e

versity
ide
elf

as we while away the hours, it s hard and hard not to adhere to

an idle and industrious vigil with its formatting of the day s
functions. drif ting and dar ting desires and designs have always
burrowed their stings in precisely mechanised patterns into my
f lesh, heightening that sense of being taught. to construct through
tears and holes we devour carefree experiments, following where
error leads us for th. systems of all living matter could learn
to thrill at the delight which falls out of being taught back-to front with a naturally chaotic beat . step-by-step instructions
guide us towards some form of nebulous activit y as we daily
play with learning, prioritising line, rhy thm and joy. the function
of a function subtly de -forms, f iz zing in my setting blood as I
remember all these failures. simply skipping ever y moment to
accord and match-up means a play time not distant , not puffed up
but here.
h ere i n th i s ma ni c u re d e nv i ro nme nt the gl int of he at- wob b le d
s ta r- s c a pe c a n b ec o m e t he d i a mond f unct i on of c utti ng, p asti ng,
dr ying a n d t y i n g , no m atter how much or how far. through our p lay
t h e sys te m will c o nti nu e to r u sh towa rds s ome l az y lily- p ond,
so me e n dl es s sc a l e d p a t h, s o m e p uffe d up e me ral d- b uz z wi t h
s h adow c a s tl es i n t he m argi ns. al way s dumb founde d, rhy thmic
an d h usk y, w e w a tc h p a ra s i te s l ea d for t h t he cr umb l i ng wa l l s.
f rom t h a t s en s e o f bec o m i ng, th e sy s te m wi l l cont i nue a way of
b ein g in th e w o r l d , a bac k- to - front p l ay of sp atte re d le tte rs as I
re memb er a ll t h es e co nd u i ts. t he col our of fre sh b lood i s ma s ke d
by loca l per fec t i o n, m e rg i ng d esi re s a nd de s i g ns af te r all. t he
u n c e n so re d r ight to qu es ti o n stings my trac ks, b urrowi ng i ts f l ow
in the day s d ri f t i ng fu nc ti o ns n ot idle, not f i z zi ng b ut c are fre e.
c are fre e
in our b e a t a n d fl u x w e d a i l y fo r m and de -for m the gl int of
c hr ysal i s h u s ks, p l a y i ng wi t h s o me se nse of t he sy s te m. a
d e hum a n is e d c u l - d e - s ac of s p atte re d l e tte rs can b e come a
te nd e n cy s h a pe d l i ke l i p p e d e d g e s me rgi ng, and it s ha rd a nd
h a rd not to le a d fo r th. l i fe - s hri n k i ng sy s te ms se e m to stop
in my t ra c ks, e m erg i ng bl eed i ng, de fe a te d a nd tor n. b e ing
t aug h t s o m eth i ng of the b r i ers and t hi cke t s of unexp l ore d
an ticipa ti o n s et s u s d r i f t i ng a nd al lows us to c l imb, p re ci s e l y
d e - fo rmin g th e patter ns. as we for ma t our f unct i ons with that
s e n s e of t h e e n cl o s u re, w e l e a r n a b a ck-to -f ront way of b e i ng i n
a wor ld ri c h l y a n d i nte ns e l y d ep l e te d. the te nde ncy to que stion
is sh ap ed l i ke t w o t r i a ng l e s k i s s i ng and ca n b e come a re ward
a li ne, a r hy t h m , a fl ow. he re w e daily f i z z, b e ing taught to fa l l
ou t , whi l e th e f u nc t i o n of a fu nct i on re conf i g ure s the f ront i e rs
of th e un kn own. w hi l i ng a wa y o u r hours, l op side d with j oy, our

de si re s a n d d es i gns c o nti nu e b uilding castle s not simp le, not

i n d us t r io us b u t d ai l y.
daily mistakes can become step-by-step reward
a w a y o f b e i n g i n t h e w o r l d ,w i t h t h a t s e n s e ,
of the colour of fresh blood. something calcified is hard
a n d i t s h a r d n o t t o p r i o r i t i s e l i v i n g m a t t e r a s w e r e t a u g h t
and we learn to be intact. precisely unknown patterns
o f l e t t e r s g r i n d a g a i n s t e a c h o t h e r, d r i f t i n g a n d d a r t i n g ,
s p a t t e r i n g u s i n t h e i r p l a y. t h e s y s t e m w i l l c o n t i n u e , a
lopsided square, a game of cutting and pasting which calls
upon the child to lead for th. this ongoing wrestle bet ween
air and breathing matter echoes whirls of appetite and
laughing which suppor t the welfare of the whole. across
this sur face, viscous and enclosed, a snail f inds a dayd r e a m g a p i n g . g o l d e n i n k- s t a i n s g r a s p a t e m p t y n a r r o w
routes, proud of this interior blemish large enough to sink
an island. by imagining it all to be a straight and narrow
route, slotted in like an appendage, we vacate untried
ground, not lipped, not thicketed but glinting.
a l way s glinting
o n a t h re s ho l d e nc r u s te d w i t h b arnacle s, the voi ce of the Sp ir it
c a lls us fo r th. a f ra g i l e s ens e of j oy offe rs an al te rnate rou te,
s m a s h i n g t he d erel i c t b al ance for fe a r of of fe ndi ng, swi rl ing
w i th vo r texe d co l o u r i n a n a t mos p he re of l ife - c hok i ng grasp.
lo n g - h e l d c u s to m s and tra di t i ons , normal and ordi nar y, daily
and d e - fo r m i ng, b e g i n to s ag wi t h t he we i g ht of our p l ay. s ome
sens e of t h e sy s tem w i l l c o nt i nue b e ing taught through sp atte red
te n d e n c ies, a nd i t s hard and ha rd not to sk i p. a b a ck-to -f ront
p l a y s ti n g s o u r he a t- wo b b l ed shadows, p uff i ng up our s e ns e of
t h e f un c ti o n. s el f- encl o se d de s i g ns mi stake s ome for wa rdlo o kin g b l a s t , l i tteri ng i t s i nte r i or, e c hoi ng and k issing t he
ru l es. i t s n ever as s trai g ht for wa rd as an i nt a ct will to f l ouri sh,
a l th o ug h ri c hl y i d l e tu r f ke e ps our p r i nci p l e s f ul l a nd devour i ng.
all th a t i s v i t a l w re s t l e s w i t h a da i l y l e a r ni ng, e ngaging ful ly with
th e t a s k gi f ted fo r f l o u r i shing. wi t h g a p i ng te a rs a nd hol es,
mi s ta kes su p p o r t t he i nne r world, te a chi ng fe r vour and i nte nsit y
i n th e ra w. a s we whi l e away the hours our f l aws va ca te l i fe sh r in kin g sy s tem s , f u nne l ling the ri c h manure of p l ay. the l i fe bl oo d of the S p i r i t i s a m argi n for mi s t a ke s , not for ma t te d, n ot
unexp l ore d b ut gif ted.
Joy of learning
Anne Jones

Contents
000 Joy of learning

Anne Jones

(inside cover)

004 Te Wai Ariki instructions

Local Time
006

The Learning Quarter

Argos Aotearoa

008 The radical demos

Neal Curtis
013 A Pacific-friendly future

Afakasi Baby
014

Fight against the linear

Selina Tusitala Marsh

016

'Atenisi : six terms of reference for an

Athens of the Pacific
Paul Janman

024 Indigenous ways of knowing

Te Ahukaramu Charles Royal
030 Under the paving stones, the seabed:

walking and the university

Eleanor Cooper
040

U of I: the university as I experience you

Alex Wild Jespersen & Pritika Lal

044 Finance, university, revolt

Campbell Jones
052 Under the clocktower

Chant Baxter West & Sam Morgan
054 The subject of chance and decision

Guy Cohn & Henri Carlos
062 UfSO: (a)history & classroom consciousness

Marcus Karlsberg & Verity Mensonage

070 Summary feedback form

072

Credit and credentialising

Tim Neale

077 Social auto-totality:

the Lecturer's predicament

Marek Tesar & Alena Kavka
081 The university of plagiarism

Laurence Simmons
087 The new dark ages

Anna Boswell
092

Conversations with mark

100 The personal touch

(message from a higher power)
102 Imagining unthinkable spaces

Sarah Amsler & Mark Amsler
110

A true Pacific graduation

Afakasi Baby

111 Equity, change and we the university

Airini
116 In search of an activist academic

Sandra Grey
123 Insurgency of discourse and affective
intervention: the Chilean students' movement

Walescka Pino-Ojeda
133 What could the university be?

Sean Sturm & Stephen Turner
138 A PhD completion vision board

Afakasi Baby
140 Contributors

Te Wai Ariki
instructions
Local Time

St Paul Street Gallery sits on the ridge known as Rangipuke that runs down to
Rerenga-ora-iti (later Point Britomart), once the site of the p called Tangihanga
Puke. The name Rerenga-ora-iti can be translated as the leap of the survivors. It
commemorates the capture of that p by Kawharu of Kaipara and the beginning of
Ngti Whtua occupation in the region in the seventeeth century.
Ngti Whtua held mana whenua into colonial times, and in 1840 made available
3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) of what is now central Auckland to the Crown for cash
and goods worth 341. Six months later, 44 acres (17 hectares) were sold by the
Crown at public auction for 24,275. The rest was mostly sold by 1842 for a total of
over 72,000.
Before European arrival, two other p were sited here: Te Reuroa near the present
High Court, and Te Horotiu in the north-western corner of Albert Park. All had ready
access to the natural spring Te Wai Ariki (chiefly waters) located in what are now
the grounds of The University of Auckland Faculty of Law.
In the waterways from which Te Wai Ariki springs lived the taniwha Horotiu, after
whom the stream that ran down present-day Queen Street and flowed into the
bay Horotiu (later Commercial Bay) was named. It is recalled in the name of the
Auckland University of Technology marae: Ng Wai o Horotiu. In 1840, settlers
renamed Wai Horotiu the Ligar Canal, after the engineer C. W. Ligar. It was
commonly known as Ligars Folly for its inability to tame the flow from Aucklands
seasonal rains. Later, it became a sewer canal, and finally disappeared from view
altogether. Its waters and taniwha now move under the streets of the CBD.

004
Tim NealeCredit and credentialising

The
Learning
Quarter
Argos Aotearoa

The Learning Quarter is bound by the motorway on its eastern side, Wakefield
Street to its west and the strip of hotels running beside Anzac Avenue to the north.
The naming of this quarter is derived, in its oldest sense, in reference to the four
parts into which a slaughtered animal is cut, and one of the earliest references
in English is to parts of the body as dismembered during execution (c.1300).
Over time, the reference to four loosened and in the 1520s we see it attributed
to a portion of a town (identified by the class or race of people who live there).
Auckland does not appear to have had quarters until around 2009, when suddenly
two appeared, dividing the city into spaces for leisure/culture by the waterfront
(Wynyard Quarter), and learning/business along the ridge above the Central
Business District (the Learning Quarter).
Under Mayor John Banks, the Auckland City Council designed the Learning Quarter
as the powerhouse for the citys knowledge economy, key to fuelling Aucklands
future success. According to the council vision, this is a sector not of waters
but high voltages, a hub of frenzied exchange, a hothouse of cognitive current.
The spaces of learning are thus re-drawn, literally, as spaces of commerce: the
universities responsibility to the CBD is derived directly from their geographic
concurrence. A quarter names a community, and as such the universities are
charged with welcoming their neighbouring corporates in. The Learning Quarter is,
above all, open for business'.
Mapping the Learning Quarter brings it into being. There are few clues as to
what the development entails other than the drawing of lines. A map, or a set of
instructions? Maps exist to lead us somewhere, and as such have always been tools
of education (from educare, to lead forth). Reorienting our worlds from above, they
teach what can be seen, heard and done within them, and what cannot.

006

http://www.auckland.ac.nz/webdav/site/central/shared/about/the-university/affiliations-associations/documents/learning-quarter.pdf

Neal CurtisThe radical demos

The radical
demos
Neal Curtis

It is now a regular occurrence to see higher education treated as a

commodity, students referred to as customers, the university seen
as a competitor in a marketplace, and the humanities regarded as
economically unproductive. That higher education should be privatised
and for-profit and that teaching and research is legitimate only when it
directly contributes to economic growth are part of the new common
sense of free-market capitalism that has come to dominate all aspects of
social life. In a recent book,1 I argued that despite claims to plural, open
and democratic government, this new common sense is evidence that we
live in increasingly dogmatic times in which alternative, more collective,
communal, socially responsible visions of socio-economic organisation
and the place of education within that vision are increasingly closed off
and rejected as unrealistic, if not deluded, fantasies. We live in an age,
then, in which the neoliberal privileging of the private in the form of a
mysteriously divine free market or the indisputable sovereignty of the
individual have become fundamental and irresistible tenets of our belief
system; a form of civil religion, one might say.
The term I used to describe this condition is idiotism, and is derived from
the Greek word for private, idios. Idiotism therefore speaks of an age
in which a deregulated market of private interests and its medium, the
commodity form, have become the arbiters of all social value. Against
this, and buoyed by the financial crisis of 2008, talk of a communist
alternative has been on the rise as even mainstream commentators have
difficulty hiding all that was correct in Karl Marxs analysis of capital.
While I would argue that the solutions to the worlds problems (resources,
poverty, social inequality, climate change, loss of biodiversity, health)
can only come from a communal approach, I would also claim that any
such commonism2 can only be pursued if at the same time we recover
the radical character of democracy. Part of the problem, however, when
articulating change is the need to find a name around which the desire
for change can come together, and in this regard democracy still has a
lot of purchase in the popular imagination. Neither closed around the
atomised individual nor any predefined dogma, democracyor rather the
demosis, as I hope to show, open in the sense that it is both public and
permanently creative.
The difficulty, of course, is that the term democracy has fallen into such
disrepute. After the collapse of Soviet communism, the supposed victory
of the capitalist democracies has in reality more closely resembled the
consolidation of plutocracy governed by an unaccountable oligarchy.
Although we may vote for politicians and their parties, it is increasingly
the ratings agencies, banks, and large transnational corporations that
determine policy. Democracy has lost its political essence and is now
used as a technique for social management. In this situation freedom is
little more than the satisfaction of preferences within a clearly bounded
set of commodified options. This means an integral part of any attempt
to move beyond neoliberal oligarchy must be to reclaim this name for a
genuinely progressive, diverse politics.

0011
0011

1
Neal Curtis,
Idiotism:
Capitalism and
the Privatization
of Life (London:
Pluto Press,
2013).

2
Susan Buck-Morss,
A Commonist
Ethics, The
Committee on
Globalization and
Social Change
(New York: CUNY,
2011), online at
globalization.
gc.cuny.
edu/2011/11/susanbuck-morss-acommonist-ethics/

Argos AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself
Neal CurtisThe
radical
demos

3
Gianni Vattimo and
Santiago Zabala,
Hermeneutic
Communism: From
Heidegger to Marx
(New York: Columbia
University Press,
2011), p. 19.
4
Jacques Rancire
Disagreement:
Politics and
Philosophy
(Minneapolis:
University of
Minnesota Press,
1999), p. xii.
5
Jan Patoka,
Heretical Essays in
the Philosophy of
History (Chicago:
Open Court, 1996).
6
Cornelius
Castoriadis, World
in Fragments:
Writings on
Politics, Society,
Psychoanalysis,
and the Imagination
(Stanford: Stanford
University Press,
1997).

Whats in a name?
The word demos () is interesting when addressing idiotism because
it is the logical and linguistic opposite of idios (). In Greek, where idios
signifies the private and the personal, the word demos means that which
is common or public. This can mean something that is held in common,
such as land, or demos can refer to the public as a body of people. This
is of further interest because in Greek demos has come to refer to the
plebeians or common people as well as the citizenry, meaning it refers
to both those excluded from the political process and those central to
it. The link to the land is also suggested in the name Demeter (),
goddess of agriculture. Here demos has a strong connection to work,
as well as to making and authorship. This means that buried deep inside
democracy is a connection to the commons, and to labour, from which
the current form of democracy as privatised consumer choice is very far
removed.
A second double meaning of the word demos also has political potential,
I believe. When thought in terms of the citizenry, the demos is integral to
the polis understood as the city-state, yet it can also refer to a rural region
or district and was originally understood to be the opposite of the polis.
If we take the polis to simply represent the state, then the demos has a
very particular relation to it in that it is both intimate yet foreign, integral
yet separate. The demos is resistant to being simply subsumed by the
state, however it might be conceived. There is a distance between state
and demos that prevents the state from claiming the demos. This space
is absolutely essential to the criticality and creativity of democracy and
must be recovered in an age in which citizenry and state are collapsed
into a free market deemed to be the perfect expression and synthesis of
both. My point is that no representation or institution can be adequate to
the demos, but that this is not a deficiency. Quite the contrary, the lack
of fit between the demos and its representation is the source of radical
possibilities, and in this the university has a very important role to play.

Democracy against aristocracy

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala have recently referred to our
current form of political organization as framed democracy.3 For them, 7
democracy in the West is largely restricted to a set of descriptions
Rancire,
about human nature and the best means for satisfying that nature that
reinforces both the dogma of free market economics and the social
Disagreement,
hierarchy that dogma supports. An important part of this framing is the
pp. 26-27.
argument that we have achieved the ultimate form of socio-economic
organization and all that is left to do is roll it out across the globe, but
as I have already intimated, democracy is allergic to such closure or
to such administration. To articulate this I wish to briefly turn to three
8
philosophers: Jacques Rancire, who argues that democratic politics
does not aim at consensus but is in fact a rationality of disagreement;4 Ibid., p. 30.
Jan Patoka, who argued that democracy is tied to the birth of history,
not its end;5 and Cornelius Castoriadis, who argued that democracy is the
continual expression of the human capacity to create new forms of social
organisation.6 It is these three factors of disagreement, historical opening,
and collective creativity that take us to the root of what is so important in
the word demos.
For Rancire, the disagreement that is democracy consists of the
political conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the
existence and status of those present on it.7 Politics, for him, is about
the emergence and appearance of this or that party, group or class that
had previously not been part of the established political order. Politics,
he argues, makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes
heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise.8 Working
against this is what he calls the police function that seeks to maintain the

0012
0012

Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

9
Ibid., p. 29.
10
Ibid., p. 30.
11
Ibid., p. 32.
12
Alain Joxe, Empire
of Disorder (New
York: Semiotext(e),
2002).
13
Rancire, Disagreement, p. 55.
14
Ibid., p. 6.

already described or permitted distribution of who counts, speaks or is

represented. It is the allocation of ways of doing [. . .] being [. . .] saying in
line with existing forms of power.9 For Rancire politics is fundamentally
antagonistic to policing because it breaks with the given configuration
of parts and divisions of the police order.10 Importantly, this is not an
occasional problem, but happens all the time because politics runs up
against the police everywhere.11
The second characteristic of politics, for Rancire, is that the division
between those who count and those who do not is perpetually challenged
through the pursuit of equality. More specifically, it is a challenge to the
structure of inclusion and exclusion that defined Greek aristocracy. This is
especially pertinent today as the current oligarchy that governs the global
economic system can more readily be likened to a new aristocracy, and a
counter-revolutionary one at that. Alain Joxe uses this term to describe
the way in which capitalist oligarchy increasingly rolls back the advances
of the eighteenth century democratic revolutions and reinstates social
division and elite power equal to the absolute monarchy which the age
of revolution sought to do away with.12 For Rancire, politics is precisely
the disjoining of government from what is perceived to be the natural
difference contained in the title aristos (best). It is opposed to all forms
of paternity, which would include the paternity of the market and its
technocrats. In line with this, Rancire argues that the police function
continually tries to reduce the public sphere to the rule of experts (a new
form of title) and those who wish to make it their own private affair, but
democracy is the struggle against this privatization.13 Democracy is the
opening up of politics. It is the disruption and displacement of the social
and political order as it is given. As a consequence, government by title
continually represents equality as catastrophic for democratic civilisation;
as the anarchic, excessive disorder of passions.14

Democracy and the end of history

If the current aristocratic oligarchy is at odds with democracy, then so
too is the prominent feature of its propaganda, namely the idea that with
the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism, history ended
with the victory of capitalism. Although the emergence of a militant form
of Islamism, world-changing new technologies, and political movements
exemplified most recently by Occupy and the uprisings collectively
referred to as the Arab Spring give a clear indication of how history is alive
and well, and even the author of the original end of history thesis, Francis
Fukuyama,15 has had to correct the absurdity of his claim, there remains
the general belief that capitalism remains the ultimate social and political
form. Amid this attitudepart hubris, part hysteriait is worth reading
a collection of essays by the Czechoslovakian philosopher Jan Patoka
who was himself part of the Czechoslovakian democratic movement
known as Charta 77, and died in custody following police interrogations
about his involvement.16 Although the topic of Patokas study is the
relationship between philosophy and history, philosophy is presented as
a moment of disruption and displacement whereby democracy comes to
take the place of aristocratic rule and the mythological world upon which
ancient Greece was based.
Patoka's 'First Essay' begins with a definition of freedom as openness.17
Freedom here becomes a form of questioning. It is essential for humans
to constantly ask questions about who we are, how we should act and
what we should strive for. For Patoka, if history signifies anything, it
is the moment where this openness is made explicit and becomes a

013

15
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History
and the Last Man
(London: Penguin
Books, 1992).
16
Patoka, Heretical
Essays in the Philosophy of History.
17
Ibid., p. 5.

Neal CurtisThe radical demos

18
Ibid., p.
12.
19
Ibid., p.
25.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., p.
28.
22
Ibid., p.
41.
23
Ibid., p.
38.
24
Ibid., p.
41.

philosophical problem. What he calls the preproblematic world is a world

of pregiven meaning [where gods] stand over humans, ruling over them
and deciding their destiny.18 Much in the way 'the market' reigns over
everything today, the gods of the current aristos attempt to render the
world unproblematic, save for the technical problem of global delivery.
The gods of the preproblematic world assumed the police function that
regulated everyday life and preserved social order. What Patoka called
the journey of history19 is not, then, simply finding this or that thing to be
a problem, but problematising the whole as such.20 History, then, is not
the recording of 'facts', or the keeping of annals,21 but the shaking of life
as simply accepted.22 The world erupting as a question is therefore the
acceptance of an unsheltered life,23 and the emergence of democracy
is that moment where philosophy opens up history and history becomes
politics understood as the questioning of the world.
This means that the rise of philosophy and politics in the founding of
Greek democracy is not the founding of a solution, but the founding of
an interminable questioning. Paradoxically, what unites the Greeks in the
demos is a unity in conflict:24 the founding of political disagreement.
Patoka states: Polemos is what is common. Polemos binds together the
contending parties, not only because it stands over them but because
in it they are at one.25 Polemos, translated literally as war or conflict, is,
for Patoka, a sort of existential shaking. He writes: '[the] unity it founds
is more profound than any ephemeral sympathy or coalition of interests:
adversaries meet in the shaking of a given meaning and so create a new
way of being humanperhaps the only mode that offers hope amid the
storm of the world: the unity of the shaken but undaunted.26 History
and politicsand especially the democratic politics that signalled the
emergence of the world as a problemmean having the courage to be
drawn into the shaking of meaning and the demand to invent the world
anew. Contrary to democracy presented as the end, democracy is in fact
the beginning or rather a recurring beginning, the persistent inception of a
radical questioning and a challenge to what is already ordained.

Democracy and social inception

To say a little more about this inception that emerges from the
questioning of the world, we can turn to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis.
For Castoriadis, the politics which is coeval with the emergence of
philosophy and democracy amounts to the explicit putting into question
of the established institution of society.27 In this reading, the polemical
nature of the demos is the permanent tension between the image or form
(eidos) of society that has been instituted and the instituting imaginary
that continually offers innovative images of alternatives. In this regard,
democratic philosophy constantly tests its bounds and is absolutely
not the business of priests.28 Akin in many respects to its usage by both
Rancire and Patoka, the demos is the recurrence of a questioning
and a challenge. Democratic politics is therefore the continual creation
or coming to light of another relation29 between the instituting and
instituted imagination, and does not halt before a conception, given once
and for all, of what is just, equal, or free.30 History, then, is not the gradual
emergence of the true form of human society, but the continual eruption
of a polemical truth without end. Importantly, it must also be noted
that this inception of new social forms is not the work of atomised or
sovereign individuals: the work of what he also calls the radical imaginary
is always the creation of a common worldkosmos koinos.31 The demos
is thus an interruption in the established public order brought about by
the continual opening up of questions pertaining to who we are and how
we should live together.

014

25
Ibid., p. 42.
26
Ibid., p. 43.
27
Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy,
Politics, Autonomy:
Essays in Political
Philosophy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
p. 159.
28
Ibid., p. 160.
29
Ibid.
30
Castoriadis, World
in Fragments, p. 87.
31
Ibid., p. 370.

Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

All of this means that democracy can only be at odds with the current
situation defined by a new aristocratic social order, and the god-like
market that supposedly brings an end to both history and the radical
social imaginary. Today, social creativity is tied to technocratic adjustment
and entrepreneurial innovation all tuned to the furtherance of profit, but
this, if it is to be referred to as democracy, is a profoundly impoverished
democracy. It is a situation that must be refused and I believe demos
could and should still be the name for such a refusal. We, the people, need
to take democracy back from the self-appointed gods, and the university
has a significant role to play in this. With the media largely co-opted into
the new common sense of markets, freedom of choice, competition,
privatisation, deregulation, and 'wealth creators', the university remains
the only public institution outside of the current dogmatic groupthink.
This is one reason why the university is increasingly under attack as being
unproductive and out of touch; it must be brought to heel. The financial
crisis of 2008 that still dominates social and economic policy today has
also given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the privatising ideologues
to roll back the remnants of public service that have thus far resisted the
neoliberal revolution. Using the excuse that the country cant afford it,
efforts have been renewed to subject the university as a public institution
to the purifying spirit of the private sector, where survival is determined
by the ability to provide what customers want.
The university has always contributed directly to the economy and
to industry through a whole range of scientific and technological
innovations. While its police function has been to manage the boundaries
of knowledge and the social hierarchy that accompanies those
boundaries, the university has also been the producer of heterodox
thinking and radical ideas thereby contributing to dramatic social change.
It has also been assumed that the university is an institution that tests
what people think they already know and challenges what the already
think they should do. Of course, the humanities have always had an
important role to play in the university. Unlike the universals taught by the
natural sciences, where truth is taken to be a correspondence between
a statement and an object, a correspondence that is the case in every
instance, the universal gathered together under the auspices of the
humanities is a different order of truth altogether. What is universal to the
humanities is that human beings interpret the world to which they belong.
This is a truth that speaks to creativity more than correspondence. While
correspondence is absolutely necessary, it is not sufficient to explain
the truth of our humanity. This other, perplexing, creative, conflicting,
paradoxical, infuriating truth is where the humanities resides and it needs
some protection within a public institution still resistant to the idea that
the answer to all human questioning has been found, and that the only
role the university has is to better advance the correspondence of all
social relations to that truth. In this respect, to speak of democracy is
to speak of the university and to speak of the university is to speak of
democracy. In both instances, they speak of the need to bear witness to
the fact that the world as it is currently described is inadequate.

015

Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

0016

Insurgency of
discourse
and affective interventionSix Walescka
Paul
JanmanAtenisi:
Terms of Pino-Ojeda
reference for an athens of the pacific

'Atenisi:
six terms of
reference for an
Athens of the Pacific
Paul Janman

19

The university
beside itself
Argos AotearoaThe
university
beside itself

Argos Aotearoa

Between 2005 and 2012, filmmaker Paul Janman

recorded the last six years in the life of the late great
Tongan scholar 'Ilaisa Futa Helu at his school, 'Atenisi
(Athens) Institute. The resulting film, Tongan Ark, is an
emotional statement about Futas paradoxical
synthesis of the Greek scientific revolution with the
struggle for Tongan indigenous autonomy. 'Atenisi has
remained at the vanguard of Tongan education for
more than 45 years.
20

Insurgency of
discourse
and affective
interventionSix Walescka
Pino-Ojeda
Argos AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself
Paul
JanmanAtenisi:
Terms of
reference
for an
athens of the pacific

The conservative avant garde

The western university of the past 20 years is a virtually unrecognisable cousin of its
predecessors. Futa Helus ironic method of assuring the continued quality and relevance
of education in Tonga was thus to point to the roots of western academia in criticism, the
importance of the formal disciplines and classical heritage, whether Tongan or western.
In an environment like contemporary Auckland, which often celebrates what Dostoevsky
called 'that apparent disorder that is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order',1
Futa Helu would have preferred the quietude of a discussion of the Greeks around the
kava bowl, followed by the song-roused harmonies of a composition by a great Tongan
classical poet such as Queen Salote or Malukava.
In Futas words: 'Many have brought a branch of the tree of knowledge back to Tonga but I
uprooted that tree and I planted it in Tonga'. That tree has proved to be a potent vehicle of
dissent in the small Pacific kingdom and it has disturbed some of our films Tongan and
palangi viewers alike. The conservative 'Atenisi avant-garde thus exposes the anxieties
and the ironies of contemporary cultural politics as well as problematic discourses around
freedom and innovation.

1. Quoted in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (London:
Verso Books, 1983), p. 88.

21 021

Aotearoa
The
beside itself
Paul Janman'Atenisi:
sixuniversity
terms ofuniversity
reference
for anitself
Athens of Argos
the Pacific
Argos AotearoaThe
beside

Against the compression of time

When I showed the poet Denys Trussell images of the animals that wander and
snuffle about on the campus of 'Atenisi, his immediate reaction was not one of pity or
condescension but of admiration. Denys considered this an essential part of a university
educationto be close to the natural cycles and rhythms of life, as well as elevated ideas.
At 'Atenisi there is time for everythingtime to think, time to sleep and time to make
mistakes. It is not so much when something happens but that it happens and that it is
effective. Futa Helu never sought a degree during his eight years of study in Sydney
and when he founded his own university in Tonga, his students from independent family
plantations often had no particular career objectives. Learning ancient Greek or Latin was
a stimulating way of passing time.
During my periods of recording and editing, I came to realise a different economy of
means and ends at 'Atenisi. In contrast with the emphasis of a world of measurable
results, it is the relationship between knowledge and the community of knowers, as well
as the natural world, that is as important as the utilitarian final products of knowledge. In
the case of making Tongan Ark, it is the back story and the continuing interventions in the
community that are as important as the reception of the distributed film itself.

022 22

Insurgency of
discourse
and affective
interventionSix Walescka
Pino-Ojeda
Paul
JanmanAtenisi:
Terms ofuniversity
reference beside
for anitself
athens of the pacific
Argos AotearoaThe

Unity as disturbance
In a world of awful global sameness, where fragmentation has been
elevated to the level of aesthetic virtue, a reactionary draconian order
weighs in to balance it with an excess of legalism, decorum and nostalgic
form. By contrast, an 'Atenisi graduation celebration does not stand on
ceremony. There are no dour processions to organ music.
The Tongan word malie expresses a joyful harmony that also intensifies the
surrounding social order. Visiting lecturers from western societies often fret
around graduation times at 'Atenisi because preparations for the big event
seem to be too casual or unhurried. Soon they realise that this is because
everyone knows their role in Tonga. Social events can come together very
quickly, without the need to broadcast an intricate planning schedule.
The huge number of mats and tapa cloths that extended families would gift
to Futa Helu and his university, above and beyond the required student fees,
is also an indication of the grassroots support that 'Atenisi has enjoyed,
despite the schools controversial position in Tongan society.
Loud cries, music and dance are simultaneous manifestations of mafana or
emotional warming of an environmentwhat Futa, following Aquinas and
James Joyce, would call the heart-warming aesthetics of fulgentethe
vital complement to the unifying qualities of claritas, integritas,
consonantia. As he once said during a graduation speech: 'Oggi, tutti sono
in fioritoday, everyone is in flowers!'

020
23

Aotearoa
The
university
beside
itself
Paul Janman'Atenisi:
six
terms of
reference
for an
Athens ofArgos
the Pacific
Argos AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself

Independence of the knower and the known

The essence of the philosophical realism that Futa Helu inherited from his
teacher John Anderson at Sydney University is expressed in the idea of the
independence of the knower and the known. This translates into other ideals of
independencethe independence of the knower from the state, of the knower
from the church and of the knower from the global
economic hegemony.
Philosophical realism comes easily when you are surrounded by pigs and the
daily work of subsistence cropping. Political independence is also fairly easy to
spot in Tonga, because power is so visible. In todays economically 'developed'
countries, power structures are more difficult to perceive, hidden as they are
within the language of career pathways, roles, reporting lines, functions,
incomes and outcomes, quality assurances and service models, etc.
Almost by default, 'Atenisi Institute has always preferred the way of life of the
dreamy intellectual, at the expense of bureaucratic efficiency. Unfortunately
the creeping standardisation of the global accreditation system has
jeopardised 'Atenisis chances of continuing to do its own thing.
In Futa Helus words:
Education has been hijacked by commerce and industry to
produce obedient, uncritical followers of western-style
consumerism, never before has the university been less of a critic
of society than it is now. We need an educational system
anchored in the classics and the objectivity provided by the
scientific methodan education with a distinct character, a
distinct morality and a distinct way of doing things.

021
24

Insurgency of
discourse
and affective
interventionSix Walescka
Pino-Ojeda
Paul
JanmanAtenisi:
Terms of
referencebeside
for an
athens of the pacific
Argos AotearoaThe
university
itself

Thinking as the art of unwrapping

In one of an eloquent series of musings on the recent goings on at 'Atenisi Institute
in his blog Reading the Maps, the poet and sociologist Scott Hamilton recalls a
lecture by the current Dean of 'Atenisi Institute, 'Opeti Taliai, on the Tongan word for
thinkingfakakaukau. It turns out that the word also means to bathe and it is
related to the word 'au'au, which means scraping or unwrapping. Hamilton notes
how gentle the Tongan metaphors for thought seem to be, in contrast to the
commonly brutal western notions of thinking as cutting, piercing or penetrating.
According to Hamiltons chronicle:
'Opeti also reported that, during some of the thousands of lectures he gave
at the school he founded, Futa Helu linked the act of thinking to the
deflowering of a huge idol which apparently once enjoyed pride of place in a
godhouse on a Tongan island. The idol, which was wrapped in tapa cloth, had
been consulted, during solemn and visionary ceremonies, for decades or
centuries, by a fearful and reverent populace. When traditional religion began
to collapse in the early decades of the nineteenth century, though, a group
of Tongans entered the godhouse and unceremoniously removed the idols
tapa cover. After stripping off layer after layer after layer of tapa, the startled
defilers discovered that the idol they had worshipped for so long was
nothing more than a small seashell. By unwrapping the idol, Tongans had
exposed an important truth.2
Futa Helus method of unravelling tapu was constant but gentle, indirect and
Socratic. It was only in this way that he managed to survive the reactionary
onslaught of the Tongan government and society to ideas that were in fact very
subversive. As he says in one of the more controversial parts of our film: 'There are
no taboo fields. Taboo can be beneficial in some cases [. . .] but it is really
destructive to the gullible'. On the other hand, he also told me privately that tapu
was inescapableit could only be twisted, transformed and renovatedmade into
new forms. In the best sense, Futa was a paradox.
2. Scott Hamilton, 'Bathing and Sweating', Reading the Maps (15 April 2003), online at http://readingthemaps.
blogspot.co.nz/search?q=bathing+and+sweating

25
022

Aotearoa
The
university
beside
itself
Paul Janman'Atenisi:
six
terms of
reference
for an
Athens ofArgos
the Pacific
Argos AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself

Acceptance and Thy will be done

As an 'Atenisi advocate, I was often frustrated by Futa Helus almost
complete rejection of planning and his fatalistic attitude to his schools
apparent languishing state. Informed by his teacher John Andersons
disdain for any form of engineering, it was as if he was quite happy to go
down with the ship as long as his dignity and purity of intention remained
intact. There were still no strategic annual plans in sight at 'Atenisi.
At several moments over the past seven years, it has seemed as if we
were recording the end of the school. Yet despite Futas passing, 'Atenisi is
once more showing an extraordinary resilience. A new administration has
given it renewed economic independence and new means with which to
articulate its values in the face of the globalised educational bureaucracy.
The school is producing many great students and it persists, of course, in
the minds of hundreds of Pacific scholars, artists, ethical business people,
activists and even clergymen around the world.
Viva 'Atenisi!

26
023

Indigenous ways
of
knowing
Te Ahukaramu Charles Royal

Since approximately 1980, there has been a revival and a revitalisation

of a body of knowledge called mtauranga Mori, or traditional Mori
knowledge. The story of this body of knowledge is similar to that of the many
indigenous knowledges found throughout the worlddiminished, oppressed
and suppressed through colonisation, abandoned by indigenous peoples
themselves and revived through late twentieth century revitalisation.
In the period 1980 to 2000, the revitalisation of mtauranga Mori was largely
driven by quests for social justice and the desire for cultural revitalisation. In my
own iwi setting, our efforts to revitalise this body of knowledge were inspired by
a mix of speaking back to colonisationreasserting our identity for example
and the subsequent desire to regain fluency with our culture, our language, our
histories and more.
Since 2000 (the dates are very approximate), a new theme has been coming
to conscious articulation. I call this the creative potential paradigm. Here
indigenous knowledge, of which mtauranga Mori is a part, is explored and
considered on its own merits and not merely as a tool for resistance or
speaking back to colonisation. My personal interest is to explore the creative
potential of mtauranga Mori and indigenous knowledge generally and how it
may contribute to our world today.

Working in a Whare Wnanga: 19962002

My teaching and research experience in our whare wnanga illustrates the
change and transition that has been taking place. In 1996, I was offered the
role of Kaihaut (convenor) of a Masters programme in mtauranga Mori.
This graduate programme supplemented and extended an undergraduate
programme in the same field.
From the outset, one of our tasks was to show how a study of mtauranga Mori
in a whare wnanga context is fundamentally different from Mori Studies, a
field of study conducted within New Zealand universities since the 1950s. It was
interesting to note how many people struggled to see the difference between
the two despite obvious differences.
In New Zealand, Mori Studies grew out of anthropology and represents the
anthropological study of Mori people, culture, histories, language and so on.
Hence, the field creates graduates who are able to conduct studies of the Mori
world and participate in the worldwide activity called anthropology. Whether this
contributed positively or not to the lives and experiences of Mori people and
culture was not the preoccupation of this field of study. Rather, the purpose of
the study was to contribute to the pool of anthropological knowledge.
Given this anthropological origin of Mori Studies, we can note, however, that
many working in Mori Studies are not preoccupied with anthropology. In some
027

Te Ahukaramu
Charles RoyalIndigenous
ways
of knowing
Argos AotearoaThe
university beside
itself

quarters, anthropology is rejected outright. In my view, Mori Development

might be a better title for some working in Mori Studies for most are interested
to bring about some kind of benefit for Mori people through their research and
teaching activities. Further, some Mori Studies academics would be better
described as working in mtauranga Mori. This lack of specific emphasis in
Mori Studies upon positive contributions to Mori people and culture led, I
suggest, to the advent of an initiative entitled Kaupapa Mori which, among
other things, was designed to create space for Mori language, culture and
knowledge within the academy (i.e. the universities).
Mtauranga Mori, on the other hand, has a different life and quality altogether.
Firstly, it was and is conducted in the general milieu of the development of
Mori peoples, culture, language and so on. It was first articulated and has been
advanced by Mori people ourselves as a way of revitalising our knowledge and
culture. As mentioned, we were inspired by the desire for cultural revitalisation
and the quest for social justice. Hence, from the outset, mtauranga Mori
has always retained this viewthat it should somehow contribute to the
development of Mori people and that our efforts should create some kind of
non-academic benefit in the world at large.
Interestingly, though, the second and critical feature is that mtauranga Mori
is not solely concerned with the Mori world in quite the same way that Mori
Studies is primarily concerned with Mori people and culture. Rather mtauranga
Mori represents a response to all life according to certain indigenous principles
(see below). The critical difference, therefore, between Mori Studies and
mtauranga Mori (as I have defined it) is that one concerns the study of
the Mori world (usually defined by the presence of Mori people) and the
other concerns a response to all life, not just the so-called Mori world. This
distinction was noted by the Waitangi Tribunal in their 1998 report: 'Maori studies
focuses on studying Maori society from a Pakeha perspective, while matauranga
Maori is about studying the universe from a Maori perspective'.1

1
Waitangi Tribunal,
The Wananga Capital Establishment
Report, (Wellington:
Waitangi Tribunal
1999), p. 21.

These critical differences are helpful in understanding the drive behind the
establishment of our whare wnanga. From the outset, these institutions were
driven to create benefits for the communities that established them. Secondly,
there was and is a determination to create a space of integrity for mtauranga
Mori so that it might be explored and understood in its own terms and not
analysed and therefore judged by pre-existing frames of reference such as
those prevalent in the university.
Of course, it takes time to initiate and establish new fields of inquiry. I think the
most significant achievement of this period was to confirm the existence of a
body of knowledge called mtauranga Mori and, furthermore, confirm our
resolve to utilise it to establish ways of knowing, explaining and
understanding life.

