Abstract
This introduction contextualizes a set of papers, which originated from the
The original versions of the papers in this special section were given at the
A number of the contributors to this special section take up the ways in which the historical dynamics of the public sphere relate to global processes, including the recent impact of digitalization. Robert van Krieken (2024), for example, addresses the long historical formation of the public sphere in relation to civilizing and decivilizing processes. His contribution focuses on the contemporary concerns about anger, which – along with lack of emotional restraint and aggressive language in social media – is associated with populism and ressentiment. Questions of globalization are also germane to Motti Regev’s (2024) contribution on cultural cosmopolitanism, which examines the ways in which nonlocal materials are absorbed into routine everyday life and public culture. Kornelia Hahn (2024) focuses on the ways in which a sphere of intimacy emerged alongside the public sphere and, despite the fact that the two spheres are often presented as dichotomized, or the latter as colonizing the former, it is argued that we are witnessing the creation of hybrid public/private events. Wedding ceremonies provide an interesting example of the way in which the experience of intimacy is supported by mediated publics.
In contrast to the case of mixing the public and private spheres, there is also the case of the deformation of publics that occurs in authoritarian regimes that helps to generate various strategies of resistance. Timon Beyes and Anna Kalinina (2024) take up the question of exclusions from the public, to discuss the concept of counterpublics and how it can illuminate the contemporary Russian public sphere. Jürgen Habermas has made a number of sustained critiques of authoritarian governments and was an active promoter of democracy. Douglas Kellner (2024) discusses this and other aspects of Habermas’s role as a public intellectual, in his examination of Müller-Doohm’s recent biography.
While the relationship between the university and the public sphere has been addressed by Jürgen Habermas, today we are experiencing a new wave of concern that the university has again entered a critical phase. These themes are taken up in the contributions by Bryan Turner (2024) and Shunya Yoshimi (2024). Both engage with the long history of the university to interrogate the current concern that the university now faces multiple problems, with the emergence of post-university forms on the horizon. This also connects to the broader questions of media literacy and its relationship to social media literacy, computer literacy and educational provision, which are addressed in the contribution of Shin Mizukoshi (2024). For Tiziana Terranova (2024) these issues point to the importance of ‘technoliberalism and the network social’, along with the need to go beyond approaches that only foreground its governmental character and fail to consider the potential for the generation of oppositional consciousness in digital networks.
A significant theme, then, taken up by practically all the papers in this special section, is the digitalization and commodification of the public sphere. A key focus has been the changes brought about by the internet and social media that have accompanied platformization, with the dominance of large corporations bent on data-extraction surveillance-based business models that have encouraged a form of ‘communicative abundance’ and populism. Habermas (2022) addressed these and related themes in his comments on the papers in the
Habermas’s reference to the editorial public sphere opens up a series of further issues which were discussed at length in the
The University, the Scholarly Apparatus and the Public Sphere
Today the university faces a number of pressures and challenges: declining numbers, the impact of digital technologies, financial constraints, student debt and reduced employment prospects. The postwar phase of educational expansion, based on increasing numbers, full employment and rising expectations, has come to a close. This offers the opportunity to focus again on the role of the university and consider the potential new forms on the horizon. Important here is not just the university teaching and research as an input to the economy through the development of specialist skills and training, but the role of the university as a public sphere institution. These concerns are of course not new, and the role of the university as a key site in knowledge formation has been discussed by notable theorists that include Habermas, Derrida, Stiegler and others.
The history of universities points to a series of shifts in their function and purpose. In the postwar era there has been what Talcott Parsons referred to as an ‘educational revolution’ (Parsons and Platt, 1973), a massive worldwide expansion of education which by the 1960s led to the creation of new universities and, in the German case, the quadrupling of the number of students (Habermas, 1987). Yet this was followed in a number of countries in the 1980s by the decline in state or public funding, which was replaced by student fees (Holmwood, 2016). The accumulating financial pressures of a more competitive higher education market encouraged hierarchical management with senior university managers seeing themselves less as colleagues, but more as business executives deserving the concomitant status and rewards (Martin, 2016; Turner, 2024). With digitalization, metrics have become increasingly important in the administration of departments and evaluation of faculty (Burrows, 2012). Research is often judged in terms of size of grant income generated and publications become evaluated in terms of citation reports and impact factors. National governmental assessment exercises to rank universities have been supplemented by the compilation of international league tables, with both seen as crucial indicators of reputation and potential income (Benda, 2018). Metrification, then, is adopted as universities seek to measure individual research performance and also use this and other data to enhance their position in the global ranking tables (Dobusch and Heimstädt, 2024). Reputational management and public relations become important as universities employ similar marketing strategies to business corporations, with the construction of logos, mission statements, video ads and image brochures, in an endeavour to control their public image through branding (Krücken, 2024). Some of these marketing strategies depict students as consumers and customers, caricatured by some as a move towards the ‘entertainment university’ (Turner, 2024).
