Place(s) of theory

Let me first thank Oliver for inviting me to give this lecture, it is a pleasure and an honor to speak in the context of your Memefest festivities in Ljubljana. So I thought it would be an interesting subject (at least for myself) to reflect on Memefest itself, or better: to present a way of thinking on the ‘core’ of Memefest activities.

Again this is work in progress. I am curious to discuss with you my thesis and I hope we will have a critical discussion afterwards.

To put it shortly and bluntly: I see Memefest as a trigger for (or: as a place of) theoretical practices, that is to say as a way of transforming theoretical matter (materie) into theoretical products by certain means which are developed by IT-technlogies.

First I will start exploring the content of this utterance (theoretical practise that is to say changing objects into products). My starting point here is an oberservation. Memefest brings knowledge, reflection, buity, it brings art and texts, but it is not an academic institution, even though Memefest has students, it also entails a kind of academic board, it has an administration and it has been set up (and is maintained by) spiritual rectors, but again it is neither an academy of arts nor is it filosofska faculteta. Physically it is a webside in the internet, it is a social network with nodes and hubs. So it can be seen as an institution that is at the same time distinct from academy and not. In my point of view: What Memefest provides and what it is doing could theoretically also be done and provided by a university. But universities these days won’t be able to initiate this.

The first thesis I want to explore now is, that Memefest itself is a by-product of the crisis of university-institutions, for it compensates their incapability to teach useful things and/or to generate theory. What you learn within the institution is ‘just’ technological knowledge and some more or less intellectual techniques to flatter. In the world where I am living in, universities are even not capable of fullfilling their neo-liberal tasks, they function as a rather complicated machinery for diplomas and degrees, they provide symbolic capital for individuals in order to win the rally for jobs, but they definitively do not produce good experts with appropiate skills.

You might have heard about students uprisings in Germany these days, one should add that that is not a new phenomena. For example: When I have been a student in the end of the 80ties/beginning 90ties I participated at three student strikes at the university of Frankfurt/Main where buisiness a usual was blocked for weeks. Since this time the problems are occuring repeatedly. There hadn’t been enough ressources for a normal course of studies - still there aren’t. Another example: Now students in Austria are paying for their studia but still they do not receive a reasonable education, they are confronted with limitations in all aspects.

You don’t have to be a culture-pessimist to make the statement that the university-system is dead. When you walk through the floors in the faculities you might be able to get a certain smell: it already stinks - but, of course, everybody is avoiding to recognize the ‘odeur’, but after having received the diploma most of the graduates will never ever see the university again - and most of the people are very happy about that.

Seen from the perspective of people working inside the institution the picture gets worth. Intellectuals in positions have to do an enormous amount of administrative work and they are involved in continous wars of position as well. “War of position” has been Antonio Gramsci’s notion to designate the political every-day struggles, that is to say: you have to defend your position and interests against your collegues and the attempts of the administration to gain control over university-life. The administrative body sets up norms where the quality of intellectual production is measured through quantitative methods - national and international publications are counted, also the frequency of being cited in publications of others. The content of what has been written in these texts is not evaluated with the hypocritical argument of freedom of science. The result is the re-emergence of cartels of citations. Recently a professor of Vienna university has explained to me that in his faculty the collegues are forced to citate each others so that all of them will get good marks when being evaluated by the heads of administration. These practices differ in no respect from those in the so called communist era.

And there is another aspect to mention: Theoretical production in the field of social sciences/political philosophy now is put completely under the auspieces of the market as well. But this market is far from being a “free” one. The most potent customers are the European Union and the national governments and agencies. Their will to knowledge and their political interests are shaping topics, discourses and also expected results. Governmental techniques are being constantly re-definded and re-calibrated through this production of knowledge.