The Move to Creativity

As mentioned, the early period of my time at our whare wnanga was dominated
by ideas of social justice and cultural revitalisation. We were emboldened in our
task and the sense of righting a wrong flowed through our activities. However,
as time passed and as I moved deeper and deeper into mtauranga Mori, my
thinking about this body of knowledge changed.
More and more I began to think about this body of knowledge on its own
merits, outside of our urgencies concerning the so-called decolonisation of
Mori people. I can recall the moment when I asked myself, what really beats
at the heart of mtauranga Mori anyway and why is this valuable? This was
an important moment and it resonated with a comment I had read in the work
28

028

AotearoaThe
university beside itself
Te Argos
Ahukaramu
Charles RoyalIndigenous
ways of knowing

of Vine Deloria. He writes that American Indian philosophy must proceed on

a 'deeply held belief that there is something of value in any tribal tradition that
transcends mere belief and ethnic pride.'2
The comment challenged me to interact with mtauranga Mori not merely as
a tool by which to struggle against and resist colonisation but rather as way of
thinking, experiencing and understanding life. More and more I began to think
about it on its own terms and I found assistance in the work of indigenous thinkers
such as Manulani Meyer of Hawaii and Gregory Cajete of New Mexico. The work
of the Yupiaq scholar Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley was also important. This
was a liberating experience and a key feature, I now assert, of the new creative
potential paradigm, the desire to look at the entire continuum of this body of
knowledge and assess it on its own terms.

2
Vine Deloria Jr,
'Philosophy and
the Tribal Peoples',
American Indian
Thought, ed. Anne
Waters (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 2004), p. 5.

Coinciding with this emerging thinking was my experience with the reestablishment of an institution called the whare tapere. These were traditional
village houses of storytelling, dance, music, games and more. My doctoral study
concerned these traditional ways of performing which, unfortunately, fell into
disuse in the nineteenth century. The research rested on two simple questions
what do we know about these pre-European ways of performing (these houses
of performance) and is it possible to create a modern version today?
Hence, these projectsmy personal research, leading a Masters programme
in mtauranga Mori and establishing a new whare tapereled me to a more
creative position with respect to mtauranga Mori. I found that if one finds ones
creative centre, then we need not feel so anxious about our cultural knowledge
and identity. We can supplement our understandable desire to preserve our
pre-existing traditional knowledge with a new creativity which utilises that preexisting knowledge as a starting point. This growth can be symbolised as a move
from a preoccupation with mtauranga (knowledge) to being inspired by wnanga
(creativity) for knowledge is exhaustible, creativity is inexhaustible. In our cultural
context, our creativity (our wnanga) is likened to the springs of Rangitea, the
springs that never run dry.3
In the period 2003-2010, I completed an overview of mtauranga Mori which
is now being published in a number of research reports.4 This research enabled
me to summarise mtauranga Mori and, more importantly, identify a number
of principles which underpin this body of knowledge. These principles might be
utilised, albeit in a new form, to underpin and inform a new creativity and I find
myself now directing my research in this direction. Having completed a large
amount of research concerning pre-existing mtauranga Mori, the question for
me now concerns whether we are able to use this knowledge, fragmentary and
incomplete as it is, as the basis of a new creativity.
Contiguous with the completion of this research was my recent appointment
to Ng Pae o te Mramatanga, a centre of research excellence hosted at the
University of Auckland, New Zealand. The focus of our research concerns
harnessing and unleashing the creative potential of Mori communities through
research. Our work is summarised in the phrase indigenous transformation
through research excellence.
We argue that the true potential of Mori communities lies beyond mere
participation in a range of pre-existing activities in our nation. Rather, we assert
that the depth and breadth of this potential can be understood by considering our
traditional knowledge, worldviews, experiences, histories and identities and how
this may be used to contribute to our nation and the world.
To this end, we are interested in a range of distinctive projects such as indigenous
approaches to economic development, to environmental sustainability, to
education, to the arts, science and humanities and more. This is an exciting and
creative field which proceeds on the view, firmly held, that Mori people represent
29
a net opportunity for New Zealand rather than a national burden.
029

3
In Mori we say,
ng punawai o
Rangitea, e kore e
mimiti . . . .

4
Some of these
reports can now be
purchased at www.
orotokare.org.nz

Te Ahukaramu
Charles RoyalIndigenous
ways
of knowing
Argos AotearoaThe
university beside
itself

As an indigenous research centre, one of our key challenges is to explore and

formulate indigenous approaches and methodologies of knowledge creation and
application. This is an exciting and creative challenge. Our goal is not merely to
utilise our fragmentary indigenous knowledge within pre-existing and conventional
methods of knowledge creation (science, for example) but also to invent ways
of creating knowledge that ultimately serve certain indigenous endsso that
the process of the creation of new knowledge can be considered indigenous
knowledge too. The last section of this essay presents some ideas about what
that process, method or approach might be. We are at the very beginning of our
experiments so that the ideas presented below are tentative.

KinshipBased Participation in the Living Universe

Where might one begin? We ought to begin with the foundational idea, belief or
view deeply held within all formal indigenous cultures and worldviewsthat is of
a kinship based, creative and dynamic participation in the living universe. Formal
indigenous cultures place mother earth at the centre of their concerns and regard
humankind as a child of the earth alongside all other living beings and creatures.
The 1992 Nobel prize winner Rigoberta Menchu states:

5
Rigoberta Menchu,
I, Rigoberta Menchu:
An Indian Woman
in Guatemala, ed.
Elisabeth BurgosDebray, tran. Ann
Wright (London:
Verso, 1984), p. 56.
6
See Mori Marsden, The Woven
Universe: Selected
Writings of Rev.
Mori Marsden,
ed. Te Ahukaram
Charles Royal
(Otaki: The Estate of
Rev. Mori Marsden,
2003).

Our parents tell us: 'Children, the earth is the mother of man, because
she gives him food' [. . .] So we think of the earth as the mother of man,
and our parents teach us to respect the earth. We must only harm the
earth when we are in need. This is why, before we sow, we have to ask
the earths permission.5
In this worldview, humans are not superior to the natural world but rather are fully
participant in the woven universe.6 This foundational idea and belief has been
cited and described in numerous texts published throughout world on indigenous
worldviews. We need not exhaustively repeat this point except to note, however,
that these themes are beginning to find expression and interest in a range of
non-indigenous scholars too. Here is a quote from the American philosopher
and historian Richard Tarnas. After delivering a virtuoso rendition of the history
of western knowledge, Tarnas discusses the paradigm for a worldview to come.
He discusses a participatory epistemology in which the human mind achieves a
radical kinship with the cosmos. Tarnas is searching for a new paradigm which
seeks to overcome critical anxieties and tensions in post-modern western life.
One such difficulty is the relationship between the human mind and the natural
world and his writing edges toward a view which reflects the human minds pivotal
role as vehicle of the universes unfolding meaning.
He continues with the following statement which feels deeply indigenous in
atmosphere and style:

7
Richard Tarnas,
The Passion of
the Western
Mind (New York:
Random House,
1991).

The human spirit does not merely prescribe natures phenomenal

order; rather, the spirit of nature brings its own order through the
human mind when that mind is employing its full complement of
facultiesintellectual, volitional, emotional, sensory, imaginative,
aesthetic, epiphanic. In such knowledge, the human mind 'lives into'
the creative activity of nature. Then the world speaks its meaning
through human consciousness. Then human language itself can be
recognized as rooted in deeper reality, as reflecting the universes
unfolding meaning. Through human intellect, in all its personal
individuality, contingency, and struggle, the worlds evolving
7
thought-content achieves conscious articulation.
Hence, the key tenet of indigenous worldviews and epistemology is that the mind
exists within the world, participating in it. This is the beginning of an extensive
discussion about the nature of humankinds relationship with the world. Even the
very idea of mind welcomes discussion from an indigenous point of view. For
now,
30let us note that the key or foundational idea of formal indigenous worldviews
is that we, humankind, are products of the earth and participate in a living and
030

Te Ahukaramu
Charles RoyalIndigenous
of knowing
Argos AotearoaThe
university beside ways
itself

woven universe. As such, we ought to remember this and build knowledge and
conduct our lives conscious to maintain unity with the natural world.

Wnanga: Features of an Indigenous

Approach to Knowledge Creation
In our language, the word we can most closely associate with the idea of the
creation of new knowledge is wnanga. Our ancestors conducted wnanga
processes and maintained an institution of higher learning called whare
wnanga. Today, there are three major whare wnanga in New Zealand. Our
challenge is that in the midst of addressing important and critical education
needs of our people we need to also fashion ways of creating, imparting and
sustaining knowledge based upon indigenous principles. One such way is to
conduct a deep and creative exploration of wnanga itself.
Listed below are some of the features of a wnanga process. These are
experimental and were developed through an extensive reading of material
concerning the workings of the traditional institution called the whare wnanga.
The ideas also reflect the worldview within which this institution conducted its
affairs. Finally, reading the work of indigenous thinkers throughout the world has
been invaluable. I stress that these lists are not exhaustive and remain in draft
form. There is no particular order, either, to each list.

Worldview, Epistemology
Knowledge resides in the body, in bodied knowingauthority
is built in a person of knowledge as they become a vessel or the
embodiment of knowledge.
The pursuit of knowledge concerns the progressive revelation
of depth and understanding about the world rather than the
construction of new knowledge as one constructs an object.
Knowing (the world) is equivalent to identification with the
worldhumankind is a product of the earth and we dwell (or ought
to dwell) in a kinship relationship with the earth. The world is to be
known and understood through relationship.
Indigenous knowledge is a heritage inspired knowledge system
which often speaks of the wisdom of the ancestors.

The Process of Wnanga

Listed here are a range of matters about how the wnanga process might be
conducted.
The purpose of the wnanga process is to activate the mana
atua of the person, the powers of the individual. It is important to
recognise that these powers are the qualities and energies of the
natural world and the goal is to allow these qualities to flow through
the person. Thus the person becomes one with the natural world.
The venue, place and location of the wnanga process is
important. Spaces and places are not neutral, absent of qualities
and energies. The topic of discussion ought to be synergistic with
the location and vice versa.
The time of the wnanga process needs to be appropriately set.
Indigenous knowledge making is conscious of the natural rhythms
31
031

Argos AotearoaThe
university beside
itself
Te Ahukaramu
Charles RoyalIndigenous
ways
of knowing

of the universeof the way day and night interact, for example, of the
way in which energy flows naturally in a person throughout a single
day. Attention is paid to the appropriate date in the lunar calendar and
more.
The process for the selection of topic is set by the leaders of
the wnanga. They consider the needs of the day, the capacity
of wnanga participants to address the question, relevance to
community interests and more.
A person is elected by the group to be kaiwhakahaere, to facilitate
the setting of the topic (the questions posed) and to facilitate the
process for discussion and any outcomes achieved.
Much use is made of narrativised knowledge (krero). This kind
of knowledge is available to the group (pre-existing stories and
narratives of the deeds of ancestors and myth heroes within which
contain ideas and perspectives relevant to the topic at hand).
Identification with the subjectone has the authority to speak not
because one is right but because of connection and relationship.8
Memory (mahara) is not just about knowledge of previous events
but also conscious awareness (te hringa i te maharaa traditional
expression about the awakening of the conscious mind).

8
In our traditional
whare wnanga,
one had to cite
a genealogical
relationship with the
topic of discussion
(often an ancestor)
before one was able
to speak.

Encounter with the world occurs through the apparatus of the

bodyuse is made of meditation (nohopuku) and fasting (whakatiki)
practices whereby inspiration and new ideas are actively sought.
Hence, whilst much development might take place in a group,
individuals may also be dispatched into the wilderness to seek
understanding.
This, then, is a sample and incomplete list of items concerning the wnanga
process for the creation of new knowledge. Overall the purpose of this way of
creating knowledge is to bring humankind into greater alignment, awareness,
sensitivity and relationship with the natural world environments in which we dwell.
We seek not to dominate life but rather to live harmoniously within it and where we
might seek to exert our influence in the world: it is the natural world itself prompting
us to do so. Given the tremendous distance that now exists today between human
consciousness and the natural world; environments in which we liveevidenced
by environmental despoliation, climate change, population pressures, energy
production issues and morean approach which seeks to reharmonise our
creativity with the planet is warranted and, indeed, urgent.

32
032

Walking stick in one hand and the hand of her mokopuna in the other,
taking it slow, one foot in front of the other down a gravel road. The
photograph of Dame Whina Cooper at the outset of Te Ropu Matakite,
the 1975 Land March from Te Hapua to Parliament, has come to signify
peaceful resistance in New Zealand and the re-assertion of Maori
political identity.2
On the other side of the world, two centuries earlier, a local of
Grasmere, Cumbria, would watch the poet William Wordsworth pass in
the village. He recalled, 'He would set his head a bit forrad, and put his
hands behint his back. And then he would start a bumming, and it was
bum, bum, bum, stop; then bum, bum bum, reet down till tother end;
and then hed set down and git a bit opaper and write a bit'.3
Last year, University of Auckland staff and students and members of
the public marched up Queen Street chanting Cuts hurt and When
educations under attack, stand up, fight back! in response to the
National governments funding cuts and education reforms.

033

Eleanor CooperUnder
Argos AotearoaThe
the paving stones,
university
the seabed:
beside walking
itself and the university

Why is it that walking, the most banal of activities, is so often right there at the centre of
the action? What is it about ambling and marching that appeals to poets and protesters
alike? We have long conceived of the university as a site of cerebral endeavour, analysis
and discussion, completely dissociated from the world of physical activity. So why, when
people feel strongly about an idea, do they get to their feet and take to the street?
The land is hilly, lined with valleys leading to the sea. This gully is too steep for habitation
so the main cluster of buildings sits near the top of the slope, facing the sun as it rises
behind the tuff crater of the Domain in the morning. Not far beneath the buildings
and roads lies the ancient seafloor, the great bed of Waitemata sandstone, laced with
circular trenches carved by feeding stingrays, shells, preserved traces of seabeddwelling forams and some tropical corals. Soldiers excavating great warrens (now filled
with sandbags) beneath Albert Park and the northern wing of the Clocktower during
World War Two tunnelled into this sandstone, hewing away submarine volcanic deposits
compressed into rock over five million years to make secret subterranean paths.

Above ground, the footpath from the Business School leading to the General
Library owes its steep gradient to the sandstone below. Those approaching the
university from the east on bicycle or foot feel the steepness of the hill in their
calves and thighs. Some people change their step, moving their weight from their
heels to the balls of their feet. Passing the part of this slope beside the Engineering
School where several protesting students were pushed over by police last year, I
sometimes recall that the Independent Police Complaints Authority subsequently
classed the hill as an inclineto call it a hill is an overstatement'.4
Sociologist Antonio Negri declares bleakly, There is no outside to our world of real
subsumption of society under capital. We live within it, but it has no exterior; we
are engulfed in commodity fetishismwithout recourse to something that might
represent its transcendence'.5 But perhaps there is reason to believe that
access for individuals to some thing outside of capital can be found
through walking.
Walking is an activity linked to other activitesobserving, sensing, exploring,
feeling, thinkingthat plunge the individual into unmediated engagement
with their surroundings. It is concerned with experience, not production;
particularities and localities, not universal sameness, and as such it stands in
opposition to a placeless, economically focused, homogenised way of being.
Like few other things, walking has the ability to bring together body and mind,
individual and society, politics and place. It is a fundamental and universal
human activity and belonged to us long before our immersion in capital.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold goes as far as to say that walking is not what
humankind does, it is what we are.6
34

034

Eleanor CooperUnder
Argos AotearoaThe
the paving stones,
university
the seabed:
beside
walking
itself
and the university

Critical theorists have long linked physical and intellectual emancipation.

Capitalism depends heavily on the alienation of individuals as they devote
themselves body and soul to the technical apparatus.7 If one technique
of domination is training the body to political or economic ends, it follows
that self-governed and creative physical activity constitutes a form of
resistance. Indeed, the university billboard outside the recreation centre
on Symonds Street quips active body, active mind'. Walking historian
and activist Rebecca Solnit elaborates on how political, intellectual and
physical freedoms come hand in hand: The fight against [the] collapse
of imagination and engagement may be as important as the battles for
political freedom, because only by recuperating a sense of inherent power
can we begin to resist both oppression and the erosion
of the vital body in action'.8
Evolutionary theory also supports the idea that movement of the body
can evoke fundamental change in both mind and society. Our intelligence
developed as our ancestors stood upright.9 Our light upper bodies,
strong legs, and elastic tendons suggest we evolved to be long distance
walkers and runners, able to maintain a slow but steady pace for days.10 A
leading theory holds that we developed as persistence hunters. Instead
of competing with the extraordinary speed of four-legged mammals, we
used our superior endurance, pursuing them to the point of collapse over
many hours.11 In pursuit, our minds were constantly strategisingreading
tracks, or where there were none, engaging in speculative hunting',
developing the capacities of visualisation, projection, empathy and
abstract thinking.12

035
35

Eleanor CooperUnder
Argos AotearoaThe
the paving stones,
university
the seabed:
beside
walking
itself
and the university

This raises the question: are we at our physical and mental best in an
environment where busy roads form the main arteries of our cities and
campuses, and the transport systems and technology surrounding us
make time race and lag and career? A world which philosopher Jean
Baudrillard describes as Star-blasted, horizontally by the car, altitudinally
by the plane, electronically by television, geologically by deserts,
stereolithically by the megalopoloi, transpolitically by the power game . . ..13
As we leap off the bus and into a lecture theatre, confronted by a dualscreened slideshow with embedded video clips, and fix our attention onto
the small figure of the lecturer far below, are we playing with or against our
innate capacity for physically-grounded learning and thinking? Where is
the persistence hunter within us, as we gaze at the PowerPoint display? In
this kind of world walking has become almost obsolete. Have we given up

036
36

Eleanor CooperUnder
Argos AotearoaThe
the paving stones,
university
the seabed:
beside
walking
itself
and the university

the ability to experience our surroundings and swapped a walked world of

rich sensory experiences for a star-blasted phantasmagoria?
Running atop the sandstone ridge, Symonds Street becomes an avenue
of plane trees where it passes through campus. These London planes
were long thought to be an infertile ornamental hybrid, until it was
discovered that they produce occasional offspring. Sapling planes have
taken root not in the gardens at their parents' feet, but in tiny rocky cracks
in the footpath or pockets in concrete walls, thinking for an instant that
they have found the stony river silts preferred by their ancestors. It is
autumn and the seed balls are ready to drop; in springtime, maybe unlikely
seedlings will be found in the footpath outside Engineering.
One symptom of the devaluing of walking is that in western societies
we have come to assume that thoughts and experiences of importance
occur only from a stationary vantage point. An addiction to efficiency
makes the slow act of walking seem anachronistic and time spent moving
between one point and another is considered wasted.14 This observation
of Ingolds seems to capture the experience of racing between
destinations on campus. If we are indeed walking creatures, how has this
ground shift happened and where is it leading us?
Ingold describes how western children are brought up to disregard the
experience of walking. Parents pull their children through the streets
between one destination and the next like baggage.15 He contrasts the
practices of the Batek of Malaysia. Forest dwelling hunter-gatherers,
the Batek step through the bush with their children before them, free to
explore under a watchful eye. For the Batek, walking is at once observing,
listening, climbing, fingering, remembering, crouching, and it is through
these acts that knowledge is forged. Sitting in a lecture theatre is
certainly a far cry from the Batek style of learning and we might wonder
about the implications of severing an association with place from the
intake of information. It is a common observation of lecture-style teaching
that students are atomised, isolated and forbidden to interact with each
other by the architecture of the lecture theatre. But they are also cut off
from the outside world, which remains out of touch, smell, hearing and
sight during the process of learning.

037

37

Eleanor CooperUnder
Argos AotearoaThe
the paving stones,
university
the seabed:
beside
walking
itself
and the university

We are built to simultaneously move about, pick things up, and

contemplate. Walking is a way to collect information and reflect upon our
environment that comes naturally to us. Unlike the quadruped, with four
feet planted solidly in the ground of nature, the biped is held down only
by two, while the arms and hands, released from their previous function
of support and locomotion, become answerable to the call of reason.

Marching head over heelshalf in nature, half outthe human biped

figures as a constitutionally divided creature'.17 On the move, our feet
lead our bodies, hands and minds astray from the highway of common
experience. We might see walking as a way of gathering information firsthand in a second-hand world.
The demise of a rich conception of walking within Western culture, Ingold
proposes, is due to three particular developments of modernity: the
physical restrictiveness of footwear, the paving of roads and walkways
and the introduction of transport that carries us.18
Together they contribute to our ideas that movement is a mechanical
displacement of the human body across the surface of the earth, from

one point to another, and that knowledge is assembled from observations

taken from these points'.19 With these developments, we no longer pick our
way over uneven ground, feel the texture of the ground underfoot or even
experience the weather as we travel. The booted foot pacing over hard, even
pavement need be paid almost no heed by the mind of the city walker. There is
very little relationship to place cultivated by this kind of walking.
With high levels of foot traffic on campus, almost all surfaces are paved.
Steeper slopes are broken into steps so that even on non-horizontal surfaces
our feet find a mindless resting place. We walk hurriedly from one destination
to the next without gathering information about our environment as we
move through it. Are there viable alternatives, when catering to thousands of

38

038

Eleanor CooperUnder
Argos AotearoaThe
the paving stones,
university
the seabed:
beside walking
itself and the university

visitors every day? David Gauld, Professor of Mathematics and longtime

president of the Auckland University Tramping Club walks unshod year
round. And it only takes a visit to the Architecture Schools courtyard to
find an example of a varied and stimulating alternative to a concrete plaza.
The paths encircling the Clocktower wend their way through titoki, kowhai,
ponga, kauri, coprosma, puriri. Once I took a walk with a woman from the

Hokianga who taught me about the medicinal properties of these trees. I

remember that puriri leaves are boiled and the liquor used to treat sprains
and sores, or drunk to relieve kidney complaints. It is good practice, she
said, to say E tu', or stand forth before picking a plants leaves or berries.
In midsummer when few students roam campus, the titoki drops its bright
red berries with shiny black seeds which can be crushed to extract oil
for painful eyes, breasts and earache. The berries are edible but dry your
mouth. When the titoki drops its fruit, it is also a sign that rata elsewhere
will be blooming. The Mori saying goes: the titoki fruit is ripe and the
rata red in the eighth month. A little up the path from the titoki are orange
coprosma berries, far tastier than titoki to nibble as you pass.
As well as connecting walking to our capacity for critical thinking, learning
and building relationships to places, Ingold adds elsewhere that 'walking

is a profoundly social activity [. . .] in their timings, rhythms and inflections,

the feet respond as much as does the voice to the presence and activity
of others. Social relations [. . .] are not enacted in situ but are paced out
along the ground'.20 The Dogrib people of North West Canada walk to
read the movement of animals and patterns of weather, and the longevity
of this knowledge is ensured by one generation walking through the
landscape with the next.21

039

39

Eleanor CooperUnder
Argos AotearoaThe
the paving stones,
university
the seabed:
beside walking
itself and the university

In a walk around campus with Professor Brian Boyd, I asked about the trees on
campus and whether we had any of the varieties Vladimir Nabokov mentions in
his novel Pale Fire. He told me about the ginkgo tree at the edge of Albert Park
and how the pungent smell came from the trees ripe fruits. Only the female trees
produce the fruits and because almost all of the trees on campus are planted
rather than self-seeded, males are almost always chosen. We also came across
the enormous larch outside the Arts 1 building, losing its leaves and turning auburn
like a chameleon beside the red brick wall. Brian said that he had watched the tree
grow from when it was planted in 1984, the year the building was finished.
When one is walking and talking, information is embedded in the real and related to
places, not just rationally or causally, but visually and physically. We had to discuss
the way the heavy flow of traffic through the heart of campus affects pedestrian
experience, over the noisy intersection. The constant change of scenery as we
walked prompted new questions. It can be no coincidence that Aristotles first
school was held in a shrine with peripatosarchitectural colonnades, or covered
walkwayswhere he would walk about as he spoke. His school became known

as the Peripatetic School, which loosely means of walking or given to

walking about'.
Early in Aucklands volcanic era, the Albert Park volcano erupted.
Red scoria can still be found in the grass and soil around the northern
end of the park. The eruption also deposited eight metres of ash over the
existing sandstone ridges and valleys, destroying the forest. Nineteenth
century excavations near the lower corner of the park unearthed a tree
stump apparently hewn by humans beneath the blankets of ash, believed
at the time to evidence pre-volcanic human habitation of the area.22
Walking home down Wellesley Street when the ginkgo there turns yellow
and spreads its golden carpet, I sometimes think of the volcano trees and
stingray rocks, silent under the pavements of the university.

40

040

Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

1
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Viking, 2001), p. xi.
2
See New Zealand History Online, 'Dame Whina Cooper', online at http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/people/dame-whinacooper, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 20 December 2012.
3
Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 113.
4
Dispositive letter to Blockade the Budget received from the Acting Inspector G. Whitley of the New Zealand Police,
11 March 2013, p. 10.
5
Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop: For A New Grammar Of Politics (London: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 25.
6
Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, eds, Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2008), p. 2.
7
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972 [1944]),
p. 23.
8
Ibid., p. xiii.
9
Ibid., p. 32.
10
Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never
Seen (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 223.
11
Ibid., p. 229.
12
Ibid., p. 235.
13
Jean Baudrillard, Astral America', America (New York: Verso, 1988), p. 27.
14
See Solnit, Wanderlust, p. 12, and Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, p. 16.
15
Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, pp. 4-5.
17
Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Verso, 2011), p. 35.
18
Ibid., p. 17.
19
Ibid.
20
Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, p. 1.
21
Ibid., pp. 5-6.
22
Atholl Anderson. Prodigious Birds: Moa and Moa-Hunting in Prehistoric New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p. 105.

041

41

Eleanor CooperUnder the paving stones, the seabed: walking and the university

042

U of I: the university as I experience you

Alex Wild Jespersen and Pritika Lal

and I experience you as experiencing yourself as

experienced by me.
- R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (Harmondsworth:Penguin,1967), p.16.

That IS intense political graffiti - jaunty dick and balls and all. I think when youre little, encountering messages where you dont
expect them can be really exciting (still is, but, you know, different).1 As a very little kid, I would be bundled into the back of the
car when mum drove into town to pick my dad up from work. I think I was just out of booster seat mode but still in fuck if we
are going in the car I need to take this blanket and my favourite dog mode.2 The lasso goes around and around and around until
the car passes and it is beyond view. Im sure I saw a similar cowboy in town, perhaps on K Road when driving through with my
folks. I just assumed that Las Vegas was the city and that whatever I saw on TV took place here. There were no boundaries for
countries, no distance or time between us.
Everything was just always happening here and now.3
I immediately thought of just throwing in a kind of circular narrative of footnotes: ones that started out conventionally academic
in their format and content, but then disintegrate from there into more personal thoughts and abstractions,4 even visuals/symbols
beyond language as such why cant jaunty dick and balls be a footnote?

Youd never know it to look at it, that anything was wrong. Unless you happened to see one of the discarded pigs heads on the
boat ramp.
Or the FUCK YOU FUCK FACE carved into the wooden tunnel of the jungle gym.
FUCK YOU
(jaunty dick and balls)
FUCK FACE
The ability to picture the route in his mind, navigating each segment of the journey is very weird. Like he has a block. Losing the
connector paths from one building to another after decades out of Berlin, the translator left it out because she thought it was boring to go on and on about buildings and streets, later on someone else was all like this is a forgotten masterpiece of retrospective
flnerie. I mean, people have written about all that since long before Baudelaire was drawing jaunty dicks and balls, surely.5 The
sometimes jarring overlaps of academic language and actual life as lived / the geography were all feeling pretty relevant but it was
nice to feel like thoughts could be what walking was for.

1 There is a shared space between us. With two adjoining doors. You and I pass in and out of the space at our leisure. Leaving bits and pieces of
information. Less pointed than clues, more like remnants from living and moving around and through the space.
2 I leave pigs heads and jaunty dick and balls.
Partially blocked out paths. You leave yellow paint, phone calls, support for rebels and an appreciation for the magical monotony of still suburbs.
3 The experience of experiencing someone elses experience. In my own mind the symbols described above are etched, I thought forever in
the form in which I found them. But reading my experiences as your experiences and trying to sketch them out on the page, I have to carefully
reconstruct the old way as this new way has taken over.
4 And by this general sentence I mean something quite specific.
5 The pigs head was on its side, cut at an angle through the neck. Its jaw stuck open, large teeth. I didnt know pigs had teeth?

Like you said, the references to an end of an era / the sometimes jarring overlaps of academic language and actual life as lived /
the geography1 were all feeling pretty relevant. When i meet someone like you and there are these shared memories from different
times and places or similar types of feeling,2 I feel like a room has opened up in my mind. A room3 between us with an adjoining
room. When i go in that room, you are there.4 Or maybe youre out but you left your umbrella behind. There is crossover in our
experiences, and gaps where they dont meet too.5 I like these gaps.
You probably werent even born then. Or maybe just or maybe you saw the jaunty dick and balls before I did. Imagine that etched
into the mind of a new baby. Just more information that does not have meaning until so many more experiences have been
digested. History is so much about sharing.6 The inability to picture the route. A block. Losing the connector paths from one
building to another after decades out of the city. (The translator left it out because she thought it was boring to go on and on about
buildings and streets. Later on someone else was all like this is a forgotten masterpiece of retrospective flnerie.)

You and I pass in and out of the space at our leisure. There were no boundaries for countries, no distance or time between us.
Everything was just always happening here and now.7 All these many gathered seemingly unimportant fragments constructed such
a strong set of beliefs. I still find empty offices after hours exciting sites of potential, which they are.

1 Mangere Bridge was on the other side of the mountain from my house, the side with the picket fences and sparkly water (go for a walk around
the suburb via google maps: you can see everyones swimming pools, the ambitious fancy architecture, the complex street layouts (multiple
bulbous dead ends) ), so picturesque, it seemed so distant at the time. Youd never know it to look at it, that anything was wrong there. Unless
you happened to see one of the discarded pigs heads on the boat ramp. Or the FUCK YOU. FUCK FACE carved into the wooden tunnel of the
jungle gym.
2 As a very little kid, I would be bundled into the back of the car when mum drove in to town to pick my dad up from work. There was a stone
wall facing the building, and on it, someone had sprayed, in a really strong yellow, EAT THE RICH. It was one of my favourite things. I knew
it meant rich people, who I imagined to be the man from the monopoly box, and I knew from the confident logic of the yellow paint that they
deserved to be eaten.
3 It can be any kind of room a library, a kitchen. New Flavour. Even my cube-shaped office in Arts 1 is any kind of room if I lie starfished out
on the sensibly thin carpet. I could almost imagine it was this room.
4 A car drives through 1970s/80s Las Vegas. From the car I see a neon cowboy with a flashing lasso. The lasso goes around and around and
around until the car passes and it is beyond view. Im sure I saw a similar cowboy in town, perhaps on K Road when driving through with my
folks. I just assumed that Las Vegas was the city.
5 The Mt Eden village had, at its unofficial starting point, a sign saying Mt Eden: Home of the Arts. A boy from Metro took to it with a
sharpie so it said Mt Eden: Home of the BORGOIS Arts. He also wrote FUCK FACISM in black on the yellow of a traffic light post. I touched
it every day. I saw him swing his lasso and figured that must be the most happening part of town. To re-remember with this new flavour. I cant
help but wonder what did it mean, eat the rich?
6 A bunch of ideas to apply to walking, to going through space, that were nothing at all to do with the concept of physical exercise as an end goal
in and of itself. My wheel alignment sucks.
7 I mean, people have written about all that since long before Baudelaire was drawing jaunty dicks and balls, surely.

Finance,
university,
revolt
Campbell Jones

The university finds itself today teetering between

finance and revolt. This is a precarious position, one
that is precarious on both sides. On the one hand,
finance provides what presents itself as a seamless
and incontestable logic that can explain the rationale
for student participation, the logic of governance and
the direction of research. On the other hand, the logic
of finance has opened a void over questions of
judgement and reason that has led to despair, exit
and open revolt.
Although the considerations outlined here respond
to a specific local situation, the ramifications of this
analysis are intended to have a broad scope. The
focus is not just one university in one country, nor
even one institution amongst others, but rather in
view here is a broader process pointing today in the
direction of the financialisation of pretty much
everything.1 In this process, in which not only private
capitalist firms but institutions claiming public purpose
are increasingly judged by the concepts, techniques
and metaphors of finance, the university stands as
an important test case. The attempted financialisation
of the university is taking place in contestation of the
previously dominant position of the university in claims
regarding the location and responsibility for scientific
judgement and collective intelligence. The stakes are
significant not because we might nostalgically say
that the financialisation of the university threatens to
depose the notion of the university as an institution
of universal knowledge, but because finance today
advances its own criteria of judgement that are at
odds with the capacities of judgement and reason
previously fostered by the university.
It is at this level that transformations of the university
are implicated with lamentations against the sad
project of destroying, of devastating, of dismantling
the general intellect and the argument that Europe
is today seeing the destruction of collective
intelligence', or, 'if you want to say it in a more prosaic
way, the destruction of the university, and the
subjugation of research to the narrow interests of
profit and economic competition. 2 With finance,
however, we are not dealing simply with the logic of
profit and economic competition, which mark the

044

classic dynamics of capitalism and have long been

known to be one of the key dynamics of the
modern university and the legitimation of state
funding of universities. 3 Finance, as will be seen,
goes well beyond the most obvious and widely
recognised features of capitalism, commodification
and neoliberalism.
***
It is no secret that university students and academic
staff throughout the world have grave concerns about
the state of the university. These have been clearly
visible in the most recent waves of mass protest and
occupations that have swept the world in the wake
of the crisis of 2008. While these caught public
attention with the protests in the United States in 2009
and the United Kingdom in late 2010, in the extended
occupations and protests in Chile since 2010 and in
the student strikes and protests in Quebec against
tuition fee rises (which led to the ousting of the
Quebecois Minister of Education in May 2012), a vast
range of university student protests has unfolded and
continues to play out in what is increasingly aware of
itself as an international student movement.
In such a context, when in late 2011 hundreds of
students at the University of Auckland embarked on
a series of occupations and protests, the response
of the New Zealand Minister of Tertiary Education
Steven Joyce that the protests didnt add up to me
seemed naively innocent if not ignorant of global
developments in the higher education sector.4
As student protests in New Zealand built through
2012, hundreds of students engaged in protesting
and occupying university buildings and public spaces,
with 43 students being arrested in a street protest
and teach-in on 1 June.5 The minister again exploded,
this time accusing the universities of not producing
the practical skills that might resolve the ballooning
unemployment that had almost doubled since 2008,
and with this a sharp rise in youth unemployment.6
Thus Joyce would directly attack the University of
Auckland: If they want us to be more directive, I am
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to make sure they do what the market wants, and if

they dont, I can go and tell them how many they should
enrol for each department.7
Such comments might be confusing in light of the
radical depth of market measures already undertaken
in New Zealand since 1984. Thus although New
Zealand tertiary tuition fees are seventh highest in
the OECD, this was not close enough to the operation
of a pure market, and no irony was present in an irate
minister demanding that if the market was not obeyed
by students, academics and administrators then direct
state intervention would make sure it was.8 Likewise,
the glaring financial hole faced by New Zealand
universities was again overlooked, leading the Vice
Chancellor of the University of Auckland to object
that The single biggest challenge facing New Zealand
universities is that we operate with the lowest
expenditure per student of any system in the
developed world.9
This is not just a case of a particular minister open to
charges of financial buffoonery or of being
astonishingly uninformed about the realities of
studying and working in the sector for which he is
ultimately responsible. The problem is not restricted
to any particular individual or political party, but
concerns a logic of financialisation that has been
taken up across the political spectrum and is rarely
the source of critical suspicion. Finance obeys a logic
that is far more specific and concrete than a nebulous
neoliberalism that many identify as the loose target
of criticism today.
In a way, financialisation is the flip-side of financial
crisis. If financial crisis is dramatic and obvious,
presenting an apparently unanticipated and surprising
event, financialisation obeys a creeping logic by which
finance gradually extends itself in a fashion often
unnoticed because of its very gradualism. Thus the
place of finance in the university becomes obvious,
for instance, in the manner in which the finance
company Harvard Management Company, a fully
owned subsidiary of Harvard University which is
responsible for managing the largest endowment fund
of any university, lost US$8bn, which was 22% of its
holdings, in the wake of the global financial crisis. But
the logic of financialisation that I propose to outline
here is much more workaday and mundane. Yes, as
the world turns financialisation brings about crisis
after crisis. But financialisation signals the routine
operation of finance not in open crisis but involved
instead in the process of the reworking of worlds,
whereby the concepts, techniques and metaphors of
finance increasingly come to order life.
The notion of logics that governs this text is drawn
in significant part from the work of Alain Badiou.10 In
this sense logic refers beyond the narrow notion of
formal or ordinary logic, and refers more broadly to
48

the appearing of a world in which objects and

relations are ordered or indexed according to a
particular operator that appears transcendental.
Hence if the positions of this or that Minister of
Tertiary Education are inconsistent or irrational with
respect to the demands of formal logic, within an
expanded sense of logic it becomes possible to
explain the way in which they obey a certain
consistency. It is this consistency, which I will suggest
here is given by the logic of finance, that must be
grasped, in spite of or maybe because of any
breaches of what in the university used to be called
judgement, reason and logic.
***
If there is a positive side to the financial crisis that
came to public attention in late 2008 then it is in the
dawning public recognition of the power of finance
and its centrality not only to the economy, but to other
aspects of life in societies in which the capitalist mode
of production prevails. The power of finance has
become visible not only in times of financial crisis,
during which financial flows at the local, national or
global level enter into systemic instability. What has
become unmistakeable today is the place of a broader
process of financialisation that was set in train in the
early 1970s and is today pivotal to the economic and
social realities of capitalist economies.
A significant and flourishing scholarly literature now
documents the profound historical depth of finance
and with this the dynamics of credit and debt.11 This
literature makes clear that finance is not a dusty
numerical technology nor a logic of abstraction distant
or removed from the real economy of work and
material production. This research into both the history
of finance and the daily experience of financialised
life is beginning to make clear that this technology of
financial speculation brings with it capacities for social
reconfiguration that exceed the dreams of the greatest
of speculative minds.
The reach of the logic of finance expanded
considerably with the collapse of the Bretton Woods
agreement in 1971, with the end of the gold standard
for the US dollar and with this the floating of
international exchange rates consolidated in 1973
with the Smithsonian Agreement. The 1970s witnessed
a radical financialisation of the economy which
involved, amongst other things, the rise in importance
of financial activities as a source of profits, the rise
of shareholder value in corporate governance, the
increasing power of the financial class and the
explosion of financial trading and the trade in new
financial instruments.12
Significantly, this process of financialisation included
not simply a rise in the power and profitability of the
financial sector but a transformation of the operation
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of the capitalist economy more broadly. This involved

a change in the nature of profit seeking and corporate
governance. This process of financialisation was felt
across a range of economic activities and also
increasingly in the operating activities of previously
not for profit organisations.

