David E. Bell has a terrific review of Taylor’s book on tenure and the university over at The New Republic. It seems to me that Taylor is a victim of a certain ideology commonly found in popular science books devoted to complexity theory, chaos theory, and network theory. Pick up nearly any of these books and you’ll straight away be treated to a distinction between hierarchialized systems under centralized control and distributed networks with no centralized control. What begins as a descriptive distinction very quickly becomes a value laden distinction where networks are equated with all that is good, whereas centralized systems are all that is bad. Very quickly the narrative (which is very theological in character) becomes that if we were to just let systems unfold according to their own immanent processes everything would be well as distributed systems without centralized control are wisely self-regulating and internally harmonious. By contrast, the story goes, bad system effects arise from attempted centralized control that interfere with the natural functioning of non-linear, distributed networks. Somehow the phenomenon of positive feedback gets ignored in all of this, despite the great debt much of network theory owes to cybernetics.
It seems that this is precisely the narrative that Taylor has fallen for in his analysis of the modern university. How anyone could, with a straight face, make such an argument after the global financial collapse of the last few years is beyond me. After all, the financial system has all the marks of an unregulated, non-linear distributed network that Taylor is defending but certainly did not behave in a wise, self-regulating fashion or yield the harmonious, creative results that Taylor seems to think arise spontaneously from such systems. At any rate, read the review. Of course, the damage is already done here. Bell will be portrayed as a parasite of the university system out to save his privileged place in that system (i.e., we’ll be treated to another round of “blame the professors and teachers”) and Taylor’s piece in the NYT and his book will be trumpeted far and wide by free market reactionaries interested in dismantling the universities and turning them into profit making machines. In this connection, isn’t it curious that Taylor doesn’t target the bloated salaries of many administrators. I suspect that he is currently the toast of the town and has a lot of opportunities coming his way as a result of all this.
September 20, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Perhaps the book will simply be lost in the avalanche of books lamenting higher education in recent years. There really is a glut.
I’ll admit that I thought Taylor had some good things to say in his book on complexity a decade ago or so. But now, well, he’s probably just become so comfortable that he doesn’t know what’s really going on.
September 20, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Couldn’t agree more. Some things in life shouldn’t be “emergent,” like health care…
September 21, 2010 at 6:19 am
Its funny, because I do really like so many of Taylor’s books, like ‘The Moment of Complexity’ and ‘Confidence Games.’ I haven’t read this new one, and didn’t realize he’d produced it till you mentioned it, though I’d read his op-ed and other works on his ideas on restructuring education.
And it all seems really misguided to me. Which I find odd, seeing how good he is on networks in other contexts. Then again, his approach to networks comes via cybernetics, information theory, and economics (despite his origins in religion and philosophy). His background isn’t in science, though I think observing biological networks would provide some corrective to what he is suggesting. Because while he seems quite aware that financial crises cause crashes, he seems to miss the cancerous aspects of contemporary capital, and how it will dismantle the archaicisms that in some respects keep the university safe from being completely dismantled and ‘for profit’-ized.
What we need to value in education is robustness. How do we foster this? And what standard of value do we use to judge educational quality? I’d propose a return to Dewey for a start. While some of Taylor’s suggestions are obvious (the web can help disseminate knowledge), the rest seems potentially dangerous.
I think also that Taylor really misses the fact that in some situations, hierarchical networks have benefits! The question is appropriateness to the situation. Al Qaeda has a paranoid ideological structure, but its organizational network is radically distributed. This does not make it a good thing by any stretch of the imagination.
I prefer the experimental pragmatics of the Deleuzian stripe. How do we maximally deterritorialize, without losing complexity and robustness in the process? This will require care.
Right now, the university is under assault on all sides by capitalist forms of deterritorialization. To deterritorialize the university faster would only support this process. I hate to sound like Adorno for a moment, but in this particular situation, the very stodginess of the university is perhaps all that is protecting it from a radical deteritorrialization that will make all universities into the Universtity of Phoenix.
This is not to say that universities aren’t hidebound – they certainly are. And tenure has many, many down sides. I forget who it was who suggested replacing tenure with something like 10 year renewable contracts. I think there are benefits to this, so long as things like retirement are taken into account (and I’m not sure how that would be done). But potentially shifting to 10yr contracts might make it such that profs actually have to give a shit about teaching evals even after tenure. But I do fear that if you remove tenure even slightly, it opens the door to its wholescale dismantling, and the next thing we know, all academics are working ‘freelance,’ no health insurance, etc.
I too would like to totally rethink the university from the ground-up. But we can’t forget that if we take it apart too quickly, it could be dismantled before our eyes and taken out of our hands before we start by the flows of capital waiting in the wings . . .
September 26, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Taylor should have reviewed Alex Galloway’s exploration of control in decentralized networks (Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, MIT Press, 2004) which evaluates this issue from a predominantly Deleuzian orientation.
http://bit.ly/d50Dgq
September 26, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I can’t help but feel that De Landa, despite this claims to the contrary, always falls into the trap you describe above of claiming meshworks are normatively superior to control hierarchies. Indeed, when he talks of meshworks in negative terms it is only because they support control hierarchies, though he occasionally allows for drift (ie a meshwork will not go in a direction you want it), which I have never found it convincing considered in the round.
September 27, 2010 at 9:31 am
Thanks for all the spade work, guys. With your help the era of the hierarchical state is coming to an end – not just the welfare state but all of its members – the hospital, the school, the factory, etc. Hayek and Rand are starting to show their age, but once we spin your new lingo through the ideological mill we’ll be one step closer to becoming all just nodes in the network. Keep up the good work. And if you ever need a job at Cato or AEI, just give me a call. As we like to say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, except at the AEI cafeteria!
September 28, 2010 at 9:28 am
capitalist running dog,
Zing!