The future is always-already now: Instituent praxis and the activist university

Abstract

In this paper, we place the issue of university activism in the context of constituent and constituted power. By this we mean the ever-present danger that activists’ demands will be co-opted and concurrently deactivated. To mitigate this risk, we develop a set of conceptual tools that enables thinking about the activist university in terms of instituent praxis; that is, an open process of co-becoming of an institution and its actors through the continuous co-production of rules that drive their actions. Contrary to the view of the university as something instituted, the activist university that we propose emphasises the possibility of sustaining the process of acting and its underlying rules, rather than the result of the act. The activist university is understood here as a crack that leaves the instituted university open every time the self-production of its subject emerges by the self-transformation of the actors in the very course of their activities. We observe a chance for grounding instituent praxis in the ontological shift in thinking the activist university from being to co-becoming, as this will allow for reclaiming the future for the university and its broader ecology.

Introduction

More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen (2015) and later on Max Weber (1946) had already shown that science and higher learning were increasingly being pulled into the world of capitalism.This gradual capitalist socialisation of the university (Hall, 2018) in the 20th century took a dramatic turn during the 1970s, when Western countries were emerging from a global crisis in the capitalist economy and the neoliberal agenda sought to remedy the shortcomings of the public sector. Subsequent events led to a questioning of the long-lasting relations that the university had formed with the nation-state and the market in the course of history. In turn, this change in the balance of forces led to a renegotiation of the social contract between the university and the state (Reading, 1997), in which nation-state acted as a guardian of the university’s autonomy vis-à-vis the demands and interests of the market. Since then, the state has taken on a new role: that of ‘overseer of higher education for the Market'' (Neave, 2012: 49). Old divisions and hierarchies gave way to new ones (Do, 2015). In effect, the traditional autonomy of the academic community was soon to be shadowed by a very different kind of autonomy, which had fatal consequences for the university’s abilities to self-govern and autonomously define its own goals. As it turned out, the university, introduced and exposed to the market forces, now became an object, rather than a subject of its transformation.

In this respect, the last decades may be perceived as a vivid testimony that the educational and scientific quest can, seemingly, be subjected to external demands and interests, as well as go hand in hand with the imperatives of profit maximisation, in a strictly economic sense (Mirowski, 2011; Münch, 2014; Stephan, 2012). The growing presence of capital in science and higher education has profoundly changed the logic in accordance with which activities within the sector are taking place. Although capital never succeeded fully in keeping science and higher education in line with its agenda, it nonetheless continues to dramatically change the life and work of those who create them. In other words, capital provides the context for ongoing struggles within the university sector. From mounting student debt, through enclosures of knowledge and the university’s space, to the acceleration of competition at all levels of the higher education system, its presence seems to question traditional academic norms and values (Hackett, 1990), concurrently opening new spaces of social conflict.

For this reason, these transformations never occurred without an activist response. Starting from 1968 – a breakthrough year when, for the first time, global mass student protests led to a profound transformation of the university – activism and unrest have regularly cracked open its institutional shell (Katsiaficas, 1987). Over the last five decades, not only have the internal and external boundaries of the university been transformed, and its functions changed, but the level of openness and accessibility for students has also increased; and this has been accompanied by the democratisation of governance, the transformation of the discipline structure and the inclusion of new activist-born research streams (Roggero, 2010). All of this occurred in response to bottom-up activist pressure. Even if some of these changes were caused by a fear of not taking a step back in a confrontation with the activist desire expressed in mass protests – all such reforms bore the distinct mark of this pressure (see Clark, 1998 on Warwick and Twente). In the course of history, the institutional form of the university was capable of encapsulating and internalising activist dreams through co-optation. The academic activists’ impulses in the West were instituted and deactivated one by one, which contributed to making the status quo bearable, rather than to the realisation of a more profound and further-reaching transformation.

