Transformation and Compensation
Or: When is the university a reason to leave the university?
Louisa Engel
The United Kingdom is a country where education is no longer a common good. Nevertheless, it is home to some of the best-known universities with an exceptionally high intellectual quality. Goldsmiths is one such university in the arts. However, due to the high tuition fees, universities in the UK are more inaccessible than in any other country in Europe. While I was applying to study in this place last year, waiting and hoping for stipends and scholarships, friends and also my family started asking me, since I come from Germany where higher education is almost free, why I needed to do a Masters in the UK, if the conditions for it were so hostile. My answer was: Because there are obviously so many critical thinkers at this university that seem to provide a very special environment.
Having invested so much time and effort to be able to study in such a prestigious place as Goldsmiths, I look now out at these windows around me through which the wind is whistling. The more I started moving around the architecture of this university, the more I noticed these places of unkindness, where it became clear that an institution had outsourced its responsibility and thus lost it. But then I am sitting here in this idyllic backyard, where the trees are green in May, the sun shines from its angle over half the yard and the babble of voices announces the approaching lunch break. I am sitting in the inner courtyard of the refectory. It is a place that opens up to the sky within the institution, a place for moments away from the official schedule, a place of informality.
The architecture of the school, which does not seem to mind how neglected it presents itself, seems at odds with the bright, thoughtful and caring people I encountered in seminars, lectures, talks and reading groups who move around these rooms and corridors, maintaining something like an intellectual and social infrastructure far superior to the architecture of the university. If visible architecture seems so neglected, perhaps an even stronger invisible infrastructure is needed to keep the entire structure of the university credible? Are these two sides related? One might think that it is this informal layer of the university, formed in faith in the institution and at the same time through its critique, that seems to guarantee the actuality that inhabits this university. And this actuality results from a More of intellectual work by those who, despite casualization and suspended employment over the summer holidays, remain intellectually engaged. But it also results from affective work – supportive email correspondence between students and lecturers, that extra half hour in a tutorial, sending invitations and organising extracurricular events. These may seem like small gestures, but this communicative work is what keeps the institution actual. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri described “affective work” as a type of labour that involves managing and producing, even sometimes manipulating affects or emotions in others. Unlike traditional forms of material labour that produce goods or services, affective work is an immaterial labour that became, following Negri and Hardt, more and more crucial for contemporary capitalist economies where the ability to affectively engage with customers or users can have a significant effect on value and profit. While on the one hand they argue that affective labour is rarely valued economically enough even though it plays a key role in maintaining and reproducing social relationships, cultural norms, and economic systems, they also attribute a potential of resistance to it how workers can challenge the way their emotions and affects are managed or exploited within capitalist systems. [1]
In the context of the neoliberal university in which personal circumstances become something only a form in a digital administration system can handle, affective work becomes a mode of resistance while at the same time compensating for the lack of welfare of the university administration and contributing to its inner functioning - giving students or even manipulating their feeling that somebody takes care. Though, is compensation a critical practice? We are not talking about a critical practice that is able to critique the university from outside but we are talking about a critique coming from those who are dependant on the infrastructure for their salaries; and that these people might also be the best people to critique it as they know it so well. James C. Scott has described these practices as infra-political practices. He thus describes the practices of oppressed people who, in their oppression, generate a pressure from below that is not discharged in the collapse of the large infrastructure in which they move, but who materialise their criticism in an internal critique and even modes of compensation strategies on the basis of the fact that they move within a structure of dependency on surveillance, oppression and punishment. Fearing the loss of a job that is focussed on such a specific field that there are probably very few other such jobs in the UK is one of those threats. Their resistance forms itself in opposition to the official organisation of the political infrastructure as a hidden transcript, as an informal logic. [2]
These infra-political logics do not take place unobserved; on the contrary, they are observed in a neoliberal context insofar as also infrastructures itself are dependent on them to a certain extent, because they compensate for something, but also keep an institution transformative through their critique, which the economised university, for example, can no longer achieve. Through their criticism, they not only have a compensatory effect, but they also imagine the university as a different place.
In this panopticon-like space enclosed by the university, I have to think about the fragility of this socio-intellectual infrastructure that even if it seems at first glance to maintain the university, is very vulnerable to managerial changes that could cause job cuts, department closures and budget cuts, as foreseen in the new wave of economization of the university through the so called “Transformation Programme”. In this context, I wonder how resilient and self-sustaining such informal infrastructures can be. Sitting here in the inner courtyard, that opens itself up to the sky in the middle of the Richard Hoggart Building, I am wondering when the connection between compensation and criticism is so strained that it collapses? When such practices can no longer serve as critical confirmation, but the university undermines such practices to such an extent that they undermine its internal functioning? Will a time come when this critical attitude has to leave Goldsmiths, because it can no longer stay inside since it only serves there to compensate for institutional gaps? There is a moment in the history of Goldsmiths when this criticism tried to move out because it could no longer stand inside. And since Goldsmiths is an art school, it sought out art spaces to materialise its critique. In response to the Bologna reform, which aimed to bring conformity to European universities and standardise study programmes and curricula in order to make them interchangeable on a flexible labour market, artists, theorists, curators and activists formed under what Irit Rogoff called the Educational Turn. [3] This gave rise to numerous initiatives that attempted to use art spaces to ask how art could change the university as a learning space. Initiatives like the "A.C.A.D.E.M.Y" project or "Summit" as gatherings in art spaces appeared, which negotiated the potential that can lie in the university if it engages with learning processes that do not yet know what they will learn. Alternative universities emerged as para-institutions, such as the Free University of Copenhagen, founded by Jakob Jakobsen. However, as Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano and Susan Kelly criticised in retrospect, these initiatives were not able to change curricula in the long term. [4] Criticism that involved the university gave rise to secondary places where criticism could be negotiated more openly, but which had no relationship to the university that could have influenced it.
Those waves of resistance that seem to have been much more effective, at least superficially, because they deprived the university of its ability to function in the short term, were the classic labour disputes that are currently taking place again – strikes.Sitting here in the inner courtyard, I ask myself whether these forms of resistance that I have just mentioned can work even more strongly together – an infra-political practice, a para-institutional critique and striking. Or can they only replace each other? I wonder what Goldsmiths will look like in 10 years time. Will people still know about its reputation for critical thinking when I tell them that I once studied here? Will this thinking have moved out and settled somewhere else?
[1] Hardt, Michael, und Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, p. 292-294.
[2] Scott, James C. 1990. „The Infrapolitics of Subordinate Groups.“ In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
[3] Rogoff, Irit. 2008. „Turning“. e-flux journal. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/00/68470/turning/.
[4] Graham, Janna, Valeria Graziano, und Susan Kelly. 2016. „The Educational Turn in Art: Rewriting the Hidden Curriculum“. Performance Research 21(6): 29–35. doi:10.1080/13528165.2016.1239912.