In contrast, the public sphere knowledge formation role of universities contains many elements that are intangible and difficult to quantify and turn rapidly into economic value. As Christopher Newfield (2016) argues, this has been a particularly noticeable tendency in the United States in recent decades, with the drive to privatization of public universities undermining a good many of the wider social and collective benefits of high education. This relates back to the sense that education in general, and higher education in particular, contribute by increasing the general stock of knowledge for the common good. Education from this perspective can be seen as a form of gift that encourages mutuality as opposed to self-interest, as well as enthusiasm, imagination and creativity, along with the value of debate, dialogue and working together (Wittel, 2023).
This is the public sphere role of the university, highlighted by Jürgen Habermas (1987), with the university operating as an important mediator between the state, the economy and civil society. The university has the potential to not only encourage the transmission of culture but also engage in critical dialogue about social justice and the public good to further democratization. Yet this becomes difficult to sustain if the university’s priorities become developed as organizations that are governed to act strategically, rather than those formed by a ‘community of scholars’ supplemented by notions of representative democracy and communicative forms of scientific argumentation (Krücken, 2024). Habermas mentions that the university acts as a specialized ‘internal public sphere’ with associations, annual conferences, journals, etc., playing a key role in bringing together a ‘community of investigators’ that engage in productive communication, discussion and dispute. A major problem today is that with digitalization the technical milieu of universities has transformed the accustomed systems for retention of memories (archives, libraries, etc.) and with it research and writing, according to Stiegler (2008). He argues that this shift from knowledge to information results in forms of automated memory that can block the formation of critical consciousness. The danger is that we lose the power to theorize, suggesting that now ‘the mission of universities is to
This points to significant changes in the scholarly apparatus accompanying digitalization that have affected the ways in which academics conduct research (Bishop and Phillips, 2006). The search via keywords through search engines such as Google has become for many the initial step in research, yet few are aware of the algorithms and mechanisms along with the principles of selectivity and ranking used to deliver the results. Indeed, it can be argued that the focus on key language terms entered into the searchbox takes attention away from any sense of the location of the topic within a particular field, or constellation of fields, that could be conceptualized relationally and diagrammatically figured. While the speed of delivery is impressive, the scattered and isolated nature of the sources drawn on when the results are delivered can also lead to difficult or capricious choices in terms of where to begin and what to select. Behind the lists of references generated stands the archive of digitalized material, a vast sea of data which is constantly changing and increasing (Featherstone, 2006). It is of course possible to search for ranking metric sources to help validate and authenticate a particular choice. The metric tables and lists will provide ranking data on impact factors and number of downloads of a particular output, along with the ranking of particular authors (such as Google Scholar’s authors’ publications citation index and H-index). There is also the question of the prestige and legitimacy of the publications’ outlet. This needs careful checking, given the changes that have occurred in the academic publishing industry in recent years.
To take the example of journals, Clarivate (2024), which produces Journal Citation Reports on the journals that are included in the Web of Science Core Collection, covers more than 21,800 journals. But it is estimated there could be an equal or larger number of academic journals outside this core collection. The numbers are difficult to estimate (Rodrigues et al., 2024), but they have expanded dramatically at a pace much more rapid than the growth of higher education. There has been a market-led increase in the number of new journals established by publishers as they seek to cover every possible disciplinary or inter-disciplinary shift and potential research initiative. Indeed, the perception that academic publishing could be a lucrative market has attracted a significant number of new entrepreneurial online publishers, some of whom would seem to have little interest in the more traditional academic procedures for careful refereeing assessment and determination of quality. The rise of internet open access journals and Megajournals, with many start-ups from business entrepreneurs, is a notable recent tendency. 2 Given the lack of overall regulation to online publishing and growth of copyright violations and plagiarism, it has been largely left to concerned academics and associates to respond to predatory publishing to form watchdog monitoring groups such as Retraction Watch, Pub Peer and Jeffrey Beall’s List (listing over one thousand journals and publishers to avoid). 3
Dobusch and Heimstädt (2019) refer to 8,000 predatory journals. A study by
Towards the Post-University?