When capitalist command over the university and the economy at large is brought together with the student protests and revolts that rupture this command, two distinct ontologies are constituted. Although they appear as antagonistic oppositions, operating on a different logic, they nonetheless remain bound together, as each rupture has the potential to be deactivated and incorporated into the former. What we face here is a classical problem of political philosophy, a tension between two different modes of power, that is, constituent and constituted power, which traverse the history of modern political philosophy (Esposito, 2012; Negri, 1999). If constituted power refers to the formal constitution and legal order, that is, the division and branches of the government, forms of representations and governance, constituent power, in turn, denotes the creative activity of collective desires that goes beyond the status quo, and which manifests itself in full force during revolutionary moments. Modern history has a distinct organisation of this relation, that is, subjugating one power to another and thereby bringing every manifestation of constituent power to an early end. As soon as a constituent power arises, attempts are made to turn it on its head and transform it into a formal constitution. As a result, constituent power loses all of its potentiality to reimagine and transform reality. Activism – understood not merely as agitation for a particular cause so it can become incorporated into the mainstream politics, but rather as a way of reimagining and recreating the logic by which our social world operates – requires an answer to a fundamental question. How to reverse the relation between constituent and constituted power, so that the latter does not consume the former? How to make constituent power persistent and enduring?

In this article, we pose this question in the context of university activism. We do so in the context of higher education in the West, and the activist processes that historically traversed it. We argue that the relation between constituent and constituted power, one that is based on the subsumption of the former under the latter, looms large over the task of resisting the capitalist socialisation of the university. In this article, we trace this problem back to the idea of the university as an institution, that is, as something already set and constituted; the effect of subjecting constituent power to the principle of sovereignty. Somewhat differently to Ronald Barnett (2015), who approaches this problem through reinstating the productive dialectics between the university as an institution and university as an idea, we propose a reconsideration of the idea of the institution itself. Instead of perceiving the university as a product of constituted power, we attempt to develop an approach suitable to the task at hand. We do so by reimagining the institution of the university as grounded in the realm of constituent power and instituent praxis; in other words, always-already present collective desires that consistently lead beyond themselves and the actions undertaken to make them resilient in the face of constituted power. It is where we seek the renewed foundations for the activist university and academic activism.

This paper is structured as follows. First, we briefly outline the conceptual framework as we discuss the idea of constituent power and instituent praxis, concepts developed respectively by Antonio Negri, and by Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot. We then make a detour through the concept of the common to explain the ontological foundations on which constituent power and instituent praxis are based. Then, we elaborate on the problem of university activism in general. Subsequently, a discussion section follows. We use the developed concepts (constituent power, instituent praxis and the common) as a prism to inquire to what extent established ideas of university activism are resilient to the dangers of co-optation. Finally, we ask what can be gained for both the theory and practice of university activism through productive engagement with the concepts discussed in this paper. After all, the multiplicity of unsolved social and ecological crises we are facing is a call for action to safeguard a common future. If the university is to join other social forces in this struggle, it must at the same time reinvent itself. It must go beyond its present institutional form in order to bring about desired changes. The concepts developed throughout this article are intended to help in this task.

Beyond the constituted power: Instituent praxis and the common

The idea of activism that we are pursuing in this essay is tightly connected with the realm of politics, understood as a sphere of agency and reality’s capability to self-transform. As such, it also entails the idea of power, here understood as the extent to which desires of the subject remain active and continuously produce material effects in the world (Szadkowski and Krzeski, 2019). However, when confronted with the reality of contemporary higher education, one may argue that the idea of politics is, in fact, very foreign to the sector itself. For this reason, the starting premise for thinking about the activist university boils down to the following problem that has to be addressed: the present-day university appears to us as an object of politics, rather than its subject; a space where governance prevails over self-governance. This image, in turn, is tightly connected with the problem of the capitalist socialisation of higher education. After all, one of the main features of neoliberal discourse that dominates the higher education sector (Olssen and Peters, 2005) is its quest to depoliticise reality. It forces us to act as if decisions are made on the basis of the objective rationality of cost efficiency, thus having nothing to do with the conflict over different interests and values (Davies, 2016), which is the very essence of politics. We have witnessed this trend in Western higher education systems at least since the 1980s, and now with a renewed force in semi-peripheral and peripheral systems undergoing market-oriented reforms. In effect, what we are left with is the idea of politics associated with the power of domination, subjection and coercion to external forces. It is the primacy of this sort of power that we want to challenge.

