A struggle of civilization against barbarism: about universities as autonomous zones

Abstract

This paper takes a longue durée look at universities at the core of the world economy, where the modern idea of intellectuals as trustees of the reflexive structures of society has achieved its most enduring institutional form. To wrest thinking away from a conformism that makes us see universities as nothing more than organisations amongst organisations forever in process of adapting themselves to the exigencies of world ordering, we focus on three moments of rupture: (i) the ‘prehistory of higher education’, when the work of the medieval renaissance was ‘largely done’ and original universities where founded in the folds of the nascent European économie-monde, (ii) the crisis of the Bretton Woods world order, and (iii) the present juncture

Keywords:

• Critical sociology
• global studies
• critical epistemology
• Resistance
• world order

Notes

1 I wish to thank reviewers for their generous reading of an earlier draft of this article and for their insightful comments. I also wish to acknowledge the great debt I owe my colleague Gilles Gagné, recently retired from the Department of Sociology at Laval University. As full of possibilities as universities may be, they remain empty without the labor actually existing people actively engaged in the often ingrate defense of whatever freedom they may bear. Whether preparing for class, discussing in his office, giving conferences, speaking and writing, Gilles provided a real model of such engagement. His work truly charged le départment from within.

2 ‘To stands apart from the order of the world and ask how that order came about’ … is how Robert Cox defined the purpose of critical theory, in contrast with problem solving theory ‘ … that takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and political relationships and the institutions into which they are organized as the given framework for action’. See Cox (1986).

3 This text is part of a long-term research program built on a conception of situation drawn from Jean-Paul Sartre and the Internationale Situationniste and on Walter Benjamin's ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’. In it, I think from situated encounter about limits to world ordering and prospects for resistance. The first text, written before the research program had been deliberately articulated, was published in 2001: ‘Québec City 2001 and the Making of Transnational Subjects.’ Socialist Register 2001, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. London: Merlin Press. In Contesting Globalization: Space and Place in the World Economy (London: Routledge, 2004), I fleshed out the theoretical intent at the basis of the work, and looked at the emergence of neo-liberal governance. In A History of World Order and Resistance: The Making and Unmaking of Global Subjects (London: Routledge, 2011), I broadened the historical framework beyond neo-liberal world ordering and drew some implications for politics. ‘Present in the World Economy: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (1996–2007)’ and ‘Present in the world economy: Québec's students in the springtime’, both published in Globalizations, present case studies. Two texts are pending: ‘The Moral Economy of Global Crowds: Egypt 1977, Brazil 2013', upcoming in New Global Studies, and ‘The question of the subject, resituated’.

4 ‘Barbarism’ is used here in the sense given the term by Rosa Luxemburg (after Engels and Bebel) in the Junius pamphlet (‘The Crisis of German Social Democracy’). Six weeks into the First World War, six months after war credits had been voted and workers’ solidarity reduced to an ‘impotent myth’, Luxemburg saw beyond desolation and dissolution an incapacity of reflexivity (‘The prosaic atmosphere of pale days … when bourgeois society has lost even the pretense to culture … ’) that she likened to ‘a specific barbarian modernity’ – ‘civilized barbarism’ Lenin (1913) had called it in the Pravda two years earlier, perhaps borrowing from Marx's critique in the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 of the ‘bestial barbarization’ of alienated work, that ‘produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism’.

‘Autonomy’ is understood here – in a manner closest to the Socialisme ou barbarie group (Claude Lefort, Cornélius Castoriadis, Jean-François Lyotard, etc.) and the Internationale Situationniste – as a self-evolving, unitary, ‘project’ forever redefined both by its capacity to reflect upon itself and learn (the autodidaxie made possible by auto-gestion) and by its relationship to alienating contexts (the barbarous molecularization of late capitalism, to be sure, but also the of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the USSR).

5 ‘Agents of world change’ is what C. Wright Mills called students in his (1960)

6 As of 5 June 2015, 15,049 academics had signed the petition. See http://thecostofknowledge.com/

7 On this, see Aparicio and Blaser (2008), Carroll and Atasoy (2014), Gill and DeFronzo (2009), Icaza and Vázquez (2013), Stromquist and Sanyal (2013)