by Santiago Zabala and
Creston Davis
In early 19th century new
hope for humanity (indeed for the entire planet) emerged on the scene with an
explosive force, matched only by that of the cosmic big bang. Only, this
"bang" was humanity coming to terms with its own power. In the
diremptive mind of the great German philosopher Georg W Hegel self-reflexive
power was born: Humanity was not lost in the loss of the divine, but found
freedom in conscious awareness of itself -- a happy and terrifying notion that
humanity controlled its own destiny.
And then there was Karl Marx's hope
for communism, then Sigmund
Freud's subconscious, Friedrich Nietzsche's Uberman and Thomas
Kuhn's paradigm shift. It was as if the power of the idea of humanity's
self-consciousness - unmediated by any theological abstraction - was an idea
too good and a bit dangerous. Perhaps it will be this idea that will launch a
21st century revolt.
After all, the power of
critiquing the barbarism of industry, war, and business was left to university faculty, artists, thespians, journalists - who
also happen to be more often than not carriers of Hegel's idea. All these have
become a marginal voice in this century. Some of them are naive enough to
think that if one could only write another book, paint one more image, fill one
more column, then the world would suddenly wake up and believe in its own
ability to change the course of history in which principles like equality,
community, and freedom would lead us into a future of happiness and peace.
Although the 20th century
certainly proved that power, greed, and evil were no match for the virtues of
the left, the war between culture and capital has raged on. It is a conflict
illustrated well by what Europe is going through presently, as Giorgio Agamben recently pointed out in his essay on
the "Latin Empire". Just as the technocrats must be voted out of the EU, so must the
univocal logic of capital be dismissed from education.
In the past three decades,
the university (the traditional locus of culture) has been bought out by
corporations and ownership of global media outlets has been concentrated in the
hands of a few, while visual and performing have suffered and declined. The
logic of the 21st century has been nothing less than an increasing awareness of
an emerging elite of 100 or so individuals who control more wealth than half
the world's population.
This logic can only be
changed through transforming educational institutions into spaces where the
virtues of sharing and working together are taught.
Educating to share
As Thomas Piketty explained in his groundbreaking Capitalism
in the Twentieth-First
Century:
"When the rate of
return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in
the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first,
capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities
that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies
are based."
One of the solutions,
according to the French economist, might be a progressive global tax on
capital or wealth. Although this solution would require a very high level of international cooperation, it does not mean it should not
be pursued, at least from an educational point of view.
This is why it is not
difficult to believe in the utility of subordination of higher education to
social control and regulation. As Slavoj Zizek explained in his latest book:
"What they really want
is simply the private use of reason, as I call it, following Kant, so that
universities basically produce experts who will solve problems - problems,
defined by society, of state and corporate business. But, for me, this is not
thinking. What is 'true' thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first
step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: 'Is this really a
problem?' 'Is this the right way to formulate the problem?' 'How did we arrive
at this?' This is the ability we need in thinking."
In short, thinking does not
solve problems, but rather creates the possibility to understand and change the
problems we inherited and must confront.
This is a recipe for a
revolt, the likes of which can hardly be imagined. Unless a new form of an old
virtue called, sharing (a word nearly as toxic in the US as
socialism) is quickly infused in the minds and hearts of many, this emerging
revolt will unleash a storm of chaos. For the virtue of a shared commons has
neither been taught nor reinforced by an educational system designed to protect
the interest of a few at the cost of the many because, as Sarah Kendzior says, "college is a promise the
economy does not keep" anymore.
From the 1980s onward
neoliberalism was so hell-bent on a view that the world is, in Hobbes' words,
"nasty, brutish and short" that it didn't bother teaching the virtues
of a shared humanity that could hold the world together when it was exposed
that brutal economic practices cannot provide for basic human needs. In other
words, not only is the capitalist outlook destroying basic means of survival
(clean water, air, proper shelter, healthy food etc.), but it has also
undermined our ability to work together for the sake of survival such that more
and more we must rely on these unjust structures of power just to
breathe.
Capital has insidiously
undercut the basic priorities of life for humanity from 1760 until today and
the stakes are only going to get more and more desperate and spiral into more
abusive forms of control turning our planet into framed slums for the
overwhelming majority of humanity. One way to short-circuit this monopolistic
logic is to create what Jack
Halberstam calls "alternative
knowledge zones" such as the EGS (European Graduate
School) , GCAS (The
Global Centre for Advance Studies) and many others, in which the
virtues of the left such as sharing, working together, and distributing goods
and services are learned and embodied.
This certainly is a better
alternative to what many universities have become in the United States (and to some extent, also in some
European nations), namely hedge funds enslaving the next generation of the
working and middle classes with life-long debt to banks and corporations.
It is time to invest in
teaching the next generation that our survival depends on our own ability to
work together and not one the bank accounts of 100 people. The power of working
together is worth considering again especially because this possibility may not
exist in the next generation.
[...]
No comments:
Post a Comment