The university
a matter of theoretical importance
pp. 119-134
in: Martin Middeke, Christoph Reinfandt (eds), Theory matters, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
"Material Theory' addresses what we might think of as "worldliness' in literary, cultural, and other aesthetic forms. Specifically, it addresses the relation between an allegedly "globalized' form of mass higher education and the legacies of the so-called "theory wars' and of late twentieth-century "high theory'.The argument starts from a brief consideration of the arguments advanced by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country, where he points out that Theory served the purpose of improving greatly our human and social relations—but that it did so only within the academy. Meanwhile, "outside' and in the material realm of the US, real social and economic relations were worsening. This chapter explores the consequences of this, but it does so by questioning the fundamental assumptions that govern Rorty's argument.The logic of the chapter starts from the premise that one of the central concerns of the university education is physics: the study of forces, and especially of the forces that hold a social formation together in various different ways. In this respect, there is no "outside' of the university (il n'y a pas de hors-université, so to speak); rather, the university exists precisely as a force within a global physics or material realm.The question then becomes how we consider the structure of the university itself, in terms of its internal logic or force. Here, the author examines how it is that the institutional rise of "high theory', especially through the 1970s and 1980s, has engaged the questions of globalization and of the social function of the higher education institution itself, and the form and function of the intellectual.The essay demonstrates that globalization has become something that has perverted the force of Theory itself, to the point where the university as a public and social institution has been actively betrayed; and that it is therefore all the more important to rediscover new ways in which Theory can be made to matter—that is, to become a material force—once more.
