Impacting the University: An Archeology of the Future

In memoriam Bill Readings

It is generally agreed that the modern university originated in early 19^th-century Prussia, under the inspiration of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Thus it was stamped with the seal of idealism and of German Romanticism. Today the entrepreneurial model that seems to be imposing itself on universities around the globe confounds this former ideal, particularly by requiring academia to report on its economically quantifiable "impact." But an impact on what, exactly? On knowledge in general? On society at large? On industry? Is it a question of developing the critical acumen of each person in a democratic universe in which the citizen must be formed as well as informed? Or is it a question of favoring industrial innovation and producing workers for the job market? One often has the impression that the term "impact" belongs to some magical incantation: one has only to use it to align the university on the side of an economically viable 21^st century. Thus it appears useful, in our highly utilitarian times, to examine the notion more closely and to grasp the very impact it can have on discourses and individuals.

The Figure of Impact

The notion of "impact" comes from the physics of solids: it designates the pressure exercised by one body on another at the moment of collision. Impact always implies the exercise of a certain violence. Its economic or social usage is clearly figural, in the often vague sense of "effect" or "influence." However, it is worth noting that its first figural use is exactly contemporary with Humboldt. We find it in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English idealist and romantic poet who, in fact, had studied in German universities and was influenced (impacted?) by Kant, Fichte and Schelling.

In one of his most remarkable texts, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge introduces his poems by an long and convoluted autobiographical preface, as well as by a group of philosophical considerations that underly the poems, as though it were a question of communicating to the reader the complexity of relations among life, thought, and writing. Within this preface that both feeds and constrains the reader's understanding, Coleridge pens a chapter on dualism, where he confronts the fundamental question of the link between perception and idea:

Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is a something which has been communicated to it [the mind] by an impact, or an impression ab extra. [...] Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible [...]. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism.

(90-91)

To better undermine the materialist posture, Coleridge stresses the mysterious metamorphosis, which must be thought through, between perception and idea, between the sensible and the intelligible. The sudden figurative use of the notion of impact intervenes at precisely this moment, to stress the unintelligibility of that "something" that has been communicated to the mind by the senses. In other words, the figurative use of the notion, which up to that point had been a matter of the senses, serves, not to calculate an effect, but to show the impossibility of a "real" impact.

Paul de Man, who made subtle readings of the symbol in Coleridge, would have appreciated this figuration of the disfiguration of the subtle process that itself disfigures the way to consider the body-mind connection. For Coleridge, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible does not retreat into a supposed impact of the one upon the other, but must be the very condition of their reciprocal manifestation:

all opposition is a tendency to reunion [...] their opposition [is] the condition of all existence or being manifested: and every thing or phenomenon is the exponent of a synthesis as long as the opposite energies are retained in that synthesis"

(The Friend, vol. 4, 94).

Without needing to return to a rigorous dualism, we can nevertheless keep in mind the complex relationship that impact maintains with it own figuration or with its sensible matter, as well...