Within the frame of an international workshop The Roles of Universities in European Integration, we would like to invite you to this online lecture. Please register here before 13 December to receive the Zoom link: 

Register for the Event

Abstract:

The presentation will outline the long-term development of the preconditions of the production, management and dissemination of knowledge with a central role for the universities, beginning with Kant’s insistence on the importance of critique and the implementation of his idea in the modern universities of the nineteenth century with the Humboldt University in Berlin as a model. It will proceed with a discussion of the changing preconditions in the wake of the digital revolution. The focus will here be on Jean-François Lyotard’s  La condition postmoderne (1979), which was a report on knowledge in computerized societies. Increasing functionalization and commercialization of knowledge would in the prediction of Lyotard result in fragmentation of narrative power. The outcome was, seen in retrospect, also to become a fundamental change of the universities and their way to produce and disseminate knowledge. The decades after his prediction brought under the new neoliberal master narrative called globalization a radicalization of the  commercialization of the definition of knowledge. However, the new master narrative (after that on modernization) seemed to reject Lyotard’s prognosis about the future impossibility of master narratives. The question today is whether he after all was not right on this point.  In a third step the presentation will shed light on the implications of this development for research in Europe and bring the outline up to the present.

Readings:

• Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne. Report sur le savoir. Paris: Edition de Minuit 1979 (English translation: The postmodern condition. Report on Knowledge. Manchester U P 1984);
• Hans Ruin, “Philosophy, Freedom and the Task of the University. Reflections on Humboldt’s Legacy” in Peter Josephson, Thomas Karlsohn, Johan Östling (eds), The Humboldtian Tradition. Leiden: Brill 2014;
• Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Bo Stråth, “Ch 9. Academic Value Production” in ibid, The Political History of European Integration. The Hypocrisy of Democracy-through-Market. London: Routledge 2010: 136-149;
• European Commission, Frontier research: The European Challenge. High-Level Expert Group Report. (EUR 21619). Available on line at erc.europa.eu/pdf/hleg-fullreport-frontier-research-april2005_en.pdf.