Zombie University by Sinead Murphy

Author:Sinead Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Zombie University
ISBN: 9781910924525
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

7

Which Is to Say, YoungGirls at Work

There is a glossy pamphlet published by The Higher Education Academy’s Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies and distributed by the careers service of the university in which I teach. Its title is ‘Philosophy and Employability,’ and it focuses on the ‘learning-tolearn’ character of Philosophy, on the ‘transferable skills’ that Philosophy generates and on the interpersonal communications that it enhances. It claims that, ‘whereas the knowledge learnt in other disciplines may be superseded by future discoveries or made obsolete by changes of circumstance, the ability to think critically does not become devalued over time. On the contrary, it is invaluable when new situations occur…’

Of course, the idea that there is any knowledge learnt in ‘disciplines’ other than Philosophy that may be superseded by future discoveries is by now really wrongheaded – as university subject areas are slowly but surely emptied of content, as Wordsworth becomes ‘my Wordsworth,’ or, much more likely, ‘my Harry Potter,’ the future cannot touch us irrespective of what we choose to study; our ‘knowledge’ is both too generic and too personal to be open to future challenge. But insofar as Philosophy is the ‘discipline’ above all others to have trumped the future absolutely, to have overcome history by making The Historical Turn; insofar as Philosophy has helped us to abandon every common concept and capacity as merely contingent, and therefore sanctioned the transformation of the general into the universal that defines the times in which we live: Philosophy is, sadly, the control ‘discipline’ par excellence. Post-Fordism, indeed, is a quintessentially philosophical socio-economic form: fashioning control from the intellectual mode that might have sought to resist it; making a friend of its would-befiercest foe; embracing as ‘invaluable’ that very ability, to ‘think critically,’ that it might have resented as by far the biggest spanner in its works.

To balance the prospect of its extinction on account of its not being the kind of thing that can satisfy the students who study it, there is also, then, the prospect of Philosophy’s flourishing, so long as it identifies itself as the HEA identifies it: as the ‘discipline’ of ‘critical thinking,’ which, in recompense for relinquishing all content of its own, teaches us to be adaptable and flexible and all-inclusive of history and change.

*

In 1999, the French collective Tiqqun published a quite startling account of what it is like, where it refers to the subject of the societies of control. The style of their account is idiosyncratic – undulating and fragmentary – but not so much so that it exempts itself from providing that defensive preface that, as we have seen, must always pave the way for such ‘personal’ stories as theirs. Recalling Woolf’s challenge to her audience at Cambridge – that they might throw her words into the wastepaper basket should they find nothing of truth to lie among them – Tiqqun introduced its account as ‘trash theory,’ out of which, if you care to see it, emerges their figure of the ‘YoungGirl,’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.