The production of theory - be it inside or outside academic institutions - has to refer to this already given agenda on one hand. You have to use a certain jargon, like “global, local or regional governance”, you have to calculate your expected results in order to demonstrate the usefullness of your research in advance. Both are not only fundamental ideological subjections (“I, the subject-to-know, am mastering my material and in case I will be able to manipulate the results so they will fit into his masters voices”). On the other hand the dominating discourses and institutional constraints are not pre-given entities. They themselves develope - and we all know that - so every intellectual is dreaming of becoming part of this dominating multiverse of discourses and talks called “mainstream” or at least of becoming a well-respected outsider.

But, my third point, this mainstream developes in the field of the “wars of position” I have already mentioned. In academic policies, I mean within the institution, “arguments” are just coins in order to outbit your foe while your interest is to gain institutional position. But the ‘logical’ nature of those arguments is special. They explicitly have to cover their background - to be part of a language game that constitutes an instituion - and call for universality. This constitutes the institution ideologically as if it really was something universal (but in fact is an instrument of intelletual domination).

So theory which consists of thesis and arguments is far from being in opposition to practise. Theory, at least social and political theory, is a political practise to generate a general truth. Theory comes into being by abstraction and generalisation. Explicitly or implicitly it claims to bring up more than just a perspective amongst others. In turn it refers to a “general truth” that might be contested by everyone. At the last instance it does not really matter here whether we analyse this as an ideological operation or whether we really believe in general truth. Fact is that this transformation from interests into universality takes place in theory.

Places recquire subjects who are willing to construct these. On the backside of the institutional struggles and their “universality” there is mass-intellectuality growing, so the thesis of Negri and Hardt. In their communist prespective they make the argument that skills and knowledge are already in contradition to their restricted use and that this contradiction might in a certain moment lead to revolutionary changes - or at least might become productive. I want to sharpen this prediction by stating that this reforms of reforms of reforms of the academic system necessarily produces “refuse”, refused knowledge, refused research interest, refused topics, refused approaches. Intellectual waste is what the so called multitude is composed of.

I graduated in Frankfurt/Main and there we had been educated in the tradition of critical Frankfurt-School. In this way of thinking there was always the thesis dominant that social and political theory could be a place of resistance and critique. The process of universalisation produces a point of resistance because it constructs an universal point of view where interests of a different nature grow, for example universal human rights, appeals for justice and so on.

I don’t want to hold the thesis that it must necessarily be so, not only because we will easily find counter-examples where social and political theory played voluntarily the role of cementation of domination in the name of universality. Also I am sceptical about this Frankfurt-school argument because the intellectual refuse is so manifold that the mode of universality I analysed above would mean to restrict and to block its virtual productivity. The refuse is a productive entity that might come into being - without the need for external justification. On the other hand we are not starting from point-zero, we don’t have to invent the wheel once more. There is a remarkable tradition of critical thinking and theories available which we can make use of: Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Foucault, Praxis-philosophy, Marxisms, I am not sure about Lacan-School… But these traditions have been going underground, they have ‘left’ the university-field, most scholars and intellectuals in these traditions work under precarious conditions and there is almost no institutional way of bringing critical theory in. Somehow one refers to discourses that are very academic and rigorous, but because they have this very nature they do not fit into academies. This is funny, but not a joke.

We shouldn’t withdraw from this field, and that’s why I like Memefest activities. You still refer to academic knowledge, you did not make an end to this struggle, in turn you have re-opened the combat by inventing an intellectual zone which can best be described as a grey-zone. The place of theory today is somewhere in grey-zones, with one foot in the institutions with the other one outside, stuck in some projects, actitvities, initiatives and so on. Most of the intellectuals I am collaborating with are constantly switching from academic discourses to activist and back and forth… Critical theory probably never ever was forced to become so practical, so political effective and was probably never ever so closly part of the social and political reality.

We are crossing boundaries and in our every-day, only then you might experience the real mechanisms of border-control

examples (from my every-day work)

• discourse theory/semiotics and social sciences

• philosophy and project-management

• teaching and philosophy

…

This is the place where I would place initiatives like Memefest. It is a bunch of activities to cross-cut institutional constraints. But freedom has ist prize.

• Self-exploitation

• Base is personal commitment which might change (and then puts into question the whole project)