When addressed from a philosophical perspective, the problem directs us towards two modes of power that reside in the realm of the political. On the one hand, there is the power of creation, born out of the needs, desires and willingness to change the world. We will refer to this type of power as a constituent power, as it opens up a horizon for something new and gives an impulse to transform reality and oneself. On the other hand, we can find a very different mode of power, one that equates with domination and control. We refer to it as a constituted power, as its true meaning lies in governing what was created by managing and defending the status quo. Although constituent power and constituted power appear as absolute opposites, they are not exclusive, but rather coextensive with each other. To address the problem of the activist university and the issue of reclaiming the power of creation, we have to grasp the logic by which they operate and how they relate to one another. Not for the sake of the old modes of university’s self-governance, but to give them a new meaning and, by doing so, make them resilient in the face of the continuous process of the depoliticisation of the university through new waves of neoliberal reforms. To do so, we refer to the work of the Italian philosopher and activist, Antonio Negri (1999), who has arguably developed this problem of two modes of power to the fullest extent.

In the wake of the failure of the Italian revolutionary movement in the early 1980s (Wright, 2002), an important part of which was formed by the active students’ and university workers’ movements, Negri faced a new challenge. The question was how to make a revolutionary impulse persistent, not merely limited to the one brief moment of insurrection. According to Negri, the answer lies in the paradoxical nature of constituent power. By studying modern revolutions, he concluded that although the constituent power initiated each of these events, the revolutionary impulse ended up trapped in the grasp of the legal constitution that prevented it being brought to fruition. Once constituent power ‘is repressed and excluded, the political is reduced to pure mechanical nature, to being an enemy, and a despotic Power’ (Negri, 1999: 335). In other words, it was not the desires and needs that prompted those events that were at fault, but instead cutting them short by tempering them in the new legal order. Once recognised, this modern dialectic of constituent and constituted power has to be questioned and dismantled.

For this reason, Negri searched for the means to set constituent power free from the ever-present grasp of constituted power. In turn, he called for a reversal of the relation between the two terms in question. Contrary to the modern tradition that focused on constituted power and the principle of sovereignty, Negri argued fiercely for the primacy of constituent power, which he posited in the form of subjectivity. Not an individual subject, but a multitude of struggling subjectivities, which by interaction and cooperation had the power to recreate the social world. This shift of perspective gave birth to the new conception of politics, one where ‘we should not think of power as primary and resistance a reaction to it, instead, paradoxically as it may sound, resistance is prior to power’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 81). Resistance comes first, as it is born out of people coming together, overcoming particularities and realising their shared dreams. Power as domination, in turn, is merely a reaction to this constituent drive; it emerges out of fear that old privileges and interests might not be safe in the face of what is to come.

We argue that such a reversal of the relation between these two modes of power is an adequate premise for making university activism more pertinent and resilient to the supposedly superior external forces they attempt to confront. Moreover, it provides a framework that connects different struggles in the common joy of giving birth to something new. However, even when we reinstate the primacy of the activist subject in the realm of university politics, we immediately face a different problem. Constituent power, now in the form of an activist subject, encounters on its path a powerful barrier, namely the university in the form of an institution, the very seed of constituted power. Always ready to deactivate the radical impulse present on the side of activism by suppressing activists’ demands and settling for the middle ground. Therefore, so far as our understanding of the university as an institution remains intact, there is a continuous threat that the constituent power will yet again be captured in the tight embrace of constituted power. For this reason, our task cannot merely be limited to reinstating the primacy of constituent power and recognising it as a subject. We must arrive at a different understanding of the university as an institution, one which will be able to accommodate constituent power and carry its desires forward. To achieve this, we now turn to the work of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2019) and their concept of instituent praxis.