The expansion of online journals and publishing has changed the academic scholarly apparatus and mode of researching. On one level it can be seen as part of a more general process of the digitalization of social life and organizational forms (Beverungen et al., 2019; Newman et al., 2022). There has been considerable concern that the bureaucratization of public institutions such as hospitals and universities results in a disproportional growth of managers and administrators (Gawande, 2018; Nash, 2019; Wolf and Jenkins, 2021), along with the increased monitoring of performance by metrics. At the same time, in the wake of the Covid pandemic it is hardly surprising that there would be an expansion of online teaching and degrees. Given the current uncertainties about the job market and students’ capacities to pay back loans, the lower fees and flexibility could well prove to be a popular option with many existing institutions and new players moving into what is expected to be a lucrative expanding market. This points back to the initial questions raised about the potential for post-university and new knowledge institutional forms, with numerous experiments taking place around the world. 4
Rethinking the role of the university, then, means not just devising alternatives to the new emergent commercial forms, many of which offer shorter and cheaper online degrees and diplomas, accessible via internet distanced learning. There will be many new forms of knowledge institutions developing from today’s situation, and there will of course be no single form of post-university. Indeed, many of today’s elite universities that dominate the global rankings find it relatively easy to attract funding from alumni, foundations and other sources and are far from being in crisis. Yet, the term can be a useful, if provocative, short-hand to stimulate reflection on what comes after, and the range of emergent forms. The focus should not just take in the potential for different uses of digitalization but should also include the value of face-to-face interactions for discussion, and the spaces where this can take place, that go beyond online video-conferencing. The physical location and organization of space could well be important for the internal public sphere that should occur within the university, as well as its relations to the wider public outside the university walls.
If the public sphere flourished in the city, with its spaces that encouraged mixing of different types of people, then should this be the template for universities too? Many universities have operated extramural and continuing education units, but these have not always been given priority. Yet they had the merit of engagement with a wider general public, some of whom missed out on university degrees, or who wished to resume education out of a more diffuse general interest. But there are also a range of other spaces for discussion, some of which Habermas (1989) identified in his writings on the rise of the public sphere, such as newspaper reading in clubs and coffeehouses. This points to the need to develop spaces which encourage convivial discussion and sociability, but also more contemplative reading and writing as well. Spaces where the role of screens is rethought or placed alongside other forms of communication in more creative ways. There are a range of sites, such as the bookshop, library, café, museum, gallery, cinema and department store, that fulfil some of these functions. Spaces where knowledge formation is not just discursive but invites participants to grapple with different experiences and modalities of communication. Spaces in which visual, aesthetic and embodied sensory criteria are encountered. Spaces in which literacy, media literacy and postmedia forms are not just presented but can be thematized and discussed (see Buckingham, 2019; Mizukoshi, 2024). Knowledge formation in this context challenges us to productively work the balance between involvement and detachment. To mobilize our feelings but also reflect and analyse. 5 Such spaces can encourage reciprocity and exchange across social groups and generations and have the potential to generate a more co-operative ethos. Spaces that are still consciously embedded in their milieu, that can still retain some sense of place, and favour the exploration of more sustainable forms of life.
The notion of the public sphere emphasizes spaces of mixing, bringing together people with different points of view and values. Universities and associated knowledge institutions are generally committed to encouraging social and cultural diversity. For this reason, there would seem to be growing support, as Yoshimi (2024) argues in his contribution to this section, for not restricting university education to three or four years around the age of 20. Education should be regarded as a life-long activity that brings together different generations across the life course. There is, therefore, the potential for the development of more flexible shorter courses, colloquia, summer schools and residences at different points in life.
