The crisis of meaning which engaged so much of the late 20th century’s attention seems to have disappeared from sight behind the social crises of the past decade, but without ceasing to underlie them: for example, the rapid rise and collapse of speculative financial bubbles around mortgages or Internet IPOs reflect the growing gulf between meanings and functions (and indicate the nature of its consequences). These ‘crises’ are not separate occurrences but different viewpoints on the single implosion of a society. It’s no surprise that the university, bereft as any of us in the Great Recession, has now escaped both its stubbornly medieval origins and the reforms of the last century to become a floating signifier, and a means without an end.
Or rather, it has no single end, but applies its not inconsiderable means to a variety of tasks in order to ‘make ends meet.’ If higher education is a social factory, the society that created it no longer needs it as such, and, like most factories, is either shutting down or switching to more automated and virtualized techniques. We all know our degrees are costing us more and more while they mean less and less, as the economic conditions to which our training was supposed to correspond continue to dissolve before our eyes. Consequently, education is less and less of what a modern university like ours does: it also carries out research for government and business, provides housing and health care, participates in regional development, polices a territory, produces students as subjects of debt, is a major retailer and markets itself as a brand, accumulates and invests large amounts of money, etc. As its functions multiply, the academic corporation/jurisdiction no longer has a ‘main purpose’ to locate its meaning in: it is stuck with the problem of continuing as an institution that no longer knows what its function is, treading water to survive in an increasingly flood-prone marketplace.
An examination of the social roles of the student and of the whole sphere of education finds them suffering a similar disorientation. The declining value of our degrees is not merely a result of ‘educational inflation’ as much as both are symptoms of the diminishing availability of work, a trend that we cannot educate our way out of as no serious economist seems to think it will be ending anytime soon. This outlook is corroborated by the parade of absurd solutions, from marriage to smartphone apps to antidepressants, being marketed as cures for our generation’s economic and existential woes. In terms that many of us have already begun to experience, academia is no longer as concerned with preparing us for a future it admits doesn’t exist as with managing the ramifications of our absent futures. It is somewhere for us to slip quietly into uselessness while the rest of the world spirals downward.
The silver lining of the ‘crisis of meaning’ is that it clears space for constituent re-imaginings and collective redefinitions; but imaginings will remain only that to the extent that they are not realized. A few recent instances provide the briefest glimpse in this direction: one demand of the Chicago teachers’ strike was a lessened emphasis on standardized testing of students in evaluating teachers. Standardized testing is a core component of mainstream U.S. educational policy and theory. This proposition implies a critique of standardization per se, of the notion that students need to be taught to wholly quantitative ‘standards’ that are no longer relevant (and maybe never were); and the idea that those who directly practice an art or trade – in this case, teaching – are better suited to determine its form and purpose than those who administrate them –in this case, politicians and bureaucrats. The strike may not have led to a clear resolution, but demonstrated initiative toward reorganizing a system for the better ‘from below,’ rather than getting stuck on trying to accepting or evade blame for its failures.
Conversely, the Quebec student movement against tuition hikes has shown its consciousness of the crisis, its roots and its implications, in the radical character of some of its activities and in the willingness of its participants to contest broader social questions. Unlike the Chicago teachers, though, and despite a persistent ability to carry out large and disruptive demonstrations, the movement has not developed insufficient durability to make itself felt as the ‘student strike’ it wishes to become. Still, the student occupations and riots in Quebec are not merely the common political currency of a province with a turbulent history, but of an era in which the figure of the student herself is in an existential crisis. In such an era, evanescent forces and possible worlds may have real advantages over the concrete; the strike could be recognized as more than a political tool, but the re-appropriation of absence (a word that, ironically, recalls schooling in its most absurdly authoritarian dimension).
The university today is a busy but dysfunctional factory that produces knowledge, subjectivity and debt through a multiplicity of interwoven processes. It is also a spectacle of itself, a house of mirrors that carries on the appearances, habits and prerogatives of an institution whose time has already passed, in the looming shadow of a ‘crisis’ that looks to be increasingly permanent. Yet I would like to call our attention to the academy’s original function – intellectual productivity and the ‘love of wisdom’ – and suggest its academia’s secret weapon against its decline into meaninglessness. Or rather, against the sort of frenzied hibernation and pointless reproduction of past social norms in which it finds itself today; to dissolve that which claims itself as ‘the love of knowledge’ and is anything but. (One place to start might actually be reasserting the difference between knowledge and wisdom.) Maybe we have the chance to prepare a rearing ground for the sort of person who really does love truth for its own sake, who can fully wield the tools of reason without being captivated by them. The sort of person who might be found, in one way or another, singly or en masse, setting out in search not of a norm that has become untenable, but of more immediate events and encounters through which to begin re-establishing our foreclosed futures.
Jan Dichter is a Collegian contributor. He can be reached at [email protected].