Zealand tend by and large to see no alternative and

no problem. Understanding some of the
consequences of the financialisation of the university
might make space for discussion about the desirability
of such processes.
***

Thus financialisation is not simply a thing that can

be observed in ways of running business and other
organisations. It is also, as Randy Martin has stressed,
a way of seeing, a way of presenting objects in a
particular way and understanding things. As he writes
in his landmark book Financialization of Daily Life,
financialisation is both something to be explained
and a way of making sense out of what is going on
around us.13
At this level, financialisation involves a change in
interpretive criteria, in which all manner of activities
come to be interpreted and understood in terms of
finance. This is a process in which not merely the
world that we sense is subjected to financial criteria,
but in which the ability to sense the world follows a
financial logic. Here the concepts, techniques and
metaphors of finance stand not only as objects in
the world but as ways in which the world is
experienced and interpreted. In what can be called
the financialisation of the senses, one comes to
relate to the world in terms of investment, risk,
speculation, hedging and profit.
***
My argument is that the dynamics of financialisation
hold clues vital for understanding the situation of the
university today. The struggle over the future of the
university today involves understanding the logic by
which it is being run, in order to know, firstly, what we
are up against. This is important because the university
has been subjected to a logic of financialisation both
at the most obvious level of financial imperatives and
also in the interpretive sense that is made of the idea
of the university.15
It would not be possible here to give an adequate
account of the full consequences of the financialisation
of the university. The variety of concepts, techniques
and metaphors that move from finance into the
university have differential impact in their application
in particular sites, characterised as they are by
different inflections of the same situation. It is also
important to note the vast strength of the forces that
have in recent years set about resisting the
financialisation of the university, and their relations
to other movements in schools and in defense of
resources and faculties that have been protected so
that they can be held in common. What I will sketch
here is the hard end of a logic that has been
implemented in some contexts with considerable
force, and to which many in a country such as New
049

Perhaps the most publicly visible aspect of the

financialisation of the university appears around
student tuition fees and, along with this, student debt.
The history of tuition fees has frequently had recourse
to financial motifs. The Wall Street Crash of 1987 was
the backdrop against which financial arguments were
made to justify the introduction of tuition fees in New
Zealand in 1989. Likewise the financial crisis of 2008
served as the background to the Browne Report of
2010 in the United Kingdom presaging the raising of
tuition fees from 3,000 to up to 9,000.
But financialisation does not operate simply at this
most obvious level of taking financial crisis as an
opportunity for fees hikes. Financialisation of the
senses involves coding social situations in terms of
the categories of finance. Legitimation of fee rises in
financial terms is one thing, but more important are
arguments that seek to persuade students to think
of tertiary education as an investment in oneself that
one undertakes in order to position oneself in the
future labour market.
The Browne Report therefore claims: For all students,
studying for a degree will be a risk free activity. The
return to graduates for studying will be on average
around 400%.16 What this means is that students are
seen as, and encouraged to see themselves as, not
a potential worker but human capital into which they
are enjoined to invest. This represents the emergence,
in theory since the middle of the twentieth century
and in tertiary education practice since the 1970s, of
what Michel Foucault identified as a new conception
of homo conomicus , in which the person is
conceived of as an entrepreneur of himself, being for
himself his own capital, being for himself his own
producer, being for himself the source of his earnings.17
In this conception of the human being we find what
Foucault identified as the individual considered as
an enterprise, i.e., as an investment/investor.18
Of course human beings are not as malleable as is
often imagined, and attempts to conceive of people
and to have them conceive of themselves in particular
terms are rarely as successful as is hoped. It is exactly
the refusal of students to think of themselves as a
little finance capitalist which explains the fury of
those such as the Minister of Tertiary Education at
students making what appear to him as irrational
choices about what to study, and why he would later
commission a report documenting exactly how much
graduates with particular degrees stand to earn.19
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What is important in such documents is the framing

of questions regarding the outcomes for young
people who complete a qualification in the New
Zealand tertiary education system and in the way in
which information in the report can help young people
as they make decisions about what to study.20 While
there is certainly a framing of outcomes in narrow
financial terms, the statistics in the report show that
the differential consequences of degree choices are
(with but a few exceptions) much smaller than obvious
gender effects and family socioeconomic and ethnic
background factors. Conceiving of students as human
capital is a technology for diverting attention away
from these factors and the concrete steps that can
be taken to remedy them.
This effort to make students calculate how they will
benefit is continually confronted by what appears to
the logic of finance as the recalcitrance of their stupid
wills. Financialisation is constantly reiterated and
reinstated because of its very fragility and its constant
failure. Students are told again and again to think of
the financial rewards of tertiary education exactly
because they see that there are quite other reasons
for participating in the university. This is also why so
much pressure is put on financial literacy programmes
in schools and in public culture with social marketing
campaigns to teach financial literacy. Such
programmes target those who are presumed to be
unable to understand finance and thus in need of
moral lessons in financial responsibility, in a forever
failing effort to constitute a youth that would be willing
to take on the categories of investment in self as
education.
If such educational efforts so often fail, it is in part
because they rub against the practical lessons of so
much else that is taught in the classroom and outside
it regarding participation in linguistic community. For
a generation that places so much value on
interconnectivity and the active participation in
culture, music and social networks, the financialisation
of self thus revises its target in the invitation to take
these vast cooperative networks as raw matter to be
pillaged in order to increase ones stock and future
advantages.
Yet whatever takes place at the subjective level,
students face the reality of being unplugged by the
cold reality of finance. This is a reality that moves
bodies even if minds remain elsewhere, although in
the movement of bodies there is of course a particular
pedagogy. Faced with the realities of financing study
and life while at university:
It would perhaps not be an exaggeration
to suggest that students spend more
time on personal financeapplying for
grants and student loans; waiting for the
50

same to come through; asking their

parents for financial support; arranging
overdrafts with bankers; finding another
part-time job to alleviate their debt than
on actual study. All the while, students
are asked to consider their very
education as an investment in their
future, as an enhancement to their
employability...their future saleability to
capital. This finance has its own
pedagogy.21
Finance has a pedagogy, but one which is always
incomplete. It is an act of considerable presumption
to imagine that students are fooled into believing that
they are nothing but capital. Thus the constant
irruption of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call
the undercommons of the university.22 The students
who have been protesting in recent years, those who
have taken over the student magazines in their
universities and those who have written for this issue
of this journal are expressing this very clearly. They
are calling the bluff on the presumption that they are
human capital rather than workers and citizens. They
are telling us that so many of their classrooms are an
open sham, in which they can pass their exams to
ward off necessity but they are fully aware of the
narrowness and bigotry of what they are taught, that
they visit libraries or more often raid online document
repositories to source materials that blow holes in
what they are taught in the classroom. They know that
to learn the history of their disciplines is heretical and
that to study is a subversive act. They also know that
it is only in these heresies and subversions that they
can see the future of the university.23
***
If financialisation is overtly or covertly resisted by
students, the ramifications for those employed as
academics and administrators in the university are
fraught. Finance is a world of objectively measurable
performance that is oriented to producing
improvements towards a forever expanding future
horizon. Further, the logic of finance is premised on
differentials of performance and return. It is out of
numerically judged differentials that allocation of
investment and, in turn, heightened returns can be
delivered. Hence the need to remove all staff who do
not deliver and for the rest to be ranked and sorted
according to this new numerical machinery. If this is
perceived as violence then it can flare up into conflict
between administration and academics so, in the
interests of smooth operations, administrators seek
to channel this new differential antagonism into
conflict between individual academics, between
departments, and ultimately into conflict between
each and every university.
At the level of the university an almost universal
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presentation of self is offered, in which universities

present themselves in terms of the unique return that
they promise to offer to investors, be these students
or businesses seeking to benefit from speculative
investment in research.
The practical consequences of finance manifest
themselves visibly in the practice of ranking. Just as
the logic of finance converts business corporations
from profit maximising and reputational mechanisms
into vehicles for reliable indexes of shareholder value,
in the university this means the replacement of
excellence with ranking tables. Under finance such
measures are constantly shifting and therefore every
element of the university must be directed towards
constantly rising shareholder value according to the
latest measure. Shareholder value is a composite
measure depending on many factors constantly in
balance rankings of research, student employability,
student rankings, ability to attract research grants
and staff.
The university thus saw the remarkable rise of ratings
agencies in a history of striking consistency with the
rise of ratings agencies in the world of finance since
the 1970s. As ratings agencies both radically
transformed their criteria and moved towards the
virtual oligopoly of agencies dominated by Fitch,
Standard and Poors and Moodys, under the logic of
finance the university is under equal pressure to
become an instrument priced in terms of reliability
and return, indicators judged at the juncture of
research assessment exercises, student association
surveys and the rankings of international newspapers.
The problem with ratings agencies is not only with
the measures they use, but the fact that their measures
are known in advance and, as a result, steps are taken
to manipulate them. This is widely known in finance,
where the gaming to satisfy ratings agencies has
taken on its own dynamic of complexity that is vastly
in surplus of the capacities of the ratings agencies,
and of the widely present appearance of risk
management so as to create the impression of riskfree investment.24 The presence of gaming in the
rating of academic research is also widely known,
which accounted for the recent abandonment of the
Excellence in Research journal rankings by the
Australian Research Council. But despite this
abandonment, these journal rankings retain a strange
undead presence in which they are used even more
cynically than before, with a knowing wink regarding
their illegitimacy.
***
Almost in spite of government rankings comes the
dynamic of monopoly formation in the academic
publishing industry. The new leaders of the academic
publishing industry such as Elsevier, Springer and
051

Wiley regularly make yearly returns on investment in

excess of 30%, with Elsevier making a 37% profit in
2011, which represents a return of 768m on
capitalisation of 2.06bn.25 Such corporations have
over the past two decades formed into a small number
of massive cartels, which not only claim monopoly rents
controlling exclusive access to publications without
which scientific research is all but impossiblebut also
extort their profits out of state funding of university
libraries and the almost entirely unpaid labour of
academics who write and review scientific research.
With financialisation in frame, however, it is possible
to see not only this financial logic, but what happens
to the content that is speculated on in the process.
What is important here is the way that financial trading
produces a certain abstraction from the concrete
particularities of the object traded, such that the trade
focuses not on the thing traded itself but on the relation
between two or more possible objects of trade, which
is coded in terms of risk and return. Taken to its logical
conclusion, the logic of finance unhindered involves a
radical dematerialisation in which the matter of the
tradewhich is of course the fundamental reason it
will ever be exchangedbecomes of a marginal
importance from the position of finance and those
prosecuting its logic.
This goes some way to explaining the logics of
contemporary publishing, in which a concern for pure
differentiation and rankings external to the product
comes to occupy centre stage. Thus the criterion of
publishability becomes a matter of differentiation, of
producing a commodity that can be brought to market
because of a tradability as both consistent with a
specific market but also offering something innocuously
unique. Likewise the flourishing of new journals, in ever
more differentiated sub-specialisms and with their own
internal criteria of selection that refuse to admit the
discredit they would face if they were to look outside
for validation.
In this absence, the authority that comes to adjudicate
is that of pure arbitrage or risk-free returns of
speculative investment. This comes to govern not only
the student investing in themselves and the university
seeking improved rankings, but decisions about what
should be researched, which researchers and research
students should be employed, who should be promoted
and granted tenure. These come to be determined not
by their contribution to reason, justice or well-being,
which are dismissed by the logic of finance as abstract
and pointless if not self-serving and meaningless
jargon. Research funds thus seek out the greatest
chance of risk-free returns, and in the technosciences
and the technologies of human manipulation it strikes
gold. Thought and the struggle for justice retreat to
the undercommons, bubbling away slowly under
mountains of research that its authors realise and
quietly admit is corrupt.
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***
What is at stake with the financialisation of the
university is thus a question of the criteria and
categories through which judgement are made. The
financialisation of the university involves a
transformation in the very idea of the institution, its
participants and social functions. These changes go
far back in time and have complex roots, which we
are here identifying as part of a logic of financialisation.
This is a logic, I stress, that is not irrational but rather
encodes a quite particular sense of rationality, in which
rationality and logic take on radically new meanings.
From within this logic, any question of its contradictions
or limits simply do not add up.
This, I submit, is the reason why there are today so
many works being published that ask what the idea
of the university is and means.26 It is also the reason
for the void that has been opened up at the heart of
the university and for the international student
movements that have exploded, wave after wave,
throughout the world in response to the logic often
described as austerity or alternatively as good
governance in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.
The revolt against such ideas is at the heart of the
current international student movements, from the
Edu-Factory collective to the Committee on
Revolutionizing the Academy (ComRAD) and We Are
The University (WATU).

It may well be true that the logic of finance is making

political economists of all of us, in the sense that
whatever our ostensible disciplinary affiliation, we are
now all being subjected to the logics of finance.
Beyond this, as the logic of finance threatens to
destroy what we knew before as the logic of logic and
its house of last resort, there is a definite sense in
which finance is equally in the process of turning all
who care for the university to revolt. In the name of
moderation and the continuation of a comfortable
life, many will say that the logic of finance does not
exist or that in the end it must make good sense. But
the more we learn about the logic and realities of
finance and what it is doing to the university, to society,
and to the prospects of thought as such, the more
we start to realise that our students in revolt are not
only right, but that it is time to join them.

What is important to understand is that these revolts

are taking place for a reason. They obey a certain
logic of their own, and are in a quite specific sense
logical revolts.27 They are revolts that follow a
particular logic of a defense of principles but, beyond
this, a defense of that institution of logic itself, the
university, and those who inhabit it. Moreover, these
movements are not looking back nostalgically to an
imagined pure past of the university that never existed,
but are struggling in the name of what the university
and more generally what a generalised collective
intelligence is and in the future might be able to create.
The impact of the logic of finance in the university is
far from complete, and the undercommons still live
on. This incompletion is due to the magnitude of the
ambition of the logic of finance and is also due to the
fact that it is a logic that runs counter to so many
previously established logics that govern the rationale
for and functioning of the university. These logics
often appear in deeply ingrained dispositions of those
working in the university, dispositions that often make
them appear unworldly or retrograde to those who
inhabit other worlds. We have here the conflict of two
logics, a logic of finance that is almost invisible to
those who are instituting it and is often merely baffling
or bizarre to those in the university who fail to notice
it, because it comes from somewhere that seems to
be outside of their area of specialism.
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1
If we are tempted to speak of the
financialization of everything
(David Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005, p. 39) then
it is important to remember that
this is not something that has
been achieved but is a process
underway and a process that
constantly encounters obstacles
along the way. The obstacles in
this case, of course, are clear:
students and academics, and
least in the former states of mind
and expectations. The obstacles,
more broadly: anything else that
does not deliver risk free return.
Hence, justice and logic, to begin
with.
2
Franco Berardi, The Uprising:
Finance and Poetry (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 39.
3
The financialisation of the
university thus radically
extends and differs in
significant respect from the
important transformations
outlined in earlier critiques
by, amongst many others,
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984) and
Bill Readings, The University in
Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
4
Claire Trevitt, Minister to
students: "Keep your heads
down', New Zealand Herald, 27
September 2011. Online at http://
www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/
article.cfm?c
5
See my Why the students are
revolting, Scoop Independent
News, 8 June 2012. Online at
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/
HL1206/S00038/why-thestudents-are-revolting.htm
6
Statistics New Zealand
information on unemployment
can be found in the quarterly
Household Labour Force Survey
which can be found at http://www.
stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/
income-and-work/employment_
and_unemployment/householdlabour-force-survey-inforeleases.aspx
7

Simon Collins, Skills crisis:

Ministers threat to uni on
funding, New Zealand Herald, 19
November 2012. Online at http://
www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/
article.cfm?c
8
International comparisons of
tertiary tuition fees can be found
in, for instance, the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) Education
at a Glance 2012: OECD
Indicators. OECD publishing,
September 2012 revision, p.
274. Online at http://www.oecd.
org/edu/EAG%202012_e-book_
EN_200912.pdf

053

9
Stuart McCutcheon, Uni
rankings fall a big worry, New
Zealand Herald, 30 April 2012.
Online at http://www.nzherald.
co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_
id=1&objectid=10802329
10

See, above all, Alain Badiou,

Logics of Worlds: Being and
Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano
(London: Continuum, 2009),
and on the distinction between
greater logic and ordinary logic
see in particular pp. 173-82.
11

Amongst this vast literature

see, for example, Ian Baucom,
Specters of the Atlantic:
Finance Capital, Slavery and the
Philosophy of History (New York:
Duke University Press, 2005),
William Hogeland, Founding
Finance: How Debt, Speculation,
Foreclosures, Protests and
Crackdowns Made Us a Nation
(Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 2012); Massimo Amato
and Luca Fantacci, The End of
Finance (Cambridge: Polity, 2012);
Mary Poovey, Genres of the
Credit Economy: Mediating Value
in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
2008); and David Graeber, Debt:
The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn,
NY: MelvilleHouse, 2011).
12

Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on

Crisis: The Political Origins of
the Rise of Finance (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press,
2011). See also Eward Engelen,
The case for financialization,
Competition and Change (2008),
12(2): 111-119; Gerald Epstein
(ed) Financialization and the
World Economy (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar, 2006); Ben Fine,
Locating financialisation,
Historical Materialism (2010), 18:
97-118 and Costas Lapsavitsas
(ed) Financialization in Crisis
(London: Haymarket, 2012).
13
Randy Martin, Financialization
of Daily Life (Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press, 2002).
14

This financialisation of the

senses is one element of what
I am elaborating elsewhere in
terms of the world of finance.
15

The reclaiming of the university

in the name of charity...[is]...
crucially reliant upon a critique
of finance and accounting
in contemporary university
governance. Armin Beverungen,
Casper Hoedemaekers and
Jeroen Veldman, Charity and
finance in the university, Critical
Perspectives on Accounting (in
press).
16

John Browne, Baron Brown

of Madingley, Securing a
Sustainable Future for Higher
Education: An Independent
Review of Higher Education
Funding and Student Finance
(2010), online at www.
independent.govt.uk/brownereport

17

Michel Foucault, The

Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures
at the Collge de France,
1978-1979, trans. Graham
Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2008), p. 226.
18

Foucault, Ibid., p. 233 n.

19

Ministry of Education, Moving on

Up: What Young People Earn After
Their Tertiary Education (Ministry
of Education, 2013). Online at
http://www.educationcounts.
govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_
file/0014/115430/moving-on-upwhat-young-people-earn-aftertheir-tertiary-education.pdf
20

Ministry of Education, op cit., p. 1.

27

See the accounts of logical

revolts that Jacques Rancire
documents in Staging the People:
The Proletarian and His Double,
trans. David Fernbach (London:
Verso, 2011) and The Intellectual
and His People: Staging the
People, Volume 2, trans. David
Fernbach (London: Verso, 2012).
Alternatively, Badiou writes
'Philosophy is something like a
logical revolt. Philosophy pits
thought against injustice, against
the defective state of the world
and of life. Yet is pits thought
against injustice in a movement
which conserves and defends
argument and reason, and which
ultimately proposes a new logic'.
Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought,
trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin
Clemens (London: Continuum,
2003), p. 39.

21

Armin Beverungen,
Stephen Dunne and Casper
Hoedemaekers, The university
of finance, ephemera: theory and
politics in organization (2009),
9(4): pp. 261-70, p. 265.
22

Stefano Harney and Fred

Moten, The Undercommons:
Fugitive Planning and Black
Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor
Compositions/Autonomedia,
2013).
23

See the University of Auckland

student magazine, for example: It
is now undeniable. The university
is fucked. There is no other way
of putting it. Any form of life
that is not fully subsumed by the
logic of capital is currently being
expelled from campus (Guy
Cohn, The figure of the student,
Craccum, Summer School Edition,
2012). Another student writes
directly about their professor:
After the first few weeks [. . .] I
became increasingly concerned
about what I was being taught
[. . .] I found that what I was
learning was incredibly alarming
[. . .] The more I learned [. . .] the
more frustrated I became [. . .]
As I looked around the lecture
theater of at least 150 students
I started to think about how
much students were paying to
learn this sketchy science (Lola
Thompson, Should we be paying
to be taught climate denial?,
Craccum, 001, 2012).
24

See for example the account

provided by Alexandra Ourousoff,
Wall Street at War: The Secret
Struggle for the Global Economy
(Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
25

See for example Brought

to book: Academic journals
face a radical shake-up The
Economist, 21 July 2012. Online
at http://www.economist.com/
node/21559317
26

This issue of Argos Aotearoa

is reflective of this, as are,
for instance, Stefano Collini,
What Are Universities For?
(London: Penguin, 2012); Michael
Bailey and Des Freeman (eds)
The Assault on Universities:
A Manifesto for Resistance
(London: Pluto, 2011).

53

Argos
AotearoaThe
university
beside revolt
itself
Campbell
JonesFinance,
universty,

Securing our future

54

054

The subject
of chance
and decision

Henri Carlos & Guy Cohn

Photo: Dan Liu

057

Henri Carlos
& Guy
CohnThe university
subject of beside
chance itself
and decision
Argos
AotearoaThe

Where to begin?
Between the beginning of 2011 and the end of 2012, we tried to
expose the reality of university life. We are here to take credit:
we, the characters who exist outside the determination of
capitalist democracy! As anyone who has ever written any thing
should know but of course they dont because they have
the logics of a whole world against them! the production of
each and ever y I ser ves to produce each and ever y instance
of writers block. It is only when we reject the imposition of
oneness by the world as it is that the truth can be written! The
madness of any prophet is nothing compared to the madness
of the academic writing her journal articles!
Our emergence was international: we are sustained by
radical texts written in occupied universities around the
world, by revolutionaries throughout histor y. Locally,
our being took shape in the tenuous spaces for critical
thought car ved out in the formal studies of the academy,
the informal studies of reading and discussion groups,
and innumerable friendships and enmities. We were
made possible by the chance presented by a number
of impending policies, including, but not limited to, our
university administrations moves to reduce the autonomy
of academic workers, and our government s policy to
co-opt student associations by taking away their power
of expropriation. We were made concrete by that which
transmits chance into a subject proper: decision! Yet we
claim to be nothing more nothing less! than
prophets of the eternal truth of the reality of equality:
for the realisation of a world against hierarchy; the end
of capitals dictation!
One need only experience the collective fer vour of an
occupied university to understand how much energy
is siphoned into the individuation of each universitys
subjects. On 14 September 2011, we are unashamed to
say, we experienced this fer vour. In the librar y basement
of the University of Auckland, a teach-in provided the
space for the coalescence of elements on the border
of a situation. A discussion about the reality of the
university; a presentation of examples of student struggles
internationally; exposure of the techniques of repression
employed by university administrations . Point by point,
a subjective determination to affirm our presence and to
break with inexistence led to an occupation: the erecting of
barricades and the drafting of demands! This event was the
beginning of the subjectivation to which we belong.
By subjectivation we mean the process through which
a new body with the ability to act in and on the world
is organised. Subjectivation, as organisation, need not
necessarily take the form of an organisation; it is better
conceptualised as the process of organisation itself, from
which an organisation, or many organisations, may or may
not be found to be necessar y.

058

Henri
Carlos
& Guy CohnA
chance
to decide
Argos
AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself

In the wake of the occupation, we practised and we

experimented. We tried through our numerous frustrations
to follow through with the consequences of what had
happened without being trapped in the mire of identity.
The war machine against the state. The impulsive desire
towards formalising a group with a coherent identity
seemed almost to universally have the consequence of desubjectivation and contraction; we would not let our desire
be subsumed by such pettiness! We would not forget the
necessar y consequences!
As the claim We are the university! became the catch
cr y of the process taking place, we found ourselves in a
struggle against the simple becoming of a particular, named
group; against saying we are We are the University; a battle
against the suture; a struggle against common sense! We
proposed that this was merely a possible phrasing of the
claim that had surged forth from our collective enquiries; it
was far better understood as a slogan than an identity, and
all slogans are quickly saturated! Could we apply the same
analysis to the revolutionar y outbursts of the twentieth
centur y? The Communist Party', what a slogan! We are but
the Party of Communists!
To claim We are the university! but not to say we are We
are the University. Again and again, we were presented
with points at which the truth would be contested: could the
process in which we were participating be enclosed within
the circle of a group, or does such an enclosure work to
delimit the possibilities that present themselves, which is to
say, prevent possibilities from becoming present? Both in
theor y and practice this was a real problem. We could even
go so far as to say it was on this dialectic that ever y thing
rested: the dialectic of an organised fraction and its
outside. We can hardly say the problem was solved; indeed
we would say the lesson is that maintaining this problem as
a problem is the only real solution.
The Situation
From whence we came!
There was little in the way of real politics on the Auckland
campus at the beginning of 2011. There was, of course, the
presence of various political groups and institutions such
as the student association and a number of labour unions,
but these were all thoroughly subsumed by the logics of
management and administration: the student association
and unions severely compromised by their place within
the overall configuration of power; the political groups,
whether mainstream parties or organisations of the radical
left, largely focused on maintaining their existence through
recruitment. These apparatuses, even under their most
subversive pretences, tend to function so as to reaffirm
conventional reality.
Of course, it would be wrong to say that there was no
politics at all; but if we understand politics as the process
of asserting the capacity for thought which leads the
way to overcoming the banality of life subsumed by the
motivations of capital, then politics found itself repressed

059

Henri Carlos
& Guy
CohnThe university
subject of beside
chance itself
and decision
Argos
AotearoaThe

by the desire for order, and other internal limits, most

notably, the internal limit of so-called democracy.
The possibility of real politics existed in the cracks of
the order maintained both in society at large and within
the university situation in particular; an order in which
society is subsumed by the dictates of capital and the
social relations it foments. The conscious and affirmational
desire for the transcendence of societys subsumption was
generally ushered into the margins of formal study. There
in the under-commons there would be reading and writing,
and the kernel of new movements. These endeavours
included a collective which itself sprang from the formal
study of a number of students; a reading group involving a
number of academics and students; and a cartel for theor y
organised by students as a rejoinder to the condescension
of soft entr y into texts via speed reading and introductor y
guides. These pockets were sites of potential, yet to see
the threshold crossed from theor y into practice. As well as
these somewhat conscious pockets there existed and
continue to exist innumerable unconscious pockets
of resistance to power without any coherent idea in
development. We must admit we were few but it is the
yeast that makes the bread!
For us, the existence of such potential had a strong
correspondence to what could be more or less openly
studied in the different spaces of the university. In our
experience, this was most strongly the case wherever
theor y could resist the injunction to do nothing more
than gather data for the encyclopaedia, or proffer in the
disingenuous demand for objectivity. This was ver y much
contingent on who happened to be teaching where, and
always subject to change. While it is clearly true that the
university largely ser ves to subvert any radical thought
into writing papers for journals which no one ever reads
and books which no one could care less about ', it is
also important to state that this is not necessar y. The
subversion of radical desire into the tedium of academia is
contingent not only on the existing state of things, but also
on the failure of that desire to find its true consequence.
It is both a failure of structure and a failure of subjectivity.
We must always work against the cowardly figure of the
academic, who hides behind the empty admission of
privilege, who demands to speak and will not listen, and who
will not link arms against the violence of the situation when
it is revealed.
The radical academics and rebellious students found
lurking in the cracks of the university make up its Imaginar y
Party. Evidence of their membership is found in the small
deeds of introducing each other to ideas that expose
the contingency of the present way of things, and their
atomised resistance to the power that bears down upon
them. It is in this Party of the Imaginar y that we found each
other. Whereas previously there was the ver y real presence
of the Party as the dominant form of emancipator y politics,
today the ver y concept of the Party is in tatters; resistance
is fragmented, atomised, disorganised. The Imaginar y Party
makes potential the idea that the seemingly spontaneous

060

Henri
Carlos
& Guy CohnA
chance
to decide
Argos
AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself

outbursts of resistance we find in recent histor y, whether

they be the recalcitrance of the workforce or the riots of the
poor, find a potentially unif ying principle in the possibility of
an imaginar y recognition of a shared project.
The importance of those precursor y classes and study
groups, despite their flaws, lay in their providing a space
for the encounters through which we began to find each
other. It was only with those first cautious leanings
coming out with our thoughts and desiresthat what
followed could: anxiety and its transgression. As these
elements began their movement towards amalgamation,
there existed a deep current of fear and anxiety toward
any real engagement. Pseudo-activity always seems an
easier option than taking any risk. We might say then that
overcoming fearfear of punishment, fear of failure, fear
of looking ridiculousnecessitated a subjective forcing .
This was a decision to abandon our fear and carr y out the
consequences of truths exposure; only with the necessar y
intensities will the permanence of our new present take
hold. We must take sides and organise. In the beginning,
there was not a problem of the head, but of the body and
its acts.
The Event
We were the inexistent!
The teach-in in the librar y basement on 14 September 2011
was the event with which the real subjectivation began,
ushering in a shift beyond the realm of the imaginar y and
into the real. The event coalesced around a happenstance
sequence from which a number of points would emerge
and genuine decisions would be made. Insofar as decisions
were made, they were made , created from the new field
of possibility we had exposed. These real decisions are
something that can only be made between what is given
and what is impossible to know, beyond inane and arbitrar y
choices, constructed in the radical prospect for change and
endowed upon a situation through chance.
The teach-in constituted a site', a part of the world apart
from the world, at the edge of the void', which, while being
within the contemporar y situation of capitalist democracy,
managed to avoid the overbearing power structures of
that situation. A site has some degree of autonomy as a
place from which the contingency and precarity of the
existing order can be seen, yet a site is itself contingent
and precarious. The teach-in was such a site within the
university under capitalist democracy; evidence is found
in the fact that the participants came to terms with the
reality of the power structures that dominate the university
under this capitalist democracy, and from there actively
rejected them; the participants ignored the demands
of the university administration's proxies the university
administrations proxies, and car ved out a space for
thought not subject to the ordinar y constraints which the
university places on thinking.
The university, within the wider political context, is
counted as something that produces a quantifiable

061

Henri Carlos
& Guy
CohnThe university
subject of beside
chance itself
and decision
Argos
AotearoaThe

product, made manifest in the symbolic register of the

market, whether it is performance based research scores
for academics, the entrepreneurial gamble of student
debt, or an obscure patent mined from neuroscience,
engineering or pharmacology. So-called knowledge is
contained, numerated and circulated. The subjective side
to the university, the capacity for study to lead to its own
independent conclusions, is glossed over, over written
in the language and the logic of finance. And it is in the
reversal of the way the university counts for the state that
we can find the possibility for something not subsumed by
the dominant logics of the world as it is structured. From
the point of view of that which the state glosses overthe
point of view of thought which follows its consequences
without compromising its principlesit is possible to
think a rupture with the dominant logics of today, and act
in support of this. For us, one of the ways such thought
and activity assumed a new consistency was through the
formulation of demands that corresponded to different
logics, unleashing the university from the dictates of the
market and accumulation, and creating the university of
taking-place and defending it from the police!
The claim We are the university! would put into words
what the event had exposed. Despite the teach-in itself
being shut down by university administration and the cops,
in maintaining the truth of what we had discussed, we
claimed that the real university existed precisely in those
spaces that are not sanctioned. In fact, the reality of the
universitythe students, academics, workers, and broader
communitywhich should count for ever y thing, counted
for nothing unless subsumed by the rationale of capitalist
democracy. And, yet, it is precisely this minimal existence
that could be turned into actual subjectivation.
The we in question cannot be captured in a specific
counted off group; we has indeterminacy, such that the
claim We are the university', despite being proclaimed
by a particular group of people, summons forth the we of
all who are not counted. The university event makes exist
that whose inexistence sustains the university as one, not
just students, but the broader community itself. What we
saw was the possibility for the coming into existence of
the entire contingent community in the university and the
capacity for a subjectivation that could build relations that
reach beyond the confines of the university as such.
Fidelity
Faith in dis-integration!
The question then became one of endurance: with the
realisation that rupture, which first seemed impossible, is
possible , how might it become possible that this rupture
endures? It is a question of fidelity. Firstly, it is a question
of subjectivation, and then, for the endurance of that
subjectivation, it is a question of fidelity. The university
under capitalist democracy has become a manifest
operation in discouraging ideas, of separating, segmenting
and allocating parts; if we think of an idea as that which
mediates between the world and its truth, we can say that

062

Henri
Carlos
& Guy CohnA
chance
to decide
Argos
AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself

the university under capitalist democracy is a space in

which hoarding and gathering information happens, often
in the absence of ideas. Thought in this environment is
something more often than not foreclosed or confined.
Politics then, as a kind of thought, is in contradiction
with the manufactured consensus of the university under
capitalist democracy, in which real political thought is
already foreclosed or confined to the margins. Again, the
figure of the academic cries, We have plenty of ideas
yes, but those ideas are little more than the contents of
an encyclopaedia that is ruled by the lies that sustain the
current state of things.
The state of the modern university is part of a wider
ideological situation. The question is: what role does the
university play in reproducing contemporar y ideology?
We found ourselves within the university, and made the
simple assertion that it was possible, from within the cracks
of the university, to have an affect . There is little point
fetishising the university as it stands as a place that has
any clear process for affecting contemporar y ideology. For
it seems that it is precisely in the cracks of such unclear
processes that the inertia of this period we find ourselves in
can be disrupted.
The question arises of severing the links of incorporation
that interpellate individuals into being realistic about
what changes can be made. When we engage, we realise
that this constant recourse to reality is precisely the
operation that needs to be broken down, and the only way
to do that is with ideas ; ideas that propose alternatives
to this so-called reality, the kind of ideas that are brutally
policed out of the picture.
How do we convince people to join us? someone will
ask. Avoiding the temptation of action for its own sake is
important insofar as, without the thought necessar y to
guide it, action is destined to merely fulfil a reproductive
role: to drain our bio-power. We do not need to implement
bureaucracy when we come to terms with disorganisation
as the ground for all politics. Bureaucracy, as that which
seeks to cover for disorganisation, only to give it the power
of an empty coercion, emerges in the ignorance of our
collective capacity to think, to speak, and to meet, that is,
to graft on to the points that can resuscitate the subject!
And so we need new political subjects. We call into question
the moment when thinking breaks down and actions
become aimless; we can point to this as the moment that
subjectivation stalls, as the moment where the figure of the
student as a political subject realises a certain impotence.
Individuals will coalesce around a totem of discouragement,
taking lessons in strategy from the already incorporated
unions, from particularist community groups and freelance
re-enactors of a bygone era. The narrative will turn to
a lack of skills and the moderate incrementalism of
small victories and membership numbers. The archaic
vanguardists will attempt to fill the lull with the recurrence
of dead slogans. This incorporation operates at the level of
police. An identity will only fall neatly into the enumerable

063

university
beside
itself
Henri Carlos Argos
& Guy AotearoaThe
CohnThe subject
of chance
and
decision

play of differences and offer us up for representation . . .

to disintegrate. We must dis-integrate from the imaginar y
of capitalist democracy. We are not here to set up a false
dichotomy between real and imaginar y politics, but when
asked, who are we' , it is in answering that we become who
we might be.
A Wager
The figure of the student and the characters of a world
to come!
The figure of the studenta decision, a throw of the dice, to
play the part in the name of the waves'is one that belongs
to today. After the warrior and after the soldier, they are
dead! Good riddance, we fear their return! Students have
always had to defend themselves; we have had to defend
ourselves! So much fear derives from our lack of faith in our
own ability to defend ourselves. Before we can withhold our
might we must come to terms with it.
The figure of the student bears witness to the possibility
of an immanent transgression of the situation. From the
bureaucrats of the left, the same old ideas are trundled out
in a new package: abstraction. A thousand NGOs and their
wealthy backers are nothing compared to the capacity for
which the figure of the student makes way. To study, and
to decide.
We need to tell a new stor y; to tell a stor y anew; to hone our
imaginations; to set forth ideas not predestined to any empty
form from histor y. We must take care in the construction
of our tale. Our recital must be unconditional. To escape
our determination by the world as it is, let us all assume
characters, let even our characters assume characters, let
us get rid of ourselves .
First principles against presuppositions; decisions against
choices; truths against opinions; reality against process;
honesty against bureaucracy! We should be honest about
our own miser y, rather than merely relying on experts and
professional activists to tell us what is wrong with the world.
The challenge for us now is to reinvigorate the procedure
of thinking politics; to sustain thought at ever y stage, and
reject the unthinking imposed by identity as we find it. We
must theorise and think against ourselves, against ever y
micro-state that has been established in the imaginar y of
those who inhabit capitalist democracy. We must finally
craft in the cracks of this imaginar y the characters of a
world to come.

064

AotearoaThe university
beside itself
KarlsbergrArgos
& Mensonge(a)history
and classromm
consciousness

&

UfSO: (a)history
Marcus Karlsberg
A-History of the UfSO
For the uninitiated, UfSO is an acronym for the University for Strategic
Optimism. Initially, it was the University of Strategic Optimism, but
whoever made the logo got it wrong and we decided the mistake
was better anyway. USO, our original acronym of choice, was already
taken by the United Services Organisations, a not-for-profit that aims
to raise the morale of US soldiers, as well as being the stock market
abbreviation for United States Oil fund. Besides, we thought, better
to be for optimism than of it: better to be Bruce Willis in Die Hard than
some golden-haired child born under auspicious signs. And, as we
were forced to remind some professorial poetry pontiff who introduced
us with a certain amount of disdain at a conference, a strategic
optimism neednt contradict a felt pessimism.

Merry Capitalism
In any case, we were asked if we might do a history of the UfSO for
this, the education-themed inaugural issue of Argos. While it initially
seemed like a good idea, when I began to think about how this
might be done it appeared less so. My main unease with attempting
to historicise the UfSO comes from my experience of the brief yet
bombastic blip that was the student movement in the UK. I am also
conscious of the commitment this journal has to a sense of place, and
that that place is elsewhere to my own (although not entirely, given the
homogeneity of neo-liberal agendas internationally and the globalising
natures of the Euro-American model of the university).1 I neither want
to bore you with the internecine beef of an experience local only to us,
nor to engage in the auto-asphyxiating self-historicising practices that
characterised the movement here. Only to say this, that the engorged
desire of many student activists to transcribe their actions into history
as they happened stifled the movement by providing a sense that
everything had already been done, that resounding applause already
greeted our performance on the world-historical stage. (Even in quite
practical terms, this often made it quite hard to get at deserving doors
and windows because of the sheer number of cameras trying to record
any petty vandalism for profit and posterity.)

065

1. In the UK, Argos is the name of a large

chain of stores with a similar product range
to The Warehouse, the difference being
that goods are viewed via phonebook-like
catalogues, then item codes transcribed
from a digital box onto a betting slip and
taken to a cashier. You then wait, not unlike
Odysseus dog, for an unspecified period,
before your new toaster or whatever is
brought to a counter, the waiting being
the worklessness of the whole operation,
presumably.

65

Karlsberg & MensonageUfSO:

(a)history
& classroom
Argos AotearoaThe
university
besideconsciousness
itself

classroom consciousness

1. A police tactic of containment: surrounding

protesters in one area, often for hours,
waiting for them to freeze, starve, implode and
generally get put off demonstrating.

A History of the UfSO A Memoir

The revolution brings fine weather. Maybe. This wasnt a revolution but it
was a beautiful day nonetheless, a really beautiful day, it was the
beginning. Everyone was pretty angry, but joyful with it. We didnt know
each other then, weaving in and out, bumping into each other, coming
together, then apart again. A huge crowd, far bigger than anyone had
forecast, tumbled and roared and bowled through the streets. I can still
feel the lift in me, a rush, when I remember the sound of itchest puffed
out, fists clenched, throat open. Sky ablaze in blue, people clambered
over bus stops and fences, this felt like a mob, it sounded like one. A few
of us happened to be there, when it came through, the text: Theyve
occupied the Tory HQ'. Smiles flashed around. No wait, they got the
wrong building! Theyre gonna try the other one. Quickly racing down
Millbank in the opposite direction to a few thousand puzzled faces,
beaming under a sea of DIY cardboard and marker constructions. We
drew up gasping, a couple of dozen, shouting. One of our esteemed
professors, still not out of protest grad school at that point, produced an
egg and snapping back his arm, sent it spattering across the entrance
with a comedic pop. Half a dozen wide-eyed cops shifted nervously.
Then it went off, like a fucking rocket. The crowd swelled from nowhere,
and then swelled some more, must have been three, four, five-thousand,
more. And we stormed it, we fucking stormed it. Upon a sparkling lawn
of shattered glass, I saw friends emerge from the ransacked shell,
stepping under a theatrical curtain of shard and scraps, hanging down
on shreds of a ruined plastic backing. And we stood next to some
blazing office furniture thatd been dragged out into the courtyard and
torched. Someone handed me a cider. That was fun.
But it didnt really start then, it was after, back at base camp, an
appropriated conference table on a campus where we came and went
as we pleased. No ID scanning in those days. We made up a name,
a blog, a plan. Not much to it, just an email shout-out to a few good
people, and word of mouth. Someone did a reccy, drew up the plans of
a bank on a big board and pointed at it with a stick, its mystery location
only revealed last minute. This felt exciting, and the footage was great.
It was real lift, a feeling of optimism, it was a triumph as far as we were
concerned. If it had gone badly, who knows if it would have been all over
in a flash.

66

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AotearoaThe university
beside itself
KarlsbergrArgos
& Mensonge(a)history
and classromm
consciousness

The desire to heroise the present is distinctively modern, we are told.2

Yet now the virility of the heroism of the present is measured in likecounts, retweets, reposts, references, and other regurgitations. The
radical past can only be accessed in flattened and posterised form, all
is leveled for exchange with the presentplease complete a Captcha
before commenting so that we know your avatar is linked to a real . . . .
This isnt a criticism of social media; UfSO has a Twitter account, a blog,
a Facebook page (probably), although the pub remains our dearest
form of social mediation. The point is that what someone had for lunch,
their feelings about this or that TV show, becomes the benchmark for
what constitutes something worthy of historification. The present, the
energy of the present, becomes stifled by the need that it must be
recorded so that kudos can be tallied and awarded. The sustenance
provided by being part of an active movement becomes dreary, as any
immediacy suffers immediate representation.

2. Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow.

What is Enlightenment? In The Foucault
reader (London: Penguin Books, 1991
[1984]), p. 40.

I want to argue that, although the UfSOs primary medium was video
that hoped to become viral, our attempt was not to fabricate a history
book for ourselves, one that we would of course feature in heavily.
Instead of attempting to concoct some narrative that picks a path
through heady times, I want to have a critical look at what I now think
we were doing then, if that makes any sense, and reevaluate whether
there is anything that might be of strategic use to us now that the
movement here has whizzed round the room making a farting noise
before flopping on to the floor. By us, here, I mean more broadly those
of us inside institutional education in some way or another, who, faced
with attacks on a system that was far from perfect to begin with, find
ourselves navigating the vicissitudes of a position best described as:
in (defense of), against, and beyond.
To ensure that I am at least constant in the contradiction of myself, I will
begin by giving a brief blurb on the UfSO as no doubt most readers will
never have heard of us. The back of our collectively written attempt to
troll the genre of the student handbook gives our bio as follows:
The University for Strategic Optimism is a nomadic university
with a transitory campus, based on the principle of free and
open education, a return of politics to the public, and the
politicisation of public space.

