty cannot be tolerated until it can be operationalized, analyzed and subsumed under capital – until it stops being a novelty at all. Infinitization of transindividual circuits and creating new meaning, that are the crux of adopting (as opposed to adapting to), are endangered in this situation. In other words, the educational ideal of cultivating potential for change and growth (be it social or individual) but also for accommodating the Other and negativity has no proper place in current economic and social environment (which was already quite clear e.g. in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man) (Marcuse 2013). The current neoliberal distribution of the sensible (pace Ranciere) is meant to be infinitely flexible and adaptive, thus immune to any radical change that education could bring about. We will return to this issue in a conclusion to this paper, joining this discussion with an earlier one about real and formal subsumption of academic work under capital.

6 I use the term ‘organic’ here to invoke two meanings: a) organic as something naturally occurring without external intervention or design; and b) ‘organic’ as resembling natural organisms which are not a mechanical and transparent construction made out of independent parts.

7 Double meaning intended.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maciej Bednarski

Maciej Bednarski, PhD student in Philosophy at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw, Poland. His doctoral research project is concerned with a topological account of digitalization of the University as his main academic interests travel between philosophy of education, philosophy of technology and philosophical topology.