Thoughts on Giorgio Agamben - Requiem per gli studenti (A Requiem for Students) and the Birth of the Hollowed Out Simulated University

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skilful of lamentation to wailing. . . Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. (Amos 5:16, 18)

Giogio Agamben has written an exquisite essay on the university in the wake of COVID-19; It is a lamentation, a wailing, a mourning for the darkness that has been called forth from the pandemic.  It is a provocative piece of impudence at a time when such things may be punished by social actors and risk averse institutions. "Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time." (Amos 5:13). Agamben has chosen to speak; it is not clear who is left to listen.  And yet the movement toward the reconstruction of the university as simulacra--the way that it parallels the movement toward the reconception of political space as a complex living analytics better understood through models than in flesh and blood--is worth pondering. The techno-populism that the university has become is likely the best simulation of the transformation of society that one can observe as the moment. What comes after pondering, and after observing in these times, is truly best left to silence.  

The essay, Requiem per gli studenti, follows (first published in Diario della crisi of the Instituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici 22 May 2020) along with my own brief reflections and a crude English translation. 

In his essay, Requiem per gli studenti, Agamben has written about the university as a shell that has been emptied of that which gave it life.  It is a haunted place now, in which specters of former academics glide in its corridors and large spaces declaring the rebirth of the shell without  the life that had given it form. Like other empty offerings of the sea floor, it is good now only for stringing together as decorative objects to be worn around the neck. It has become an offering, a sacrifice, to the imperatives of the market, and of the cultures of university as business that has effectively emptied the space of the university as marker of the past. And thus, as I read the essay I could not but recall a passage in Amos: "They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly" (Amos 5:10) and the opening quote. Agamben has managed to speak uprightly in a day of divine darkness--and to that end he assumes the posture (a necessary posture given the times) of the mourning husbandman, delivering a skillful lamentation to those who would be inclined to hear it not. 

Agamben speaks, of course, to the transformation of the university from a physical space to a simulated space, to a space that serves only as a nexus of the technology necessary to virtually connect students to each other and to those who would teach them.  It universalizes the style of the administrator--always remote, and always undertaken behind a curtain--the impenetrable office, the meetings to which no one may be admitted, the written communication, and of late the email and the "town hall" meeting, the later the fullest expression of the techno-populism embraced as the centerpiece of the culture of a university (on the latter see here, and here). 

Agamben laments a semester of online teaching both for what it means in the short term, and for what it signals going forward. He begins as shaman; the starting point is the recognition that his divination about the course of things has indeed come to pass. And now what? Divination of events to come, like the reading of a statute, is of little use unless one can get beneath the words or events to their intent. Indeed, even the understanding of events as objects requires their signification.  They must be identified (fiat lux) and thus identified, interpreted.  The identification serves as the gateway to interpretation, but interpretation acquires little meaning (other than as yet another object in need of signification) in the absence of the political (or coercive) act of collective judgment.  To gicve meaning to something is to judge it.  And it is important here to signify pandemic to judge those who would impose on it a certain collective meaning, and in so doing transform meaning into a tool. It is to the characteristics of that tool--to the constraining nature of meaning, that Agamben starts; and it is as well the place where he eventually ends.

Here, Agamben suggests (and like many others, not without reason) the intent is pretext. What pretext?; for the re-signification of an object (education) by means of the pervasive diffusion of digital technology into a simulated space.  But the exercise is not narcissistic in the sense that is it meant as a cover to whine about changes in the delivery of instruction.  Agamben has a far more fundamental critique. He worries about the effect of the simulated university on what has been its neglected core--the construction of the student society, and from it the kernel of changes to society at large that this construction permits. He argues that in a sense, the university has already become a perverse simulation.  I leave the specific of the historical argument Agamben makes to the reader.  He effectively argues that the pandemic has provided the pretext for the public manifestation of a trend already well in the works--the hollowing out of the university.  By emptying the university of its students, the university ceases to exist.  It emerges from that hollowing it ourt as something radically different from its ancient conception and function.  No longer the gathering space for students, it now serves as the intangible nexus point for the management of labor. In Agamben's words:

Of every social phenomenon that dies it can be said that in a certain sense it deserved its end and it is certain that our universities had reached such a point of corruption and specialist ignorance that it is not possible to regret them and that the students' way of life is she was consequently equally impoverished. (Requiem per gli studenti).

