Abstract
The origin of this commentary lies in the sensation of bewilderment, pessimism and nostalgia observed in many academics and educators around the mercantilisation of higher education. The approach, however, identifies the danger of confronting an idealised past characterised by deeply engaged modernity with an individualistic, banal, postmodern present. A genealogical perspective is adopted to analyse the structural and functional continuity between those two world views. More specifically, the connection can be analysed from the social and political plan designed to encourage reflective, critical and self-governed awareness in Western citizens. A significant corollary to the clear divide drawn between social engineers and populations in the modern origin of the historic process at issue is the re-composition of that dichotomy in the form of an empowered awareness among citizens and a guilty reflective conscience among specialists and educators. From that standpoint, deprived of their traditional authority and influence on the definition of the social model, today’s academics and educators should learn to live in harmony with more cross-sectional, horizontal and complex life model management. Postmodernity should be seen not only as a source of problems and obstacles, but also of critical tools for resistance to experiment with new types of agency and social and political subjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
Communiqué of the Conference of European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education, Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve, 28–29 April 2009: http://media.ehea.info/file/2009_Leuven_Louvain-la-Neuve/06/1/Leuven_Louvain-la-Neuve_Communique_April_2009_595061.pdf).
- 2.
That was achieved to varying degrees of success in the twentieth century by countries embracing the West’s liberal democratic model. Further to socio-economic standards, however, their adoption of that model obviously failed to ensure many countries’ membership in the club of so-called first-world countries.
- 3.
The wholesale, compulsive output of articles has been shown to support the viability of the scientific paper exchange or market. Mimicking the logic of financial rating agencies, these content-opaque, presumably objective indices and values are generally used to assess the quality of professors, universities and research institutes.
- 4.
Despite the influential trend to regard new technologies as spaces for individual agency and reflexive and critical development, their doctrinal and purely technical use in education are not only possible, but common. In that respect their potential functions do not differ significantly from those fulfilled by other communication technologies in the past. Reading and writing, to cite one obvious example, was used from Ancient Greece through the advent of the modern nation-state to discipline subjectivity and place individuals’ activity, and more specifically their productive activity, at the service of the sociocultural logic prevailing at the time. The genealogical intertwining of reading–writing and new technology is obvious in this respect (Castro-Tejerina 2014).
- 5.
Among others, reading–writing afforded whole populations, illiterate or nearly so until the institution of cost-free public education, the ability to objectivise or acquire awareness of the collective narratives proposed for their consumption. Reflecting on, or more exactly imagining, other possible worlds as proposed by Bruner (1986), may detract from the credibility of the one in which we live and critically weaken the narratives that persuade us of its inevitability. Even in its totalitarian excesses and leanings such as Fascism and Stalinism, the liberal and social democratic project emerges with its own educational contradictions: between the constraints on citizens who tend to critical, autonomous, politically participatory absolute self-governance in democracy and citizens who, trained to drive material progress in the sophisticated industrial world, tend to optimise their productive skills. Postmodernity, with all its multicultural, cyberspatial, neo-capitalistic complexities continues to seek while redefining that difficult balance on the grounds of other parameters. Perhaps less than the prevalence of the neoliberal monster, and with it productive or ‘prosumer’ citizens, what may be underfoot is the pursuit by self-governed citizens of realms of adscription and engagement that blur the classical bounds of the nation state. The appearance of alternative identities through the empowerment of material and virtual communications and the universalisation of digital literacy enables people to continually update their loyalty to a remote reality, whether the place of origin or virtual communities. Paradoxically, this virtual experience may be felt to be more familiar and rewarding than quotidian face-to-face experience and, naturally, than the imaginary community proposed by the nation state (Anderson 1983).
- 6.
The manipulation and banality of information, essentially everything that is now labelled as ‘post-truth’, are not a postmodern invention. Journalism by definition aims to shape public opinion and that includes manipulation in a number of directions. Sensationalism, yellow journalism and the politically self-interested use of journalism hail back to the times of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
- 7.
The sort of influence referred to here must be clearly distinguished from the ‘conspiranoid’ definition adopted by the public at large, in which citizens are viewed as mere agency-less puppets, remotely controlled by presumably well-planned, perverse ideological, material and economic interests, master-minded by certain powerful elites: and not because such attempts have never been made. The truth of the matter is that there is no socio-economic or psycho-sociological scheme able to subject and model the incommensurability and unpredictability of such a large number of historical–cultural factors, webs and pathways that concur and interact in the long term. Indeed, as in Borges’s story, any attempt to build a map, theory or plan exactly concurrent with what may be regarded as ‘reality’ is sheer madness.
- 8.
That professionalisation itself is part of the problem is underscored by the fact that, for instance, there were no ‘professional’ psychologists or journalists in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The academic degrees specific to such studies were not created until well into the latter. Before then, their sociocultural functions were assumed by generically educated elites with degrees in medicine or the humanities: law, economics, liberal arts and so on. That broad-based training provided the foundations for the deeply humanistic and critical view of the clinical or informational tasks performed, the same gaze apparently yearned for in Shestakova’s (2018) chapter.
- 9.
As in other cases, a more specific and focused analysis in this chapter would illustrate many other continuities and at the same time, the contradictions that surround the genealogical connection between modernity and postmodernity. The chapter’s commitment to sustainability associated with academia’s participation in its immediate quotidian context appears to be consistent with new forms of localist identity. Consequently, despite the assignment of the notion of ‘sustainability’ to modernism, we are presented with an argument typical of the postmodern context which, above and beyond globalisation, would also clash with such basic issues for modernity as the universalist aspiration of the Humboldtian academic model or the priority adscription of subjects’ identity to the nation state. In any event, the idea of ‘sustainability’ is not at all novel and would also be rooted in modernist historic-cultural pathways. In this regard, it is reminiscent of the misgivings expressed by much of US liberalism, both progressive and conservative, about the excessive bureaucracy and centralisation at the national level of the model for coexistence and its management. Autonomy, self-governance and organisation in small communities form part of the country’s very foundations.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of the European project Between the Representation of the Crisis and the Crisis of the Representation, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 649436.
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Castro-Tejerina, J. (2018). Educating Specialists in the Context of Postmodern Citizenship: Keep Calm and Carry on. In: Valsiner, J., Lutsenko, A., Antoniouk, A. (eds) Sustainable Futures for Higher Education. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96035-7_20
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