The Tesco Lecture

067

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university
beside itself
Karlsberg & MensonageUfSO:
(a)history
& classroom
consciousness

So we gave the proverbial finger to a bank, in more eloquent,

theoretically couched terms, but not too much theory, it was praxis. We
gave the finger to Tesco, we held a conference in a kettle1a place that
felt more like a medieval battlefield as certain of the throng managed
to storm the treasury. Recollections of taking a piss in the centre of
Parliament Square flood back, looking up at spires, brittle with a spiteful
pretense at those same, false architectural claims to authority the
church had been heaping on us for centuries. Now it was eclipsed in
thick red and black smoke, cold air humming heavy with bass. Another
horse charge repelled with a phalanx of twisted fences. Someone poked
the establishment in the ribs with a sharp stick.
A favourite was the storming of Lewisham Town Hall on a Tuesday
evening or something, when our local council met to vote through the
massive cuts to local services, including closing down seven libraries.
The police turned up with horses and dogs as the pensioners joined
the fight. Someone swung on a chandelier and chased away the mayor,
someone was taking trophies from the cops, but it was all over in time
for a few pints before bed. It felt like the revolution was coming, for about
five minutes, but the pub still kept in business. Another fond memory
was the party we held at the university to repulse a speech-giving Tory
from the premises, an exuberant occasion. Tory Scum Fuck Off read
one banner, as we burst through the locked doors to the reception, and
calmly snatched the wine that someone had tried to hide under the
tables of the VIPs, just as some others hauled the sound system up the
stairs. It seemed that we did a lot of storming things in those days. That
didnt really last.
We kicked a conspiracy nut out for an explosion of dubious gender
politics, a few more fairweather friends fell by the wayside, but from
there on in it felt like a professional operation, tight. Invites poured in,
but there was a self-sustaining energy. Occupations came and went, all
good until someone fell off the roof trying to get sexy after drinking a
bottle of whiskey. From half a dozen London galleries trolling our inbox,
to university talks, conferences and radio shows, our smattering of
viral videos seemed to wear us thin with some mysterious kudos. The
movement was over and culture was desperate to catch up for a piece
of the (in)direct action. Radical chic. Someone stuck us in the New York
Times fashion supplement. From Goldsmiths conferences, where the
wine was good at least, to Chelsea art happenings, where it wasnt so
great, we followed the offers where theyd pay cash, which we could use
to buy megaphones, paint and other important armouries. That Chelsea
show was good for that, and wed fobbed them off with an old, cut-up
colouring book, a copy of Capital and a few dozen cocktail sausages.
After occupying this or that library, a government department seemed
a plausible target. To sell Tory pornos with monopoly money, cultural
capital to the suits of the Free Free Market Market would be easier than
expected. Someone dressed up as a clown and a swing band cringed
along to 80s hair metal, blockading the exit to the weekend. Some likeminded strangers in New York set up an international branch and carried
out like-minded interventions. Dazed, Vice, The Guardian offered us
column inches; we fed them half-truths and rolled our eyes
in embarrassment. Was this what selling out feels like? Or are
we furthering our cause (I have no idea what that is, short of full
communism). At the apex of the student movement, someone even
wanted to put us in the Museum of London, along with other protest
artifactsseems the Tower isnt how its done these days. That was one
offer we politely ignored.

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beside itself
KarlsbergrArgos
& Mensonge(a)history
and classromm
consciousness

3. University for Strategic Optimism.

Undressing the Academy: Or, the Student
Handjob (New York: Minor Compositions,
2011). Download at: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=272#more-272

To date, the UfSO has operated as a framework for the collective

production of political activity, as a space for study, discussion and
collective writing, as well as delivering a course of performative lecture
interventions in public spaces ranging from banks to supermarkets.3
In more day-to-day terms we were a group of students and
progressively leftalthough progressively less and lessacademic
staff. We formed after the protest that had seen the headquarters of
the Tory party smashed up in response to their announcement that
they would be tripling university fees and cancelling an allowance
that enabled children from under-privileged families to attend school.
Our initial decision about how we could contribute to the movement,
and how we could organise against the attacks on higher education,
led us to temporarily re-appropriate one of the bailed-out banks as a
classroom. We collectively wrote a lecture that was given by one of our
newly tenured UfSO Profs, arguing for a strategic optimism in the face
of the state sanctioned pessimism of austerity. Capitalism was failing
and flailing, the situation looked promising.

4. For their explanation of trash theory

see: Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a
Theory of the Young-Girl (Los Angeles,
Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 20 21. Prior
to this (14) they assure us, Listen: the
Young-Girl is obviously [?!] not a gendered
concept. Ill let Jennifer Lawrence in .gif
form respond: http://imgur.com/gallery/
seh6p (Oh yeah, [thumbs up].) Compare
trash theory with crude thinking: 'Nothing
is more important than learning to think
crudely. Crude thinking is the thinking of
great men [!?]. Bertolt Brecht, quoted in:
Ronald Hayman, Brecht: a biography (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.
182. Gender is crudely contrasted here,
yet meant only in the same way as any two
nouns chosen at random, say, hammer
and sickle, may be differently gendered in
German. Crude theory takes up the third
gender, neuter, in-between and in excess
of by being multiple hence polygendered
- the Young-Girl and the Great Man.

Importantly for the point I would like to make, nothing was worked
out completely at the level of theory. We theorised on the fly in a kind
of makeshift way that was in constant negotiation with our differing
viewpoints and the limitations of our concrete context. This type of
theorisation I would call something like crude theory, a basic tool-kit
or a pocketknife, as opposed to the trash theory expounded by those
Young-Girls over at Tiqqun.4 Banks had been bailed out by the public,
and universities faced funding cuts to help pay for it, we would use the
bank as a classroom. Being and Time this is not; Brecht on a bathroom
wall gets closer to my intended meaning.

5. What follows is some sort of indigested

tangle of Gayatri Spivak and Frederic
Jameson. For it to become crude
theory it would need to be argued about
collectively as a way of orientating or
informing collective action. Crude theory
would be whatever survived this process.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic
Education in the Era of Globalization
(Cambridge,: Harvard University
Press, 2012). And, Frederic Jameson,
Cognitive Mapping, in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson
et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1988), pp. 347 - 60.

Knowingly or not, the UfSO attempted to address the disorientation,

political and otherwise, that is caused by the fragmentation,
individualisation, and isolation that characterise life in contemporary
capitalism.5 Defragmentation is achieved in part by the process of
becoming collective that took place through the work and play of
planning actions and thinking through the conditions of our struggle.
However small, the collective is caustic to fragmentation, as long as
the borders of its praxis remain open. The disorientation that issues
from fragmentation suggests an inability to grasp the totality, and so
to position oneself within it. In a narrow sense, what I mean by totality
here is the sum of social relations that anyone finds themselves
connected to in any instantthinking the totality requiring nothing
short of a planetary thinking, then. Any attempt at apprehension
of totality is of course a fools gamble, an impossible and doomed
dash made out of the necessity to find coordinates by glimpsing the
whole. Batailles mad laughter ringing out in the Bibliothque Nationale
provides an apt soundtrack for any metaphorical leap made from part
out in to the unknown.6

6. Bataille below the line: librarian,

numismatist, philosopher, Georges
Bataille had a checkered employment
history at the Bibliothque Nationale.
As the story goes, peals of his maniacal
laughter would occasionally puncture the
somber silence. I hate the image of being
that is linked to separation and I laugh at
the recluse who thinks he is reflecting on
the world. He cannot really reflect on it
because by becoming himself the centre
of reflection, he no longer exists, just like
the worlds that disappear in all directions.
But when I realize that the universe does
not resemble any isolated being that is
closing on oneself but to what passes
from one being to the other, when we
burst out laughing or when we love one
another, at that moment the immensity of
the universe opens up to me and I become
confused with their flight. Georges
Bataille, Friendship, Parallax 7, no. 1
(2001), pp. 3 - 15.

The passage from the classroomto the differently organised and

political classroomto the bank-as classroomto the video of
bank as classroomperforms a mapping function. Throwing a small
pebble at the impenetrable force-field of the totality, perhaps. Yes,
the pebble can be said to have a line of flight, but that is not what is

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Karlsberg & MensonageUfSO:

(a)history
& classroom
Argos AotearoaThe
university
besideconsciousness
itself

Cropping up in books and articles, we decided to write our own, 100

(very) odd pages of puns, dirty jokes and militancy, to cut through the
dross in a space between the universitys glossy poverty manuals
and the tedious waste paper of Trotsalways using the fucking same
designs and slogans about resisting. We could have sold ourselves
as a marketing consultancy, perhaps we would if we werent lazy. Im
joking, we did believe in it really, we just wanted to use the stuff theyd
trained us in at this radical art college against some of the dickheads
who had already been shat out the end. So we played a few games
with dtournement, it was fun, on trains, in newspapers, online. We
even dtourned a whole occupation, declaring it a party, without an
agenda, other than to blockade university finance offices and at once
to both claim and decolonise the space. We wanted to offer no point of
purchase. In reality we did have an agenda, but claiming that we didnt
whilst releasing as many deliberately rude communiqus about the Pro
Warden as possible ensured they wouldnt be able to offer us some
bullshit about listening to our concerns. We never did get around
to leaking the files that we found, about how management failed to
adequately monitor social networking sites ahead of occupations.
As the blog buzzed in the wreckage of a summers uprising, a cell
of scribes cemented something that was a joy to create, together,
and not just the book. Bound on the living room table, we stuffed it
under the wipers of cop vans, stuck free condoms to the front and
hijacked the Space Hijackers party as a clandestine book launch.
That went well until we all got wasted and ended up lost in Limehouse
with our designated pissed-up veteran communist in no fit state to
facilitate our getaway southwards. He had a steely eye and broad grin,
and walked with a stick after the cops beat him up, hed seen worse
though, when hed fled his home after the revolution there, especially
to be our godfather and supply us with cigarettes I think. Somehow
we knew he wasnt a cop, though hed always be the one to check for
bugs and duck from helicopters. We were an international bunch, New
Zealanders, Indians, Germans, French, Australians, Poles, Americans,
Greeks, Canadians, Italians, Spanish, English, there were others, it was
never really spoken of, but it made for a mix of cultural experience that
only increased our energies exponentially. There was something utterly
ridiculous about performing the tropes of a revolutionary organisation,
but something kind of empowering about it too, as long as we
remembered the humour.
There was the time we were bouncers for a prize-winning novelist,
which was fine until we all showed up in black and they gave us red
armbands to wear, that wasnt so funny. Or the time we attempted to do
a cocktail making workshop at some twee protest-themed, artsy fair
at the Museum of ChildhoodMolotov cocktails that is. It didnt make
the cut with the curatorial team for some reason, so instead we led
them on an aimless parade to nowhere, like wed been on ourselves so
many times. We got drunk, enraged a liberal journalist enough to make
him smash his water glass during some panel discussion, before hastily
apologising, thus spectacularly failing to make the case for his side of
the stupid dichotomy between peaceful and violent. The problem with
liberals is they have no understanding of the dialectic ;) We could be
sweet when it suited us, giving out roses on the underground, inviting
our dates to the riot.
I dont know what killed the energy. A few months on the cold steps
at Occupy might have done the trick. People moving away, falling in
and out of love/bed, group intrigue, minimal, but intriguing I suppose.

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KarlsbergrArgos
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and classromm
consciousness

of interest.7 The force-field makes an almost imperceptible sizzling

noise, its opacity flickers as the pebble hits. We learn something.
What is cognised and what is mapped is the possibility of walking out
of the classroom in the service of raising the consciousness of that
classroom. As UfSO fellow traveller and The Dude lookalike, Stefano
Harney, puts it:

7. Heroism is an attitude of flight.

George Bataille, quoted in Carolyn J.
Dean, Georges Bataille: An Occasion for
Misunderstanding, Diacritics 26, no. 2
(1996), pp. 2-5.

I felt I ought to have some way to be able to see that world, to

feel that world, to sense it, and to enter into it, to join the study
already going on in different informal ways, unforming, informing
ways. I am speaking about walking through study, and not just
studying by walking with others. A speculative practice is study
in movement for me, to walk with others and to talk about ideas,
but also what to eat, an old movie, a passing dog, or a new love,
is also to speak in the midst of something, to interrupt the other
kinds of study that might be going on, or might have just paused,
that we pass through, that we may even been invited to join, this
study across bodies, across space, across things, this is study
as a speculative practice, when the situated practice of seminar
room [. . .] moves out to encounter study in general. 8

8. Studying Through the

Undercommons: Stefano Harney &
Fred Moten interviewed by Stevphen
Shukaitis, Class War University. Online
at http://classwaru.org/2012/11/12/
studying-through-the-undercommonsstefano-harney-fred-moten-interviewedby-stevphen-shukaitis/ (accessed
February 8, 2013).

This may seem like an elaborate justification of the class trip, which is
fine, but let me try to convince you from a slightly different angle.
What takes place in the otherwise, politically and collectively organised
classroom as it steps out into the world in general, is the beginnings
of the beginnings of the preparations for the preparations for an
epistemological project that is capable of rearranging desires so
that a previously impossible way of being togethercommunism
becomes possible. Learning how to learn to be collective through the
politicised classroom, inscribed as aesthetic that hopes to become
contagion. The UfSO was not a generalisabale model in the sense that
our structures could have handled expansion into something like a
political party or even movement umbrella. Our intervention was only
meant to map and enact a small move via an aesthetic that educated
us while offering an idea to others. For that idea to ascend, as my
friend Ol Beardo would say, from the abstract to the concrete, they
would have to argue about it in their own local. That said, the air that
the UfSO could breathe in was the atmosphere created by a broad
radical movement. Without that we would have not only been an avantgarde without a classroom, but also a vanguard without a class. The
question of organisation, which is the question of sustenance, remains
to be answered. Without the types of coherence that kicked off and
maintained struggle in Cairo and Quebec, our collectives can only
be temporary, our lives increasingly fractured in direct relation to the
increasing unity of the enemy. Learning to learn collectively remains
the beginnings of flipping the whole thing on its side.

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Argos AotearoaThe
university
beside
itself
Karlsberg & MensonageUfSO:
(a)history
& classroom
consciousness

The stifling egos that came in and tried to co-opt us into serious
initiatives didnt help much, the autonomists with their nice theory but
cliquey hypocrisies about care that drove me to despair. Wed mainly,
although not entirely, dodged Leninists and Maoists, who to be fair to
them, were fairly friendly bunches in this contexthistory may judge
otherwise. We occasionally worked alongside certain Trots, although
attempting to avoid them where possiblenot least because they were
boring as fuck. We were lost children whod been accused of various
infantile disorders, even the anarchists didnt really get us although
their poster boy took time out from speaking at German art biennales
and inventing the Occupy movement to attend a few events. Then
there were the militant publishers, who seemed to have been taking
lessons on tedium from the SWP.2 They wanted to write a pretty paper,
because they could, they had a retro printing press. It was a nice idea,
and it looked radical, but after a few issues caught the militant mood
of a moving moment, there remained no content that anyone really
gave a shit about enough, or even really felt part of. It died, stifled in
boredom, a necessary if utterly failed experiment in trying to organise
the spontaneity. Another academic exercise. I never wanted to work
in publishing. A least the marketing stuff was fun, that was always
our strong point. We could have made a lot of money out of this
testament to my comrades, no one really did, yet.
In the above memoir, I tried to tell it like it was, like it is. Capitalism is
the disease that infects both you and uswe were an antagonistic
symptom, a bit like an embarrassing rash, and made no pretence to be
a cure. Understand such symptoms and we, and you, may be further on
our way to finding what was good and what was fucked up in all this, in
turn better able to think and act out our next moves in this ongoing war.

72

072

72

2. The Socialist Workers Partya.k.a. a UK

based bunch of boring, bureaucratic, delusional,
struggle-appropriating, control freaky, antidemocratic, deep entryist', rape-apologist
Trotskyites.

Tim Neale

75

Credit
and
credentialising
Tim Neale

I
The University is a site of distributed cognition. Or: a site for the distribution of
cognition, a site for the monetised exchange of cognition between embodied
nodes (whereas the site of the thinking of this exchange is elsewhere). The
exchange may be between people (students and staff) or it may be between
bank accounts (mine and theirs). In another sense, the exchange involves the
educating present being given as a loan from the indebted future to secure the
servicing of said debt. Those who wish to acquire certain socialised cognitive
processes come here if they want those processes to be demonstrable; is
its object the learnt cognitive process, their confirmed repeatability, or
the certification of a warranted certifier? This is the distribution centre of
certificates of demonstration. The University of Life does not, to the best of
our knowledge, distribute certificates.
Outside of this site thinking (or cognition) may occur. However, these
exteriorities are not formalised, nor are they reviewed by independent
agencies. If they too are educational facilities, they too have systems for
counting and accounting for cognitive behaviours, but they are not best
practice counting and accounting. These other sites are not highly accredited
cognition facilitators and so they cannot on-sell the best cognition, or the
certification of the best cognition, through virtual networks. Their customers
are not maximising the ratio between their cognitive accreditation and
their capital investment; attendance at the University, like any productive
investment, is capital intensive. But, this is a leading site of investment with
a difference. Other sites of investment other sites of cognition distribution
have not ranked internationally. They are not privy and their evidences of
cognition are compromised, lacking solidity and objectivity. The Universitys
solid certifications act as quality guarantors in the workplace, allowing our
stratified society to be structured around its verified processes of cognition
accumulation. The student becomes a portfolio of guarantees.
Thinking practices probably exist outside the institution, since the institution
provides thinking about those sites, but the practices of these other sites have
not been so efficiently monetised. The institution provides documentation
and readings of these external cognitive practices, recording and formalising
them where it is economically useful (where patents or publications can
be established, or where faculties can develop), or borrowing them under
license when another institution has formalised them. The formalisation of
cognition as patents and publications is a legitimised form of plagiarism. It is
the thinking of spaces both within (classrooms, staffrooms) and without the
institution (offices, conference rooms, galleries, cafes, flats, etc.), remade into
an achievement of accreditation and job securitisation. The use of others
thinking for credit is plagiarism.1
In order to centre itself as the archive and curator of cognition, the University
is itself structured in the language of cognition. The two have been conflated.
Clusters of intellectual concerns are called faculties. One gains accreditation

075

1
The terror of
plagiarism is not,
of course, that
one seeks credit
for ends without
acquiring the
means. The terror is
that it undermines
the institutions
guarantees.
Thus, students
are reminded to
rewrite others
work by exchanging
active for passive
voice in order to
avoid detection by
plagiarism software.

Tim Neale

Argos Aotearoa

Credit and credentialising

from a faculty, mastering that faculty. As it certifies my mastery of a given

facultymy passing of their testing processesthese institutions and archives
continuously formalise and normalise themselves as the prime site for the official
recognition of my thinking. The faculties are embodied in their faculty members.
Without their guarantee, my claims on cognition lack documentation. When
someonecasually, carelesslyasks you where you studied, what you studied
and with whom they are also asking a second question: 'Can I see your papers?'
The University is a site for the distribution of concrete accreditations reliant
on tangible cognition. The University has acquired the alchemical processes
of corporate responsibility, requiring that otherwise ephemeral cognitive
and administrative practices can be made manifest, sited, recited, patented,
distributed, publicised. Thinking demonstrated in speech can be recorded;
faculty notes can be digitised; consultations between staff and students take
place as electronic correspondence and can be archived as documents; the
classroom is a dramatisation of the publicised aims and prescribed pedagogies
handed out in the first class of semester. The institute is a correspondence
course you can visit. Of all the commodities abstracted by the University from
its labourers, teaching was the most swiftly forfeited.
The accreditation model has transformed the University into a transcendental
corporation: the University Generic. Through the consistent making corporeal of
cognition in the form of accreditation the University Specific itself has become
the site for the distribution of a transnational economy, an economy of cognition
whose performance index their ability to maximise growth and refine best
practice can be tracked courtesy of the annual Times Higher Education-QS
World University Rankings. Here cognition is counted, collated and compared
before being redistributed as an update of an emergent consensus. These are
not just the calculations of key performance indicators of cognitive practice as
decided by key performing cognitive practitioners; they are also, more nobly,
numbers. The numbers speak for themselves. From the University Generic
Prime (an alpha University Specific) of any given year radiate descending strata
of accumulating algorithms, brackets in which the undergraduate hopefully
searches for the best of possible futures and the postgraduate hopefully
derives competitive advantage over other accredited species. What are the best
numbers you can hope for, given your circumstances?
The University is a site of harvested cognition. Each year the Universitys total
income stems from not only its cognition distribution business but also the
multi-million dollar revenues generated by its cognition acquisitions, courtesy
of patentable processes and products. The more obvious and traditional
manifestations of harvested cognition are the publications of the University
Specifics presses and publications by other manifestations of the University
Generic. These publications are primarily the accreditation and re-accreditation
of University faculty and are lucrative not in immediate sales, but rather as
attributable key performance indicators; academics need citations, not readers.2
The most immediately lucrative sources for cognition harvesting are the Sciences,
Engineering and Business, as they are areas in which innovations appear more
immediately protected and exploited. Their innovations are already related to the
realms of economics and technology including the pressing concerns of health,
design, efficiency and the capitalisation of all three entailing only technocratic
questions of implementation and copyright. Various critiques have worked
towards a renovation of the Social Sciences towards the economic and cognitive
efficiencies of the Sciences, often suggesting these speculative and analytical
cognitive faculties become the service industry of the professional scientific
faculties. This is another sense in which we might understand the University as a
site of distributed cognition, a bureaucratic hierarchy made out of departments
of thinking; Research and Development delivers products to Marketing.

076

2
Academic journals,
much like their
contributors, work
under the principle
that citationality or
visibility equates
to excellence.
This creates an
abstract cycle of
circulation but not a
readership.

Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

Tim Neale

77

Annually the University Specific facilitates an Entrepreneurship Challenge, asking

various nodes to supply competing innovations for the attention of an audience
of investors and the monetary prizes of a select panel. This competition is itself
the innovation of other best practice Universities and previous winners include
innovations in the reprogramming of cells, the exporting of indigenous species
and devices that deliver higher business efficiency (such as alarms that monitor
the drowsiness of workers).3 The competition includes cognition demonstration by
successful businessmen who have created value in the marketplace.4
The University harvests cognition and onsells it as novel and patented solutions
to contemporary functional problems. Problems of lifestyle. Problems of growth.
Problems of production and product.

II
The University is an institute of distributed cognition. Institutions are, at least in part,
built by the individuals who think them from within. Our thinking about the institution
what it is, what it is for, what it is doingis all thinking that manufactures the site
as an institution before-the-fact. As a thinking system, the University Specific is no
more than the accumulated thinking actors and their thinking activities, structured
as they are by categories and stratifications that are bestowed by the University
Generic and then re-thoughtas legitimated categories of knowledge or standing
or practiceby institutional individuals.
In this schema, the Humanities seem to be caught in a bind, thanks to the conflict
between distributed cognitionwhere the subject (student or staff) is not
autonomous, not Romantic, not individualised, caught as they are between different
cognitive practices and practitionersand a foundational belief in the cognitive
autonomy of the subject. This bind seems, in fact, to be an optical illusion. If
cognition is not just that knowledge which is demonstrated in formal assessments,
attributed to a single name and student serial number, but is rather thought of as
an ill-defined mash of problem-solving, language usage, formal reasoning, public
memory, communal emotion, intuition and imagery, then the Humanities thinkingsubject is just like the Science thinking-subject; they are still disciplined towards
the truth procedures of their discipline (its just some truth procedures look more
truthful than others).
While the University Generic is typically obedient to the imperatives of vertical
counting (higher numbers equate to higher values), more is not necessarily better
even in this site, as it also serves the protocols of efficiency and strategy. More
is often worse. So, while serving vertical counting the institute also attempts to
distribute cognitive practices and cognitive actors into effective and strategic
organisational units, ordering thinking subjects into appropriate buildings, activities,
modes of dress, modes of work, technologies, textual practices, environments, etc.,
in order to think the institution through the individual and the individual through
the institution. When you use a calculator you are thinking it and it is thinking you,
just as you are thinking (and being thought by) the desk that calculator rest on, the
room the desk resides in, the room in-relation-to-other-rooms, the building that
names and locates those rooms and the difference between this building and other
institutional buildings.
Distributed cognition is not made up only of practices and disciplinary protocols,
but also of idiosyncratic actors and unpredictable activities. The tension between
the formal and the informal allows the highly-designed institution to also be the
site of innovations and ad-hoc collaborative activities. What to do with resistance,
or rebellion? A peer of leading autonomous Universities Specific that therefore
maintains a status as a leading iteration of the University Generic cannot, at least
by definition, also produce critique or novelty. The suspicious amongst us might see,
in the University Generics prioritisation of Science, not only an eagerness for the
efficiency dividends and commercialised technology it springs as innovation, but

077

3
What could be
better fitted to the
needs of excellent
businesses than
devices that
measure and
regulate the
bio-functions of
employees? We
need to monitor the
graduates body, as
the bodily is one of
those rare things
whose effective
functioning is not
guaranteed by a
Bachelors degree.
4
Here, thinking
innovatively means
innovating value
where formerly
there was no
value, markets
where there were
no markets and
products where
there were no
products before.

Tim Neale

Argos Aotearoa

Credit and credentialising

also its inability to produce criticism of the vulnerably hyperliterate University. Science
alone can solely tell us about the chemical properties of technologies, the circulation
of air, the respiratory hazards of our aging ceilings or the neurochemical reasons to
change room arrangements or assessment modulation.
You are likely dubious that this account of cognition being accredited, patented and
strategically organised is not a full account of how we come to think what we think. We
are regulated thinkers, but we are regulated through interactions with multiple knowers,
technologies and tools beyond the bounds of the institute. As all participants in an
economically structured society must, we regulate ourselves to take part in the great
social reverie the great growth project through external regulators; we discipline
ourselves in order to take part through both objects and others. At the University
Specific we dont just internalise an archive of facts and details, we internalise factdiscerning and detail-discerning procedures. This is what you are learning, socialised
and socialising cognitive protocols.
After a certain amount of this cognitive training we may self-determine that we are
sufficiently competent to start manipulating our cognitive practices. From a professional
viewpoint what is important is that our cognitive training can be guaranteed according
to the standards of various degrees; the subject can be counted on to follow further
explicit regulation from an employer, and sometimes to a level that the subject is of
such high certified discipline that they can self-discipline. But in the University Generic,
competence in the manipulation and critique of cognitive practices is limited to teacherresearchers, generating knowledge that is rarely imparted to students as its purpose is
actually to accredit the University Specific and the scholar in their counting competition
with others Universities and scholars. Other than at the advanced postgraduate level,
where students become teacher-researchers, the University rarely encourages selfregulated cognition because, simply, what would be its use?
The unpredictability of cognitions distribution explains why innovative thinking
sometimes does not run to the temporal (semesters, 50-minute classes), technological
(computers, audiovisual systems, pdf and PowerPoint files) or disciplinary organising
of the institute. Thinking does not sit passively or tidily within the borders of courses,
individuals, offices, departments, meetings or e-mails. The thinking in the institute that
manufactures the institute also, then, puts an unruly pressure on the institutes delineating
structures. Against this, a major development across the Universities Generic has been
the appropriation of research models and learning theory by their managing overseers
to produce commercialised kinds of thinking that are both commercial and best
practiced by the University. These overseers have taken distributed cognitive practices
collaboration, expertise, adaptive skills, capitalised applications and formalised them
into the skills of compliant and flexible professional portfolio people ready to be onsold. These people are guaranteed producers. Just check the certifications of their
portfolio. This kind of University is only as autonomous as any business serving the
needs of a market, regulated and organised to meet the needs of consumer-employers
that request professional disciplined thinkers.
Hyperliterate, underdetermined and unruly thinking are not compatible with a conditioned
and conditional University. The University is not an autonomous institution working for
the public good and the betterment of us all. We are not sovereign agents and knowers.
We do not control or provide rationale for the larger system in which we are situated.
The University has thoughts separate from the thinkers that are thinking within it.
Is this a problem or an opportunity?
The University Generic is not satisfied with esteem, communal affect or customer
satisfaction unless these are indices of quality control or comparative assessment. How
we might think of peer esteem is intimately bound to the ways in which the University
thinks about the distribution of cognition. Under this model, peer esteem is not a
measure of your standing with students or staff; peer review is not an employment
protocol or oversight committee as conducted, formally or informally, by officemates

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Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

and department fellows; peer review is not what happens in the dying minutes of
each semester as students, beleaguered by bureaucracy, decide where to plot the
qualities of your teaching on axes from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree; peer
esteem is not a measure of your rank of excellence as a quantified average of the
value, originality or rigour of your research as decided by anyone who has to work
with you. As managerial culture has taken over the networks of distributed cognition,
certain kinds of knowing and certain kinds of making are obviously favoured. Tertiary
research is capital intensive, producing tangible commercial outputs. Capital wants
to grow, and critique and resistance are rarely, in this sense, growth enterprises.
What is at odds here is that teacher-researchers do not teach across purely textual or
digital international networks (though they are sometimes encouraged to).5 Teachers
teach in classes with students who define themselves as local participants. Between
the ranking of Universities by research excellence and, financially, by enrolments
and endowments, there is the unmarked assumption of teaching excellence which
seemingly goes uncounted. Undergraduate classrooms, a primary business of the
University Generic, only enters the count quantitatively, as high enrolments provided
a sufficient endorsement of the Universitys quality teaching.
This problematic schism in the institute remains unaddressed, generating
undergraduates with guaranteed competences that are delivered in localised
environs by academic staff encouraged to ignore local horizons. Academic staff
are, on the one hand, creating portfolio people with a list of checked and quantified
skills, while generating thinking to and for peers who are, almost by necessity,
nodes in an abstract network; anyone who has been in a tutorial room or lecture hall
will understand the weight and affect of bodies that must be accommodated in those
spaces, just as anyone who has submitted a paper to a journal will be familiar with
the disembodied text-based communiqusthe hieroglyphic ligatures measured
out in bullet points, the procession of emailsthat make peer esteem happen.
Managerial culture is happy with this schism, as it produces two viable commodities,
even while it creates a schizophrenic postgraduate culture (part portfolio, part
peer). It guarantees, in the manner that High School graduation might once have,
a certain cluster of basic techniques have accumulated in the undergraduate/
pre-employee, basics which are not core data or content but rather transferable
skills like English proficiency, timetabling and infrastructural disciplining through
deadlines, assessments and attendance.6 This does not open up the educational
space to create contexts or challenge meanings, to ask what the University is here
for and what it is up to. The commercial University, the managed University, instead
proscribes a set of excellent skills for successful employees-to-be, while actively
making inappropriate spaces and time for critical thinking and critique.
But this makes sense, doesnt it? What interest does a business like the University
have in critique unless it makes it a more effective and higher achieving University
Specific? Perhaps its tactics may have some purchase due to the University
Generics stated commitment to social equity, a countervailing force against the split
directives of credentialising? Given the above, might we not regard standard equity
policies as a strategic guarantee against political rapprochement, or an apparatus
for the creation of new markets out of those previously excluded by economic or
social marginalisation? Demographic equity is a remedy to social injustice but it
is not itself justice. Social equity, if it happens across this disciplinary network,
happens because cognition remains necessarily ill disciplined.

079

5
The Sciences
have again
demonstrated their
superior efficiency
by digitising
the classroom,
making it more
easily distributed
and reducing
the unnecessary
engagement
of teacherresearchers with
students. Through
the usage of
databases, slides,
recorded lectures,
and monitored
online discussions
the difficult studentteacher work of
the classroom,
which can lead
to moments of
institutional
opacity and
misunderstanding,
is dispersed into a
tidily impersonal
network of files and
processes.

6
We might say here,
given the marginal
status of any one
facultys content,
that specific and
historically-located
added value is
of little portfolio
value. As such, the
Bachelors degree
is at heart an
apparently neutral
disciplinary tool; it
creates a literate
and responsive
monoculture.

Authors note:
sections of the
latter part of this
paper were written
in response to an
academic seminar
on a related
topic. The author
has sought the
permission of the
original author for
this work.

The university beside itself

Social auto-totality:
the Lecturer's
predicament
Marek Tesar

The Story of the Lecturer

This story tells a tale of the ordinary, everyday life/work experience of a
Lecturer, who coordinates an educational course, and who, in a Havelian
sense, questions his irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his
ideals.1 The Lecturer publicly behaves as is expected of him; he does
not do anything extraordinary, and carries out his work expecting that the
University system will take no notice of him. He participates in the public
domain, attends all required meetings, sends the right emails to the right
people, and uses ideologically correct and sensitive language. He does all
of this to remain untouchable by the University. He knows and understands
that it is only a game, and he accepts its rules and plays his part well.
One day, the Lecturer receives an email from the Head of a School. The
email comes with a very simple request: to print out and place on his office
door the statement PBRF is essential to our University, and it is important
that we hire professors to score highly. The email does not say anything
surprising or new; this information, this same request, has been expressed
in previous years. The Lecturer knows it well, as he sees the same
statements on the doors of his colleagues. So the Lecturer prints out the
sign about PBRF and pins it on his door.

& Alena Kavka

How can we Live within the Truth within neoliberal academia? In

this short paper I will depict the Havelian notion of a post-totalitarian
citizen and re-shape and apply it in a story that focuses on a Lecturer
in the New Zealand tertiary sector.

Havel is concerned with the reasons why the Lecturer does that. The
Lecturer has always done so, because he is aware of the consequences of
not displaying it; he could be punished and be considered a disturbance,
or he could be considered a threat to the University system. He could
also be labeled a traitor and be accused of disloyalty, to the goals and to
the mission statement of its School. He could be accused of not being a
team player. So if the Lecturer wants to live life as he has lived it in the
past years, he needs to display this sign. The sign means that he officially,
publicly declares that he has accepted his role in the University, and that
he is ready to live in harmony with it and its structures. Rewriting Havel,
this is the message that the Lecturer conveys as he displays the sign:
I, the [Lecturer] XY, work here, and I know what I must do. I behave in
the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond
reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.2
When the Lecturer displays the sign, he acts as if he accepts the meaning
of the slogan we need to score highly in PBRF and therefore we will hire
Professors itself. In a Havelian sense, the meaning of his actions lies not
in the slogan but in the performative aspect of responding to the request
and placing the sign on his door. This act carries a different message to the
semantics of the sign itself. As the Lecturer displays the sign, the message
conveyed to all staff members and students walking past his office is: I am
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Argos AotearoaThe
university
Marek TesarThe
lecturer's predicament
Sandra
Grey

beside itself

just like you, I play my part in the system, I displayed the sign on my door
just as all of you have done your little parts. You cannot badmouth me, you
cannot tell on me, and informers have nothing on me. I am supporting the
University, and my public record is clean. My managers know that I have
fulfilled my part and that I have obeyed the order.
Following Havel, if the sign that the Lecturer was asked to display stated: I
am afraid and therefore unquestionably obedient,3 the Lecturer would most
likely be embarrassed by it, and he would care about what the sign says.
The semantics of the slogan would immediately become essential to the
story, as it would produce a response and personal feelings in the Lecturer.
He would probably feel undignified, he would be wary of anyone looking at
him, and measuring him against this sign. However, the semantics of the
slogan that he was actually asked to display allow him to think to himself:
there is nothing bad, unusual or wrong with reminding yourself that the
University needs to score high in PBRF and to adjust its hiring strategies to
meet this aim.
Why does the Lecturer need to display the sign and therefore publicly
support the University? Why does he need to be loyal to the University in
such a visible way that all others can observe it? The Lecturer is already
active in various semi-public domains, as he may have volunteered to
take on extra workload to support the University operations, and may have
participated in University committees. The Lecturer has always done all
that was expected of him, he has obeyed and he has been a loyal staff
member, and no-one could question his devotion to the University. So the
concern that Havel raises is: why does the Lecturer feel that he has to
place the sign on his door?
The fellow staff members may not notice or even ignore the sign if it is
displayed, as these signs are on every door. What becomes the concern is
when the sign becomes suddenly invisibleLecturers who walk by his door
may ask themselves: what is absent here, rather then what is present. By
not displaying the sign, the Lecturer could demonstrate an act of resistance
to the hegemonic discourse by not acting, and therefore not conforming to
the demands of the University.
Lecturers living within a lie form what can be paraphrased from Havel as
the panorama of everyday [academic] life.4 The concept of a panorama
paints a picture within which the Lecturers sign is just one small
component, without which, the full picture would be incomplete. If the
sign about PBRF was missing from his door, it would draw attention. So
the predicament that the Lecturer faces at the University is not whether
someone would notice or not notice the displayed sign, but that by the

081
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Marek Tesar
& Alena itself
Kavka
The university
beside

Argos AotearoaThe university

Social auto-totality: the Lecturer's predicament
beside itself

act of not displaying it, the Lecturer would become an anomaly within the
University. The University needs this panorama to be solid and compact
for the staff, as it indicates to the Lecturer how other Lecturers behave,
and therefore how he should behave. If Lecturers did not exhibit their
public approval with the system, they would be excluded, fall into isolation,
alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the
loss of their peace and tranquility and security,5 no matter how fake and
artificial these options may be.
The staff that walk by the Lecturers door have hung these signs too. All
staff display these slogans as a sign of their agreement with the panorama
of everyday University life. Lecturers are well adapted to the conditions that
they live in; they know how they must behave; and they create the public
sphere of the University, which in return shapes them. As Havel notes,
they do what is done, what is to be done, what must be done but at the
same timeby that very tokenthey confirm that it must be done in fact.6
As with the Lecturer, the other staff are indifferent to each other about the
act of displaying the signs, but at the same time they compel each other to
hang them, they are mutually dependent, and they support each other in
their obedience. Lectures are supervised and controlled, but at the same
time they are the controllers and supervisors of each other. And, as Havel
argues, they are both victims of the system and its instruments.7
When the Lecturer obeys the request for displaying the sign, as he has
done in the years before, and when other Lecturers do too, the whole
campus is flooded with signs. It conveys an important message from one
campus to another: Look, we have done our job, all the signs are in place.
Now you need to make sure that all signs are in place in your campus. This
produces what Havel refers to as the social auto-totality.8 The social autototality means that every Lecturer is drawn into the sphere of power. Havel
notes a change in human beings, as they may now surrender their human
identity in favour of the identity of [the University]. In other words, changes
in subjectivity can lead individuals to become part of the automatism and
[to become] servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate
in the common responsibility for it,9 which would ultimately put pressure
on their fellow academics. This shapes the subjectivities of those who are
comfortable with their positions and their capacity for public involvement,
and for feeling uncomfortable with those who opt not to participate. By
making all academics participate, the University then produces everyone as
instruments of a mutual totality, or the auto-totality of society.
1 Havel, V. The Power of the Powerless in Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe,
(ed.) J. Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 27.
2 Ibid., p. 28.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 34.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 36.
9 Ibid., p. 34.

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M E R I D I A N

THE UNIVERSITY OF PLAGIARISM

A N T I P O D E A N

LAURENCE SIMMONS

A E S T H E T I C S

Originality consists in trying to be like everybody elseand failing.