To that point he adds two specific indictments.  The first  is against the professorate which, almost en mass, has become complicit in this transformation.  But Agamben notes the long tradition of the professorate of bending the knee to administratiove power irrespective of its purported principles. My own experiences tend to reinforce this insight, discussion of which has sometimes appeared on these pages (e.g.,  ). The second is against the students who are also complicit in the process of transformaiton by submitting to the new regimes without a whimper.  To these he urges that they imitate their forebearers and again reclainm a stusdent space to which scholars are invited to teach.


I also find it useful to approach Agamban's central thesis from the perpsective of semiotics. The university as an object, the significs of which produced a collective meaning of great societal importance was built around it students.  The university as object was the coming together of students in one place.  That place of gathering was the university.  Its signification  was produced as scholars came to the students to offer instruction. But they were not a force for the management or discipline of the community of students, just a factor in the production of value the ultimate representation of which was the students themselves emerging from their community back into the world. That essential construction of the object-"university"--did not change as the community of students, along with the emerging community of scholars attached to the gathering places of students, acquired servants to administer the apparatus of their organizations. Administrators preserved the object (the physical space of gathering); scholars provided service to the community of students who were the spirit of the physical space within which they gathered, and thus served as the instrument of signification of that space, the means by which that space acquired meaning.

What the triumph of the remote-techno-instruction factory that now defines a space once evidenced by the collective presence of a society of students gathered together to organize themselves and recieve such instruciton as suited them, and which now views students as recepticles of information necessary tyo prepare them for insertion into labor markets, the placing of which has been determined through the simulation of markets and economic actrivity, is that it has inverted the way the university acquires meaning.  In the face of a techno-bureaucracy presiding over the (re)construction of youth as ideal workers in an ideal (simulated) state, the hollow university has been fiulled with something altogether alien. The university is now understood to be a physical space--and identified by tangible objects.  Those tangible objects are then signified by filling them with animating forces--strudents (recepticles) and faculty (feeders).  Stuydents and faculty provide the means by which the object--the hololow university as a spce full of buildings--is signified. But the meaning of that signification is neither int he hands of the students or that of th faculty.  Meaning is now made by the techno-bureaucracy, which themselves are not their own masters, but who serve the constructs produced by the simulaiton of the societal space within which they serve as a component part.        

And that produces, as well, a semiosis of indictment--not of the university (it has withered away abnd now serves mostly as a recepticle of memory)--but of the society from out of which this transmormation of meaning (and the forms of its making) has been driven.  The first is against the mania for quantification that has denatured the spirit of the society for whose good it was once thought to aid. And the second against the great societal actors who, intent on managing all risk, and the results of actions, have continued to strip the human of its essence.  And it is here that one confroints the ultimate objective of the proces--the mechanization of a predictable process--the control of which is held by those who drive its analytics.  What emerges, in a  word, is the hollowing out of human autonomy--except, of course, as a concept of (equally hollowed out) constitutional law. .     

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Giorgio Agamben - Requiem per gli studenti

Maggio 22, 2020

Diario della crisi

23 maggio 2020

Come avevamo previsto, le lezioni universitarie si terranno dall’anno prossimo on line. Quello che per un osservatore attento era evidente, e cioè che la cosiddetta pandemia sarebbe stata usata  come pretesto per la diffusione sempre più pervasiva delle tecnologie digitali, si è puntualmente realizzato.

Non c’interessa qui la conseguente trasformazione della didattica, in cui l’elemento della presenza fisica, in ogni tempo così importante nel rapporto fra studenti e docenti, scompare definitivamente, come scompaiono le discussioni collettive nei seminari, che erano la parte più viva dell’insegnamento. Fa parte della barbarie tecnologica che stiamo vivendo la cancellazione  dalla vita di ogni esperienza dei sensi e la perdita dello sguardo, durevolmente  imprigionato  in uno schermo spettrale. 

Ben più decisivo in quanto sta avvenendo è  qualcosa di cui significativamente non si parla affatto, e, cioè, la fine dello studentato come forma di vita. Le università sono nate in Europa dalle associazioni di studenti – universitates –  e a queste devono il loro nome. Quella dello studente era, cioè, innanzitutto una forma di vita, in cui determinante era certamente lo studio e l’ascolto delle lezioni, ma non meno importante erano l’incontro e l’assiduo scambio con gli altri scholarii, che provenivano spesso dai luoghi più remoti e si riunivano secondo il luogo di origine in nationes. Questa forma di vita si è evoluta in vario modo nel corso dei secoli, ma costante, dai clerici vagantes del medio evo ai movimenti studenteschi del novecento, era la dimensione sociale del fenomeno. Chiunque ha insegnato in un’aula universitaria sa  bene come per così dire sotto i suoi occhi si legavano amicizie e si costituivano, secondo gli interessi culturali e politici, piccoli gruppi di studio e di ricerca,  che continuavano a incontrarsi anche dopo la fine della lezione.