Indeed, there is potential for universities and post-university knowledge institutions to provide a different form of temporality, to become places which give us time, rather than proclaiming their quest for excellence and efficiency (Hörl, 2024; Readings, 1999). It can be argued that places that are generous with time, that factor in intermediate spaces, tend to encourage inventiveness and learning how to judge critically. Spaces that are not designed to drive the speed of task completion and information transfer logic, but rather give us time to feel the texture of words, or the gaps between them. A more holistic education needs to encourage problematization and incompleteness, the countering and undermining of authoritative statements by the logic of the supplement (see Featherstone and Venn, 2006). 6
The contemporary university can be seen as caught in wider social processes which, according to Stiegler (2015; Hörl, 2024), generate a tension between: firstly, the conditions of computational framing with its constant disruption through technological innovation; and secondly, the time of recomposition, a time of questioning of the technological ‘advances’, and development of various modes of knowing, thinking and living to synthesize, adapt and place technology in the service of care. But if this dual process is interrupted and the second phase doesn’t occur, Stiegler suggests general conditions of ‘proletarianization, denoetization and disindividuation’ will prevail. The university will then become ‘a university-in-disruption’ in which ‘automatic understanding’ replaces thought and reason. This makes it all the more urgent for the university to reinvent itself as an institution and become the site for ‘careful thought and responsible invention’ (Hörl, 2024). But what might a university of care look like? If the scholarly apparatus and internal public sphere within the university become increasingly structured by digitalization, then how might critique and care be placed back on the agenda?
One of the answers may relate to the public function of the university and other knowledge institutions in the city. As mentioned above, in the city we have a greater variety of venues that address different cultural forms that attract greater mixing of participants and audiences: students; ex-students; ex-academics; amateurs, not just experts; the old, not just the young. In this context it is interesting to note that Stiegler (2015) argues it is essential for the university to invent a new relation to the outside and help foster ‘a community of amateurs’ to engage in dialogue with the academic world if we are to foster social invention (see Dillet, 2017). This involves a struggle on a number of levels. In the same way that Stiegler (2018) refers to industrial proletarianization (the proletarianization of the producer with the worker tied to the machine) and the proletarianization of the consumer (through capturing the consumer’s attention via marketing and advertising), he also refers to computer proletarianization (the inability of the ordinary user to understand the judgements made via coded data and algorithmic processes). The latter processes, Stiegler (2017) argues, have also delivered a ‘machinic turn of sensibility’ which threatens to lead to ‘the proletarianization of the amateur’, in which amateurs lose their knowledges and ‘libidinal energy to love’ and become mere cultural consumers. In the case of the love of art, it can be argued that art works also demand practices of care – they invite the need to be taken care of (Stiegler, 2017: 13).
There are many dimensions to care which Stiegler (2018, 2020) addressed in his later writings that are relevant to our discussion of post-university developments. In connection to our earlier reference to the importance of the supplement in knowledge generation, Stiegler (2018: 267) emphasizes that reason is not ‘dis-affected calculation’ which becomes algorithmic, but rather a matter of ‘the hermeneutic investment of traces’, through a ‘neganthropological . . . a new foundation of political economy on a technospheric scale, as well as a critique conducted
For Stiegler (2020), then, theoretical computer science needs to be rethought outside the computational paradigm to produce knowledge that makes us think and care in ways that go beyond automatic calculability and take diversity functionally into account (noodiversity). This process involves experimentation with neganthropic institution-building in open localities (Krzykawski, 2022). Stiegler (2019) wanted to see the exploration of experimental ways to move towards a negentropic contributory economy that develops new creative forms of knowledge and care at a local level (knowledge communities), based upon automatic computer systems that further dis-automatism (p. 127). The Internation Collective project was one such experiment on the part of Stiegler and his associates to develop ‘territorial laboratories’ designed to further the regeneration of local knowledge (Bishop, 2022; Bishop and Ross, 2021). In the Plaine Commune North Paris project ‘Contributory Learning Territory’, they endeavoured to put some of the ideas into practice with a ‘political laboratory’ to encourage democratic participation and develop new educational practices by bringing together academic researchers, doctors, child psychiatrists, care workers and parents to study problems such as the effect of screens and smartphones on children’s psychic development (Alombert, 2022: 45). Along with computer scientists and digital designers, they sought to create ‘curative’ digital tools that responded to local needs as defined by the inhabitants. The overall goal was to foster a ‘new relationship with technology’, with local people not just users of technological systems but, by studying them collectively, able to gain practical and theoretical understanding to enable them to ‘prescribe, transform and practise’ digital technologies (Stiegler, cited in Alombert, 2022: 45).