Jean Cocteau plagiarising Raymond Radiguet
When Jacques Derrida came to Auckland in August 1999, he delivered a paper
entitled The Future of the Profession; or The University Without Condition
(Thanks to the Humanities, What Could Take Place Tomorrow); the essay
was published, together with some local responses to it, in Derrida Downunder.1
Here and in another essay entitled Unconditionality or Sovereignty: The
University at the Borders of Europe,2 he gives the name unconditionality to
the research universitys hypothetical freedom from outside interference, to the
privilege to put everything in question, even to put in question the right to put
everything in question. He posits that the modern university should be without
condition and:
[t]his university demands and ought to be granted in principle,
besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional
freedom to question and to assert, or even, going still further, the
right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge,
and thought concerning the truth.3
The University Without Condition relies, as Derrida acknowledges, often and
at length on Austins now classic distinction between performative speech acts
and constative speech acts. This distinction, he continues, will have been a
great event in this century and it will have first been an academic event. It
will have taken place in the university.4 The profession of the professor calls not
upon discourses of knowledge but upon performative discourses that produce the
event of which they speak. The performative is an act that consists in swearing,
taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility, in short,
committing oneself in a performative fashion.5 The future is not described, it
is not foreseen in the constative mode; it is announced, promised called for in
a performative mode.6 Its promise, its performative act, is thus staged as the
instantaneous positing of what is not yet, and perhaps never will be, present. Yet
the performative can only take place by asserting constatively, indeed the
actuality of a real, incontestable institution for its future; it can only take place
on the double terrain of the not-yet-real, the spectreal perhaps.
What is invoked here is the way in which all performatives are necessarily
haunted by a non-present remainder, by what still remains to be thought,
engaged, experienced, by the possibility that the performative fails or goes
astray. Derridas unconditional university is based on ungrounded performative
speech acts, speech acts based neither on previously existing institutionalised
sanctions, nor on the authority of the I who utters the speech act. For Derrida,
it is literature that manifests this unconditionality as the extreme expression
of the right to free speech, as the right to say everything publicly, or to keep it
secret, if only in the form of fiction.7
To understand this turn to literature at this moment in Derridas discussion
of the university, we need to return to an earlier point where he defines
literature, notably in This Strange Institution Called Literature.8 For Derrida,
literature is the possibility for any utterance, writing, or mark to be iterated in
innumerable contexts and to function in the absence of identifiable speaker,
context, reference, or hearer. The space of literature, he says, is not only that of
an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one
to say everything [] The law of literature tends, in principle, to defy or lift
the law [] It is an institution which tends to overflow the institution. That
is, literature is the possibility that any seemingly non-literary usage of language
can be used in a literary way, that any literal use of language can always be

85

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taken figuratively, such that figurative meaning is the basis upon which literal
meaning stands. Yet this lawlessness of the literary is the result of certain rules,
conventions and institutions.
Literature is an exploitation of the possibility that any utterance may be nonserious. It, and therefore all writing, is the reduction of an idea: a truth, the
notion of serious linguistic usage, the right way to think, my real intention. Yet
such an idea may always only be a supposition, radically unverifiable, because
the only sensible form it takes is its appearance in literature, in language as
literary. All language is potentially non-serious, potentially just literature,
because it never is for sure the restitution of the serious, of something prior
to language. Derrida thus identifies literature with the freedom of speech, the
unconditional right to say everything and to disclaim responsibility for what is
said, that is the linchpin of Western democracy:
What we call literature implies that license is given to the writer
to say everything he wants or everything he can, while remaining
shielded, safe from all censorship, be it religious or political [.]
This duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for ones thought
or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of
responsibility.9
It should be clear, at this point, how the institution of fiction, which gives in
principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules to displace
them, and thereby to institute, to invent,10 is not unlike that of, and in its
institutionalised procedures informs, the practice of plagiarism. It is perhaps not
surprising, then, that Derrida also concerns himself with plagiarism. Derridas
early essay on Condillac, The Archaeology of the Frivolous, argues that Condillacs
duplicity of terms, his imagining as retracing the connection of ideas, and his
repetitive structure of knowing gives rise to a metaphysics of plagiarism.11
Derrida reproduces Condillacs own note against plagiarisers from the Essay on
the Origin of Human Knowledge:
I ought to warn that many writers have copied this Essay, for it
could be thought that I myself copied them by writing on the art of
thinking [Derrida adds an interesting aside here: how do you fight
the form of plagiarism that looks like you are plagiarising those who
have in fact plagiarised you?]. Plagiarizing metaphysicians could
not be more common. When they are shown, within themselves,
metaphysical truths, they flatter themselves that all by themselves
they would have found these truths, and they unscrupulously
present these truths to themselves as discoveries.12
However, deconstruction is itself plagiaristic: Derrida insists that
deconstruction is not a method for repeating the propositions of an original
in the voice and spirit of the original; rather, it encourages the potentialities of
that supposedly first and originating text to create its own copy or double. For
him, the condition for the possibility of thinking is an essential and unavowable
debt: in order to speak of this radically new present, and in order to make claim
for the new, one must already submit that eventful newness to a repeatable
system. There is always a redundant, repeated and stolen element that enables
any future or anticipation, an undecidable haunting of all speech and writing
with repetition. Repetition is not therefore the opposite of originality or even
innovation, but rather both internal to it and at the same time heterogeneous.
The paradox is that in order for an original work to be recognised it must bear
a resemblance to other works, which compromises its originality, and yet in
order to be recognised as original a work must be taken to resemble nothing
other than itself . Plagiarism is not the machine-like repetition of a work

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or event understood in terms of a pure singularity, but rather something like

the condition of every work. That literature and plagiarism (of which literary
forgery is a subgenre) are categories of writing that have much in common
might even cause us to revalue plagiarism as an antimonian phenomenon
produced by creative energies whose power is attested to by the individuals and
the institutions that exhibit such fierce resistance to it, who feel compelled to
denounce and eradicate it.
The traditional definition of a citation, derived from classical rhetoric, that
limits it to the purpose of illustration and ornament is thus inadequate and
no longer applies for postmodern writers for whom quotation represents
a break with tradition as well as a means of questioning the nature of the
literary text. That is, the concept of text as an autonomous entity is no longer
adequate. Derridas own experimental volume Glas,13 which relies on citation
to such an extent that as readers we never know quite where we are, or with
whose words we are, can serve as a new paradigm for a theory of quotation
(and by implication plagiarism), one which I only have time to sketch out
in a very programmatic fashion here. In Glas, Derrida links quotation with
violence and sexual penetration, and stages a deliberate game of appearance
and disappearance through which his reader is unable to pin him down; he
reveals that words contain within themselves other words, blurs the boundaries
between languages and between specific texts, demonstrates how meaning is
generated through an aleatory scattering of semes. Indeed, in Glas we might say
that Derrida has elevated plagiarism to the level of originality and has shown
that writing is always and inevitably quoting.
Nonetheless, the turnitin.com view of plagiarism that dominates university
discourse necessitates a simplistic definition of the relationship between power
and resistance as primarily one of absolute otherness and exclusion. In actuality,
this view of plagiarisms authority to prohibit can never be separated from
its need to include, or to regulate by way of strategies of engagement with
and appropriation of available meanings. That is, the pure text cannot erase
traces of dialogic ambiguity constituted in and constituting any pure text. The
identification of authorship thus constitutes a kind of censorial limiting of
language. Losing all sense of plagiarism as reading, turnitin.com promotes a kind
of non-reading. Tradition does not want to understand fiction as the possibility
of the very work of knowledge, and as that which reserves the possibility in its
enfolded pliability of unconditional truth. Whereas, in contrast, deconstructive
reading (lets front up and call it that), as Derrida insists, must be understood as
polysemy, indeterminancy, ambivalence and dysfunction:
Deconstruction is not a method for discovering that which
resists the system; it consists, rather, in remarking, in the reading
and interpretation of texts, that what has made it possible for
philosophers to effect a system is nothing other than a certain
dysfunction or disadjustment, a certain incapacity to close the
system.14
Indeed, I could be outrageous (and why not be outrageous!) and suggest that
plagiarism and the imposition of it within the domain of specialised knowledges,
or the academy, should be understood as the very structure of the field in which
university discourse is produced and circulated. This structure of the field, an
institutionalised field enabled by its own difference, places internal constraints
on the very process of discursive production. It is thus the structure of the field
that constitutes plagiarism, not some adversarial position with regard to the
sanctity of the word or copyright. Plagiarism, then, is not something that others
do to us, but something we do to ourselves.
Another way of saying this with Derrida is that plagiarism, like literature,
represents a counter-institution. In A Taste for the Secret, Derrida confesses:
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In abstract and general terms, what remains constant in my

thinking [] is indeed a critique of institutions, but one that
sets out not from a wild and spontaneous pre- or non-institution,
but rather from counter-institutions. I do not think there is, or
should be, the non-institutional. I am always torn between the
critique of institutions and the dream of another institution that,
in an interminable process, will come to replace institutions that
are oppressive, violent and inoperative. The idea of a counterinstitution, neither spontaneous, wild nor immediate, is the most
permanent motif that, in a way, has guided me in my work.15
Elsewhere, he noted that in French [t]he word contre, counter or against, can
equally and at the same time mark both opposition, contrariety, contradiction
and proximity, near-contact [.] The word contre possesses these two
inseparable meanings [].16 So the notion of the (counter)institution requires
careful thinking of the kind that may only derive from the perspective of the
contre itself, which, as Derrida notes, forces together and yet refuses to fuse
proximity, on the one hand, and a certain kind of contrariety, on the other.
Such a relation articulates and disarticulates itself, within and against itself,
at each time of use and persists in its own divisibility. Indeed, this divisibility
leaves its mark within the institution of the university between the desire to
conserve and defend an establishment, and an unavoidable exposure to what is
unpredictable, to alterity and the event.
So, finally, without condition: what does it mean? Exempt from dictations and
servitudes;17 immune from the exactions of authority and the contaminations of
power;18 self-standing, self-defined, self-governing, self-responsible;19 sovereign
without its suspect theological overtone;20 having the freedom to assert, to
question, to profess, and to say everything in the manner of a literary fiction.21
Derridas essay delivers a profession of faith [. . .] in the University and, within
the University22 that helps those of us working in or with it by clarifying how
our work is doubly structured, in part by a respect for tradition and precisely
the tradition of unlimited commitment to the truth,23 and in part by a regard
towards the future and especially towards what Derrida calls the event. An
event, he says in The Deconstruction of Actuality, cannot be reduced to the
fact of something happening [. . .] it is what may always fail to come to pass.24
Derridas event, vnement, comes from the Latin evenire, to come out from.
At the root of the verb is venire, come, and it resonates with Derridas to
come, la-venir, a strange kind of futurity that will never be present. The event
names something that changes the notion of truth-as-masterable. We could
say that Derrida wagers on the event. With such an engagement, he commits
to something completely different from those whose proposals for university
education stop with a tepid and vapid return to tradition. Derrida, on the
contrary, seeks not a return to something known, but takes risks for the future.
What such events might make happen to the concept of truth is that truth
not be defined as an affair of mastery, but rather as dependent upon an
unconditional. Derrida maintains that [i]t would be necessary to dissociate a
certain unconditional independence of thought, of deconstruction, of justice, of
the Humanities, of the University, and so forth from any phantasm of indivisible
sovereignty and of sovereign mastery.25 If we conceded to the notion of the
master (the teacher) as he or she who possesses certainty and its conventions
absolutely, then we first of all give in to a phantasm, and secondly reduce the
future to a mechanical application of a programme. Derridas allegiance to an
unconditional independence of thought resists such closure and finality by
insisting upon what is never mastered. As its etymology suggests, unconditional
is what cannot be agreed upon, what cannot be said, what is irreducible to
consensus. As a teacher, what Derrida teaches is that without an unteachable
we cannot teach and are not teachers. He argues for a transformative reaction

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to tradition, a re-activation that also produces something not only different but,
as yet, unconventional and, moreover, necessarily incomplete. The university
without condition does not and cannot give the answer; it can affirm answers
but it can never prove them. This is, however, why the university can always
be appropriated: there is always someone claiming to have the answer.26 The
university without condition commits to the unconditional: the impossibility of
a simple truth, of truth as simple. This is why the university is always in danger:
first, such an avowal of powerlessness is well-nigh an invitation to the wolves
of demagogy, capitalism and above all ministers of education; second, such an
admission will be understood as irresponsible by dogmatists. What is sovereign
for Derrida would be this unconditionality. It is what, by being impossible, rules
since our otherwise supposed sovereignty (mastery, control) can never overtake
unconditionality.
The violence of the founding act, the institution of the institution, leaves a
puzzling mark, as a strange feature within institutions between the desire to
conserve and defend an established set-up, and an unavoidable exposure to what
is unpredictable, to alterity and the event, even to the possibility of instant death
precisely as a result of the institutions own auto-immune disorder. A true event
must be something incommensurate with any pre-existing conceptual grids. Thus
the institution remains caught undecidably between life and death; the institution
lives in a kind of constitutive dissension although, in the case of the university
without condition, this indelible scar of the institutions institution leads, as
Derrida argues, to the chance of affirmation and ultimately to the possibility of
life over, after or in death: in other words, survival. The university is in principle
the institution that lives the precarious chance and ruin of the institution as
its very institutionality. Like all institutions of meaning, the university can only
dream that it is closed and settled, determined in an eternal present by a past
tradition. It is not a question, as I have said, of self-inflicting wounding, a form of
self-harming, nor is it a question of leaving the university behind, moving beyond
it, denouncing it as an institution. It is rather that the counter-institution of the
university to come brings into the open whatever keeps the institution from
fulfilling its goals. The system disarticulates itself before our very eyes, forcing
open again whatever closure gives the university its concept.
1. Jacques Derrida, The University Without Condition,
in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 202-37. Originally
published as The Future of the Profession; or The University
Without Condition (Thanks to the Humanities, What
Could Take Place Tomorrow) in Derrida Downunder, ed.
Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth (Palmerston North:
Dunmore Press, 2001), p. 233-48.
2. Jacques Derrida, Unconditionality or Sovereignty: The
University at the Borders of Europe, Oxford Literary Review
31 (2009), pp. 115-31.
3. Derrida, The University Without Condition, p. 202.

12. Condillac cited in Derrida, The Archeology of the Frivolous,

p. 128-29.
13. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
14. Jacques Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, with Maurizio
Ferraris, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and
David Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 4.
15. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, p. 50.
16. Jacques Derrida, Countersignature, Paragraph 27:2
(2004), pp. 7-42.

4. Ibid., p. 209.

17. Derrida, The University Without Condition, p. 224.

5. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work

of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 50.

19. Ibid., p. 236.

6.Ibid., p. 103.

18. Ibid., p. 220.

20. Ibid., pp. 206, 208.

7. Derrida, The University Without Condition, p. 205.

21. Ibid., p. 205.

8. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New

York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33-75.

23. Ibid.

9. Ibid., pp. 37-38.

10. Ibid., p. 37.
11. Jacques Derrida, The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading
Condillac, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne
University Press, 1980), p. 128.

89

22. Ibid., p. 202.

24. Jacques Derrida, The Deconstruction of Actuality: An

Interview with Jacques Derrida, trans. Jonathan Re. In
Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 536.
25. Derrida, The University Without Condition, p. 235.
26. Derrida, The University Without Condition, p. 27.

The new
dark ages

Anna Boswell
A checklist

Systems of reward driven by the imperative to generate commodifiable

research in accordance with the dictum publish or perish
Individual and institutional stature-seeking and grandstanding based
on productivity and performance indicators such as peer-reviewed
publication outputs
Ever-increasing levels of disciplinary specialisation permitting everincreasing numbers of academics to pose as innovators and so reap
the symbolic benefits of original discovery
Subjugation of teaching to research activities whose focus is
determined by market forces, budgetary constraints and probable
return on investment
The rise of modes of governance fostering conformity, calculability and
competitiveness through systematising, standard setting, reporting,
auditing, benchmarking and league tabling
As William Clarks Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research
University (2006) makes strikingly clear, leading aspects of the managerial
capitalism that defines the current culture of the research university were set
in place in German-speaking lands during the eighteenth century.
Back to the future
Clark offers an ethno-historical perspective on the birth of our institutional
environment deeper than the one customarily invoked. His study makes
plain that the research university is considerably older than the rough
hundred years recently proposed by Ronald Barnett.1 It also makes plain
that the entrepreneurial and bureaucratic universities of Barnetts historical
schema are not later developmental stages marking the evolution of the
research university, but rather that these models are synchronous and
entwined. Our current working environment doesnt just have its origins in
the 1980s US, or in late twentieth and early twenty-first century iterations of
neoliberalism more generally, and while the so-called global financial crisis
may have supplied (and may continue to supply) a rationale and pretext for
further and accelerated changes, the lesson offered by Clark is that these
patterns of institutional development can be traced back over centuries. The
contemporary redefining of the purpose of the university, it turns out, is both
prefigured and markedly consistent with earlier definitions.

Ronald Barnett,
Being a University
(London and New
York: Routledge,
2011), p. 21.

This immediately begs questions of surprise, not least because weve

generally understood academic culture to possess a long and distinguished
history of relative autonomy. Many of us have clungperhaps credulously,
in the face of compelling indications to the contraryto the belief that
university industry and enterprise havent solely and literally always been
about industry and enterprise, and that our work in such places is in some
ways to do with teaching and social good. Our condition of not-knowing also

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2.
Vilm Flusser, Does
Writing Have a Future?
(Minneapolis and
London: University
of Minnesota Press,
2011), p. 8.
3.
Ibid., p. 61.
4.
Sheldon Rothblatt,
The Professor
Comes of Age,
American Scientist,
September-October
2006, http://www.
americanscientist.
org/bookshelf/pub/
the-professor-comesof-age [accessed 28
June 2013].
5.
Clark proposes that
the transformation of
memory and history
into epistemictechnical systems
was a hallmark of
modernity, although
it seems clear
that memory and
history have always
been technically
supported. See
William Clark,
Academic Charisma
and the Origins of the
Research University
(Chicago and London:
University of Chicago
Press, 2006), p. 303.
6.
Clark, Academic
Charisma and the Origins of the Research
University, p. 68.

likely stems from unexamined faith in the modern university as a university

of writing, and from unexamined faith in writing itself as a modernising and
illuminatory technologyas the source of our salvation from the dark ages.
Writing gives us to understand that we live in an age of documentation,
recorded information, knowledge. Tied to ideas of legibility and visibility, and
used to produce and implement systems of rational order, it offers a radiance
which may, as much as anything, be an effect of the bright ground of the
page across which neatly-inked characters march in disciplined rows. Making
things historicisableindeed, making possible historical consciousness
itself2, writing has come to be revered as the highest form of academic
labour.
Clarks study points towards the extent to which research (and thus
writing) activities conducted within the university have been and continue
to be programmatically scripted (as a matter of functioning)3 and marketoriented (as matters of PR and commerce). For several reviewers of this
book, realisation of the darkness of this history has been experienced as
a shock of recognition. Conspiracy-theorising, however, seems unlikely to
be the most helpful response. It isnt necessarily a matter of having been
manipulated or deceived, as one commentator would have it, into ever more
vigorous pursuit of the larger technological and bureaucratic aims of our
universitiesand, by extension, our modern statesin competition with other
universities and other states.4 It may simply be that weve been so busy being
in something we cant really remember why were there or how we came to
be there. Memory itself is technologically mediated (through writing itself,
as well as through sites, events, images and objects of other kinds), and it
is tenuous at best.5 We sometimes speak of institutional memory as if this
were memory of a different order, but because memory works in and through
things, it is institutional by nature (and subject to institutional pressures of
different kinds), and its also constitutional or constitutivewhich is to say it
constitutes who we take ourselves to be.
The fact that recent changes within the university are precedented also begs
questions of progress. Reaching back to the twelfth century, to the outgrowth
from ecclesiastical institutions of what would become the first western
universities, Clarks book charts the programmes of reform through which
writing came to serve as the essential site and practice of the university.
Progress is, of course, a deeply-embedded capitalist idea and its lexicon
which reflects its onward-and-upward ethos of continuous and graphable
improvementhas underwritten the design-drives of official university
culture for centuries. Clark does not address this directly, although in practice
the sweep of his story is counteracted by tremors and convulsions that show
patterns of institutional development being articulated and disarticulated
by turns. And when we read, for example, that medieval academia revolved
around orthodoxy, it appears that some things have not moved very far.6
Secularisation of universities may have transpired over time but adherence
to doctrinal norms is pretty much still expected, or is perhaps expected
anewas is indicated by the relative conservatism of contemporary research
funding- and academic publishing- organs which discourage radical oddness
and isolated idiosyncrasy. Working against the linear logics that it invokes,
in other words, Clarks study suggests alternative ways of diagramming the
universitys lived coursethrough parabolic or orbital trajectories, or through
cellular mutation, or through accretion and sedimentation.
Asking after
Clark also usefully corrects the widely-held notion that originality relates
to novelty and to the creative wellsprings of individual genius. Originally,
he reminds us, originality referred to stemming-from-the-origin, and his
underscoring of this term (and of what counts as original research) points

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up contradictions at play in our evolving environments. Research has always

been expected to provide a basis for further research and to relate to existing
work in a complementary manner. It is supposed to operate in a paradigm of
anticipatory posterity, knowing itself as the (constitutive, institutionalised)
future-memory of its own event or epoch, and its supposed to be catalogued
and inter-referenced, rather than serving as a singular or solitary display. Such
reflections on conditions of originality begin to make sense of an industry
in which papers submitted to journals are increasingly subject to scanning
through plagiarism detection software, and yet in which such papersalong
with research grant applications and 250-word conference abstracts and
all elsemust show direct evidence of networked forms of knowledge.
Citational overdrive, stimulated in ever more urgent ways through academic
integrity campaigns, makes ventriloquism and assimilation legitimate and
commonplace practices, and whole careers are now staked on derivationon
piggybacking on the work of others.

7.
Ibid., p. 212

Clark also points towards the paradox that while academics and their
institutions acquire charisma through the publicity generated by research,
much of what is published is emphatically not charismatic, and that a
knowledge economy really might mean exactly that: knowledge operating in
isolation from ideas and in the service of Big Business and/or of institutional
and professional ladder-climbing (grant-mongering, book-contract-procuring).
As is made clear by the present tide of conference proceedings, journals,
edited volumes and monographs surging to fill all available spaceon
bookshelves, in libraries, on hard drives, in cyberspace, in recycling bins
both virtual and real, the routinised, treadmilled research being funded and
churned out under ever-intensifying PBRF and equivalent pressures isnt
necessarily making things clearer or deeper, or shifting conceptual frontiers
in any particular direction or manner. Indeed, the principal purpose of an idea
seems to be that it can be transmitted to paper which bears an ISBN number,
and its hard to see that anyone could have time for new ideas when were
all so busy being busy and accounting for our time and augmenting our CVs
and working to secure funding for the production of more knowledge. In our
increasingly pre-formatted working worlds, we dont actually need to generate
new ideas, and we certainly arent encouraged to reflect on what ideas
themselves might be (the idea-of-an-idea). Were just required to average the
thinking thats already been done, and to insert these averaged ideas into
standardised receptacles (marketing pitches, grant applications, abstracts,
essays, articles, reviews, books, PowerPoint presentations). Our research
practices and our writing are so thoroughly habituated and automated that we
barely register the kind of template were filling out in each case.
It would be niceand comfortingto imagine these matters are no big deal.
Clark himself shows that they certainly arent new. Since early modern times,
university-based research has been largely serial and technical, a matter
of proving diligence:7 a publication dating from 1702 bears the title On the
Reasons Why Not Few Scholars Bring Nothing To Light; there was a particular
fad for dissertations in the piggy-backing mode between the 1670s and
1730s. Among other things, however, this history raises urgent questions
concerning the social benefit or social impact of research. Applicants are
increasingly required to address (and profess) such benefits and impacts in
constructing research proposals and submissions. Outcomes, in other words,
must be known and anatomised in advance of the inquiry, as a precondition
for selling the inquiry itself. As this suggests, research is becoming ever
more strongly conceptualised as a form of problem-solving rather than
problematising and it involves rote gestures and predictability: its supposed
to be targeted to meet the needs of funders or of other identified external
parties, and its duty-bound to yield quantifiable results (preferably licensable
as intellectual property through the commercial research and knowledge
transfer companies run by universities themselves and/or by other financial

.
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stakeholders). According to this model, research serves as a business analysis

tool for society, cauterising unprofitable loops rather than encouraging these
to be expanded. In practice, it readily comes to serve as a means of marketing
the university to a wider public, and of marketing to this public ideas of what
the public itself should be and do and valuealthough the fact that our local
PBRF engine privileges publication in offshore venues further short-changes
a local audience, since it means that issues of critical import are frequently
fielded in distant or inaccessible places.
Clarks book also obliges us to consider the implications of our research
culture in pedagogic terms. Research has left teaching far in its dust in terms
of prestige value and institutional and financial support. At the same time as
they deploy teaching-derived income streams to cross-subsidise the research
activities upon which the excellence of their reputations will be calculated,
universities are widening the gulf between research and pedagogy through
two-tier academic employment contracts. The very structures of the buildings
we inhabit are coming to enshrine this ever more hierarchised system:
teaching bunkers below, research cages fitted with hamster wheels above. In
these circumstances, it isnt simply a matter of insisting that teaching ought
to be research-led. Research, Clark reminds us, originated in the postgraduate
classroom in the eighteenth century, arising as a new method of instruction
which would simultaneously train graduates to produce capital for floating on
the academic market, fashion their academic selves (as Romantic authors,
heroes of knowledge), and mark their passage into a new and competitive
world of professionalised labour. In other words, research should be properly
teaching-led and pedagogically-informed because it is pedagogy, performed
in a certain kind of way, and because pedagogical methods countsuch
methods condition a future workforce of researchers.
The dark arts

8.
Ibid., p. 185.

Its hard not to feel despondentand deeply cynicalthat one of the parts
of the university perhaps best-equipped to think about the implications of
this current institutional environment is the part most at risk. Clark shows that
despite the early modern development of the arts as a means of combatting
scholastic barbarism,8 this faculty has long battled its own vulnerability. The
arts (initially comprising philosophy, arts and sciences) consistently tracks
as the last-and-least in the ranked order of faculties, trailing behind theology,
jurisprudence and medicinealthough the hard sciences circumvented this
fate once it became clear how well-suited they are to producing demonstrable
applied benefits (partnerships, patentability, saleable results). The shuffling
of the order has seen the rise of STEM subjects and the fall of theology into
the arts, but the arts itselfin its residual forms of the humanities and social
sciencesremains quagmired at the bottom, struggling to prove its worth (or
to earn its keep) through research. The irony of this fate is that the origin of the
modern notion of research can be pinpointed to German doctoral dissertations
for subjects in the arts. As Clark explains, the Doctor of Philosophy degree
first emerged as an attempt by lowly Masters of Arts to achieve parity with
academic doctors in the three so-called superior faculties.
For these reasons, it seems incumbent on those of us who are trying to subsist
in this particular area to seek to suspend or disturb or dislocate this unfolding
history. Here, then, an alternative checklist, which might be titled Possible
Ways To Commit Heresy in the Modern Research University:
1.

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Insist on the value of the arts. If the university is to assist in bringing

about social futures impelled by something other than transactional
determinacy, and if research is to find and say things that havent already
been said (or to say things afresh) rather than confining itself to latterday scholastic barbarism, trust needs to be placed in the faculty that
is most sharply characterised by and devoted to creative and critical

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activities. One form of learning offered by the arts is that a university

isnt hermetically sealed from the public, as institutional perception
frequently has it. Rather, a university enacts and calls into being an idea
of society, and its borders are permeableits people are members of
publics of all kinds. Another lesson offered by this faculty is that the
conditions for genuinely creative endeavour require openness to risk,
idiosyncrasy, oddness and provisionality, to abstraction, to unplanned
and unplannable outcomesto waywardness and failure, even.
2.

3.

Make proper commitments to teaching, ensuring that the university

itself functions as an object of pedagogy and of research. We owe it to
our students to cultivate research networks for their benefit that serve
as more than reductive entrepreneurial ecosystems in which budding
businesspeople are encouraged to create start-up companiesin
competition with one another, naturally. Future graduates (all of whom
are citizens of society, and some of whom are future researchers)
should be supported in working with one another and with others.
They should learn what disciplines are, and why and how these have
evolved; they should know what research is, and why we do it, and
under what circumstances; they should be critically conscious of the
selves and social worlds they fashion or unfashion through their work;
they should be able to think and repurpose the box, or the checklist of
aims and goals and outcomes, rather than simply filling or fulfilling it.9
More generally, we need to reframe learning, teaching and research as
activities that are not subject to strangleholds of professionalisation
and institutionalisationwhich is to say that we need to rethink
established assumptions about who or what an expert may be, and
to materialise and recognise classrooms-beyond-the-classroom.
And pedagogy and research themselves need to appear in the work
of academics and students alike, informing our activities and moving
these on in ways that bind (and thus make them accountable) to their
own entangled origin.
Develop research practices on our own terms, in ways that arent
strictly subject to programming intents. This may take the form of
getting better at appearing to do what were programmed to do, while
doing other things besideslike insisting in our research on the value
of the classroom interface; pursuing projects athwart or beyond the
margins of what counts; resisting the disciplining power of disciplines;
turning networked knowledge back on itself. We also need to reflect
hard on what we remember with, and to understand anticipatory
posterity as a matter of both survival and staged disappearance.
This might permit refusal or reformulation of the publish-or-perish
snare, and it isnt simply a question of scattering written fragments
like white breadcrumbs in the (Romantic, heroic) hope of lighting the
wayfor ourselves, for others, for the future. Its more an operative
sense that our work might congeal something, blot-like. A blot might
be thought of as representing a meeting place composed of the tracks
that have made it,10 and it works against neatness and rational order
and recoverability. Its un-aesthetic, a sign of blemish or surfeita
means of drawing upon and pushing against the writerliness of
writing, the templateness of templates, the programmatic nature of
the programmes that run us. If we understand our research activities
as holding disruptive (staining, impairing) potential, we might become
more aware of how we leave (or fail to leave) the imprints of our own
attempts to know where we are and what were doing as we go.

9.
This paper draws
in part on teaching
materials prepared
for ENGLISH 777:
Pedagogy and
Performance
(University of
Auckland, Semester
One, 2013). Im
very grateful to
the students in
that class for their
engagement with
these ideas and for
their willingness
to experiment with
research in riskprone ways.
10.
Paul Carter, Dark
Writing: Geography, Performance,
Design (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii
Press, 2009), p. 162.

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Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

Prof Marcus Karlsberg

Argos
& DrAotearoaThe
Verity Mensonage(A)History
university beside itself
and classroom consciousness

Conversations
with m a r k
Collective statement of intent

As a response to the current climate of privatised knowledge and stimulated competitiveness, we propose to
redefine our education within Elam by constructing a new pedagogy around learning and sharing knowledge.
The intention of this collective is to work in a double bind with the development of individual practices, whereby
members will feel empowered to direct their own learning.
The collective will physically take the form of a shared work-space, teamed with a number of various scheduled
workshops, seminars, field trips, reading groups and other ways knowledge can be shared, open for everyone to
attend.
We are excited to explore new ways of learning, conscious of our privileged position as art school students.
We wish to demonstrate the benefits of interdisciplinary, group and collaborative work as we feel these are not
focused on in the current system. The collective aims to challenge the competitive individualism of the current
university construct.
August 2012

Do you want to talk about your aims?

Last semester, quite a few people were producing more politically-driven art, and more and more talk
started about the competitiveness within the university.

We kept talking about how frustrating it was that there were so many things happening around and outside
the university that we all wanted to attend, but no one could go to all of them . . . if we somehow all worked
together, we could go to all of them without necessarily breaking ourselves.

And in trying to discuss everything with everyone, theres that element of sacrificing your own project. Like,
I should be doing my own shit right now instead of talking about this.

That was one of the things we definitely wanted to change within the university. Just being able to be there
for each other, and help each other do the best we can and learn as much as we can, rather than going off
in our own worlds.

And prioritising other peoples learning as much as we do our own, which isnt emphasised enough within
the system. In saying that, Elams a pretty good example of somewhere where it is emphasised a bit more.
Considering crit[ique]s and stuff, youre really relying on your peers sometimes. But thats a good thing to
draw from, because of how much you can learn from your peers. Why dont we just emphasise the fuck out
of that?

Were encouraged to leave school, collaborate, and work together as a part of this great team, but its not
recognised by the institution as a way of learning.

From a broader point of view, if you think about societys expectations of a successful individual, its about
contributing to the economy. Thats how you become a contributing member of society: your work makes
money, youre successful and you have a career. And thats really individualistic. If we can think about our
education in a much more open way, as something more than just creating a career for ourselves, its a
really good stepping stone in thinking about the wider social responsibilities we have. And the things we
can do in society if we all work together . . . if we all hold hands and . . . [laughs]

Its taking control of our own learning, and putting the emphasis on learning. Tertiary [education] is a step
that is expected if you have the privilege to go here, and the learning tends to become secondary to the
degree. But when we have such limited time and we spend $6,500 a year, why not make the learning our
actual emphasis? Rather than just a step to . . . 'art'.
95
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96

Or a step to getting a grade.

If we talk about getting rid of competitiveness and focusing on learning, yet were still competing with each
other for marks, it detracts from everything were doing. So it just makes sense to try to eradicate or fight
that together. And when you get rid of that you can actually focus on something. Its not a faade. You dont
have these backstage thoughts, like, oh, Ive still gotta get my individual mark. To rid ourselves of that is
really freeing.

Totally. I mean you can say that you dont care about your individual grade but its always gonna be in the
back of your mind in some way.

In terms of research too, youre always stockpiling, to make it look like youve done more work whether
youre learning whats in there or not. Theres a lot of generosity when youre working collectively. When you
stop thinking about yourself and start thinking of others, then you give more to others.

Should we talk about individual projects, like Night School?

Its from 7-11 each night, Monday to Wednesday, and Thursday is making day. Mondays weve got world
politics and film studies. On Tuesdays weve got contemporary art class. And Wednesday is New Zealand
night. Were doing official languages of New Zealandso we did te reo for a couple of weeks, and then we
did New Zealand sign language. And then we also have New Zealand history, and occasionally we do New
Zealand art history as well. Pack it all in there. Its been real successful. Were trying to get as many people
to come as possible. But attendances have been pretty good.

Translating that back into Monday and Friday studio has been a bit difficult though. Its hard to just say, oh
yeah, this is what we learned this week . . .

I think of the role of the artist as the educator, in that they think they have an idea or a material experiment
thats worth talking about or worth being shown. So why not pare that back so that the role of the artist
becomes educating that idea, however abstract that is, to an audience? And then [with Night School]
its paring that back so far that its just the artist as the teacher. So instead of trying to hide that idea or
objectify it, youre literally just presenting that. Thats really nice and it makes us realise whats important.

How did working as mark affect your understanding of learning?

Learning takes the verb form of educationits just something that happensbut education describes
the way things are arranged outside of the act. And if youre having to determine those sorts of structures
yourself, then it becomes really clear that for education to work there has to be a teacher-student
relationship, theres some kind of authority there. You have to agree to sit down and listen to somebody else.
And if theres no authority then it becomes difficult, sometimes, organising yourself.

Yeah, but the authority doesnt need to be understood as a singular authority. All the structures and stuff
[which mark developed], we came to by talking about, so the authority became decided on by the group.

G:

There was a lot more subconscious learning. So you didnt actually sit down and [say], oh, Im going to learn
this today. But looking back on it, I learned how to be in a group and how to work with others, and we figured
a lot of stuff out that didnt need to be said or sat down and taught in a lesson. It was a much more practical
way of doing it as well, it wasnt just all in theory. We were making it and doing it, making things happen.

And a lot of the time there wasnt a predetermined end goal. Whereas today [working individually] I find
that Ill sit down and read someone and say, Im going to try and figure out this theory today, in my head,
and then have an idea by the end of it. But [in mark] everyone comes together with all these predetermined
ideas but then they get lost in dialogue. Which is real nice; theres heaps of spaceand then something
new is created thats unpredictable.

Also when youre learning by yourself, a lot of the time youre not really sure if you have learned or what
youve learned, but having five other brains there . . . they tell you when youve learned something. Or they
explain what theyve learned, or reframe an idea that maybe you missed when you were doing it by yourself,
or that you didnt value when you were doing it by yourself.
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Prof Marcus Karlsberg

Argos
& DrAotearoaThe
Verity Mensonage(A)History
university beside itself
and classroom consciousness

Its helpful to think of it as sharing. If I want to know about contemporary art things, Ill go to B. If I want
to learn about political theory, Ill go to G. And if I need to talk about my feelings, Ill go to A [laughs]. Its
no secret that we all have our different interests within a bigger umbrella. The difference of learning in
a group is that you share everything. You dont go and do your learning and then go home and do your
own thing. Youre just always sharing and there are always conversations going on.

Yeah, and sharing different ways of learning, I mean we all learn differently. Its really good to take on
another persons format.

Yeah, an obvious example of that is how the ways of talking about things can change. You might try
to describe or communicate something and someone else might feed it back to you in a new way. Its
almost like something completely new

Completely new but familiar

Yeah, circles around itself in a nice way.

I feel like learning as a group is way more complex than learning as an individual. And you cant be
lazy and get away with it. I guess you get to know yourself, the more you work, and you can pretty
much just switch off and do what you need to do. And its quite easy to tell yourself that youve
learned something. But learning through other people and with other people, you have to be able to
communicate everything in a way that suits everyone.

Thats what I was trying to say at the beginning of this, the whole idea of learning as about being alive,
engaging with your brain, your consciousness and yourself as a living thing. We have these different
ideas, but when youre with other people you have to use your language to communicate them. Which
really helps you to concretise the learning as well.

What do you think it means to teach?

I think L had it spot on before when she said that we should think of it as sharing.

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98

Sharing and convincing and having to believe what youre being told are better ways of understanding
learning. You could be a teacher, as in a dispenser of information, like a vending machine is a dispenser
of food, but it could just fall straight out the slot and land on the floor. You could just miss it completely.
But if youre there, handing it over the counter . . . Like at KFC, they dont leave the food on the counter
for you to pick up. Its just company policy. They leave their hand on it and watch you, and you walk up,
and you take your item and draw it away from them, but you have to come into contact somehow.

'Cause its an exchange, right? Its not just being thrown out there. And that comes down to thinking
about education as well. Its not just absorbing information, but its facilitating a space for things to be
figured out or experimented with.

And really caring for the other end.

Theres a massive level of faith that you have to put into it. You have to really trust the teacher to be
able to get anything from it. You have to have faith that what youre being convinced of is actually
something of value that you can take away.

Its the same on the other end. You have to have a certain amount of faith in something to want to
share it with people

Yeah exactly. Goes both ways

Assumes youre getting the good stuff.

What about teaching in a collaborative environment, as opposed to having the one authority figure at
the front of the lecture theatre and then a whole lot of individuals?

I guess it acknowledges that we all have something to give.

Something thats totally different to a lecture set up is the real human interaction thats so important
that is just taken out of the university lecture style of education. Whereas if youre having an intense
conversation with a group of people you need to trust them, you need to be able to interact socially on
some level with them . . .
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Prof Marcus KarlsbergArgos

& Dr AotearoaThe
Verity Mensonage(A)History
classroom consciousness
university beside and
itself

That whole lecture scenario makes it really easy to understand whats happening, the drive to commodify
education or knowledge. You have this person whos employed to offload this thing to consumers, instead of
trying to make this thing grow together. Cant say it without sounding like a hippie, but . . . you know? Sharing
a real concern for the commons and appreciation for what happens when were all on the same level, as
opposed to having these hierarchies.

Do you want to talk about your final grades from last year?

Yeah, so they gave us all individual grades, which was kind of hard, and kind of unexpected. We knew that
officially they couldnt give us all the same grade, but [we hoped] that maybe they would just . . . Give us the
same grade [laughs]

Or similar.

But by doing this they didnt recognise the merit of the project as a whole.

It was like them rubbing something in our faces. Like, aw, good try guys, but B-, A, A-, C . . .

The marks were just ridiculous as well. Theres no way that [A and I] did any more than you guys did. I dont
understand it at all.

The thing I found really frustrating was how affecting the marks were. We got them back and I was like, dont
even care. And then everyone shared and I was like, why do I care?

I think we cared more that they were different. Well I did. Just seeing them, I was like, really?

I was happier that you guys got more than a B- because I thought that collectively we deserved (well fuck
it, who gives a shit) but when I heard you guys got better than that I was like, ok, rad, someone deserves
something better.

And it was just that we worked harder than anyone else. And Im not being an asshole when I say that. We were
at school all the time.

But did you still end up feeling like it did reflect on you as an individual?

I took it really hard. And I think it really affected me. I tried to re-evaluate my own individual practice just
because of this grade. And that was bad. [Ive] stopped doing that now, because I realised that it was just kind
of bullshit.

A
For art practices in general, a grade, like an A- or a B, is arbitrary anyway. So to put us in the position where
were supposed to take it personally . . . Thats what they were saying, by giving an individual grade. It seems
like theyre reinforcing whats so nuts about [grading] in the first place.
B

Yeah, I had the worst semester grades-wise that Ive had at Elam, and learned ten times more than I had in any
other semester, so I was like, well . . . obviously somethings not quite right here.

Do you think we need a marking system in the university?

Not this one.

Nah.

I dont understand why weve got the A, B, C range of grades, I find that really weird. Maybe [we just need] a
pass and a fail?

Yeah. Theyre reinforcing competitiveness and individualism. Giving a grade segregates people. A pass/fail
system would be much better because youd want everyone to pass, right? So there wouldnt be the hoarding
of information that you get. Especially in something super-competitive I can only assume that in Med school
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university beside itself

or Law School, its like, dont talk to me, ever. Im studying. I need to get an A.
L

Dont look at what Im reading. Itll help you too.

Get out all the books before everyone has a chance.

Recall wars.

Do you think thats because at Elam there are already other systems of evaluation in place? Do you think
you need evaluation at all?

We need criticality more than we need evaluation.

Yeah, evaluation could just be something to trip up on. It doesnt really serve us. It might serve someone
whose area of study leads on to a clear profession. It makes sense that you would wanna pick the best
doctor for a hospital or whatever. But [if youre] studying at Elam, youve got no identifiable profession
ahead of you, and if the purpose of it is just to break you down emotionally . . .

Turn you against each other . . . [laughs]

Im quite into rubrics. Maybe not the ones that we have in place, but [I like] the idea of a rubric, where you
can be doing really well in this area, but need a bit of help in that area, so you can see that and help yourself
grow.

'Cause its great as a concept right? And if the sole purpose of that was about your education[al
improvement], thats amazing. But the problem is that you tick these boxes and then you get an average
and then thats your grade at [that] moment. As opposed to like, lets work on this.

And the value given to the different sections, and the way those sections are chosen, is pretty fucked.
Theres so many things missed out, which you then dont really have the encouragement to be thinking
about.

In saying that, the rubric took [Elam] a lot of time to work out. And I know that, aside from real grading, the
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Prof Marcus Karlsberg

Argos
& DrAotearoaThe
Verity Mensonage(A)History
university beside itself
and classroom consciousness

Each 'earth' section of the rubric is assessed in relation to the

inherent values of:
concept
material
research
audience
self-awareness
If all five segments are filled, the bonus segment 'Boris Groys' is
attained and the student has made it.

tutors have our best interests at heart when they [devise and implement] the rubrics. Youve gotta give them
some credit.
M

[Referring to marks own rubric] But [the Elam one] doesnt have things like [Boris Groys concept of] heart?

Heart would be such a good thing to be worth 20%! Do you really care about what youre doing? Its about
what you want from a student body, but the things that could be encouraged through a rubric . . . the potential
for that is so exciting.

