One curious thing about this discussion is that most of the people
involved are speaking from their experiences on faculties involved,
broadly, speaking, in 'digital culture.' This field sits in an odd
conceptual space between design, art, 'technology' (e.g., computer
science), and critical fields grounded in somewhat politicized
humanities (as opposed to, say, political science). Certainly, many of
the main ideas proposed are shaped by different disciplinary
inflections, which are mainly institutional in their orientation: they
seem to look outward, but they remain tacitly inward-looking in that
constant reference is made to the experiences and prospects of
graduates, new classes to taught, and so on.
They're also shaped by different regional inflections: you can hear
echoes of, on the one hand, different national policies regarding
educational funding and employment policies, and, on the other, the
emergence of transnationally legible fields of practice -- enabled
partly by the standardization of 'technologies' (ranging from TCP/IP to
Adobe products), and partly by seismic shifts in governance (e.g., the
EU's impact on our own biographical options). If we had contributors
writing from China, Korea, Japan, Israel/Palestine, Turkey, Australia,
Brazil, India or Pakistan or even for that matter different parts of the
US we'd hear some perspectives with key differences. For example, in NYC
there are immense amounts of money sloshing around in 'digital design,'
but in very contingent ways. I think they're mainly a byproduct of
megacorps' distinctions between their 'core' capacities (where they make
direct investments in employees) versus peripheral needs (which they can
outsource at lavish rates to agencies and boutiques, which can easily be
jettisoned ). It doesn't take much effort to see how this will end in
tears for many.
Felix is absolutely right that this is all at root political -- and not
just politicized, in the way noted above, but political in the sharply
defined sense of people's will and ability to recognize where they stand
in structural terms and to act effectively on that understanding. This
is where the roll (I would say the *plight*) of faculty expresses itself
most poignantly, because faculties these days are at a fork in the road,
or, as I think, sitting on the edge of a knife. Their status n veery
sense is directly grounded in their employment in a particular kind of
institution -- one whose function is, basically, to mediate change in a
sort of Goldilocks way, i.e., not too much and not too little. That
mediation takes many forms, some 'synchronic' (e.g., sectoral), some
'diachronic' (e.g., generational). But, internally as it were, a central
part of this process is the practice of standing 'outside' the forces it
mediates -- in ways that are both imaginary and real. What does
education do, after all, but transform the imaginary into the real, yes?
In 'digital' fields, this ambiguity or ambivalence is completely
concrete in ways that were exemplified by the recent ruckus over the
Facebook 'manipulation' study. From a certain, very idealized
standpoint, the FB study shocks the conscience, violates important
ethical norms and probably many laws as well, and so on. At the same
time, I think many people working in these fields are utterly befuddled
by the ruckus, because that woolly combination of study and intervention
is the *point* of design; and from that parochial perspective, the
academics who are upset by it seem like the village green preservation
society, hopelessly naive nostalgists. Worse, that nostalgia prevents
them from seeing as clearly as they should the ways in which the FB
study exemplifies a profound shift in universities, where declining
public funding and prestige is forcing them to seek out alternative
sources of funding and prestige.
That shift from public to private sources of funding is another area
where regional differences will express themselves *very* clearly. The
political, economic, and cultural traditions that have shaped higher
education -- again, in part, as a mediator -- as a *national*
phenomenon. Historical experiences in the US, the UK, the Netherlands,
Germany have varied dramatically in the postwar period, to say nothing
of the countries I mentioned above that we haven't heard from. So I
think it doesn't make much sense to spend time on particular national
studies about the economic prospects of any given 'creative' practice --
in particular, *photography*, as though it were a useful historical
constant or reference on any level.
But if every single thing about photography has changed since, say, WW2,
we can at least note that it *existed* before that war. The same cannot
be said of 'digital' fields, can it? So presumably they've changed even
more than photography in that same period -- not least, by absorbing it.
Given these abysmal depths of change, I don't think (_pace_ David) we
can make any generalizations about cyclicality of any kind, least of all
economic cyclicality.
We could settle for that lazy refutation of a certain way of thinking
about history, but the specificist context -- the rise of
computationalism -- changes things on a much deeper level. The
difference is roughly akin to, say, the shift from Braudel and Piketty:
on the one hand, a ponderous model of a world history that emphasizes
the longue duree and continuities, on the other, a more dynamic and
pessimistic model of a historical word that emphasizes pathological
trajectories. It doesn't matter what you think about either of these
thinkers (let alone whether you 'like' them), whether you think they're
right or wrong: each exemplifies a kind of mentalité or zeitgeist. And
universities are a key site where we're trying to figure out how to
bridge that chasm.
But the problem is that the university as we now know it, despite its
masonicky pretensions to being ancient by dint of concerning itself
with the truth, is a pretty recent affair. In particular, the norms that
define what it 'means' to be a faculty member -- your pay packet, as
David put it -- is very, very recent, just a few generations old. Those
generations happen to coincide heavily with a period of postwar economic
expansion and prosperity (and its imaginary afterimage). And, as people
tend to do in good times, they think they'll last forever -- or at least
hope they will. That hope, as much as anything else, is what shapes the
standpoint of the contributors to this discussion -- basically, the
assumption that the university is a safe place from which to observe the
world. It is not. So we can talk about what 'other' sectors will be made
redundant by computationalism or about the experiences of people in our
fields and our graduates, but of course the elephant (or gorilla or
whatever) in the room is when and how computationalism will, in effect,
make faculties redundant.
Lots of faculty are consciously wary of explicit forms -- for example,
how OMG!!! BOO!! MOOCs!!! will displace their rituals -- but are blind
to the greater danger: the financialization of education. Of course,
since the universal 'stability' they've generalized from the experience
of a few generations relies precisely on that financial cushion, so
they've had very little incentive to see this threat. In any event, as
most of us know, financialization is just one dimension of a much deeper
change afoot, which Felix, citing Snowden, described as the emergence of
a kind of 'deep state' defined more by administrative bureaucracies and
proceduralism than democracy. And let's not forget that manufacturing
competent subjects for democracies was one of the main reasons for being
of the modern academy; so as democracy becomes ever-more optional, so
does that function of the university. And that, more than MOOCs etc, is
why faculties aren't just as a fork in the road but really on the edge
of a knife. Many knives, actually.
I'd like to stay and awaken the dead as they say, but this is long
enough already. One thing worth noting, in conclusion, was something
astonishing that Snowden said to the assembled crowd at HOPE X in NYC a
few days ago -- something that only a handful of faculty in the US are
willing to admit (and I'm one of them): that student debt student debt
is creating a 'new class of indentured servants.' If that immense
juridical step backward isn't political, I don't know what is.
Cheers,
T
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