Paul Gibbs - Universities in the Flux of Time: An exploration of time and temporality in university life

The French urbanist and philosopher Paul Virilio is one of the principal theorists of speed. After many years pursuing the relationship between concepts of velocity and the paradox of being in a virtual world of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time Virilio explains how real time has supplanted real space such that A synchronization has taken place of customs, habits, mores, ways to react to things, and also, of emotions, exemplified in the hysteria that followed the global financial crisis. He maintains: Since speed earns money, the financial sphere has attempted to enforce the value of time above the value of space and while this has led to massive profits for the few and increasing inequalities, to truly understand the phenomenon of an economy of speed, the left has to jettison its old framework that insists capitalism is dead, and all we need is more social justice. This is a false deduction that proceeds from adopting the same old materialist analysis.

Whether one accepts Virilios analysis or his predictions, it is clear that speed and velocity are two of the main aspects of a new finance capitalism that operates at the speed of light based on sophisticated buy and sell algorithms. Already researchers have demonstrated that data transfer using a single laser can send 26 terabits per second down an optical fibre and there are comparable reports that lasers will make financial high-frequency trading even faster.

The game has changed permanently. Now universities are engines of innovation for fast capitalism dealing in fast knowledge, fast publishing and fast teaching (e.g. massive open online courses (MOOCs)) where knowledge (confused with information) is seen as having a rapidly decreasing shelf-life. We have passed the bedding-down stage of neoliberal universities that occurred with the transformation of the public sphere during the ReaganThatcher decades of the 1980s and 1990s. We have passed the stage of the adoption of principles of New Public Management and the emulation of private sector management styles to enter an era of universities in the service of finance capitalism where universities, increasingly reliant on student fees (especially international students) and independent research funds, serviced by high-speed networks and MOOCs, operate as a part of global finance culture.

Increasingly universities are instrumental in generating and managing a burgeoning student debt. They have become loan institutions that gamble with endowments and make investments in futures markets. They prioritize research that generates income, develop global partnerships with like institutions and consortia to act as powerful actors in the global higher education market, often overly concerned with branding, institutional image, positioning and global marketing. In this new context the university is increasingly preoccupied with finance, with financial global partners, imbued with a finance culture that permeates the institution substituting at every turn for academic leadership and academic culture, downplaying the very sources of self-criticism that used to characterize the university and playing up the financial and reputational stakes.

One might also add that at the very heart of a permanent change of regime is the relationship between global capitalism and the new information and communication technologies, a relationship that has developed quickly in the post-war context to create what I call cybernetic capitalism, a term I introduce to emphasis the new circuits and forms of global capital and new mode of capital accumulation. At the same time, the social and communicative acceleration that results from this relationship at the heart of cybernetic capitalism can be understood in philosophical terms that change the basis for temporality, for subjectivity and being: being a student, being a professor, being a university.

In the first part of this chapter I introduce the notion of digital reason and describe main features of the university in the epoch of digital reason as a philosophical basis for understanding so-called fast capitalism and fast knowledge and various theorizations of cybernetics in relation to the university.