I think social responsibility should be on it. Imagine the people who would come out of Elam . . .

So responsible! [laughs]

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beside itself
itself

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The
personal

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: iso-8859-15 -*import random, string
from datetime import datetime
#
for institution in universities:
for names in database:
(forename,email) = names.split()
Dear """ + forename + """,
This is my first email for
""" + str(datetime.now().year) + """
so may I take the opportunity of welcoming you back to
""" + institution + """
University. I am sure this will be a busy and productive time as we implement our
latest
""" + "".join(random.sample(string.ascii_uppercase,3)) text += """
plan, which again involves restructuring all institutional functions across traditionally targeted faculties. This plan is ambitious but achievable if we focus our
collective energies on it, and it reflects the stunning earlier success of major
developments frequently and infrequently communicated via this regular email. As
always, it is my transparent will to keep you informed in authorised ways.
Overall, our very generous donors, worth more than
""" + random.choice(
["$","","",""]) + str(random.randint(2,10)) + """
million a year to this university, continue to supply and demand numerous intentions which provide strong and stable long-term orientation. Financial security ensures that knowledge flows seamlessly in both directions and is aligned with
strategic priorities and an unwavering customer focus. At the same time, our latest
cost-benefit analysis demonstrates that utilisation of a consistent model of dialogue would neither

""" + random.sample(
["improve service delivery", "increase capacity", "improve efficiencies", "reduce operational costs", "secure further investment"], 3) + """,
nor strengthen managerial functions. The level of service externalised to internal
stakeholders has recently been found to be remarkable, rating at
""" + str(random.randint(25,75)) + """
per cent. This result nicely reflects our declared objective of operating in an increasingly constrained operational environment, producing decisive implications for
infrastructure and performance and placing ongoing demands for near-perfect scores on
all service divisions. We aim to keep building on this massive investment, which certainly appears to be paying off.
Our state-of-the-art business school has officially been acclaimed as the
most successfully benchmarked philanthropic enterprise in the history of
""" + random.choice(
["our institution", "this country", "the world", "human
endeavour"]) + """.
As noted in our latest Annual Report, the business school is the key driver of critical excellence in all valued fields and it reflects blue sky thinking on every level.
Following this first whole-of-university initiative, which has likely positioned our
institution among the leading brands globally, I am very pleased to advise that our
marketing team has secured an integrated sale and purchase agreement regulating all
future research. This unconditional agreement is set to realise equity-based benefits
that are both significant and as-yet unconfirmed. Each interaction between academic
staff and
""" + random.choice(
["clients", "prospective clients", "external stakeholders", "internal stakeholders",
"mystery shoppers"]) + """
will be subject to a standardised needs analysis assessment, with strong emphasis
placed on
""" + random.sample(
["perfecting customer service skills", "meeting all legal obligations", "avoiding
matters of uncertain value"], 2) + """
and on closing the inquiry. This represents a key qualitative and thematic development, and once again I must congratulate all those who have helped us to attract
these paying dividends.
I am also delighted to announce substantial improvements in the efficiency of our improvements, which are the result of concerted and collaborative efforts by the most
""" + random.sample(
["loyal", "dedicated", "hardworking", "trusted", "recently upgraded"], 3) + """
elements of our workforce. At the same time, we are working hard to ensure that existing contractual obligations to our human resources can be met through phased reversal of the projected transfer of remuneration and promotions. For those affected,
such an outcome represents a significant step in an academic career and is vital in
addressing the major strengths, weaknesses and opportunities facing this country and
the world as technological intelligence continues to break new ground. These challenges notwithstanding, there may remain limited scope for retention of those exemplary members of staff who are endowed with
""" + random.sample(
["sufficient endowment potential", "prompt submission systems", "controlled core outage requirements", "relevant experience in tracked changes"], 2) + """
and with the capacity to deliver programmed outputs at machinic speed. Meanwhile,
it is very encouraging to see strong interest in the accreditation of our dispute
management process. As I spelled out in an earlier communication, and as the review
committee has duly recommended, many of our internal interpersonal conflicts would
escalate much more effectively through sharp increases in the competitive stakes perceived at individual, programme, school and faculty levels.
Finally, as we prepare to execute our dynamic initiatives to re-shape all staff questions and suggestions, I would like to remind current employees that we consistently
accommodate the full range of consultative measures which are so important within a
comprehensive
""" + random.choice(
["future", "first", "world", "leading", "edge"], 2) + """
university. This avenue of support obviously places our institution at considerable
risk. It also has important implications for making ends meet and for the enhancement of those areas (formerly known as departments) in which we have already invested
heavily, which I acknowledge are not the same thing! While I welcome your confidential feedback, I should make clear that any information you supply will inevitably be
utilised in order to safeguard the heightened securitisation of our institution. As
you are aware, we increasingly function in a knowledge

AmslerImagining
untinkablebeside
spacesitself
Argos
AotearoaThe university

Imagining
unthinkable
spaces

Sarah Amsler & Mark Amsler

1
The neoliberalised university embodies the destruction of the public sphere
by capitalism. Spaces for heterogeneous thinking, for creative, critical,
contested connections, and thus for potentially liberating work are being
relentlessly foreclosed. Indeed, the very idea that we have the right to
intellectual debate, collaborative inquiry and collective action within the
university at times feels almost unthinkable. This is why it is important that
we not only think these spaces open, but that we pry them in practice, opening
up what has been sealed off or is being made inaccessible, unthinkable. We
believe it is not only possible to do so, but that building the collective
possibilities to create such spaces in everyday academic life is an important
part of more ambitious projects to remake the university. We need better for
our students, and for ourselves.
Today, higher education is organised increasingly around two complementary
projects: market expansion and profitability. Nobler rationales are often offered
for these changes: democratisation, dissemination of excellence and world
class knowledge, promotion of better living for those outside the developed
west, public/private partnerships which encourage participation by
stakeholders. But as exemplified by a recent controversy over New York
Universitys physical and educational expansion across New York City and
around the world (referred to as NYU 2031), there is a dissonance between,
on the one hand, profiteering from corporatised teaching and research and,
on the other, democratic ideals, teaching and research for public goods, and
public accountability. In March 2013, just over half of fulltime tenured and
tenure-track academic staff in NYUs faculty of Arts and Science approved a
non-binding resolution of no confidence in the Universitys president John
Sexton. Afterwards, both the president and the Board of Trustees stated they
were attentive to the vote and that the time has come to consider ways in
which the voice of the faculty may be made even more meaningful.1 Later,
however, Sexton emailed the entire University to assert NYUs big footprint
on international higher education: 'we have during the past 30 years
transformed NYU from a decent regional university into an international
research university that stands among the top institutions in the world.2 He
referred to this as a collective achievement.
The NYU debate is one illustration of how the possibility for universities to
democratise intellectual engagement and shared governance is undermined
by market expansion, profitability and aspirations for international status. The
vote by teachers and researchers in arts and science subjects illustrates that
the structural questions apply not only to academic work in the humanities
or soft sciences but across the university. Nor is the situation at NYU
idiosyncratic. It is typical of broader agendas within government, senior
university management and commercial enterprises to harness the cognitive
labour within higher educational and research institutions as resources for
organised capitalism. Organised capitalism is the name for a political-economic
system that deploys a range of practices enacted by governments, commercial

105

1
Ariel Kaminer, Noconfidence vote
for head of NYU,
New York Times,
15 March, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.
com/2013/03/16/
education/no-confidence-vote-forhead-of-nyu.html
(accessed 20 March
2013).

2
John Sexton,
The Outcome of
the FAS Vote of
no Vonfidence,
NYU Office of the
President, 2013,
http://www.nyu.edu/
about/leadershipuniversity-administration/officeof-the-president/
redirect/speechesstatements/
the-outcome-ofthe-fas-vote-of-noconfidence.html
(accessed 20 March
2013).

Sarah Amsler
Mark AmslerImagining
spaces
Argos& AotearoaThe
university unthinkable
beside itself

capital groups and neoliberal reformers to consolidate profits generated by

corporate organisations and other institutions. It is accomplished through
various practices and technologies. The imposition of larger student fees
and reductions in tuition grants and living allowances, for example, means
that the teacherstudent relationship is explicitly founded upon a principle
of commodity exchange. Activities such as hypercentralised budgeting,
targets-based auditing and accountancy, and the pursuit of efficiencies
through expanding short-term and contingent teaching and research
workforces all reorganise higher education according to the logic of capital.3
3

Louis Menand,
The Marketplace
of Ideas. (New
York: W. W. Norton,
2010); Bill Readings,
The University in
Ruins (Cambridge:
Harvard University
Press, 1996); Cris
Shore, The Reform
of New Zealands
University System:
After Neoliberlaism. Learning and
Teaching 3 (2010):
1-31.

These same processes are accomplished in everyday action and discourse.

Publications have become outputs; students are clients who invest in
quality assured education with a demonstrable graduating profile keyed to
improving the national economy. Requirements that curricula conform to
generic university templates align knowledge to institutional strategies and
controls about the universitys representation for public consumption. In
such ways, universities under organised capitalism pay lip service to serving
a public or common good in their mission statements but persistently subvert
aims of educating an informed citizenry, producing critical knowledge and
qualified professionals, challenging and testing accepted wisdom and acting
as the critic and conscience of society. As the strategic principle of
contemporary universities shifts further from people to profit, higher education
as part of the public good becomes a public catastrophe.
2
What is to be done? By analysing and problematising these changes within
the organising structures of our academic lives, we can regain agency and
critical traction within our institutions, locally and collectively. We want to
build alternatives, non-monologic and non-administered worlds both inside
and outside the university ethics and sustainability projects in business
schools, community-based science research and indigenous public health,
critical analysis of benchmarks, transferable skills and strategic goals as
part of subject knowledge.. From the vantage point of different institutions,
countries and stages of career, we have witnessed how organised capitalism
remakes the university through the constant restructuring of our everyday
lives and horizons of possibility for critical work. Sharing our experiences
offers insight into the complexities of this project, as well as confidence in
our analysis of its possibilities.
Across our careers and two generations, we have taught in nine different
universities in the US, UK, New Zealand and Central Asia. We now live in New
Zealand and England, two countries in which the transformation of the
university is embedded in state-driven marketisation and aggressively
neoliberal policies. While we belong to different generations of academic
experience, both our careers are products of the expansionist agenda in
higher education.
Mark completed his PhD in 1976 and began his career as a tenure-track
assistant professor in English that year. It was the start of a downturn in the
humanities after three decades of expansion in enrolments and academic
hiring. The subsequent expansion of higher education in the US, UK, Australia
and New Zealand has primarily been achieved through strategic hiring and
student (particularly international) recruitment not so much in the humanities
as in STEM, business, and engineering subjects.4 Since then, in the US, UK
and New Zealand, the numbers of traditional (tenure-track, tenured, or
continuing) university research and teaching posts have declined steadily.
In 1969, 27% of US university and college teachers were defined as adjunct
or temporary staff. By 1998, more than 40% of teachers in US higher education
were employed part time, as adjuncts or non-tenure-track staff (Part-Time,
1998:5).5 In 2013, adjunct, part time and non-tenure-track academics make

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untinkablebeside
spacesitself
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AotearoaThe university

up more than 50% of all US university and college teachers. In Australia and
New Zealand, ratios of casual and adjunct academics to fulltime and tenuretrack are similar.
The problem is not with adjunct positions as such. It is universities and US
colleges increased reliance on part time, qualified instructors who are hired
primarily to deliver instruction, invisible within the institutions governing
structure and often without an institutional voice. What were at first short-term
measures in the 1980s to meet new enrolment demands have become
normative employment practices throughout higher education.
Sarah was born in 1973. A beneficiary of the expansion of public higher
education in the US, she attended the university where both Mark and her
mother Ann worked. After completing her PhD in England in 2005, she was
appointed a continuing academic contract in one of the many departments
of Sociology created through the incorporation of polytechnic institutions
into the English system of higher education in 1992. Tenure had existed for
some senior professors in the UK prior to this time, but since tenure in any
meaningful sense had been effectively abolished by the UK Education Act of
1988, aspiring to a tenured position in the US sense of the term was not a
possibility.6
Since 2000, we have experienced in parallel a number of processes which
illustrate how key technologies of neoliberal reorganisation and resistance
work cross-nationally. In particular: the commodification of the international
student, the tying of academic work to management-imposed performance
targets and market efficiencies, the rolling back of labour rights for university
and other public workers, the reorganisation of universities into units that can
be both centrally controlled and marketed, and the institutional locking-in of
loan-based student fees.
Since Mark began teaching in New Zealand in 2006, more than
one dean or head of department has exhorted staff to increase
international graduate student enrolments because they are
worth more. In England, information for prospective postgraduate
students assures them that many [. . .] programmes are rooted
in industry and [. . .] have excellent links with major global
employers who often contribute to the curriculum. Meanwhile,
across the UK, universities comply with demands from the state
to monitor the attendance of all non-EU international students
on behalf of the state or risk losing this now essential revenue
stream.
Recently, at one New Zealand university, a traditional arts
department hired four new full-time academics at different ranks,
but within a few months was required by senior management to
downsize its full-time academic staff. The intervention was made
to align the departments budget with the universitys 80/20
rule, a mandated constraint on the ratio of continuing and parttime (casual) academic staff. Over a two-year period, the
department lost through retirement seven senior professors.
Academic leadership took a back seat to salaries. In England,
the budget rule is often simpler: if you can pay the balance of
your salary through attracting fee-paying students and obtaining
competitive research grants, you can be considered a valuable,
viable and a responsible contributor to the universitys strategic
development. Recently, one New Zealand university administration
has proposed changing the criteria for academic continuation
and promotion to emphasise successful grant applications which
stabilise ones position. Ranks are monetised.

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4
Cf. Menand, Marketplace of Ideas.

5
David W. Leslie,
Part-Time, Adjunct,
and Temporary
Faculty: The New
Majority? Report of
the Sloan Conference on Part-Time,
Adjunct, and Temporary Faculty. (New
York: Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, 1998).

6
Stephen Court,
Academic Tenure
and Employment in
the UK, Sociological
Perspectives (1998),
41(4): 767774.

Sarah Amsler
Mark AmslerImagining
spaces
Argos& AotearoaThe
university unthinkable
beside itself

7
University and College Union, Model
Statutes and the
Zellick Model, UCU
website (2013),
http://www.ucu.org.
uk/2529.

Since 2002, the UK University and College Union has been

working to mitigate revisions to the existing statutes of
universities which make it easier to employ people on temporary
and short-term contracts and impossible for academics to appeal
to third parties in cases of dismissal.7 In 2010, the University of
Auckland senior administration proposed removing key working
conditions (including Academic Grades and Standards Criteria,
Disciplinary Procedures and Research and Study Leave) from
the existing collective agreement and making them policies
upon which academics and the union could comment or advise.
A new contract was offered to both union and non-union
academic staff with a pay increase but with the working conditions
removed. The union forewent a pay increase and organised an
industrial action around retaining the key conditions in the
collective agreement. After a turbulent year, including mediations,
demonstrations and an energetic union campaign supported
by activist students to respond to many of the Vice-Chancellors
claims and rationales, the administration and union finally agreed
to a new contract and resolved to ensure collective participation
in the academic governance of the University' whereby the
employer will follow 'participatory processes' when reviewing
policies such as Academic Grades and Standards and Research
and Study Leave. Subsequently, however, the union filed a claim
against the Vice-Chancellor before the governments Employment
Relations Authority, charging the administration had breached
the terms of the contract by not involving the union from the
beginning in any proposed changes to existing academic policies
as defined by the collective agreement. Just recently, the ERA
found in favour of the union, asserting that university governance
is different from corporate governance and management
structures. Nonetheless, the Vice-Chancellors proposed
changes to existing Academic Grades and Standards Criteria
are still going forward, albeit with more involvement and pushback
from interested academic staff.
In one New Zealand university, after months of discussion and
debate and at least one negative vote by academic staff, one
faculty is proceeding to reorganize its 16+ departments and
centres into four schools with disciplinary areas. As one
academic said at a general faculty meeting, disciplinary area
sounds like the part of the building where you go to get a
spanking. The rationale given for the reorganisation was not to
improve research or student learning, but to solve the problem
of finding enough heads of department and centralising
budgeting and administrative structures. When some academics
offered novel and energetic alternative proposals to solve the
perceived administrative bottleneck, they were rejected. Other
faculties and groups within that same university have experienced
similar restructurings and administrative interventions in
everything from student learning support services to funding
schemes for scientific research posts. In the UK, Sarah has also
experienced major restructuring which similar characteristics.
Change management has become the normative practice in
university structures.
Recently, our experiences have converged around severe
structural disruptions in the organisation of teaching in our
disciplines. In 2010, the UKs conservativeliberal coalition

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AotearoaThe university

government abruptly withdrew all state funding to English

universities for teaching in the social sciences, arts and
humanities, redirecting it to individual students in the form of
personal loans as part of a wider drive to marketise the system
of higher education (except in economically strategic areas).8
In 2012, New Zealands National-led government allocated new
resources to university engineering and science faculties by
shifting funding away from the humanities and social sciences
faculties in a zero-based budget scheme. When dedicated
resources for teaching in our disciplines are subtracted, the act
of teaching itself becomes embedded more squarely within the
logic of the market.

8
Sarah Amsler,
Beyond all Reason:
Spaces of Hope in
the Struggle for
Englands Universities, Representations (2011), 116,
6287.

As these examples illustrate, academic life in both UK and New Zealand

universities is characterised by continual struggles with central administrators
over working conditions, resources, strategic goals, and what we regard as
our core academic activities of teaching and research.
And yet, both Sarah and Mark continue to identify with ideals of relatively
autonomous inquiry and to participate in knowledge-making for social and
public good. These intellectual aims, far from being disinterested, are at odds
with the conception of the university as an instrument of organised capitalism
and with the broad conditions of our everyday working lives. We find it
interesting that versions of this dissonance have always been, to varying
extents, part of academic work itself, as Kant, Veblen, Horkheimer and Adorno,
Heidegger and Marcuse have shown. We are also aware that because the
present project transforming universities into market-expansive and profitproducing economic institutions accelerated after 1975, particularly in the
US, UK and Australasia,9 the idea of the academy that we have produced
within our own family has been coterminous with both its neoliberal
transformation and challenges to it.
It is unclear how the dissonance felt by each of us will manifest in future
generations of students and scholars. Mark was becoming an adult intellectual
and professional academic in the US during the early 1970s, at the end of an
earlier era of expansion in public higher education. Sarah, born at the beginning
of this period, entered academic life in ways that were not always palpably
neoliberal but became a professional academic in more aggressively neoliberal
contexts. Many of our younger students and colleagues, however, have had
much less exposure to ideas that do not conform to narrow definitions of the
usefulness of a university degree determined by specific market goals, returns
on student debt, professional status or job anxiety. It is tempting and
discouraging to think that the tendency towards what Marcuse called onedimensional thinking in advanced industrial societies has been realised in
our intergenerational lifetime.10
And yet, our professional lives also challenge this narrative. We know
universities to be contradictory spaces of closure and possibility often
frustrating and demoralising, sometimes radical, transformative and enabling,
but never one-dimensional. Our students come in all shapes and sizes, from
many different backgrounds, and with different relations to critical knowledge,
cultural literacies and the marketization of higher education. We both believe
in the importance of being scholarteachers for whom the classroom is an
important discursive space for relating our thinking, writing and speaking with
that of our students. Despite institutional efforts to control, instrumentalise
and commodify education, we are motivated by a desire for critical thought
and practice that thrives as excess, the unthinkable, often as refusal or
refiguration, and that can carve possibility into even the most inhospitable
of spaces. We are also encouraged and challenged by our students who take

106

9
Menand, Marketplace of Ideas;
Shore, The Reform
of New Zealands
University system.
10
Marcuse, Herbert,
One-Dimensional
Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

Sarah Amsler
Mark AmslerImagining
spaces
Argos& AotearoaThe
university unthinkable
beside itself

hold of critical questions, who pose questions and answers we havent dreamed
of, who become more active and reflective learners and knowers with complex
hopes and designs for the future. Students who protest and struggle to have
a voice in their own education when a government minister of tertiary education
tells them to keep to their heads down. Students who themselves are
researchers, designers, dancers, bloggers, doctors, public defenders, writers,
preschool teachers, literacy advocates, community organisers and much
more. Students for whom learning a different vocabulary of reflection and
collective hope means finding a different way of being in the world. We believe
it is essential to teach and critically explore our subjects and questions with
our students in universities that contribute to human flourishing and imagining
rather than only or primarily commercial interests or pre-determined goals.
Therefore, we both wonder, from our different locations and contiguous
generational perspectives, at what point does it become too contradictory
to work in institutions that deliberately, even aggressively undermine,
destabilise or close down opportunities for human flourishing, except where
it can be exploited as commercially-profitable investment? Isnt that
unthinkable? Is it right to abandon students to a commodified system of
education with no dialectical tension, no imagination? Can we re-think how
we work, critique, produce and progress in transformative dialogues in todays
universities? Should we imagine doing so outside them?

11
Edu-Factory,
Towards a Global
Autonomous University (New York:
Autonomedia,
2009) http://www.
edu-factory.org/wp/
book/.

3
The flip side of this grim portrait of academic life dominated by neoliberalising
processes across two generations is the overwhelming evidence of the
practices that challenge, resist and transcend these forces. We call attention
to these practices cautiously, not wishing to overestimate the progressive
possibilities of autonomous, oppositional and creative work within existing
systems. Indeed, our experiences on either side of the Atlantic and the Pacific
remind us that what is possible in one place and time is not necessarily so in
another. In addition, while there are strong movements that radically rethink
the meaning and organisation of the university itself,11 neither of us yet sees
a critical conjuncture that would allow us to conceive of a more radical
transformation of the universitys existing institutional forms. Practically, while
radical change from above seems to be accomplishable in seconds, change
from below often seems impossible, unthinkable. It is difficult for many
academics and students living within the money economy to imagine escaping
the structures of higher education; nor is there a clear shared desire to
do so.
Even as we work to critically understand the limits and possibilities of different
alternatives, we are also interested in intensifying and expanding the critical
spaces that remain within. How can we occupy them otherwise? How can we
revolutionise or reassemble teaching and research by altering the thoughts
and practices according to which the logic of organized capitalism is sustained
and legitimised? We suggest we need to start with dialectic.
Critical dialectical thinking and relationships function not only as resistance
by negation. They can also be affirmative and need not, perhaps should not,
necessarily produce a synthesis. Rather, an alternative positivity (the negation
of a negation) can propel us towards something new. Dialectical practice can
help us move beyond the unthinkable to create spaces for democratic, even
humanistic transformation in higher education by foregrounding the tensions
between cultural and political criticism as action. How can we link up cultural
analysis and critique with specific action within our institutions and higher
education globally?

107

Argos AotearoaThe university beside itself

Here are nine ways we suggest academics can open spaces of possibility within
the university in the everyday:

1
2
3
4
5
6

Make the place and the structure into the subject in as many
classes, research colloquia, committee meetings and contexts as
possible on campus. Try using examples of administrative or official
discourse to illustrate all manner of syntactic, rhetorical, logical and
political claims, theories, assertions, aspirations and illogics. To whom
or what does the phrase the University refer in a specific context?
Model heterogeneity, plurality and productive debate in empowering
and enabling discourse, rather than as inhibiting or not helpful. An
individual who asks uncomfortable questions is easily labelled as
difficult to manage, but many people asking critical questions can
keep space, time and decision-making processes open. Practice
being awkward together, and make it fun.
Organise events and meetings with parents, prospective students
and colleagues where alternative versions of the university and higher
education are presented in addition to and beyond the standard
recruitment ones. We dont mean secret neighbourhood covins but
venues and occasions organised locally by subjects, faculties and
programmes. Also, find ways to communicate across departments
and disciplines, and to build alternative visions that can be meaningful
within the various languages and logics of the university. Organise
roundtable discussions at conferences and academic meetings,
especially where graduate students are present.
Make the world meaningful, as Stuart Hall once suggested. Those
presently in power do this through controlling language, standardising
expression, swamping discourse in neoliberal-ese. Many academics
and students have opportunities to speak and write in classes,
meetings, public events, newspapers, magazines, blogs and other
media. Where critical concepts have been resemanticised for
marketing purposes, reclaim them if you can, and create new common
languages. Confront the narrowly commercialised linkage of creativity,
innovation, and imagination, and represent other intellectual, social
and personal values in freedom.
Cultivate open access to as much scholarly research and writing
as possible, especially peer-reviewed work. Presently, the humanities
and social sciences are seriously retrograde with the most prestigious
20% of humanities journals not open access at all, as compared with
medicine and physics, in which over 90% of published work is openly
accessible. Peer or self-archiving is one possibility; new international
projects such as the Open Library of the Humanities point to the
emergence of more systematic alternative platforms for disseminating
intellectual work.
Cultivate collective action through unionisation and, where possible,
academic and public-advocacy organisations. At least, so long as
unions and academic organisations work progressively, both within
individual institutions and coordinated across them. Where academic
unions are not or not-yet viable, cultivate alternative ways of building
community and collectivity within the university by reimagining the
strike as constituted by moments of dignity and autonomy in everyday
acts and by developing ways to recognise and support
industrial actions.12'

108

108

108

12
Sara Motta, Beyond the Picket
Line, Beautiful
Transgressions
blog, Ceasefire
Magazine, 22
March, 2011,
http://ceasefiremagazine.
co.uk/beautifultransgressions-2/.
13
Stevphen Shukaitis, Overidentification and/
or bust, Variant
(2010) 37/38,
http://www.
variant.org.uk/issue37_38.html.

Argos
AotearoaThe
universityunthinkable
beside itself
Sarah Amsler
& Mark
AmslerImagining
spaces

14
Mike Neary and
Andy Hagyard,
A, Pedagogy of
Excess: an Alternative Political
Economy of Student Life. In The
Marketization of
Higher Education
and the Student
as Consumer, ed.
Mike Molesworth,
Lizzie Nixon,
Richard Scullion.
(New York and
Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp.
209-224.
15
Harriet Swain,
Could the Free
University Movement be the
Great New Hope
for Education?
The Guardian, 28
January 2013.
14
Mike Neary and
Andy Hagyard, A,
Pedagogy of Excess: an Alternative
Political Economy
of Student Life. In
The Marketization
of Higher Education
and the Student as
Consumer, ed. Mike
Molesworth, Lizzie
Nixon, Richard
Scullion. (New York
and Abingdon:
Routledge, 2010),
pp. 209-224.
15
Harriet Swain,
Could the free university movement
be the great new
hope for education? The Guardian,
28 January 2013.
16
Joel Lazarus,
Understanding
the Emergence
and Growth of Free
Universities in the
UK Today, Oxford
Left Review, 9, February 2013 http://
oxfordleftreview.
wordpress.com/
olr9-5/.
17
FUL Committee,
FULs Free Work,
Ephemera (2013),
13(1), http://www.
ephemerajournal.
org/contribution/
ful%E2%80%99sfree-work.

Invoke the powers of parody, highlighting existing institutional

rationales, norms or procedures so as to unpack and expose their
underlying criteria, implications and roles in neoliberalisation. Also
called overidentification, such work can create a cynical distance
that disrupts situations in which people know that there is something
fundamentally wrong but continue to act as if this is not the case.13
The Books as Shields demonstrations in Europe foregrounded in a
compelling way the conflict between administered learning and critical
inquiry. Members of the UK-based Really Open University once dressed
up as a giant brain and then chased it around campus to perform the
capture of intellectuality by cognitive capitalism. Extrapolating this
logic, how might people react if we were to speak ironically about
students as if they were actually commodities in the presence of
administrators? What happens when we radicalise the notion of
student engagement to demand that students participate fully in
collective governance? How can we imagine pedagogies of excess?14
Occupy as many spaces and positions as possible within the
institution, where those spaces have the potential to be critically
empowering and can strengthen collective intellectual and political
relations. Work hard to load up the ballots for key senate and faculty
council elections with candidates who are union members or strong
advocates for a more open university. In institutions where there is
little or no academic governance, as is the case of many post-1992
universities in England, decisions to occupy managerial positions
might be made with collective intentions to democratise them.
Step outside the formal university to learn what is being done in
emerging spaces of autonomous, public or non-hierarchical
communities for higher education and research.15 Can you contribute?
Free universities in the UK, for example, are not only a small but
significant part of the fight for the right of all people [. . .] to access
free, democratic education.16 They are also critical spaces of
experimentation and conditions within which we are able to engage
in processes of humanisation with each other [. . .] in relation to higher
education and knowledge production.17

8
9

This sort of practical-intellectual politics might take many forms, including occupying,
opening and finding outsides. They allow us to redirect energy from fire-fighting
the absurdities of the system towards understanding, refusing and transgressing
them critically and collectively. None are exclusively push-backs against power,
but because they aim to disrupt as much as diffuse power, they are likely to be
uncomfortable and risky. Some will be more possible in particular situations than
others, and all should be conceived as collective rather than individualised actions,
not least because they are important sites for building relationships of understanding
and solidarity in order to overcome practices that atomise, isolate and disenfranchise
academics and students. These are some of our initial thoughts on the kinds of
work that might contribute in small or maybe not so small ways to the development
of a prefigurative politics of academic life, where such politics are still possible.
Just imagine.

109

109

109

The university beside itself

Argos Aotearoa

Equity, change
and we the
university
Airini

Introduction

We are coming to a decision point of fundamental importance to how we

understand our work and ways in New Zealand universities. Do we value
Mori and Pasifika students only because they are so often represented as
being needy, underachieving, and disadvantaged minority groups, those who
are the focus of government investment approaches geared to improving
education outcomes? Or is there an alternative based on recognising the
contribution of all to the university project of enabling higher education?
If the value of Mori and Pasifika students is associated with funding
imperatives and research opportunities to address need, then the job is
to create the interventions for these groups until the job is done. The
alternative view is that Mori and Pasifika peoples are integral to the very
identity of the New Zealand university. If so, then closing disparity gaps is
about ensuring success for all within the university, and so to be done at an
accelerated pace in order to change the identity and ways of the university
itself. Action is not merely an intervention for Others. Rather, there is a social
contract between universities and the public, for equity and change for the
public good.

1.
Tertiary Education
Commission, Initial
Plan Guidance for
2013 Plans: Guidance for all TEOs.
(Wellington: Tertiary
Education Commission, 2012). Online
at http://www.tec.
govt.nz/Funding/
plan-guidance/Planguidance-for-2013/

114

I am in favour of accelerated change for better outcomes for Mori and

Pasifika peoples. I think we all should be, for the advancement of communities
and for the good of New Zealand. But when I hear some people talk, I
hear confusion and hesitation about the way equity might be achieved. It
is as if they are saying, Is there any life in Mother University after equity
comes to town? With government investment in universities geared to the
expectation of Mori and Pasifika students achieving parity in participation
and achievement,1 they worry, Is this going to shut down academic freedom
and institutional autonomy? Counter to these concerns are the critical
perspectives wherein culture, language and identity are understood to be
assets, and knowledge creation and higher education are decolonised.
Through these perspectives, the potential to expand how and what we know
is brought into view.
Genuinely belonging in the university is an ongoing challenge that Mori and
Pasifika peoples continue to face. This paper addresses this challenge by
critically examining the importance of priority groups and equity targets for
universities, and the social contract between universities and the public to
achieve equity for Mori and Pasifika students. But at the broadest level, this
paper is about who belongs in New Zealand universities. What we may have
considered previously to be a matter for debate is no longer such. How we
understand our work and ways in New Zealand universities is bound to how
we value Mori and Pasifika students, and how in turn this changes the very
identity and workings of the university.

114

The
Airini

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Argos
Aotearoa
Equity, change, and we the
university

Priority groups and targets

Universities have emerged as vital institutions of post-industrial democracies,
taking on a range of social tasks. From an economic perspective, universities
play a key role in the growth of the pool of skilled New Zealanders, in turn
raising overall productivity and our ability to compete internationally. Lifting
university participation and achievement by Mori and Pasifika students, is
crucial both for this task and in and of itself. The university remains in close
relation to its social context.
Our universities also need to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse
population. In New Zealand, the ethnic make-up of the 15-39 year age
group, the group most likely to participate in tertiary education, is shifting to
include higher proportions of Mori, Pasifika and Asian peoples of that age.
Completion rates show that the university sector is not serving some groups
of students well.2 Pasifika students have the lowest completion rates of any
group. The long-term performance of the university system depends on its
ability to teach a broader cross section of students within our New Zealand
public.
The changing demographic of New Zealand has been described as the
greatest challenge for higher education. As Middleton indicates, the net
effect is that those population groups which have traditionally provided
successful students are being replaced by increasing numbers of students
from groups that are traditionally underserved by higher education.3 It is
clear that it takes an entire education system, including schooling, to address
issues of equity and access in higher education. Even so, there is evidence
that Mori and Pasifika people are attaining disproportionately poor results
through the tertiary education system.4 Universities that respond to the
changing demographics will recognise that the supply of students who have
conventionally proceeded into higher education will diminish and be replaced
by increased numbers of non-traditional (under-represented, underserved,
minority) students. Only an education system that can succeed with this wave
of new students will be able to respond both to the challenge of increasing
diversity in the community and the needs of a new economy.
So what benefit would come from greater responsiveness? If we look
at Pasifika peoples, the first point is one of community. More Pasifika
peoples are born in New Zealand than overseas, which means that Pasifika
peoples can no longer be considered an immigrant population.5 Hence, the
advancement of Pasifika peoples in higher education is nationally relevant
and is about our New Zealand community. The Pacific population is youthful,
with 38% (100,344 people) aged under 15 years. By 2030, Pasifika people
will be one out of every eight in the younger (1539 years) workforce. But
current unemployment figures show that too few Pasifika secure jobs and
independent income.6 In Auckland, 21% of working age Pasifika peoples are
unemployed, compared with an Auckland unemployment rate of 7.5%.7

2.
Tertiary Education
Commission, Initial
Plan Guidance for
2013 Plans.
3
.Stuart Middleton,
Beating the Filters
of Failure: Engaging
with the Disengaged
in Higher Education,
paper presented to
the 2008 HERDSA
Conference (Rotorua, New Zealand),
p. 4. Online at www.
herdsa.org.au/wpcontent/uploads/.../
Stuart%20Middleton.pdf
4.
Tertiary Education
Commission, The
Auckland Study: An
Assessment of the
Tertiary Education
Needs of School
Leavers in the
Auckland Region
(Wellington: Tertiary
Education Commission, 2009)
5.
Philip Siataga,
Pasifika Child and
Youth Well-Being:
Roots and Wings,
in P. Gluckman
(ed.) Improving
the Transition:
Reducing Social
and Psychological
Morbidity During
Adolescence. A
report from the
Prime Ministers
Chief Science
Advisor. (Wellington:
Office of the
Prime Ministers
Science Advisory
Committee, 2011),
pp. 153-168.

6.
Alison Sutton and
Airini, A Snapshot of
Pasifika Education
in Auckland 2011
(Auckland: COMET
Education Trust
and Raise Pasifika,
2011).
7.
Ibid.
8.

For New Zealand to do well in the future, New Zealands Pasifika students
need to do well in schooling and in tertiary education today.8 The link between
degree qualifications and employment in higher paid, more sustainable jobs
is well-established.9 So, too, is the link between Pasifika higher education and
New Zealands social and economic future. If, by 2021, Pacific peoples wage
incomes are similar to the incomes of non- Pasifika people, the benefits to
the New Zealand economy would be in the order of $4 to $5 billion in 2001
price terms.10 The focus on priority groups in universities is vitally important
to student supply for universities and to New Zealand society overall.

Ministry of Pacific
Island Affairs,
Career Futures for
Pacific People: A
Report on Future
Labour Market
Opportunities
and Education
Pathways for Pacific
Peoples (Wellington:
Ministry of Pacific
Island Affairs, 2010).
9.
Ibid.
10.

115

Ibid.

115

Airini
The
university beside itself

Equity, change and we the

university
Argos
Aotearoa

The social contract

11.
George Fallis,
Multiversities,
Ideas, and
Democracy, 2nd
Revised Edition
(Toronto: University
of Toronto Press,
2007).
12.
Ibid., p 9.

Borrowed from political theory, the metaphor of a social contract emphasises

the democratic role of the university. As Fallis has argued, this social contract
recognises that the university helps to meet needs and aspirations right across
democratic society and is accountable to all its citizens.11 If one part of that
citizenry is benefitting more from the ways in which a university operates, then
that is not democracy for all. It is a malfunctionif stated generously. So far,
the university approach has not served Mori and Pasifika as well as it has
served other learners. The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) reported in
2009 that evidence shows that students of Pacific ethnicity experience clear
disadvantages within the New Zealand tertiary education.12

13..
Ministry of
Education, The
Tertiary Education
Strategy 20102015 (Wellington:
Ministry of
Education, 2010).
Online at http://
www.minedu.govt.
nz/NZEducation/
EducationPolicies/
TertiaryEducation/
PolicyAndStrategy/

The relationship of the university to society operates much like a contract

setting out the responsibilities of the university, the financial support to be
given to the university, and the degree of autonomy and freedom grated to the
university in order to fulfill these responsibilities. It was after all the public who
gave these freedoms, and it is the public and their government who decide in
each era how much they want to control universities. The ultimate legitimacy
of the universityfor its many tasks and privileged standingcomes from the
people in a democratic society.
This social contract is formulated over time and shaped by history, and by the
needs and wants of each era. It embodies more than an unwritten arrangement:
it can find expression in public funding, and the basic principles of the social
contract for New Zealand universities can be seen in the Tertiary Education
Strategy (2010-2015):13

14.
Tertiary Education
Commission, Initial
Plan Guidance for
2013 Plans, p. 7,
online at: http://
www.tec.govt.
nz/Documents/
Forms%20
Templates%20
and%20
Guides/2013-PlanGuidance-for-allTEOs.pdf

116

provide New Zealanders of all backgrounds with opportunities to gain worldclass skills and knowledge;

raise the skills and knowledge of the current and future workforce to meet
labour market demand and social needs;

produce high-quality research to build on New Zealands knowledge base,

respond to the needs of the economy and address environmental and social
challenges; andenable Mori to enjoy education success as Mori.

The stated priorities involve increasing the number of Mori students enjoying
success at higher levels and increasing the number of Pasifika students achieving
at higher levels.
In practice, this means that the TECs expectation is that Tertiary Education
Organisations will ensure that Mori and Pasifika participation and achievement
will be at least on a par with other learners. The Guidance is very clear:
During 2013 to 2015, New Zealands tertiary education system needs
to make a bigger contribution to economic growth and it needs to do it
within current levels of government investment. This means focusing
on outcomes and raising performanceespecially for Mori and Pacific
learners, where the biggest gains are to be made. New Zealand has planned
for greater success and invested public funds accordingly, some $2.7
billion annually. The tertiary sector investment is geared explicitly to the
expectation of parity at least, participation and achievement at all levels by
Mori and Pasifika students.14

116

The
Airini

university beside itself

Argos
Aotearoa
Equity, change, and we the
university

The expectation of equity and reduced disparities is consistent with

legislation for participation and success of all. Through the Education Act
1989, the University Councils have explicit responsibilities for supporting the
success of all:
181 Duties of councils
It is the duty of the council of an institution, in the performance of its functions
and the exercise of its powers,
(c)to encourage the greatest possible participation by the
communities served by the institution so as to maximise the
educational potential of all members of those communities with
particular emphasis on those groups in those communities that are
under-represented among the students of the institution.Hence,
through both legislation and investment plans, universities are
contracted to expand and increase participation and achievement.15

15.
Ministry of
Education,
Education Act 1989.
Online at http://
www.legislation.
govt.nz/act/
public/1989/0080/
latest/DLM175959.
html
16.
Donald Kennedy,
Academic Duty
(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University
Press, 1997).
17.
Ibid., p. 22.

A social contract is consistent with the obligations universities have to the

societies that support them. Even so, some within universities may feel that
the pulse of their autonomy is under threat by linking national strategy, in
the interests of the public good, to institutional strategy. In truth, universities
enjoy more independence than they often themselves admit. Consequently,
the public does demand greater accountability. After stepping down as
president of Stanford University, Donald Kennedy wrote in Academic Duty
that there has been an internal failure to come to grips with responsibility in
the university.16 Having been given a generous dose of academic freedom, we
havent taken care of the other side of the bargain. As he argued, the struggle
concerning universities has little or nothing to do with political positions, or
with relativism or race relations: It has to do with how we see our duty and
how our patrons and clients see it. If we can clarify our perception of duty to
gain public acceptance of it, we will have fulfilled an important obligation to
the society that nurtures us.17 Universities remain in relation to society.
The relationship between this duty to society and economic imperatives
has been critically examined, exposing the need to remain connected to
democratic purpose of higher education. Such purpose is essential if the
university is to expand understandings of who belongs within its institution.
Nussbaum argues that thinking about the aims of education has gone
disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad.18 With similarities
to New Zealands tertiary education investment approach, Nussbaum sees
that by being focused on national economic growth, institutions increasingly
treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to
be economically productive rather than to think critically and become
knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable
skills erodes our ability to criticize authority, reduces our sympathy with
the marginalized and different, and damages our competence to deal with
complex global problems. The loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes
the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response,
Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of
the gross national product. Rather, we must work to connect the curriculum
of study at universities to the intention for students to have the capacity to be
true democratic citizens of their countries and the world.