Media Literacy and Postmedia Education
To take up again the earlier discussion of the decline of the editorial public sphere, Habermas (2022: 160) remarks that, ‘Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalisation is making everyone into a potential author. But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?’ Platform social media encourage the self-empowerment of users, with little guidance how to sort and select from the flood of information, how to distinguish between true and false information, how to judge the potential effects of different communicative styles and forms of rhetoric (see van Krieken, 2024, in this issue). The release from the editorial tutelage and gatekeeper model of the old media suggests the need for the identification and formation of a new set of competences as part of an educational process. But who would provide the competences and regulation? Hardly the platform corporations, but possibly the state through the education system and legal regulation. As Habermas (2022: 160) emphasizes, the author role is not the same as the consumer role – it has to be learned. Literacy, the competence to read and write, was supplemented in the 20th century with the plea for media literacy, the critical understanding of how images and sound work in the new forms of information flows (Buckingham, 2019). But the question today is: if we need social media and computer literacy which demand a new set of competences, how are they to be selected and fashioned, and who and what are the agents and intermediaries that will deliver them?
From a radical perspective, this can point to the importance of thinking the way towards postmedia, as Guattari (1995) started to do near the end of his life, as part of his interest in developing new forms of subjectivation and aesthetics. He became interested in the importance of non-discursive pathic knowledge, in the ways, for example, that images operate not just at the semiotic level but deliver affective intensities. Affect plays an important role in this process, as it points beyond existing forms of media literacy towards postmedia. It also connects to the pathic dimension of life that acknowledges that we are living, embodied beings who fall sick, grow old and die (Canguilhem, 1989; von Weizsäcker, 1958). As we move through the
There are also connections to Stiegler’s ambition to create a new theoretical computer science, which is not based on the entropy models common to informatics and economics (Bishop and Ross, 2021: 238). The attempt to move towards negentropy and consider lived experience and the affective relationship between the body and the environment is also evident in the work of Giuseppe Longo, who worked with Stiegler on the Internation Project. Along with Angelini (2022), Longo emphasizes the importance of distinguishing the difference between two realities which are often superimposed: the interpreted information of living beings constructed from a sensible world on the one hand, and the attempts to artificially reproduce these processes by translating information into an anonymous transmission of data, on the other. The first relates to the pathic dimension of living beings and the affective experiences that can produce singular, creative and imaginative meaning (Angelini, 2022: 74). In effect, in animals, including the human animal, it is the emotion, the significance and meaningfulness that help us select and recognize actions and gestures in everyday life (Longo in Angelini, 2022: 78). Machines do not have this help from an embodied self that has the capacity to qualify its perceptions via historical and lifetime formation of the senses. As Longo elaborates, this has implications for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
It also has important implications for literacy, editing and the scholarly apparatus. Longo indicates that computer networks provide us with ‘extraordinary tools to bring us into contact with distant colleagues, different experiences, to compare divergent visions, access rare texts, forge unexpected collaborations, construct immense data bases accessible to everybody, then interpreted from different viewpoints’ (Angelini, 2022: 84). But they can also be used in the opposite way to normalize us with ‘automated bibliometrics’ (citation counts), channelling ‘all minds to the strongest school of thought’. For Longo, evaluations should not be based on machine ranking as ‘majority thinking makes it very difficult to form new thought, which is of necessity minority thought’ (Angelini, 2022: 84).
Bruno Latour (2022) remarked near the end of his life, in a reflection on the need to move from the university to the pluriversity, that ‘Education is not problem-solving, but finding what the problem is’. Indeed, the university as a public sphere institution necessarily has to be interested in fostering creative thought and becoming a caring institution that relates to and cares for a wider public. It also has to protect and sustain the scholarly apparatus at a time when a number of universities feel they are under threat (see Featherstone, 2023). Too often, academics are embroiled in their activities and rarely reflect on the wider implications of the tools they use. Tools that involve delegation to algorithms that provide speedy information processing that automatically suggests further content that leads to homogenizing behaviour and elimination of differences. This suggests the need to design, develop and experiment with new digital and algorithmic tools which do not just extract statistical data but enable users to interpret content and share and collectively discuss interpretations through contributory platforms which encourage annotation and deliberation (Alombert, 2022: 44). As Stiegler (2020) suggests, such practices of collective discussion and debate need new types of functions related to ‘indexing, categorization, annotation, visualization, recommendation, editorialization and group-formation’. The editorial function, then, both within the university and in the wider public sphere, is an important part of this process.
Footnotes