Tutto questo, che era durato per quasi dieci secoli, ora finisce per sempre. Gli studenti non vivranno più nella città dove ha sede l’università, ma ciascuno ascolterà le lezioni chiuso nella sua stanza, separato a volte da centinaia di chilometri da quelli che erano un tempo i suoi compagni. Le piccole città, sedi di università un tempo prestigiose, vedranno scomparire dalle loro strade quelle comunità di studenti che ne costituivano  spesso la parte più viva.

Di  ogni fenomeno sociale che muore si può  affermare che in un certo senso meritava la sua fine ed è certo che le nostre università erano giunte a tal punto di corruzione e di ignoranza specialistica che non è possibile rimpiangerle e che la forma di vita degli studenti si era conseguentemente altrettanto immiserita. Due punti devono però restare fermi:

1. i professori che accettano – come stanno facendo in massa – di sottoporsi alla nuova dittatura telematica e di tenere i loro corsi solamente on line sono il perfetto equivalente dei docenti universitari che nel 1931 giurarono fedeltà al regime fascista. Come avvenne  allora, è probabile che solo quindici su mille si rifiuteranno, ma certamente i loro nomi saranno ricordati accanto a quelli dei quindici docenti che non giurarono.
2. Gli studenti che amano veramente lo studio dovranno rifiutare di iscriversi alle università così trasformate e, come all’origine, costituirsi in nuove universitates, all’interno delle quali soltanto, di fronte alla barbarie tecnologica, potrà restare viva la parola del passato e nascere – se nascerà – qualcosa come una nuova cultura.

Letto 57867 volte 

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Giorgio Agamben - Requiem for students
May 22, 2020
Diary of the crisis


May 23, 2020 As we had foreseen, university lessons will be held online next year. What was evident to a careful observer, namely that the so-called pandemic would be used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies, has been punctually achieved.

We are not interested here in the consequent transformation of teaching, in which the element of physical presence, at any time so important in the relationship between students and teachers, disappears definitively, as collective discussions in seminars disappear, which were the liveliest part of the 'teaching. It is part of the technological barbarism that we are experiencing the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses and the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen.

Far more decisive in what is happening is something that is not significantly talked about at all, and that is, the end of the student way of life. Universities were born in Europe from student associations - universitates - and they owe their name to them. That coming together of students was, first of all, a form of life, in which the study and attention to lessons was certainly crucial, but no less important was the meeting and the constant exchange with the other scholarii, who often came from more remote places and organized themselves according to their place of origin within nationes. This way of life has evolved in various ways over the centuries, but constant, from the clerical vagants of the Middle Ages to the student movements of the twentieth century,  was the social dimension of the phenomenon. Anyone who has taught in a university classroom knows well how friendships were linked, so to speak, and, according to cultural and political interests, small study and research groups, which continued to meet even after the end of the lesson.

All this, which had lasted for nearly ten centuries, now ends forever. Students will no longer live in the city where the university is located, but each will listen to the lessons closed in his room, sometimes separated by hundreds of kilometers from his former classmates. Small cities, once prestigious university locations, will see those student communities that often made up the most lively part disappear from their streets.

Of every social phenomenon that dies it can be said that in a certain sense it deserved its end and it is certain that our universities had reached such a point of corruption and specialist ignorance that it is not possible to regret them and that the students' way of life is she was consequently equally impoverished. Two points, however, must remain firm:

the professors who accept - as they are doing en masse - to submit to the new telematic dictatorship and to hold their courses only online are the perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the fascist regime. As happened then, it is probable that only fifteen out of a thousand will refuse, but certainly their names will be remembered alongside those of the fifteen teachers who did not swear.

Students who truly love studying will have to refuse to enroll in universities transformed in this way and, as at the beginning, become new universitates, within which only, in the face of technological barbarism, will the word of the past remain alive and be born - if it is born - something like a new culture.

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