117

18.
Martha Nussbaum,
Not for Profit
(Princeton:
Princeton University
Press, 2012).

19.
Elizabeth McKinley,
Barbara Grant,
Sue Middleton,
Kathie Irwin, Les R.
Tumoana Williams,
Supervision of
Mori doctoral
students: a
descriptive report,
MAI Review 2009,
Issue 1. Online at
www.review.mai.
ac.nz.

117

Airini
The
university beside itself

20.
The University
of Auckland,
The University
of Auckland
Annual Report
2012 (Auckland:
The University of
Auckland, 2012).
Online at http://
www.auckland.
ac.nz/webdav/
site/central/
shared/about/theuniversity/officialpublications/
documents/
The-University-ofAuckland-AnnualReport-2012.pdf

Equity, change and we the

university
Argos
Aotearoa

Taken to its extension, Nussbaums argument could mean New Zealand

universities changing what and how they teach and engage with students. This
is not the same as the provision of remedial approaches framed as academic
support for at-risk students; a clip on to mainstream approaches. This is about
liberating university curriculum and teaching in ways that affirm the contribution
of Mori and Pasifika as integral to its organizational purpose and identity. In so
doing, the understanding of who belongs is expanded because the identity and
practices of the university are changed.
In their study of Mori doctoral student experience, McKinley and colleagues
described one such development.19 Their study found that Mori doctoral
students in New Zealand universities face challenges not usually experienced
by other doctoral candidates. After analysing data from 38 Mori doctoral
students, the researchers concluded that universities need to consider ways
to recognise and resource indigenous methodologies, including educating
and resourcing ethics committees, so that they can provide good counsel
to students embarking on research involving indigenous knowledges and
communities. In addition, the supervisors themselves should take part in robust
professional development if non-Mori advisors are working with Mori doctoral
students. Crucially, the challenge for the institutions in which doctoral education
takes place is both to create an environment supporting indigenous students
to work at the interface of academic and traditional knowledges, and also to
recognise their dual contributions to the advancement of their communities and
the project of higher learning. A critically responsive approach to equity views
Mori and Pasifika identity as intellectual assets. Practices of the university
change not solely on the basis of need, but in response to the intellectual assets
represented by students of colour.

Conclusion
Equity in universities is about changing understandings of who belongs at
university and why. Neediness has been a historical reason for attention to
Mori and Pasifika university participation and achievement. Although there
is government funding currently linked to Mori and Pasifika participation and
achievement, this alone is insufficient. A critically responsive approach to
university strategy and planning recognises when the institution delivers for
some yet not for all and makes changes to its practices; the onus being on the
university to ensure more effective engagement with underserved students.
Getting to parity at least, and at an accelerated pace, is core business for New
Zealand universities.
When we hear the word university, the images that come to mind directly link
to the people-facts we know about our own universities. For the University of
Auckland, the image is of 2807 Mori, 3153 Pasifika, and a university in which
Mori, Pasifika and Asian students combined out-number European and Other
students combined.20 Our minds eye sees thousands of Mori and Pasifika
students. This is our university public. We see too that a national strategy and
legislation committed to equity in representation and outcomes, at all levels
of university studies. We see the social contract with our communities and
the public, and the duty therein. We can look at the intellectual and scientific
leadership of Mori and Pasifika ancestors and contemporary scholars, and we
see that Mori and Pasifika belong and lead in places of higher knowledge and
learning. We see too the possibilities for expanding research through Mori and
Pasifika ways of creating knowledge and advancing learning. We as Mori and
Pasifika are integral to the identity of the university. We are not outreach groups
attached to the university, or beside the university, as if for the time being only,
to address neediness. We belong in places of higher education. At this time of
change we say, We belong in the university.
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In search of an activist academic

In search
of an activist
academic
Sandra Grey

An activist who is required to

act in ways which are secretive,
unaccountable, and not open to
dialogical engagement with others is
an activist who is displacing activism
in favour of professional elitism.1
Most of us working and studying in tertiary institutions
in New Zealand are familiar with the corridor
conversations, the grumbling after meetings, and
the remarks over a cup of tea about how managerialism
is changing the nature of our institutions and our
profession. Furthermore, there is now a significant
body of academic work critiquing the current policy
direction shaping higher education worldwide. The
picture painted around the globe is of institutions
and their staff being robbed of the spaces needed
for research and teaching projects which are not
countable, auditable, measurable or commercialisable,
as their institutions are enveloped by what Richard
Winter has called the new higher education
environment (NHE).2
What has not yet been well developed is an analysis
of the opportunities for staff and students to resist
the myriad of corporate, managerial and auditing
techniques infusing daily life in universitiesan
analysis that will enable us to build a coherent strategic
campaign against the NHE agenda. Pockets of
resistance, often led by unions, are appearing at
university and college campuses in the US, England,
Scotland, France, Chile, Australia, New Zealand and
elsewhere. The question, however, is how to turn
these pockets of resistance into a coherent global
movement to ensure that universities in the twentyfirst century are places where we can address the
cultural, economic, environmental, scientific and
social questions of our age. How do we move from
academic analysis of the problems facing higher
education to a concerted and ongoing political
campaign which pushes back against those driving
an NHE agenda dominated by economic imperatives,
privatisation, marketisation and managerialism?
This paper analyses resistance to the NHE environment
documented within a range of sources in order to
identify some of the possibilities for moving from
119

analysis to action. It mobilises concepts drawn from

social movement and non-violent conflict research
to understand activist techniques, and it is informed
by lived activism and scholarship in the form of
document analysis. I served as the full-time National
President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education
Union in 2010 and 2011, and am a member of the
successful Campaign for MMP.3 While some may
assert that my situatedness within the union means
I am uncritical and unthinking, my role as an academic
demands that my critique of the NHE environment
is public, rigorous and open to dialogical engagement.
At this point I want to acknowledge the tensions that
many of us face when discussing our role within a
political project which challenges the power of those
supportive of the NHE environment. Though many
academics now happily challenge notions of
objectivity in research, when pushed to contribute
their rhetorical, intellectual and research skills to a
political project, they question whether this is a
suitable space for academics to occupy. Certainly
this challenge was something I encountered on joining
the Campaign for MMP. Colleagues often indirectly
questioned my actions, saying they would remain
available for objective commentary since the duty
of political scientists is to inform the public, not to
fight for a particular alternative. I am of the view,
however, that there are moments in time when good
academic evidence supports a particular political
perspective, and that the roles of academic and
activist are legitimately intertwined. An activist is
someone engaged in publicly challenging the status
quo, and this challenge can take place through acts
as diverse as producing public reports to street
activism.
If significant evidence shows that the NHE environment
is causing harm to students and staff, to knowledge,
to teaching and learning, and to democratic debate,4
should we not use all the resources at our disposal
to fight back? We will be accused of having vested
interests for engaging in resistance to the NHE
agenda, since public choice theorising infuses the
reshaping of universities just as it does the broader
project of neo-liberalisation and marketisation of all
public entities. At its heart, public choice theory views
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society as a collection of individuals (rather than

groups) who are assumed to act rationally in order
to maximise benefit given their own preferences and
desires.5 But, we must ask, who better to fight for
quality public tertiary education than those who
participate in it daily? To dampen this vested interest
criticism, we must also ensure that any work (including
work to support political projects) is done with
intellectual rigour and honesty.

it tends to provoke countertendencies, and it exists

in historically and geographically contingent forms.10
Understanding the NHE agenda as unfinished is
important because, as Wendy Larner notes, it is only
by theorising neo-liberalism as a multi-vocal,
contradictory, and historically contingent
phenomenon that we can make visible the
contestations and struggles in which we are currently
engaged.11

Taking action against the NHE environment

From analysis to activism

For academics, the easiest form of activism in which

to engage is the ongoing diagnosis and critique of
the NHE environment (since it sits squarely within
the bounds of our existing world and expertise). While
the problems created by managerialism,
commercialisation, privatisation and corporatisation
have begun to be thoroughly identified and debated,
we must continue to articulate these problems
publicly. As Jean-Franois Lyotard and Jacques
Derrida have suggested, the very future of the
university depends on how successfully it carries
out the task of its own self-examination, and, along
with this, the responsibility for the scrutiny of reason
in all its historical forms.6 As this inaugural edition of
Argos shows, many who work within the current NHE
environment are prepared to engage in academic
critique of the NHE agenda and its impact. We must
articulate the problems of the NHE environment
because there is power in the taken-for-granted
nature of the project that is presently being pushed
through.7 This taken-for-grantedness is central to
the broader social, political and economic project
dominating our world. As Erik Olin Wright has noted,
to most people capitalism now seems the natural
order of things.8

While we must expose the boundaries and

contradictions of the NHE environment, academic
analysis is not enough to change the system. As
academic members of staff within tertiary education,
we contribute to the system's functioning through
our daily actions. It is therefore incumbent on us to
devise and implement a coherent programme of
transformative action:

Part of challenging the taken-for-grantedness of the

NHE agenda is to demonstrate that the world it
creates is a created one. As they advance their
reforms, the architects and acolytes of the
corporatised, privatised, commercialised and
managerial higher education system insist there is
no alternative (the mantra historically used to embed
multiple forms of neo-liberalism). They also assert
that those working within higher education institutions
consent to their vision. Indeed, the New Zealand
Ministry of Education states that the Tertiary
Education Strategy approach, which links the outputs
of the tertiary education sector to government goals,
is accepted by the sector as the necessary way
forward.9 This TINA obscures the fact that the NHE
environment is a created environment and that it is
multi-vocal, fragmentary and incomplete, as is the
overarching ideological and economic project of
neo-liberalism itself. As Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell
observe, neo-liberalism should be understood as a
process, not an end-state [. . .] it is also contradictory,
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In search of an activist Argos

academic

All of us working on these issues in

research universities [. . .] have been
waiting for someone else to take the
lead in moving civic engagement work
but it hasnt happened. What we have
now discovered is that we are the ones
weve been waiting for.12
The question is: what will be involved in taking the
lead? For me, the answer lies in seeking out
knowledge, expertise and skills from thosesuch
as social movement leaders, organic intellectuals,
unions, non-violent conflict leaders, community and
voluntary sector leaderswho are engaged in
activism in civil society. We must find new modes of
acting and working, since what we have been doing
for the past two decades in New Zealand has not
halted the implementation of commercial and
managerial imperatives in our universities.
Social movement and non-violent conflict literature
suggests that the activist academic will have to
participate in acts both of commission and omission.13
Staff and students already practice a range of acts
of commission. We make submissions to our own
institutions and parliamentary select committees;
we write letters to those in management positions
and to relevant political elites; we take part in
institutional forums; we write columns for newspapers
and other media; and we make deputations to senior
management teams, governance bodies, government
agencies and ministers. Instances of acts of
commission are readily found in New Zealand. The
Public Service Association, for example, made a
submission on changes to student unions in 2010,
noting concern that if the bill were to proceed into
law, it would devastate important services to
students.14 In 2012, a Victoria University of Wellington
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academic, Dolores Janeiwski, wrote to the Dominion

Post newspaper, commenting that as protests about
the removal of funding for primary and intermediate
teachers mount, we should also pay attention to the
impact of declining levels of funding in the tertiary
sector.15 Another act of commission featured in the
April 2012 report to the University of Canterbury
Council from the Vice-Chancellor, Rod Carr, who
noted the engagement of staff in debates at
Canterbury during planned closures of three
academic programmes (engagement which resulted
in one of the planned closures being cancelled).
These are but a few examples of the insider tactics
being used by staff concerned about the NHE
environment and its impacts on teaching, learning
and research.
Acts of commission are relatively low cost (they are
often require only a short-term engagement and do
not threaten an individual activists life or liberty), but
as the NHE environment has enveloped our
institutions, there are suggestions that such acts
have become less common. It is possible that many
staff have found it easier either to exit, or to show
loyalty, than to voice their concerns.16 Some staff
may have chosen to exit (by changing professions
or retiring) rather than sitting by and witnessing the
on-going effects of power moving from the hands
of staff collectively to the hands of those implementing
arbitrary accountability and efficiency measures on
behalf of the paymaster (the government). Research
demonstrates that the introduction of managerialism
in New Zealand from the 1990s resulted in increasing
line-management within institutions and a drift
upwards in decision-making from faculty to
professional administrators.17 The professionals
who hold expertise about teaching and learning have
been pushed aside in favour of managers interested
in balanced books and KPIsthough in the New
Zealand education sector these are labelled EPIs
(Educational Performance Indicators) to make them
more palatable. As Paul Trowler has explained, within
the present NHE environment, managers have control
of the product and academic staff are disempowered
in order to eliminate producer capture, to facilitate
market responsiveness and to ensure that structures
and processes are honed to maximise economy
and efficiency.18
While some of our colleagues have chosen to forego
decision-making in our institutions or to exit
universities altogether, others have become loyal to
the new way of doing thingsperhaps because
they have accepted the TINA mantra or because they
benefit from the new rules of engagement. As noted
by Chris Lorenz, support for New Public Management
(NPM)19 in higher education is based on the unholy
alliance between the neoliberal political class and
the NPM managers on side and aligned faculty and
students on the other.20 This speaks to another
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In search
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lesson we can take from those who practice and

teach non-violent conflict resolution: the need to
dismantle the pillars of support.21
One pillar of support which it seems obvious to target
in the new NHE environment is comprised of the
many Vice-Chancellors, senior management teams
and academic managers who have ceased to be
advocates for the broad-based mission of universities,
and instead uncritically implement the managerial
line. I agree with Stewart that:
The ascendancy of entrepreneurial
university managements who
emphasise a market-based rationality
in which education becomes a
consumer good, and who have a
correspondingly anxious eye on
consumer satisfaction and public
relations as well as governments
concerned with fiscal constraints,
corporate ties and short term priorities,
are paving the way for dangerous
widespread institutional change.23
I would add that another factor helping to pave the
way for dangerous widespread institutional change
is that many of our senior management teams
currently have their anxious eye on meeting
government objectives. Examining the public
proclamations of Universities New Zealand (the New
Zealand Vice Chancellors Committee) demonstrates
this problematic tendency in action. Throughout the
public documents of Universities New Zealand appear
statements drawn from economic discourses which
present universities as existing for commercialisation,
business development and economic growth. The
Universities New Zealand Briefing: Contributing
Government Goals, for example, states that
universities are uniquely well placed to partner with
government in pursuit of boosting economic growth,
creating high value jobs, and growing export
education.24 There is only one mention of a social
goal in the 53 press releases put out by Universities
New Zealand between March 2008 and April 2013.
This seems at odds with the stated mission of
Universities New Zealand, which is to advance
university education and research activity, to promote
the common interests of the universities nationally
and internationally, and to contribute well-argued,
unified responses to developments that may impact
on university autonomy.25
The fact that economic imperatives for education
infuse Universities New Zealand publications is
deeply problematic, no matter what is said behind
closed doors to political elites. As noted by Cynthia
Gibson, it is important to have administrators who
inculcate a civic ethos through the institution by
giving voice to it in public forums, creating
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In search of an activist academic

PILLARS OF SUPPORT
Successful nonviolent movements analyse the various segments of society (pillars) that
keep a power structure intact (supported). Once identified, those pillars can be dissected
into their component parts, identifying specific individuals or groups that make up that
pillar. Nonviolent movements plan for ways to weaken and topple those pillars, eventually
causing the power structure to collapse all together.

Identify the various pillars of support in this conflict that were

keeping the power structure intact.
Discuss which pillars you think are strongest and which are
weakest.
How did the movement attempt to undermine and topple the
different pillars of support?

infrastructure to support it, and establishing policies

that sustain it.26
Part of the problem is that the NHE environment
seems to encourage the creation of individual master
managers for our complex institutions, when in reality
good institutional leadership will be seen as a
portfolio of roles and tasks performed by a group
of people in key institutional positions.27 Distributed
leadershipthat is, leadership underpinned by
collective and inclusive philosophymay in fact be
the required approach for complex institutions:
[D]istributed leadership [is] a new
architecture for leadership in which
activity bridges agency (the traits/
behaviours of individual leaders) and
structure (the systemic properties and
role structures) in concertive action.28

122

A second pillar of support to which we must turn our

attention is the bureaucrats who at times acknowledge
problems with the governments narrow economic
measurements which distort the rules of the game
(Gillings Law states The way the game is scored
shapes the way the game is played),29 but are not
prepared (or able) to reject the failing system. We
must find alternative administrative and policy
approaches which will appeal to public servants. The
political leaders of New Zealand comprise a third
pillar of support for the NHE environment. The present
National-led government is rapidly advancing the
NHE agenda in ways that will fundamentally alter the
nature of inquiry, teaching, learning and knowledge
generation.30 Analysis of policy documentation,
however, makes it clear that the major opposition
party, Labour, was responsible for placing public
tertiary education on the road to strong government
steering when it established the Tertiary Education
Advisory Commission in 2000.31 It was from this point
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beside itself

onwards that the actions of our autonomous tertiary

institutions were moved to align closely with the goals
of government. The challenge now is how to convince
at least some political parties that this agenda is
propelling universities in the wrong direction.
Moving to dismantle the pillars of support for the
NHE agenda means working with those elites who
are uncomfortable with the current direction of higher
education in New Zealand, and enlisting them to
support alternatives. In order to aid this, we must
build empowering processes, structures and
institutions to which people can align themselves.32
If the existing institutional mechanisms of academic
challenge and debate are proving less useful than
they once were, then we must create new ones.
Drawing on the work of Eric Olin Wright, I would
suggest that the focus should be on interstitial and
symbiotic transformations, and on developing new
forms in niches and margins; such reforms will
simultaneously make life better within the existing
economic system and expand potential for future
advances in democratic power.33 Social movement
actors are long versed in this type of behaviour.
Womens movements internationally, for instance,
have set up refuges and rape crisis centres to help
immediate victims of patriarchal violence, and in so
doing, have advanced the possibilities for removing
patriarchal systems altogether. Related forms of
activity have been evident in our own institutions.
During the 1960s and 1970s, feminist scholars set
up gender and womens studies courses to challenge
patriarchy, and black scholars established spaces
for teaching black studies, challenging racism,
disadvantage and colonisation within academia and
more broadly.
There are already examples of alternative institutions
being established at the margins, both in New Zealand
and around the world. Conferences and seminars
are debating, discussing and challenging the takenfor-grantedness of the NHE environment. Academics
are coalescing around research and advocacy groups
such as URGE34 and the Campaign for Public
University in the UK.35 Students are also creating
spaces at the margins to debate and discuss the
future of education. There are many examples of this,
such as the deliberative forums and street politics
of the Quebec student movement in 2012 and the
WATU (We Are The University) campaigns recently
formed in Auckland and Wellington. Staff in some
places are setting up parallel institutions, like the
Council for the Defence of British Universities36 and
advocacy organisations such as Campus Compact.37
We must continue to set up institutions, structures
and processes that will enable us to thrive as an
academic community based on moral principles
which support a broad based vision for tertiary
education, and which can eventually replace those
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Aotearoa
created under the NHE agenda. We must find and
make spaces within our institutions where we can
begin to dismantle the neo-liberal project which
threatens the very nature of universitiesspaces
where we can turn anger or disillusionment into hope
and action. As Wright notes, we need an agentcentred notion of power, which involves people
acting individually and collectively, using power to
accomplish things.38 I would argue, too, that in the
case of a push back against the NHE agenda we must
fight collectively, since there may be huge costs and
penalties if individuals or individual institutions try
to challenge or opt out of the auditing process.39
The acts of commission mentioned so far are insider
tactics involving those already engaged in governing,
managing and staffing higher education. If we are to
turn the NHE environment around, it is likely we will
need to borrow contentious political techniques from
social movements. While university staff have tried
a range of insider tactics to resist managerialism for
30 years, it seems that a major public movement will
be needed to mount a successful challenge.40 Large
numbers of people internationally know that higher
education is a transformative experience. We need
their moral support as their voices can help put moral
pressure on the leaders of our nation to turn this ship
in another direction. Engaging the public is likely to
require actions which capture media attention and
it may stretch to contentious performances such as
demonstrations, teach-ins or public meetings.41 The
aim must be to build complex activity networks.42
There have been examples of these already around
the globe. At WITT (the Western Institute of
Technology) and at Virginia U, staff and students have
taken protest actions over the removal of popular
institutional leaders.43 Student protests have been
staged in Auckland and in the UK over budget cuts
and rising student fees, and last year TEU members
at polytechnics in New Zealand mounted a day of
action against the governments diverting of a large
pocket of funding from public institutions to private
training establishments. What is needed is to turn
these moments of activism into ongoing challenges
of the NHE system. Social movement activists and
scholars know that successful campaigns are ones
displaying worthiness, unity, numbers, and
commitment.44 We must support academic staff
many of whom have practiced acts of commission
to try to push back against the NHE agenda being
rolled out for decadesto find the time and energy
not only to continue to resist the agenda, but to
increase the intensity of that resistance.
Finally, we must examine whether acts of commission
will be enough to force change in the policy,
governance and management approaches being
imposed on higher education. While research shows
that it is much easier to build alliances and forge
support when asking people to take fairly safe (and
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often institutional) actions, the time has come to think

about the transformative power of acts of omission
perhaps better known as civil disobedience. In the
case of the NHE environment, this would mean
refusing to take part in processes which are not
educationally and pedagogically sound. We have to
do this as a strong collective, however, not as
individuals who can be picked off one by one, so the
first step is to stimulate widespread appreciation
that change is both needed and possible.
If we believe that universities should not simply be
destined to become an instrument of the economy,
activism will be a necessary end point. More than
two decades ago, Colin Lankshear called upon
university staff to find energy for day-to-day
resistance and challenge, for critiquing and debating
university policy, and for establishing active networks
with activist organisations and/or political elites.45 As
this suggests, we must use the resources we do
havewhich are numerousto oppose and resist
further implementation of managerialism,
commercialisation and privatisation in higher
education. And we need to view this goal as being
achievable. Since, as Campus Compact has noted,
research universities possess significant academic
and social influence, world-class faculties,
outstanding students, state-of-the-art research
facilities and considerable financial resources, they
are well-positioned to drive institutional and fieldwide change relatively quickly, and in ways that ensure
commitment to civic engagement for centuries
to come.46

Argos
In search of an activist
academicAotearoa
1
Anna Yeatman, Activism and the Policy Process, in
Anna Yeatman (ed) Activism and the policy process,
(Allen and Unwin: St Leonards NSW, 1998), p. 33.
2
Richard Winter, Looking out on a Bolder
Landscape, Times Higher Education Supplement
(18 October 1991), p. 17.
3
This paper is an academic analysis informed by my
active engagement in the union, not a paper setting
out the TEU position on this issue.
4
For the past two decades academics have been
examining the cost of the NHE environment, for
an overview see: Daniel Seymour, Boundaries
in the New Higher Education Environment, New
Directions for Institutional Research 68 (1989):
5-24; Paul Trowler, Beyond the Robbins Trap:
Reconceptualising Academic Responses to
Change in Higher Education (orquiet flows the
don?), Studies in Higher Education 22:3 (1997):
301-318; and Cris Shore, Beyond the Multiversity:
Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Schizophrenic
University, Social Anthropology 18:1 (2010):15-29,
p. 17.
5
Richard Mulgan, Politics in New Zealand (Auckland
University Press: Auckland, 1994), p. 8.
6
Cited in Michael Peters, Re-Reading Touraine: Postindustrialism and the Future of the University, Sites
23 (Spring 1991): 63-83, p. 78.
7
See Paul Trowler, Captured by the Discourse?
The Socially Constitutive Power of New Higher
Education Discourse in the UK, Organization 8
(2001):183-201, p. 190.
8
Erik Olin Wright, Transforming Capitalism through
Real Utopias, American Sociological Review, 78:1
(2013):1-25, p. 2.

9
Ministry of Education, OECD Thematic Review of
Tertiary Education: NZ Country Background Report
(Ministry of Education: Wellington, January 2006),
pp. 17-18.
10
Cited in Shore, Beyond the Multiversity, p. 17.
11
Wendy Larner, Sociologies of Neo-liberalism:
Theorising the New Zealand Experiment, Sites 36
(Autumn 1998): 5-21, p. 17.
12
Cynthia M. Gibson (writer/editor), New Times
Demand New Scholarship I: Research Universities
and Civic Engagement: A Leadership Agenda,
Journal of Higher Education Outreach and
Engagement 15:4 (2012): 235-269, p. 238.
13
Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action
(Porter Sargent Publishers: Boston, 1973).
14
Submission to Education (Freedom of Association)
Amendment Bill 2010.
15
Dolores Janiewski, Letter: Kiwis Must Mobilise to
Stop Tertiary-Education Cuts, Too, (Dominion Post,
11 June 2012) http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominionpost/comment/letters-to-the-editor/7077103/
Letter-Kiwis-must-mobilise-to-stop-tertiaryeducation-cuts-too

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17.
Patricia Gumport cited in Penni Stewart, Academic
Freedom in These Times: Three Lessons from York
University, Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry 2:2
(2010): 48-61, p. 57.
18.
Trowler, Captured by the Discourse? p. 190.
19.
NPM is defined by Steven Van de Walle and
Gerhard Hammerschmid as a two-level concept.
Firstly, NPM is a set of managerial innovations,
and, secondly, it signifies a 'change of the role of
government in society'. See Stephen Van de Walle
and Gerhard Hammerschmid, The Impact of New
Public Management: Challenges for coordination
and cohesion in European Public Sectors,
Halduskultuur Administrative Culture 12:2 (2011):
190-209, p.191.
20.
Chris Lorenz, 'If You're So Smart, Why Are You Under
Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism and New
Public Management', Critical Inquiry (Spring 2012):
599-630, p. 625.
21.
Robert L. Helvey, On Strategic Non-violent Conflict:
Thinking About the Fundamentals
(The Albert Einstein Institution: Boston, 2004).
22
.
ICNC-Rutgers course material, 2013. For
information on this course see: http://www.
nonviolent-conflict.org/
23.
Stewart, Academic Freedom in These Times, p. 49.
24.
Universities New Zealand, Universities New Zealand
Briefing: Contributing to Government Goals,
December 2011, p. 2.
25.
Universities New Zealand, Briefing for the Incoming
Government, November 2008, p. 5. The briefing
does acknowledge the one social goal within the
government agenda -achieving greater educational
accomplishments for Maori and Pasifika peoples
but the focus of most of the documentation is on
the economic growth-oriented goals.
26.
Gibson, New Times Demand New Scholarship I,
p. 240.
27.
Cited in Geoff Sharrock, Four Management
Agendas for Australian Universities, Journal of
Higher Education Policy and Management, 34:3
(2012): 323-337, p. 335.
28.
Sandra Jones, Geraldine Lefoe, Marina Harvey
& Kevin Ryland Distributed leadership: a
collaborative framework for academics, executives
and professionals in higher education, Journal
of Higher Education Policy and Management 34:1
(2012): 67-78, p, 70.
29.
Brian Easton, Shaping the Way We Play: an
Economists View, The 11th Annual Public Sector
Finance Forum, 11 September 2007, http://www.
eastonbh.ac.nz/2007/09/the-current-state-of-thepublic-sector-an-economists-view-3
30.
For an overview of the agenda see Office for
the Minister of Tertiary Education, Tertiary
Education Strategy 2010-15 (Ministry of Education:
Wellington, 2010).
31.
See Tertiary Education Advisory Commission,
Shaping a Shared Vision: Strategy, Quality, Access
(Tertiary Ministry of Education: Wellington, August
2000); Shaping the System: Second Report of the
Tertiary Education Advisory Commission (Ministry
of Education: Wellington, March 2001); Shaping the
Strategy: Third Report of the Tertiary Education
Advisory Commission (Ministry of Education:
Wellington, July 2001).

125

In search of
activist academic
Inansearch
of an

activist academic

32
See Wright, Transforming Capitalism through Real
Utopias, p. 20.
33
Ibid.
34
URGE (University Reform, Globalisation and
Regionalisation) is a multidisciplinary programme
of knowledge exchange, examining how processes
of regionalisation and globalisation are redefining
the nature and scope of universities (See http://edu.
au.dk/en/research/research-projects/universityreform-globalization-and-europeanisation-urge/)
35
Initiated by a group of university teachers and
graduate students, the UK Campaign for the
Public University is based on the notion that the
public university is essential both for cultivating
democratic public life and creating the means
for individuals to find fulfilment in creative and
intellectual pursuits regardless of whether or not
they pursue a degree programme. The Campaign
is not affiliated with any political party (see http://
www.publicuniversity.org.uk/about).
36
The Council for the Defence of British Universities
exists to advance university education for the
public benefit (see http://www.cdbu.org.uk/about/
values-and-aims).
37
Campus Compact is a national coalition of college
and university presidents in the United States of
America who are committed to fulfilling the civic
purposes of higher education (see http://www.
compact.org/).
38
Wright, Transforming Capitalism through Real
Utopias, p. 12.
39
Shore, Beyond the Multiversity, p. 293.
40
See Lorenz, 'If You're So Smart, Why Are You Under
Surveillance? p. 601.
41
Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious
Politics (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers,
2007).
42
Trowler, Captured by the Discourse? p. 194.
43
In November 2012, Tertiary Education Union
members and students at The Western Institute
of Technology (WITT) came together to protest
government funding cuts and the removal of WITT
chief executive, Richard Handley (see http://www.
stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/7987435/
Union-protests-at-funding-cuts and http://teu.
ac.nz/2013/01/walsh-and-handley-move-on/).
Similarly, in April 2013, students at Virginia State
University gathered to urge the university to
reconsider the contract renewal of associate
professor of sociology, Sundjata ibn-Hyman (see
http://drsundjataatwvsu.blogspot.co.nz/2013/04/
west-virginia-state-university-students.
html#!/2013/04/west-virginia-state-universitystudents.html).
44
Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 17682004
(Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2004).
45
Colin Lankshear, In Whose Interest? The Role of
Intellectuals in New Zealand Society, Sites 17
(Spring 1988): 3-21, pp. 15-17.
46
Gibson, New Times Demand New Scholarship I,
p. 237.

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Insurgency of
discourse and
affective
intervention:
the Chilean
students'
movement
The university beside itself

Argos Aotearoa

Walescka PinoOjeda
Imprisoned Emotions

During the Chilean military dictatorship of 11 September 1973 to March 1990, a

widespread contestatory culture of collective enthusiasm for political and social
change produced affective networks of solidarity that weakened the very foundation
of pragmatic civic order. These networks of resistance provided the basis for a
culture of opposition towards the projects of ideological cleansing that had been so
brutally implemented by the dictatorship. Upon the return to institutional democracy
in March of 1990, the affective ties that had been created in this resistance movement
were suppressed, civil society ceding the task of mending national social bonds,
democratic culture and national institutions to the states political elites.
Once they regained legitimacy, the nations political class was also entrusted with
the task of managing collective sentiment, ameliorating fear, uniting former political
antagonists, tactfully identify perpetrators of state terror and dealing with victims of
the outgoing regimes repression. Faced with the destruction of their judicial system,
the government established two Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, proposing
a politics of reconciliation that built an emotive framework for behaviour hinging
on responsibility and the civic need to build consensus.1 Their expectations in this
regard were well intentioned and largely understandable to a certain point. Taken
to an extreme, this collective sentiment could be seen to have become hostage to
the politics of consensus (i.e. governability), with feelings of consolidation becoming
subsumed within economic imperatives and the fulfilment of market-mandated
consumerism. Thus, financial transactions would occupy the social sphere previously
reserved for more varied types of collaboration, companionship and daily affective
exchanges.
In other words, these processes made the post-authoritarian Chilean political elites
responsible for managing the entire affective sphere of civil society. This meant not
so much moderating, but rather reorienting it, liberating a proxy of social interaction
through liberalisation of markets and, thus, the massive circulation of merchandise.
Within this new framework, market circulation became a surrogate for collective
ideological and social aspirations. In this way, the recovery of true communal order
in post-authoritarian societies such as Chile may be seen to still require a massive
ideological redirection away from ephemeral individualist imperatives and towards
the communal sphere of long-lasting shared fulfilment that these imperatives have
inadequately replaced.

126 126

1
The Truth and Justice
Commission resulted
in the Rettig Report in
April of 1990, identifying
around 3,000 cases of
disappearance. The
National Commission on
Political Imprisonment and
Torture, also known as the
Valech Report released its
own report on November
28, 2004, recognising a
further 27,000 victims of
these practices.

Theuniversity
university
besideitself
itself
The
Insurgency of discourse and affective intervention
Walescka beside
Pino-Ojeda

ArgosAotearoa
Aotearoa
Argos

The ongoing social movement initiated by Chilean students in May 2011 tackles
current frustrations with this condition, enacting dissent through a discursive
framework that re-appropriates the notion of common sense away from neoliberal
adages and centres itself in the fundamental realm of feeling and emotion.

'Lets recover common sense. The solution will

come through mutual action'.

The students rhetoric has broken through the veil of normativity that once hid the
ongoing ethical duplicity and absurd logic of the current system of socio-economic
politics and practices. Their discourse has drawn attention to the fact that what we
are dealing with in the current social structure is a logical obscenity which confuses
the means with the ends. This confusion was repeatedly put forward in multiple
debates over the imperative to generate profit in all types of exchanges of service
even essential social services such as education. In these discussions, profit, which
provides the means necessary for the achievement of social objectives, which in this
case is education, has been converted into the goal for which education serves as the
means. Only an intentional blurring of critical judgement could lead to this perversion
of goals. The discursive insurgency exercised by Chiles student leaders in this regard
has attempted to invert this dynamic in order to reorient a much larger social debate.
This represents a gesture of transcendental responsibility to the degree that it returns
debate to the realm of communal sustainability through the recovery of basic modern
notions of humanism.

Perverse Goals and Discursive Insurgency

This student protest movement constitutes a foundational dislocating event in
Chilean society. It is foundational in the sense that, from its very emergence, it
has been propositional, rejecting the binary rubrics that structure typical political,
economic and generational debate. These are the same rubrics that place powerful
financial and political elite coalitions in constant opposition to debilitated unions and
activist groups, with both sides adopting well-worn rhetorical frameworks. Indeed, the
discourse adopted by the current protest movements student leadersand by the
wider population they representrejects the legitimacy of this dynamic, putting into
question the entire discursive parameters imposed and upheld by the dictatorship
and the post-dictatorial political elite, respectively.
For their part, these political elites have absolutely failed to respond to this discursive
re-framing, and have become paralysed by their inability to step outside the
rational parameters through which they have governed thus far. To an extent, their
disconcerted reactions have been understandable, given the massive worldwide
success enjoyed in the last 40 years by the ideological model they inhabit. In this
sense, this movement represents the most radical schism to have yet stemmed from
Chiles transitional democracy refusing to engage in dialogue within the established
parameters of imagination, logic and affect set up by this transition.
It is precisely because of this negation that the student movement has been able to
bring the ethical duplicity and absurd logic of current political and socio-economic
practices to light. The movement seeks to reveal how these practices, rather than
benefiting the wider social body, instead benefit a very small minority of the population,

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consistently betraying the social contracts they themselves have established through
their sustained abuse of both the environment and labour. In many ways, this discursive
rupture has succeeded in bringing to light the fraudulent underpinnings and deceptions
of economic success inherent in neoliberalism, revealing that, rather than a problem of
systemic and institutional corruption (though this is a concern), what is at issue here is
the fact that the very foundation of Chiles current institutional and social environment
has been built upon an ethically bankrupt and logically corrupt construct.
The leaders of the movement put forward this very sentiment when speaking in front
of the Chilean senate. In outlining and defending their legislative proposal to bar profitdriven educational institutions from receiving state funding, Giorgio Jackson points out
in what way the logic that has allowed market forces to control education is perverse:
You only have one opportunity to get an education [. . .] This cant be seen
as a marketable asset, because it is impossible to truly measure the quality
of the education you are receiving once you have committed to becoming a
student in a given institution. It is very difficult to perceive. Its not like trying
a dry fruit, deciding that its not to your taste, that it is bad, and the next day
buying another, or demanding your money back with a receipt. In this case,
one goes on for 12 years, and then another 4 or 5, and its only one chance [.
. .] right now we are seeing education as a market commodity, as if a person
could come back, demand better quality, and waste another 15 years of
their life [. . .] As such, it is barbaric that we can admit and be complicit, as a
society, as a nation, with a system that generates such perverse incentives,
(incentives that allow) the commodification of the right to education [. . .]
We see the legislative project proposed here as being a step in the right
direction, one in which the state will cease to be a participant in this moral
offence [. . .] We believe this legislation is a moral imperative and necessity
[. . .] in which we may establish the foundation for the state to become the
guarantor of human rights, and not of market commodities.2

Camila Vallejo, President of the University of Chile

Students Association, speaking in the Chilean Senate.

Presidents of all major university students

associations in a meeting with the president of Chile,
Sebastin Piera.

The perversity to which Jackson refers is tied in with a form of premeditated evil fostered
by hegemonic power structures. In turning education into a consumptive profit-driven
mechanism, these structures are demolishing Chiles social fabric and turning their
victims into the very instruments of their perpetuation, unable to see the sinister nature
of said structures. It is because of the obscurantism involved in this dynamic that it has
been possible to impose such perverse imperatives, and it is within this context that
the discursive insurgency enacted by these student leaders has sought to rectify this
reorientation of means and ends and, in doing so, re-frame social debate.
For its part, the wider civil movement has now responded with strategies that display
an awareness of the manipulated rationale they have been living within in the last few
decades, utilising rhetoric that places an emphasis on affective bonds and shared ideas.

128 128

2
Jackson was then the
president of the Universidad Catlica de Chiles
Student Federation (FEUC)
and together with his fellow
leaders he spoke before
the national Commission
on Education, Culture,
Science and Technology
on the 16th of August,
2011. This presentation
was made available to the
public live via the Senates
television channel, and
is accessible online at:
http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=HNe3XgPaxB4

Insurgency of discourse and affective intervention

Walesckabeside
Pino-Ojeda
The university
itself

'In a world of lies, to

tell the truth is a
revolutionary act'.

Argos Aotearoa

'I think, therefore

they wont let me be'.

Irruptions of Affect and Memory

3
In October of 2010, the
month in which the miners
were rescued, President
Pieras popularity rose to
65%, 15 points higher than
those he had before the
accident. Amid the student
protests, the Presidents
popularity fell to 23%, a
figure that leaves him as
the president with the
worst ever approval rating
since Chiles return to
democracy.

The outbreak of this massive civil movement takes place within a social context
which, superficially at least, appears to be both functional and healthy. In recent years,
Chile has enjoyed strong economic indices, has soundly overcome the significant
earthquake of February 2010, and currently has a presidential administration that has
gained much respect from the international community in the wake of the successful
rescue of the much publicised miners trapped underground between August and
October of the same year an incident which contributed to the image of efficiency
promulgated by the impresario Sebastin Pieras administration for Chile, something
that bolstered the governing conservative coalitions hopes for future electoral
success.3 Indeed, when observing common indicators of development, there is no
perceptible crisis in Chile at present, be it economic or political. What then is the
populace demanding?
There are, in fact, a multitude of explicitly stated demands being put forward in the
manifestations organised by the student-led movement demands which come from
a range of popular sectors. Of these, I have selected three as particularly illustrative
examples of the ideas and emotions involved in these acts. With some variation, all
of the sentiments detailed in these examples can be seen either in the movements
marches and performative acts, or in the signage it has posted in a variety of
educational and private spaces.

No ms lucro! (no more profit!)

'For sale: public education'.

'No more profit from

education. Our hopes/
dreams dont belong to
you!'

129
129

'Chile doesn't educate: It

profits'.

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itself

the primary political agenda it seeks to bring to the attention of the nations
political elite. This proclamation recuperates the NO+ (NO more) ensign seen
throughout the urban environments of the dictatorship era, and recaptures the
symbolic potency of this symbol as a truncated protest against an environment
of oppression and brutally enforced censorship. At the same time, this same
truncated nature invites a dynamic, appellative relationship with the reader,
compelling them to fill in the blank: No More Torture, No More Death, No More
Fear, etc. In this way, though NO + certainly functions as an evocation of
memory, it is flexible enough be integrated into present circumstances. In this
way, No more profit works as a phrase that doesnt just seek to complete the
statement with a signifier, but rather identifies that signifier, profit, as the one
that is to be addressed in this particular instance. It is somewhat counterintuitive
and paradoxical to realise that it was during the dictatorship that such an open
and collective social ambition was manifested in this call to action, and it is in
fact within a democratic context that it is seen as necessary to reiterate it and
attach a specific agenda. This situation is much easier to grasp when taking
into account the nebulous rationale described above, which serves to illustrate
how the repressive technologies of authoritarianism have created divisions
based in the polarisation of meanings, thus leaving neoliberal violence to
persist amid the confusion of the same in the post-dictatorial context.

Argos Aotearoa

4
This document is available
online at: http://www.
forumsocialmundial.org.br/
main.php?id_menu=4&cd_
language=4

Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo!