Dardot and Laval are convinced, as we are, that the key to proposing a lasting condition for change lies in designing suitable types of institutions that would allow and stimulate such change. However, functionalist sociological theories of the institution, which have dominated for many years – and which construct institutions as stable and rigid beings; as the outcomes of past human acts, rather than frameworks for self-transforming activities – pose a substantial challenge to such an endeavour. For this reason, Dardot and Laval invite us to change the way we look at and investigate institutions, including the institution of the university. They suggest that in order to enact an alternative to the status quo, we first need to stop asking ‘what is an institution?’, as if it were something stable and fixed, and ask instead ‘what type of acting creates and recreates institution?’. We need to shift from the noun perspective to that focused on the verb. Thus, our task is to shift from the institution and the instituted towards institutionalisation and the instituent. In such a move we would be able to expose a seemingly paradoxical duality of the institution: its being at the same time a thing and a praxis. From the ‘activist’ point of view, it is the praxis component that matters most. As the authors of Common suggests, praxis ‘is self-production of its subject by the self-transformation in the actor in the very course of this activity’ (Dardot and Laval, 2019: 299); thus, it emphasises a processuality that continuously opens up the institutional shell and, in turn, it is opened by it. Instituent praxis that takes place in the institutions and through them is a cyclic, mutual relation of self-transformation that occurs between the actors and their acts and the institution itself. It is from this angle that we can grasp the core difference between constituent power and instituent power. As Dardot and Laval state, instituent power ‘does not have the majesty of a solemn foundational act, and it does not need a subject that pre-dates it’ (2019: 302). While Negri’s constituent power gives us a vital vector that matches the direction of activist struggles at the universities all over the world, Dardot and Laval offer an instituent form in which these struggles cannot become congealed and constituted.

Before examining the activist university in more detail, and through the prism of these two concepts, we have to make a crucial ontological detour to lay bare the foundations of our perspective. What distinguishes the two philosophical propositions discussed above is their reference to the ontological concept of the common. The common cannot be contained in either the public, with its state and bureaucratic modes of organisation, or in the competitive and market-driven concept of the private and the individualism that stems from it (Szadkowski and Krzeski, 2019). When taken from the perspective of the power on which they stand, both form two sides of the same coin of constituted power, dominating what exists in an uncreative way. In contrast, the common is primary, a non-hierarchical and self-determined social relation that binds us together, a condition for the prosperous development and growth of society and the planet as a whole (Szadkowski, 2019). It needs to be clarified that at least two different interpretations of the common are present in the literature. While Hardt and Negri (2009) emphasised the productive aspect that creates a cellular form of an alternative to contemporary capitalism, which is based on its expropriation and exploitation, Dardot and Laval (2019), in contrast, emphasised the praxis-related aspect of the common in their interpretation, which conceives it as a political principle guiding the struggles and practices dedicated to the realisation of a non-capitalist future. However, we think that the politico-economical merger of these conceptions is not only possible but desirable, and that it may bring positive results.

Under the political-economic interpretation that we propose, the common cannot be limited to a set of material or immaterial resources. Furthermore, it involves a process, a subject and a set of rules that binds them together. Thus, we could say that the common has an inherent tendency to become an institution – but an institution of a different type. This is the vision we drafted in the paragraphs above: that of an institution where the constituent impulse is not caught up and deactivated, but instead gets accelerated and gains the potential for further expansion. Moreover, such an innate drive towards the institutional form substantially diverts from the two institutional modalities that prevail in Western modernity: the state form and the market form. The former is the most rigid and stable phenomenon in which power takes the sovereign and constituted form, while the latter undermines the constituent forces of self-determination through a more diffused and networked form of totality. An institution that would be able to host and strengthen the constant praxis of collective self-transformation is an appropriate place for the common. Therefore, the instituent praxis, as an expression of the living site of the institution, is a proper modality of the common, as well as the key to understanding the institution and activism. On the remaining pages of this essay, we will discuss the activist university as seen through the prism of the common and instituent praxis that it implies. We will start with a discussion of the dominant approaches to university activism to move through their alternative takes, and finally to set the ground for our concept.

The university and activism

The first of the lenses through which the university and activism can be seen constructs the former as a stable ground that can host a plurality of voices (see, e.g. Amrozas, 1998; Holmwood, 2017). Here, the university resembles a tool that amplifies the activist message, or a public sphere, the responsibility of which is to allow activist voices to be heard, to enable them to reach out to the broader society, to form a stronghold of reason in the unstable times of post-truth. The institution of the university is seen here as having a particular identity, and its externalities (society, global society) are constructed as areas on which academics or students from within the university can act ‘academically’. We may describe this approach as the ‘identitarian activist university’, as its identity is understood as a stable container for a quasi-pluralist reason.

