Imagining the negentropic university: The madness of computation, the possibility of the uncomputable, and thinking otherwise

Abstract

In this piece I outline the history of the university in terms of a shift from a place concerned with the contemplation of the unknowable and the infinite to a machine focused on instrumental rationality, calculation, and computation. Reading this history through Lyotard’s work on the post-modern condition and the emergence of the knowledge economy, I consider the rise of the computational university and artificial intelligence in terms of the abolition of the foundational principle of the ancient university model concerned with the exploration of the unknown. In this regard, I examine the purpose of the university and higher education more widely in a technological system where calculation means that every question can be answered in advance. In this situation the closed feedback loop, computation, and certainty replace contemplation, the unknowable, and uncertainty as the key principles of the institution. Following this exploration of the history of the university, I turn to Bernard Stiegler’s consideration of the negative impacts of this techno-scientific model on thought and the ways in which these undermine the human potential to imagine the future. Thus, exploring the state of contemporary humanity in an environment where outcomes are always-already decided in advance, I think through the relationship between technology, cybernetics, and pathologies of communication that undermine the potential of the university to serve as a place for making sense together with a view to imagining alternative futures. In conclusion, I consider this situation in the contemporary social and political context where possibility seems to have given way to apocalyptic visions and predictions of endings of various forms, and unpack Stiegler’s theory of the neganthropocene to imagine a very different kind of university premised upon the protection of uncertainty, the unknowable, and alternative futures.