(They fear us because we are not afraid!)
This slogan encapsulates the emotional imprisonment implicit in the politics of
governability I detail above, in which the administration of collective emotions
has caused civil society to internalise an almost visceral rejection of conflict.
This collective behaviour has been fostered in order to serve the politics
of reconciliation, and benefits from the residual fear first set in place by the
dictatorship.

'They fear us because we are

not afraid'.
The fear referred to in this slogan is not only that of social exclusion,
unemployment and denigrating labour conditions, but also indicates an
ingrained historical fearone which has demanded there be a culture of
forgetting with regard to the recent past for the sake of establishing social
consent. This imperative has damaged the notion of conflict as a healthy civic
reality, stigmatising the figure of the communist and socialist, turning these
into cultural phantasms or zombies that traffic alongside those dissidents
now labelled subversives and terrorists. It has also devalued and trivialised
campaigns working towards social justice, collective causes, and all the
advances in labour rights that have been achieved in past decades. As such,
this tendency represents a multi-generational culture of wilful forgetfulness
entrenched in fear.

Despite the positive discursive rupture enacted by the movements towards this
culture of fear, the very fact that fear is being evoked as a point of discussion

130

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indicates the extent to which fear is still relevant as a factor in Chilean society. It
serves to liberate repressed, imprisoned emotions and reorient collective discussion
by re-empowering the political agency of the citizenry.

'Better a
useless
subversive
than an
oppressed
dummy'.

'A world for citizens not for

mark t$'.

'You don't represent me'.

They dress like democracy, but are made up of dictatorship

We arent terrorists, we are dissidents
Im also one of those useless deadbeat
subversives that wants free education

Confronted with a country

for sale, the people wake up

If they educate us to exploit us, we rebel to

explode their system

Pinochets education will collapse!

Dont let them fool you, there is a life

outside capitalism

Chile debe ser distinto!

(Chile must be different!)
'Chile must be different, lets
fight for equality'.

'Another Chile is possible'.

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affective
intervention
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Pino-Ojeda
The university
beside
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Insurgency
of of
discourse
andand
affective
intervention
Walescka
Pino-Ojeda

Argos Aotearoa

This slogan echoes the one first brought to the public fore in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in
June of 2002 during the First World Social Forum Another World is Possible.4

4
This document is available online at: http://
www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_
menu=4&cd_language=4

While the current Chilean social movement places itself within this larger framework
particularly with regard to its opposition to the domination of capital interests it
distinguishes itself from the open invitation to construct a new world put forward in
Porto Alegre, by presenting a much more urgent, imperative message. The message
that Chile must be different suggests much more responsibility and agency in the
reader, its imperative tone suggesting that this necessary change is long overdue and
requires immediate action.
Within the above-detailed Chilean context of discursive rupture, this imperative can
be seen in a variety of urban occupations, many of which display vastly divergent
and sometimes contradicting emotions within the need for change. While some
demonstrations emphasise a celebration of entrenched communal spirit, others do
not take these bonds for granted, and seek to first generate them through pathos and
empathy, with a conscious effort to interpelate the spectator as a co-participant to
the act, and not as an other. Among the first, celebratory category we may include:

The Family March For Education (July 6, 2011)

'Piera, if you studied for free,
why dont my grandchildren
have the same right?'.

'I have two kids, which one do I

educate?'
'Mr. Piera, if you studied for
free, why cant I ?'.

'Because I don't want to be

educated in a ghetto'.

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Kiss-athon for Education (July 7, 2011)

'If love isn't visible it is because

social inequality fragments it'.

'Love with no profit motive'.

'As much in love as in debt'.

The Cueca Dance for Education' (July 23, 2011)

'Id rather be part of the Chilean rabble than a

boujee government supporter'.

The Umbrella March (August 18, 2011)

'Rain won't stop us' .

'End profit'.

Marches and Carnivals for Education (July 29th, September 4, 2011, March 25th, 2012)

'Lose a year, win a future'.

'Im a useless, subversive dog... and

Ill keep barking for a free education
for EVERYBODY'.

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Multiple Karaoke Videos for Education and Spoken Word for Education films have
also emerged as the movement has progressed. All of these acts playfully celebrate
a communal spirit deeply intellectually and affectively enmeshed with the interests
of all those involved. This community seeks to create a dialogue that ruptures with
dominant ideological and moral parameters by recurring to those aspects and desires
of existence which appeal to the very core of communal life: family, love, festivity, and
a shared historical and cultural past.
Within these demonstrations, a special role is played by flash mobs as a means of
performative, collective demonstration. As stated by Georgina Gore, flash mobs:
[are] designed to create a visual stir, to intrude into or even disrupt the
quotidian [. . .] I suggest that the event acts as a marker in several ways.
First of all on memory the novel or unexpected has a particular cognitive
impact and is integrated with difficulty into the maps of the mind. Flash
mobbing is like soft terrorism, using guerrilla tactics, which explains
why it is a good medium for communicating a succinct message, as it is
retained because of its difference with the habitual, because it creates
a shift in focus [. . .] Polymorph and polyvalent, flash mobbing may be
said to be a truly universal dance form, more flexible and versatile than
tango, salsa or flamenco for creating ephemeral identification with
communities of interest where the celebratory, political, and commercial
become conflated in a mode typical of twenty first century consumer
capitalism.5
The examples of flash mobs realised in Chile present the majority of the attributes
identified in Gores profile of these performances. Their particularity within this
movements context, however, lies in their power to transmit a social message
while at the same time avoiding the political canonism inherent in both coordinated
political picketing, as well as the Chilean funas, a likewise spontaneous though much
more confrontational social act by which this movements flash mobs nonetheless
have been clearly influenced.6 In contrast to these acts, the flash mobs are much
more geared towards eliciting surprise, empathy, persuasion and feelings of social
congregation and openness with regard to their political messages, now laid bare and
stripped of institutional partisan politics. At the same time, and taking into account the
long-term nature of their campaign, they have also served to create new performative
points of interest in the wider population, bolstering a general attitude of alertness
and awareness of the movement as it continued to adopt new messages and formats
for protest.

5
Georgiana Gore, Flash
Mob Dance and the
Territorialisation of Urban
Movement, Anthropological
Notebooks 16 (3): 125131,
pp. 130-131.

6
The funa is the Chilean
equivalent of the
Argentinian escrache, a
form of popular justice
that seeks to both make
visible and publicly punish
the perpetrators of
dictatorial human rights
abuses who have escaped
legal justice. It consists
of a sometimes very large
group of people visiting
the home or workplace of
the perpetrator, reading
a prepared document
detailing their crimes, after
which speeches will follow,
generally combining both
a mournful and celebratory
tone.

A few of the more noteworthy flash mobs of this type include the Thriller for Education
(June 24th 2011), which recreated the zombie dance from Michael Jacksons
eponymous music video, complete with full choreography, make up, and bearing signs
bearing such slogans as: RIP, my brother died owing $5,150,109 studying medicine
and I died owing $15,347,251.

The figure of the zombie itself not only symbolises the persistent and unyielding
student debt that burdens so many and which exceeds the limits of the human life
span. It is also indicative of an economy that manufactures its own ruin, establishing

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unsustainable parameters through its phantasmagorical dependence upon the

speculation of virtual capital and is not sustained in any human or ecological reality,
as is well detailed by Chris Harman in the aptly titled Zombie Capitalism.
Genkidama for Education (July 15, 2011) represents an example of the ways in which
new symbolic imaginaries, in this case derived from Japanese comics and animation,
are coming to the Chilean cultural fore. Despite the (obviously prejudiced) perception
of such media as being alienated from concrete quotidian concerns, it was drawn
upon by the students in this instance through their symbolic evocation of the supernatural benevolent force of the Genkidama (translated as spirit bomb in English media
but keeping its original Japanese appellative in the Latin American translation). The
Genkidama itself is a massive orb of collectively donated life-energy (Chi), wielded as
a weapon by the character Son Goku, protagonist of the massively popular animated
series Dragon Ball Z (1999-2001, L.A airdate). Collectively evoking this force of
collective will, represented in the performance by a massive paper orb, the students
hold it aloft collectively as they enforce their positive energy over the educational
authorities in order to compel them to provide free, high quality education.

Genkidama for Education (with

original voice):
'Because he is, and will
continue to be, a hero! GOKU
supports the students in
their struggle for free, quality
education in this song'.

The collective nature inherent in the diegesis of the Genkidama cements this
evocations discursive relevance within the strategies and goals of the movement, as
does its generational relevance as a cultural product embedded in the childhoods of
so many young adults in Chile.
The various discursive techniques wielded by both the leaders and participants of
the Chilean student movement have all sought to interject themselves within both
physical urban spaces and in the public imaginary in order to enact a re-orientation
of meanings and affect. In all of these cases, what is being questioned fundamentally
is the radical nature in which neoliberalism has reformatted alterity, so that the other
is seen not as an unknown neighbour, but rather an unknowable and dangerous
entity that threatens the subjects wellbeing. The other is, above all, the antagonist
competitor, a latent enemy. The performative acts adopted by the Chilean student-led
movement combine, then, both accusatory and contemplative imperatives. While they
denounce, indict and call to action, they likewise perform, entertain, satirise and create
spaces in which affects and feelings may be enacted. In this way, they appeal to the
realm of sense and emotion in order to facilitate the understanding of what otherwise
would be very abstract ideas and ideals. Slogans succeed in their imperative pleas
only when sentiment is put into action, when performative acts compel us to see by
looking at ourselves, and reflect upon the world around us by examining within.
By gaining awareness of the ways in which one may see oneself within the other,
we are able to rebuild, recuperate, appreciate, and reconnect individualities into a
functional collective body. This is true even within the larger context of discursive and
ideological violence engendered and perpetuated by neoliberal rhetoric. In as much
as this movements leaders have assumed the role of evidencing the manipulations of
meaning inherent in this context, performative techniques are able to communicate
not simply what is being denoted, but also evoke the multifaceted and emotive power
only available within the language of art. It is in this way that the current student-led
movement of Chile manifests the agency of culture and its power to transform the
socio-political through the force of imagination.
Assistance with translation: Camilo Diaz Pino

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Argos Aotearoa

What could the

university
be?
Sean Sturm & Stephen Turner

If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for
the passion of possibility, for the eye [. . .] that sees possibility ever.
Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or1
The many worlds of the pluriversity
The name Argos, allied in Greek mythology with the epithet panoptes (all-seeing)
as Argus panoptes, implies an unwearying watcher, and, as the primordial 'lord
of the neatherd' (herdsman), the very name of the land he watches.2 (The Greek
town named in his honour still exists today.) But we two writers, both of us
Phek, cannot help but see our land differently. We are not in Europe now, or
rather, the 'Europe' we occupy is the powerful penumbra of a differently centred
place,3 a place called Aotearoa ('The [land of the] long white cloud,' namely,
New Zealand), located in a 'sea of islands,' Te Moana nui a Kiwa ('The great
ocean of Kiwa,' namely, the Pacific Ocean).4 To find ourselves in this position
suggests a double occupation, whereby Europeanisation, or more specifically,
Anglosphericism, has had to accommodate itself to an already differently
occupied place and its larger Oceanic setting. Such a pre-occupation cannot but
make us think geotheoreticallyand, in turn, think in terms of other centres and
on other grounds than those of the northern axis of Europe or Anglo-America.5
In this spirit, we ask after the grounds of the universityand the grounds, literal
and figurative, of the university in which we find ourselves. (Strictly speaking, the
land asks us to think about it, for 'the land has eyes,' to borrow the title of Vilsoni
Heronikos film about Rotuma.6)
For us, this asking after grounds is what a university does or, rather, ought to
do. We see every 'class,' or university occasion, real or virtual, as subtended
by the deeper set of questions raised by Mori scholar Te Ahukaram Charles
Royal: 'Who am I? What is this world I find myself in? What am I to do?'7 Thus, the
'ground' of the university, unlike that of any other social institution, is not given
in the sense of being preordained or pre-programmed ('prescribed'), but given
by asking after grounds ('constructed'). That is, it is constituted as such by this
critically deliberative activity, which we would argue must be interactive (alert
to its setting), interpersonal, collaborative and collective. The land on which
our university lies makes it a pluriversity, a place of many worldsand makes
it plain that the university per se ought to be seen likewise. So, we aim to give
this land sides, to acknowledge that it is whenua tautohetohe ('contested land').8
Furthermore, for us, this implies that the university as pluriversity is worldmaking: it enacts a constructive 'worlding' or possibilism, in other words, neither
the positivism of knowledge production that is blind to its own purposes nor the
probabilism of the techno-capital university (the University 2.0) and its taken-asgiven normative imperatives. Possibilism, as Albert Hirschman writes, 'consists
in the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears
to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic [or positivistic] reasoning alone.'9
This is the university we see: the university as a 'garden of forking paths', of
paths of possibility.10

136

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The university
beside itself
Sean Sturm
and Stephen
Turner

Aotearoa
What Argos
could
the university be?

The one world of econometrics

The normative imperatives, or scripts, of the University 2.0 could be acronymed
as ICE (innovation, creativity, and enterprise):11 we ask not only why we live in
an age of acronyms and when this came aboutalong with the econometrics
of technical capitalism (ETC), no doubtbut also what these terms and their
acronyms actually mean, and when it was that they assumed the normative
power of givens. Are these scripts, we ask, themselves 'innovative,' 'creative' or
'entrepreneurial,' especially when they are every other universitys imperatives,
and therefore globally convergent and generic? Is it innovative, for instance,
to follow imperatives to be innovative? To us, this normative drive is better
understood as econometrically determined programming, or prescription,
whereby the measure of performance itself determines what counts, for
example, as innovation, or, to put it another way, knowledge creation becomes
knowledge management. We reject this kind of 'end-stopped' thinking, which
reduces thinking to mere calculation in advance12 and participation to the
managed consensus of 'consultation,' in which even the strongest objections
are considered merely 'positive feedback' and evidence of 'robust' processes.
Instead of simply executing and extending such scripts, we ask after their
rationales. In doing so, we suspend such norms and make them available for
deliberation by those whom they concern and to whom they matter. We do
not allow norms to simply govern the action to be taken or the process to be
followed, that is, the rule to be applied. Instead, we reconstruct them, along
with the university itself, on the basis of this questioning. In such deliberation,
the consensus such norms constitutean 'anthropological bedrock', in Paolo
Virnos terms13is itself opened up for inquiry and other worlds (or 'paths',
indeed) considered that give the 'one world' of the globally convergent and
generic University 2.0 sides, options, openings. The university 2.0, unlike our
pluriversity, lacks contest and context. Driven by econometric scripts ('Globalise
or die!'; 'Follow others or fall behind!'), it is a place that lacks critical imagination
that cannot offer alternate visionsand that can offer neither students nor
society the wherewithal for personal or collective transformation. In it, people
think 'outside the box,' which is to say in 'innovative', 'creative' or 'entrepreneurial'
(ICE) clichs ('crystallised thinking'),14 because they cannot think what a box is
or does.
Teaching the emergency
Here is where the Arts, supposedly redundant due to their econometric
deficiency, actually come in handy. If anyone knows anything about innovation,
creativity, and enterprisenot to mention critiqueit is scholars in the Arts,
for whom these are everyday matters of practical concern. The capacity
generated by Arts-based critical imagination, which has of course addressed
numerous social crises in the past, is not negligible, however difficult it might be
to measure in terms of economicor socialoutputs or outcomes. Indeed, the
current global crises, financial, ecological, technological and military, suggest
that teaching and learning is taking place in a global 'state of emergency'.15 We
therefore advocate teaching the emergency in two senses: with these critical
emergencies in mind, and with a view to producing emergent lines of inquiry.
With regard to the second sense, it is our task, as Walter Benjamin puts it, 'to
bring about a real state of emergency'.16 Thus, we believe the Arts are more, not
less, important than the Sciences to our shared social futures.
The more general crisis of humanity is a matter of philosophy, which is to say,
of how we ought live together, and not simply a matter of technical solutions
to problems of population, food supply, global warming and so on. (What is the
technical solution, for instance, to global surveillance, which technology itself
gave rise to?) The shift in the weighting of research funding to STEM (Science,
137

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What could
the university
The university beside
itself

be?

Sean Sturm
& Stephen
Turner
Argos
Aotearoa

Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines, as is happening under

current Government policy, may equally be viewed as simply an increase in
investment in universities by the corporate interests that stand to benefit from
such a partnership. Similarly, the increased emphasis on research in the 'research[
i.e., richer] university', may be seen as the abandonment of the universitys mission
to 'educate' in favour of 'quality assurance' and outsourced (adjunct) or tickbox
(constructively aligned) teaching aligned with faculty goals and aims, themselves
aligned with the universitys strategic mission and overseen by managers
responsive to the spreadsheet rather than to the classroom.
Furthermore, we would also advocate using the Arts to produce deliberative
knowledge (this is the Arts version of 'Mode 2' knowledge).17 Undeliberative
teaching, subject as it is to econometrics, misses the very purpose of the
enhanced means of measure it serves. The reduction of intelligence to
computable information is part of the general crisis of humanity: today, all that is
solid melts into the data cloud. Our first response is to address the misbegotten
language of the terms in which social crises are articulated, and to thereby
give sides to issues that cannot be resolved by more or better programming.
This 'problematising' involves taking language literally, and taking the buzz out
of buzz-words (transparent, excellent, robust; experience, quality, benchmark;
etc.).18 It involves asking what templates and their boxes do, which is to say,
every other survey, review, report, outline or summary feedback form, and what
rationale might drive the pre-programmed scripts they unfold (what pass for
meetings, in universities as elsewhere, also merely require people to be present
and to implement their scripts, certainly not to deliberate on the grounds of the
meeting itself). To take such language literally, then, is to ask after the letter of
such scripts. The university can hardly be a place where this, but not anything else,
escapes pause, reflection and deliberation. We therefore take the grounds of our
institutional practices, as well as the grounds of all other knowledge, quite literally.
We realise that this literality is heretical because it exposes the empty consensus
of doctrinein this case, the feedback loop of managed consensus (to give an
example of literality as heresy, St Francis of Assisi exposed the interest of the
Church in feudal property relations by taking literally the vow of poverty).
Thinking the emergency
Our literal method takes us beyond critique in the twentieth-century sense of
unveiling ideology, premised on a caricature of Kantian transcendental idealism,
to something that we might call emulation, or, to misread Alain Badiou, 'immanent
articulation'19 (emulating the immanent 'agency of the letter', perhaps20). This is an
action in and though which the inner contradictions of normative imperatives are
revealed (i.e. the 'ill-logics' of 'a-human' rationales21). By emulation, we mean literal
replication, designed to induce a certain reflexivity (from the Latin reflexivus, 'returning') that is actually a re-purposing.22 The university, we think, is an institution
for generating social purposes conducive to social emergence, that is, flourishing
and transformation, generating such purposes not ex nihilo, 'out of nothing', but
de novo, 'anew' (genuine innovation, we would say). As Ronald Barnett argues,
'a university that takes seriously both the worlds interconnectedness and the
universitys interconnectedness with the world' is ecological, a university that
'does not merely take its networking seriously but engages actively with the
world in order to bring about a better world.'23 It is, to paraphrase Barnett, at
once hopeful and critical: as he puts it, 'a university neither in-itself (the research
university) nor for-itself (the entrepreneurial university) but for-others'.24
The university is thus failing in its true mission if it does not prompt conversation
about matters of local public and political import, that is, if it does not pose
problems for languageand businessas usual (the public is itself constructed
as the voice of contest and context in this conversation). We do not simply mean
to provoke or persuade; instead, we wish to prompt others to consider what
provokes us and to become engaged in the same issues. Our object is to give
138

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Sean Sturm and

Turner
The Stephen
university beside
itself

What could
the
university be?
Argos
Aotearoa

them pause for thought as an act of social affirmation, where what is taken to
be 'social' is constituted as such by a collective reflection and deliberation. The
university is conceivably any place where this occurs. In the actual university
that we inhabit, we therefore value moments of pause: error, digression or
procrastination. Such interstices are, as it were, cracks in the bedrock of the
university that allow for creativity and criticism that is at once accidental and
opportune.
Making up the pluriversity
Finally, we are interested in rules, or orthography (from the Greek orthographia,
'straight writing'). We do not mean that social rules should simply be followed
such rules are modelled by but not reducible to languagebut, again, that they
should be asked after, and their human purposes brought into clear view. The
'anthropological bedrock'25 of any social consensus is a set of 'crystallized'
rules.26 Our own 'purpose' is not simple replication, or rule recognition, though
this is part of our teaching (of writing). It is to investigate the human capacity to
make and break rules.27 In this sense, the pluriversity bears some resemblance
to the Mori whare tapere, or house of games.28 In learning how rules can be
made, and not simply recognised, we recognise the human capacity for the
transformation of social and natural worlds. Herein lies the wherewithal that we
call worlding or possibilism. Both the 'where' and the 'with' of this wherewithal are
important to a university that is sensitive to contest and context, which is to say,
to a local place and its peoples, and to the many worlds it withholds from view. A
real university is always situated, always face-to-face, despite the technological
utopia and technical feasibility of e-learning and cloud teaching (the logic of
university administration means that it should entirely outsource teaching, so
that students would download superior lectures from Harvard, and make all
university employees administrators). Otherwise, reflection on rules is reduced
to the function of a programme: an app for critical thinking.
The human animal is not only rule-bound, but also rule-finding. In the first
instance, the making of rules may have involved making the most of an accident:
a tree that provides shelter becomes a house; a rock that serves to cut becomes
a tool. Upon reflection, such crystallized rules can be reconstructed to repurpose their original human purpose, for good or ill, which process exhibits the
humanity of design rather than the ascriptive force of the tool or the letter (such
templates imply a proscribed or pre-inscribed outcome). We find that focusing
on error or digression or procrastination in order to opportunise accidents is
critically and creatively engaging. We consider the possible worlds in terms of
which such accidents make sense in unaccountable or unaccounted for ways,
and we reconstruct the university in the light of these worlds. The erratological
(from the Latin errare, 'to wander, roam, ramble' or 'to be mistaken') engagement
we advocatea kind of 'wandering thought'takes all sorts of forms: in 'asking
after' rules, it can deform, defuse, assume power in alternate forms, and so on.29
We say: perform the university, emulate it, occupy it, teach it with an 'eye [. . .]
that sees possibility ever', in the words of our epigraph.30 This is the joy of rulemaking and rule-breakingafter all, humanum est errare: 'to err is human.' In and
though such activity, the university turns out to be many worlds: a pluriversity. Its
future is what we make of it.

1
Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1987) 41.
2
Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (1972; Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1983) 16667.
3
Interestingly, the geonym Europe derives from the Greek eurus, meaning wide, broad and ps, meaning eye, face, hence
Eurp, wide-gazing, broad of aspect.

139

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The university besideWhat

itself
could the

university be?

Argos
Sean
SturmAotearoa
& Stephen Turner

4
See Epeli Hauofa, 'Our Sea of Islands,' A New Oceania: Rediscovering our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hauofa (Suva,
Fiji: The University of the South Pacific in association with Beake House, 1993).
5
See Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Sydney: Allen & Unwin Australia; Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1997).
6
Vilsoni Hereniko (dir.), Pear ta ma on maf [The Land Has Eyes] (2004; Northcote, Vic.: Umbrella Entertainment; Te Maka Productions, 2006).
7
Te Ahukaram Charles Royal, People Need Nourishment (Not Judgment). Presentation to the Apostolate hui, Catholic Church, Palmerston North
Diocese, 22 July 2006, web.
8
Sidney Moko Mead, Landmarks, Bridges and Visions: Aspects of Maori Culture: Essays (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997) p.235.
9
Albert Hirschman, 'In Defense of Possibilism,' Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (New York, NY: Viking, 1986) 173 (17175).
Hirschmans possibilism was announced in his A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1971).
10
Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' Collected Fictions, ed. Maria Kodama (New York, NY: Penguin, 1999) pp. 11928.
11
Note that The University of Aucklands Business School is the founder of, and now partner in, the Icehouse, a business growth centre
described as development factory of owner-managers and entrepreneurs who will shape the future of New Zealands economy; see Partners:
The Icehouse, Icehouse, 2008, http://www.theicehouse.co.nz/partners/, 4 Aug. 2013.
12
See Martin Heidegger, 'Postscript to What is Metaphysics?, Pathmarks, trans. William MacNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998) 23536 (23138).
13
Paolo Virno, Multitude Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext[e], 2008): 115. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd rev. ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Maiden, MA: Blackwell,
2001): 1011.
14
Arnold Gehlen, 'The Crystallization of Cultural Forms,' Modern German Sociology, ed. Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld and Nico Stehr (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1987): 21831.
15
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998):
9596.
16
Walter Benjamin, 'On the Concept of History,' Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 389400, p. 392.
17
Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott and Martin Trow, The New Production of Knowledge: The
Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1994).
18
See Michel Foucault, 'Polemics, Politics and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault' Essential Works of Foucault 195484, vol. 1:
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, NY: Penguin, 2000): 11119.
19
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2008): 21.
20
Jacques Lacan, 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,' crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London:
Tavistock, 1977): 146178.
21
See Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner, 'Erratology and the Ill-Logic of the Seismotic University,' Educational Philosophy and Theory (2013),
forthcoming.
22
For re-purposing, see Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner, 'The University Beside Itself' paper presented at The Creative University: Education and
the Creative Economy, Knowledge Formation, Global Creation and the Imagination Conference, University of Waikato, Hamilton 1516 August,
2012; forthcoming.
23
Ronald Barnett, 'The Coming of the Ecological University,' Oxford Review of Education 37.4 (2011): 43945, pp. 451-52; for the ecological
university, see Ronald Barnett, Being a University (London: Routledge, 2011) pp. 14150.
24
Barnett, 'Ecological University' p. 452.
25
Virno, Multitude p. 115.
26
Gehlen, 'Crystallization.'
27
Paolo Virno, Multitude Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson (2005; Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext[e], 2008) p. 117.
28
Te Ahukaram Charles Royal, 'Te Whare Tapere: Towards a New Model for Mori Performing Arts,' PhD thesis, Victoria University (Wellington),
1998.
29
The neologism 'erratology' combines in what we are aware is an etymological error two senses: erring, that is, wandering, roaming or
rambling, or being mistaken (errare in Latin), and ground, discourse or thought (logos or -logia in Greek); see Sturm and Turner, Erratology.
30
See Jeffrey J. Williams, 'Teach the University,' Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature,
Language, Composition, and Culture 10.1 (2010): pp.19.

140

140

Contributors
Sarah Amsler is Reader in Education at the University of Lincoln (UK).
She writes on the cultural politics of knowledge and education, teaches
the sociology and philosophy of education and critical pedagogies, and
is a founding member of the Social Science Centre higher education
cooperative. She is involved in research projects on transformative
cultural practice, popular higher education and pedagogical justice. Her
book Educating Radical Democracy is forthcoming.
Sam Morgan is a student at Auckland Grammar School. As an aspiring stencil
artist, he is doing his best to stay on the right side of the law.

Henry Babbage is an Aucklandbased artist, curator and graphic

designer. Henry graduated with a
BFA(Hons) from Elam School of Fine
Arts in 2011. Henrys art, design and
curatorial practices overlap around
an interest in design-as-research.
As well as working collaboratively on
the design for Argos Aotearoa, Henry
has recently designed publications
and catalogues for Elam, The Physics
Room and Window. Henry is a
curator at Window, a gallery within
the University of Auckland and he is
a director of Gloria Knight, a gallery
he co-founded in March 2012. Henry
has contributed texts to exhibitions
and publications for Te Tuhi, split/
fountain, The Physics Room and
Auckland Art Gallery.

Alex Wild Jespersen is a writer, lecturer

and researcher obsessed with the
historiography of everything. She has
a PhD in German Studies (2013) and a
Master of Creative Writing (2008) and
is, at present, a Professional Teaching
Fellow for the Department of English at
the University of Auckland.

Stephen Turner teaches Writing Studies at Auckland

University. He writes and talks about migrancy,
metropolitanism and the constitution of Aotearoa New
Zealand. He is interested in untenable objects, which
should not but do exist, which invoke care and courage,
and which give us pause and prompt questions about
the everyday and what we value. He also writes and talks Afakasi Baby is an art collective
with Sean Sturm on learning, writing and the university.
made up of brothers Caleb
Satele and Daniel Michael Satele.
Caleb is completing an honours
degree at Elam School of Fine
Neal Curtis is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film
Arts. Daniel is a writer and a
and Television at the University of Auckland.
doctoral candidate in English,
He is the author of Against Autonomy (
Drama and Writing Studies at the
Ashgate, 2001), War and Social Theory
University of Auckland. Daniels
(Palgrave, 2006) and Idiotism (Pluto, 2013).
writing has appeared recently in
His current interests include media theory,
Art New Zealand, ArtAsiaPacific,
technology and comics and is currently
Brief, EyeContact and The
writing a book called On Sovereignty and
Pantograph Punch.
Superheroes for Manchester University
Press.

Born in London but raised in New Zealand, the half-Welsh Paul Janman is
an Auckland writer and filmmaker. Early studies in history and philosophy
and an interest in Buddhism and martial arts caused him years in Europe
and Asia. Back in NZ, he entered into anthropology and street theatre
before becoming bemused and inspired by Herakleitos and Andersonian
Realism. After two years under I. Futa Helu at Atenisi Institute in Tonga, he
made the film Tongan Ark a series of paradoxes and an interventionist
model of documentary-making that has both elated and disturbed
audiences around the world.

Marek Tesar is a Lecturer at the University

of Auckland. His research is concerned
with the construction of childhoods, and
the importance of childrens literature as
a discourse that affects the production
of childhood subjectivities. Marek was a
recipient of the 2012 Philosophy of Education
Society of Australasia (PESA) annual doctoral
award and the 2013 Deans list award.

Anne Jones has spent far too much of her life, foolishly struggling to make sense of the contradictions of living as a
human being on earth. The puzzlement she experienced as a child in relation to the academic dryness she was expected
to adopt towards the immediate vibrancy of all things living, forced her into the world of the theater, the falseness of which,
in turn, soon forced her back on herself in a way which plunged her deep into the abyssal depths of the human psyche,
as she left the stage and dived into the reality of relationships based on human weaknesses of all kinds. This led her back
into her passion for writing, allowing her to transcribe her experiences into a two-hour one-person performance piece
called Alive and Desperate which led her back to the stage and into the worlds of Buddhism and Anthroposophy. These
two philosophies supported her belief in the sovereignty of the human spirit in relationship to the material realm. Out of
the study of these two philosophies, a new respect was born for the world of the intellect and she returned to university,
where a whole new struggle evolved: one in which her thirst for learning was thwarted and narrowed by the dictates of a
depleting assessment-based system. Having worked her way through a Masters of Creative Writing, she has returned to a
state of sanity she first experienced as a child, where she was empty of all expectations and in this empty state, finally, she
is now able to relax with a sense that she and everything around her is enough, as is, while, relentlessly, she continues in
her exploration of ways in which to convey the balance between the spiritual and the material, the active and the idle, the
need for improvisational play along with the need for disciplined rigour.

Henr
in wh
polic
respo
socia
of a w
thoug
unive

Po
kn
w
en
th
cr
(A
of

Mark Amsler is Senior Lecturer in

English, Drama and Writing Studies at
the University of Auckland. His teaching
and research includes literacy studies,
critical theory, semiotics, sociolinguistics
and medieval studies. He recently
published Affective Literacies: Writing
and Multilingualism in the Later Middle
Ages, and is currently completely a book
on pragmatic discourses and heterodox
communities, entitled How to Do Things
with Words, 1100-1500.

Anna Boswell knows what precarity feels like. For now, she is a Professional
Teaching Fellow in Writing Studies at the University of Auckland, and while she
dreams of occupying an office fitted with a hamster wheel, she feels lucky to be
making do with slivers of support offered by research awards and prizes from the
Kate Edger Educational Charitable Trust, Auckland Museum and the Journal of New
Zealand Literature. She talks and writes about settlement in terms of inscription,
institutionality and pedagogy, and is becoming increasingly preoccupied with the
(healthy) relationship of parasitism to these things.
Pritika Lal is an interdisciplinary author whose method of exploration
across all media uses sketching to focus on process. Pritika holds a
Master of Creative Technologies 2013, Spatial Design Honours 2011
and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts.

Once upon a time, Toivo James was here, before you. At said point, he busied himself building web-based miscellany,
whilst quietly dreaming of crafting jewels which might instead, under the right light, reflect that glint in your eye...
Miri Davidson has studied
anthropology, sociology and
English, and is currently doing
an MA in Cultural Studies at
Goldsmiths, London. Working
in, writing about and taking part
in politics at the University of
Auckland has led her to interests
in continental critical and
decolonising theory.

Campbell Jones is Associate

Professor of Sociology at the
University of Auckland. HIs
most recent book is Can the
Market Speak? (London:Zero,
2013)

Sandra Grey is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Victoria University of Wellington.

Her research focuses on social movements and citizen engagement in democracy.
Sandra is currently working on a project examining four decades of contentious
political activity by the womens, union and anti-poverty movements of New
Zealand. Her recent publications in this field include a chapter on the New Zealand
womens movement in Rethinking Women in Politics; an edited collection Women's
Movements: Flourishing or in Abeyance? co-edited with Marian Sawer, and Voices
of the community: the community and voluntary sectors role in New Zealand
democracy, a report co-authored with Charles Sedgwick. As well as her keen
research interest in social movement activism and civil society politics, since 2010
Sandra has been the spokesperson for the Campaign for MMP. And during 2011
and 2012 Sandra took leave from Victoria University to work full-time as the National
President of the Tertiary Education Union.
Alena Kavka is a student in her last year of high school at Western Springs College. Faced
with the impending uncertainties of adult life, she spends most of her time looking at
photos of cats on the internet and crying.

ri Carlos and Guy Cohn are two figures of responsibility. In a world

hich taking responsibility in any meaningful sense is obscured and
ced, Carlos and Cohn present themselves as more than happy to take
onsibility. They insist on putting forward the necessity of an end to
al relations dictated by capital, and the chances for the construction
world beyond capitalist democracy. Their desire for forms of action,
ght lost to the past, whether it be shutting down streets or holding
ersities captive, is not a nostalgia, but a beginning.

oetry and doodling, opps, I mean, diagrammatic

nowledge reconconstruction via mind mapping, are viable
ways of knowing for Selina Tusitala Marsh. Any learning
nvironment, no matter how dense or boring, can gain
hat LOreal mantra of being worth it, if something new is
reated. Selinas second collection of poetry, Dark Sparring
Auckland University Press), is now out. It comes with a CD
f poems with music by Tim Page.

Local Time is an Auckland-based collective of artists, writers

and teachers who have been working together since 2006.
Their practice is varied, creating site-specific projects with
an emphasis on local and indigenous knowledge and the
investigation of naming and framing across multiple histories.
Local Times multi-strand projects and events aim to integrate
their academic and artistic backgrounds. Their research
and interventions have often been staged in remote areas,
addressing the complexities of living in a colonial nation.

Tim Neale is a writer and researcher at the

University of Melbourne. His research concerns
political ecology, econationalism and historical
geography in the settler-colonial south, and
his writing has appeared in journals such as
Australian Humanities Review and Hue & Cry.

mark was an artist collective formed mid-2012, made up of six third-year Elam students. The collective was formed
as an act of resistance to the universitys neoliberal appropriation of education. mark based itself on the rupture of
the competitive, individualist nature of the university in order to rethink education, not as a commodifiable good, but
a process of reciprocity and collaboration. Removing the individualised transactional process by which a grade is
given, and by which success is measured, revealed the possibility of collectively controlling the education process. In
doing this, mark was able to renegotiate the possibility of an education which superseded market logic and neoliberal
structures. The students involved used the space formed by this rupture in the neoliberal logic to create a dialogue
about our current situation and how to collectively create change.

Sean Sturm is a lecturer in academic development in the Centre for Learning

and Research in Higher Education (CLeaR) at the University of Auckland. He
teaches and writes about writing, teaching and learning in the university, often
with Stephen Turner.

Te Ahukaram Charles Royal (Marutahu, Ngti Raukawa and

Ng Puhi) is a musician and researcher with interests in the
creative potential of mtauranga Mori (Mori knowledge),
particularly as this relates to the whare tapere (traditional houses
of performing arts). He is Director of Ng Pae o te Mramatanga,
New Zealands Indigenous Centre of Research Excellence and
Professor of Indigenous Development in the Faculty of Arts, The
University of Auckland. Charles has been a New Zealand Senior
Fulbright Scholar, a Winston Churchill Fellow and a visiting
scholar at the University of London. Charles has written or
edited six books on aspects of mtauranga Mori and iwi history.

Walescka Pino-Ojeda is an Associate Professor

in Latin American Studies, and Director of the
New Zealand Centre for Latin American Studies.
She specialises in Latin American literature and
critical theory, with an emphasis on popular
culture, memory and trauma studies. Her book
Night and Fog: Neoliberalism, Memory and
Trauma in Post-Authoritarian Chile was published
in Chile in 2011 by Cuarto Propio Editorial House.

Eleanor Cooper is an Auckland-based artist.

Recent exhibitions include Hermes Lack of
Words at Artspace and Mount Eden Information
Kiosk at Split Fountain gallery. She completed her
honours degree in Fine Arts and BA in Philosophy
at the University of Auckland in 2012.

Ashlin Raymond is an Auckland-based artist, writer and

graphic designer. She predominantly works in video,
installation and sound. Her practice is conducted through
various fictional guises to navigate around uncomfortable
zones of ego. Recent projects include Chill Spree at Dogpark,
100% Pure You at Blue Oyster, Virtual Spa at Dogpark,
Boundless Energy at Ferari and Eternal at Gloria Knight.

Marek Tesar is a Lecturer at the University

of Auckland. His research is concerned
with the construction of childhoods, and
the importance of childrens literature as
a discourse that affects the production
of childhood subjectivities. Marek was a
recipient of the 2012 Philosophy of Education
Society of Australasia (PESA) annual doctoral
award and the 2013 Deans list award.

Laurence Simmons is a Professor Department of Media, Film and

Television at the University of Auckland. He is the co-editor of Derrida
Downunder (2001), Baudrillard West of the Dateline (2003) and From Z to
A: Zizek at the Antipodes (2005) and has published a book about Freuds
papers on art and aesthetics and his relationship with Italy entitled Freuds
Italian Journey in 2006. His latest book, Tuhituhi (2011), is on the painter
William Hodges, who journeyed with Captain James Cook on his second
voyage to the South Pacific.

Henri Carlos and Guy Cohn are two figures of responsibility. In a world in which taking responsibility in any meaningful
sense is obscured and policed, Carlos and Cohn present themselves as more than happy to take it. They insist on putting
forward the necessity of an end to social relations dictated by capital, and to exposing the chances for the construction
of a world beyond capitalist democracy. Their desire for forms of action, thought lost to the past, whether it be shutting
down streets or holding universities captive, is not a nostalgia, but a beginning.

Chant Baxter West is studying spoken word poetry in

Tamaki Makaurau, and looking at how it performs dissensus.
Issues of justice such as colonialism and cultural identity are
articulated in this new way of speaking that are accessible
both in who gets to speak and what they can say, as well as
who can experience whats being said. It is then an anti-elite,
intensely democratic and inclusive creative for(u)m. This
makes it an important tool in political organizingin her own
activism and in generalespecially considering a middle
class Pkeh background.

Airini is Head of the School of Critical Studies in

Education. Her major research and professional
interests revolve around issues of ethnicity and equity
in education, particularly higher education. http://
www.education.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/airini

Verity Mensonage and Marcus Karlsberg

are a couple of washed up academics from
a profligate institution that only ever had
fleeting existence in the fugitive inbetweens
of fantasy, friendship and the imposition of
reality in severalty. They remain optimistic
and still find life in the street, the pub, the
park, the street Party, and the pages of those
books whose authors managed to resist
the unceasing demands to professionalise
or otherwise polish themselves slick. They
believe in full communism and the infinite debt
of planetary reparation.

Argos Aotearoa
Issue 01:
The university beside itself
March 2014
Published by
Argos Aotearoa
Auckland, New Zealand
www.argosaotearoa.org
Argos is
Henry Babbage
Anna Boswell
Miri Davidson
InDesign
Toivo James
Ashlin Raymond
Sean Sturm
Stephen Turner
Special thanks

We gratefully acknowledge English, Drama, and Writing

Studies and Media, Film and Television at the University of
Auckland, and URGE (University Reform, Globalisation and
Europeanisation) for their support for this publication.
We extend special thanks to all contributors and to Ian Wedde,
Wystan Curnow, Jo Smith, Ross Boswell, Jane Horan, Jack
Hadley, Robin Murphy, Marcus Elliot, Echo Janman, Conor
Lorigan, Evija Trofimova, Jenny Stuemer, Kelly Malone and
Makyla Curtis.

Argos also pays tribute to And (1983-85).

Printing
SG Digital, Auckland
Typefaces
Aktiv Grotesk by Dalton Maag
ZXX by Sang Mun

All parts of this journal, images and text, are licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
License. They may be shared freely for any non-commercial
purpose, as long as they are not altered in any way and the
authors are credited. To view a copy of the license, visit http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
PDF copies are available online at www.argosaotearoa.org

Argos Aotearoa issue 01: The university beside itself

ISSN: 2324-5794
132 pages 195 x 278 mm
Published: Auckland, New Zealand
March 2014

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uni
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