The other approach that we want to focus on emphasises flexibility and openness to what is unknown and new. Such an institution listens to students, social movements and their voices, and it opens up every time society is facing wider social unrest to include voices, then mutating accordingly in order for the society to remain as it was before the crisis (Klemenčič, 2015). We have seen these mutations many times, starting from 1968, and with black or queer movements transforming into academic disciplines (Roggero, 2010). Recently we have observed the same de-activating absorption of activist energies with the current history of the movement against climate change or the Black Lives Matter. Some scholars have even emphasised in this context ‘the impossibility of a permanent revolution’ at the universities, pointing to the cyclical nature of all students’ movements (Altbach, 1989), as if the co-optation would be the only possible future for any form of university activism. We refer to this perspective as the ‘safety valve activist university’.

We argue that those two approaches operate in a problematic modern framework in which primacy is given to constituted and instituted power. By this we mean that although there is a space for change or transformation within the university, it can only occur on the basis of a double constitution. On the one hand, only subjects that are recognised as already constituted in a unified body can put forward demands with regard to the university and on the other, accepting those demands can occur only through a formal constitution. Once the contract is made, any further demands lose their legitimacy. The point of reaching a consensus between the two sides by full or partial incorporation of demands into the new constitution of the university is at the same time a moment in which constituent power dissipates into constituted power; the principle of sovereignty prevails. Activism that operates by this logic might be able to introduce progressive changes into the life of the university. However, it is unable to change its fabric, as it implicitly acknowledges the primacy of constituted power of which the university as an institution is a manifestation. For this reason, we must look further for approaches to university activism that, by rejecting the primacy of constituted power, are seeking a new meaning and form for the institution of the university.

First and foremost, such attempts can be seen in the approach of such British Marxists and radical educationalists as Mike Neary, Sarah Amsler, Joss Winn and Richard Hall, which was developed through both theory and practice (in projects such as Student as a producer or the Social Science Center, and through participation in the Occupy Movement). Their approach is built on the premise that any real alternative to the current capitalist socialisation of the university can occur only through questioning the institutional form of the university (Neary and Winn, 2009). Instead of putting their trust in the institutional framework, they work towards building an alternative within the university. Those alternatives work by an autonomous logic and act as seeds for potential further transformations by the deinstitutionalisation of the University (Neary and Amsler, 2012) as well as reinforcing the resilience of the academic community (Hall, 2013).

Another approach that we want to draw on comes from abolitionist university studies (Boggs et al., 2019). Even though it is rather an epistemological proposal (despite the fact the authors emphasise that ‘critique isn’t a substitute for organising’), we see here a useful exposition of an ontological relationship between activism and the university. To de-romanticize the institution of higher education and rip off its pretentious appearance of the necessity of its existence, the abolitionist approach turns the university into an ‘object of analysis, site of intervention, and a resource to be exploited’ (Boggs et al., 2019). In doing so, it combines both a destructive and constructive moment. Instead of just proclaiming the abolition of the university as an institution, in a fugitive move of exodus, it aims at abolishing the social and economic conditions that made the university in its current capitalist form possible. For that purpose, it proposes to use the universities’ sites strategically, in order to achieve the broader aims of non-capitalist transition, even if during such a transitory move the institution would simply disappear for good.

A similar activist figure that we would like to reflect further upon emerged in the entanglement of radical student activism, the university and the broader academic environment in West Germany between 1967 and 1969. Although it did not form the core of the antagonism between the radicals and the forces of the old order at the universities, we can see it when looking at the clash between student activists and Theodore Adorno, back then the director of Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. ‘Adorno as an institution is dead’, said one of the thousand leaflets distributed by the students around the campuses back then (Leslie, 1999). A strange formula for an activist slogan. Nevertheless, it contained a vital component for our further reflection. However, Adorno, the proponent of Critical Theory and supporter of the ‘ivory tower’ model of the university, became an easy target of the student movements after he called the police to arrest students occupying his dear institute in 1968. No matter that, like many other prominent figures of the Frankfurt School, his ideas partially formed the atmosphere of the students’ upheaval, he remained unmoved, defending his strict belief that: ‘theory is much more capable of having practical consequences owing to the strength of its own objectivity than if it had subjected itself to praxis from the start’ (Richter and Adorno, 2002). His general stance was a perfect synecdoche of the kind of institution to which the university students wanted to bid farewell. As for the role of the university in their rebellion, the student activists were generally divided between two strategies: a long march through the institutions or forming academic counter-institutions (Mohandesi et al., 2018: 134).

