‘UNIVERSITY MUST BE SAVED’ GENEALOGY AS A KNOWLEDGE APPROACH.

Abstract

The research offers an elaboration of genealogy as an approach to knowledge from Friedrich Nietzsche's original work on method (1887) processed by Michel Foucault (1971). It provides an interdisciplinary version that integrates theoretical and analytical contributions from the philosophy of knowledge, from exact and social sciences to artistic research. This work also takes into account those who have most explicitly enhanced the potentialities of geneaalogy such as Gilles Deleuze (1962) and, more recently, Carlo Sini (2007) and Giorgio Agamben (2010), but also embraces the reflections of researchers, from the past or present, whom I dare associate with the genealogy approach such as Max Weber (1922), Bruno Latour (2013), Fritjof Capra (2014), Diego Velázquez (1656) and the newer holistic and immersive approaches in digital art (Roy Ascott 2007). The result will be a “grid of intelligibility”, an instrument of knowledge of the emerging phenomena that can be used for mappings and interdisciplinary networks and that, as in the original version (by Nietzsche and Foucault), intends to overcome the epistemological limits and disciplinary segmentation inherited by modernity. Such limits and segmentation are transferred in a special way in modern universities. For this reason, universities are not only the privileged object of this genealogical analysis, but also the field where its application is posed not only as a research practice or pedagogical tool, but also as a self-reflexive method on an organizational level. The genealogy of universities, therefore, is not just a speculative analysis, but a strategic and experimental choice, rather unusual, despite the vast literature available from a well-known text of Immanuel Kant (1798). Universities embody an intersection node among cultural, economic, political and technological trends, since their inception in the Middle Ages. They are the institutional entities that delegate big apparatus paradigm shifts that influence the approaches to knowledge of the people who live in a given social context in vehicular, transversal and vertical ways. Universities have always been the legitimised place to disclose knowledge approaches socially recognised. Their historical centrality and legitimacy has been renewed for more than five hundred years . In the contemporary world, their role is being compromised by global processes , neoliberalism and digitization in particular. This research will investigate the latter genealogically by focusing on the manifestations of resistance namely audit university and its development until the automation phase. In addition to contemporary authors such as Michael Power (1994), Laura Maran (2009), and Giovanni Leghissa (2012) - the theoretical framework will refer to Ivan Illich (1971), Edgar Morin (1999), but also Marshall McLuhan (1964) and those researchers that are currently involved in the analysis of the impact of media on the education system (Ben Fry, 2007, I. and M. Toru S. Vijay Kumar, 2008). It is an attempt to genealogically answer the question –What will the current audit universities become? This research has gone up to a drift that is more than a narrative exercise. It has pushed up to a prophecy that is only partly a fiction experiment namely automation in academia, which is the main research hypothesis. In an apocalyptic scenario automated universities represent an audit university involution, a result of hybridization among economic, technological, cultural and organizational phenomena. It is only by addressing this hybridization process that we can develop an alternative narrative. By following Antonio Caronia’s (2008) approach, this research will use science-fiction language as a distortion of reality that allows creating, in Foucault's words, a doomsday scenario (a case of ‘fiction historique’) or an alternative perspective avoiding ideological risks. Along with contemporaries Derrick de Kerckhove (1998), Roy Ascott (2007), Marcello Giacomantonio (2007), Valeria Pinto (2012), Federico Butera (2007), I will summarize the works of Franz Kafka, Philip K. Dick and James Ballard, but also recent contributions from artistic and pedagogical research. Keywords: Genealogy, Grid of Intelligibility, Knowledge, Power, Control, Subjectivation, EHEA, Audit, Automation.