Traces 5: Universities in Translation: The Mental Labour of Globalization

How an “Intellectual Commune” Organizes Movement: A Brief Report on the Experiment “Research Space Suyu Nomo”

How an “Intellectual Commune” Organizes Movement T R A C E S : 5 371 how an “inTellecTual commune” orGanizes movemenT: a brieF rePorT on The exPerimenT “research sPace suyu+nomo” Ko mi-sooK — Translated from Korean by Lee Seok-Won “The University’s Dead!” Professors will tell you, “College students these days have no interest in anything but their love lives and the higher civil service examinations.” Students say, “Professors do nothing but go to conferences and work on research projects.” It seems students no longer consider professors their teachers and professors do not consider students their intellectual companions. In a word, there exists no relationship of teacher and student in the university at the moment. But actually, this is not true. The term “relationship of teacher and students” had already disappeared a long time ago. A university (大學) without the relationship of teacher and student? What a laughable contradiction in terms!!! As is well known, before modernity, students wandered all over the world seeking for teachers. Confucius had over three thousand students; five thousand students gathered for Zhu Xi’s lectures; and a group of writers assembled in WangYang Ming’s back yard: today these sound like stories from science fiction. Looking around, you can see universities all over the place. Their facilities have become much better. Nearly all have devoted themselves to remodeling their facilities. Moreover, today there are no students who simply ignore their grades, hanging around in the Student Union all day the way students in the 1980s did. Students these days devote themselves to attending class and managing their Ko Mi-Sook 372 T R A C E S : 5 grades. Professors are the same. It is simply unimaginable for them not to show up for their lectures as faculty did in the 1970s and 1980s, or not to prepare for their classes meticulously. In other words, both students and professors have become upright and loyal subjects of university. Yet the relationship of teacher and student has disappeared? Yes! Everything is in place, but there is one thing lacking: the intellectual pathos that connects students to professors as teacher and a student has disappeared. Knowledge is grounded in the desire (I call it “questioning while walking”) to pose a challenging question to existence and the world and to constitute with that question a completely different kind of life.This kind of knowledge has neither cause nor effect, direction nor purpose, and it is by nature productive and subversive, since it is indeed primitive. And at universities of our time, has this “primitive force” disappeared? Where on earth has it gone? As everyone knows, it has been absorbed by capital! In this respect, universities of our time are incredibly homogenous. Whether they are “first class” or second class, in Seoul or rural areas, specializing in the humanities or natural sciences, all universities and all academics produce subjects with the same desire and similar capabilities. One may argue that this is the “popularization” and “democratization” of knowledge. Of course not! In addition to being sterile and exclusive, homogeneity without difference is this way because it is always coupled with monopoly and hierarchy. Beginning in the late twentieth century, so-called technocrats began to emerge as Korean society was rapidly transformed into a “knowledge-based society.”1 They are clans completely different from traditional intelligentsias. For them, knowledge itself is capital and power. In other words, technocrats are not people who serve capital and power, but those who have managed to embody “knowledge, capital and power.” Today it is they who determine and establish the basis of Korean society. Yet from the outset access to their knowledge is blocked. The masses only know the results. Not subjects but objects of management and control. Obviously, homogeneity and monopoly go hand in hand with each other. The university is moving in the direction of ever greater consolidation of the configurations of knowledge. This will mean an enhancement of the “distinction” of the modern knowledge that has dominated Korean society since the twentieth century, and the death of the university that has been the backbone of knowledge. Its symptoms are emerging here and there: the clear and unmistakable symptoms that link the “distinction of intellectuals/technocrats” and the “death of university.” How an “Intellectual Commune” Organizes Movement T R A C E S : 5 373 The Intellectual Commune: Active Networks of “Mass Intelligence” However, there is no need to be...