Nonetheless, one formula for the university role stood out from this binary model. In their keynote address to the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund members, the two most prominent activists of the time said: ‘The university forms a secure zone, or more exactly a social basis, in which and from which the guerrilla organises the struggle against the institutions’ (Dutschke and Krahl 1967, in Mohandesi et al., 2018: 139). It is in this context that one needs to understand the proclaimed death of Adorno as an institution. This instituted discursive machine, stable and withdrawn, hidden behind the ivory walls of the university, needs to be opened up by students’ energy, so as to form a point of departure for further, successive transformation of itself and the surrounding society. The institution in this form resembled the closure of constituted power, the end of the struggle rather than its aim. Nevertheless, Dutschke and Krahl found themselves in a paradoxical position, by demanding a place at the university to organise creative destructions of the institutions around it. What they were appealing for was a university capable of containing a place for instituent praxis. However, even if, as Habermas (1987) wanted to emphasise during the peak of this historical conjuncture, the wave of student activism contributed to a change in the consciousness of those who were studying, the reforms of the universities deactivated the most progressive impulses and congealed them again within the empty institutional shell. Once again preventing the university from becoming a permanent instituting process that young radicals design it to be. Drawing on this failed attempt at university renewal in the final part of this article, we would like to propose a rethinking of the activist university as an instituent praxis of the common.

The activist university as an instituent praxis of the common

What, then, does the activist university mean for us? We are aware that either ‘identitarian’, or ‘safety valve’ activist paths do not offer a viable solution, as they both are unable to escape the embrace of the constituted form of exercising power over activism and its results. First, they consider the university as an institution that is inherently separate from activism. As such, it may host activism or open its gates to activist actions, but in its essence the university is considered a constituted thing, rather than a node of multiple processes. Second, they construct the link between the university and activist and struggling subjects as a temporary short circuit. Once the demands are heard (as in the case of the university treated as a part of the public sphere) or partially met, they get deactivated, and the struggling university subjectivities are turned back into a passive and dormant mode. Finally, they limit the scope of activism to either the academic mode of impacting the socio-economic reality or confine it within the university walls. Thus, instead of a broad process of the cross-conditioned self-transformation of the institution, its subjects and the broader environment in which they are embedded, we get an atomistic and identitarian vision of singular interventions. Hence, the activist university that we are looking for definitely lies beyond the stable academic identity and the rigid institutional shell.

Even though we sympathise with deinstitutionalisation and the abolitionist approach to university activism, and despite the fact we share the basic premises on which they are based, we see a substantial difference in the approach to current institutions and their future purpose. While we agree that there is a need to de-romanticise the university and to use it strategically, we doubt that, without rethinking the institution as a form, abolishing or deinstitutionalising the university will be enough. We do need an institution, but we have to give it a different form. For this reason, we stand on similar ground with radical students like Dutschke and Krahl (1967), who insisted on the destruction of institutions in their capitalist reified (thing-like) form. The activist university, in our understanding, may play a useful role for that purpose. It is not that we see the university in its activist form as a privileged social space for expanding the common and transforming the world. Just like other existing stable institutions, the university needs to open itself up to activism and transformation according to the logic of instituent praxis. Revolutionising social relations is not a one-time event. There is no end to the process of transformation, as there is no hope that the changes will be everlasting. To fail to acknowledge this may result in us witnessing yet another constituent struggle becoming a foundation for sovereign constituted power.

As we argue in this essay, linking the common and instituent praxis is a key to establishing a resilient activist university. The common lies at the very foundational impulse of activist universities. They emerge out of the ongoing constituent struggles, that, as Hardt and Negri suggested: ‘are posed on the terrain of the common and that not only express the urgent need but also chart the path for a new constitutional process’ (2012: 48). What is at stake in these sorts of struggles is the establishment of new social environments under which ‘more equal, common and sustainable relations can grow’ (2012: 48). However, the important thing is what happens next, when the struggles for the common reach the institutionalisation phase. To put it differently, how can one establish the institutional form in which constituent impulses would be stimulated and developed further, rather than congeal in a constituted form? Following the reasoning of Dardot and Laval (2019), we suggest that the activist university that forms the space for regular instituent praxis does not need a pre-existing subject or a grandiose constituent act in order to motivate actors to a self-transformative change for both the university itself and its surrounding socio-economic environment. Understood in this way, activist universities may operate as a sustainable form that activates its subjects and itself for further emancipatory self-transformation.

Activist universities based on the logic of instituent praxis are not a matter of pure theoretical invention, and even if this conceptual article may only briefly refer to them, they offer a continuous inspiration for further thinking and acting. There are both historical and current examples of the institutions operating according to the impulses of the common (Erdem, 2020; Pusey, 2017; Szadkowski, 2019). Irrespective of their long-lasting or more ephemeral character, no matter whether they are born directly out of constituent struggles, like the Croatian Occupied Faculty of Social Sciences from Zagreb in 2009 (Bousquet and Drago, 2009), or emerge in a transitory process from bigger institutions, like the Turkish network of Academies of Solidarity established after the repressive actions against academics (Bakirezer et al., 2018; Erdem and Akın, 2019), or whether they are part of a more comprehensive transformative effort from within the regular universities, like the communal and commons-driven Universidad Politecnica Salesiana in Ecuador (Carrera and Solorzano, 2019), these common-based activist universities share some basic structural features.

First and foremost, they make their resources common, especially when it comes to knowledge and teaching resources that may benefit both the internal community of learners and the broader societal plane. Second, they aim to develop schemes of self-management, struggling to be self-sustaining and being able to determine their own areas of activity. Finally, they subject their decisions to procedures of democratic participation, whether that be a democratic plenum open to all the academics and citizens of a given city (Bousquet and Drago, 2009) or other inclusive structures that allow for going beyond a rigid academic identity and open up the institution to its wider surroundings. Activist universities are inclusive institutions that aim at the global transformation of social relations. They are institutions of the common that are based on the multiple processes of activation of those who form them on a daily basis. Regardless of the fact that they usually have a limited lifetime, the impulse and the desires for substantial changes that they brought forward endure, and they urge us to rethink both our modes of thinking about university as an institution and how the universities we inhabit are shaping our modes of acting.

The future is always-already now: The horizon for the activist university

The focus of this essay gravitated towards a fundamental question derived from political philosophy: how to make constituent power persistent, sustainable and expanding? In other words, how to imagine the constant progress of social emancipatory forces without running the risk that their energy will congeal in some form of sovereign power? We asked this question in the context of the relationship between activism and the university to propose a new reading of the activist university, as a form of institutionalisation that combines the democratic forces of the common with the logic of instituent praxis. In our intention, such a proposal may overcome the limits of the reified approach to the institution of the university and emphasise its processual and active character. We demonstrated that the current approaches to university activism got caught in a deadlock between the identitarian and safety valve conceptions, on the one hand, and the attempts at abolishing the institution of the university altogether on the other. Finally, we have provided examples and listed the general features of such activist universities functioning according to the logic drafted in this essay, proving that our concept is not a result of a pure exercise in theory but has its roots in the material practices of actual university movements from all over the world.

We started this essay with a genealogical reflection on the crisis that plagues higher education worldwide, one that stems from the exhaustion of the productive dialectics between the state and the market that secured the self-governance of the university sector in modernity. The activist university that we have presented is a response to what seems to be a deadlock of imagination caused by the end of such dialectics. We assume, and we have emphasised this in this paper, that to overcome it, the university needs to meet activism on a newly formed institutional ground. In the instituent-praxis-driven activist university, the future is always-already-now – as it is reachable through the collective self-steering performed collectively in the present. This new institutional form consistently helps its inhabiting subjects to become empowered and act, and to change both themselves and the world around them. However, we still have much to learn regarding how to establish and make common activist universities. In that respect, however, the current and the past students’ and academic workers’ struggles, their achievements and experiments, their tragedies and defeats, their attempts at the institutionalisations of their dreams and desires, provide us with lessons that need to be addressed both in practice and in theory.