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ublished and written for, Educational Complex, generali foundation, vienna, 1997 - a catalog of my show: Educational Complex Education, “Bildung” (a German word referring to the bourgeois educational ideal with a specific ideological touch), knowledge and science constitute a complex which cannot be conceived of and described without reference to economic, technological and socio-political developments. In this text I will examine some of those transformations in this realm that seem important to me. My main focus here is on university education, since it can influence, negotiate and co-determine changes affecting the whole field of education. I. Education – a Discourse on Social Reproduction The way in which knowledge production and mediation is created, organized, financed and ensured is essential for the survival of a society. The latter constitutes itself to the extent that it controls, defends and guarantees its reproduction and legitimation. This task is accomplished primarily by its educational institutions and cultural organizations which can be seen as social indicators of quality and crisis. Educational and cultural apparatuses tend to blur the arbitrary, historical and variable character of its formation. Antagonisms and struggles between diverse interests and ideologies within each society and between diverse societies become manifest within educational and cultural institutions. Education, training and culture are thus also directly linked to authority and politics, even if their interdependency need not be mechanical. Attacks on educational and cultural institutions, ranging from closure, censorship, direct and indirect control to financial depletion, can thus be seen as clearly symptomatic of drastic shifts on a politico-economical level. While cultural entities are very difficult to create, they can be easily destroyed – something Austria, in particular, has had to experience in the 20th century. By contrast, social shifts also necessitate educational and cultural changes, usually not accepted when conservatives are in the majority. Thus their legitimation and their authority are once and for all subverted. There is thus an eminently socio-political interest vested in educational institutions and the agencies governing educational policy. Rereading Pierre Bourdieu’s and Jean-Claude Passeron’s book “La reproduction, éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement” (1), which speaks of “symbolic power,” “symbolic capital” and “cultural arbitrary,” and of every educational activity bound to educational authority, one is not only struck by the insurgent thrust of this institution-critical sociology of the sixties but also by the adequacy of its analysis. Such an analysis still functions even when the existing, more or less liberal institutions of higher education and cultural institutions are in danger of being destroyed, becoming irrelevant, obsolete and/or being closed, not from the street but from within and from above. Rereading Althusser’s theory of reproduction and his “ideological state apparatuses” is more complicated since the state is now ceding its omnipotence to transnational capital and its institutions. II. Bildung – a Master from Germany If one reads Kant and German Idealism against the grain of the history of philosophy, one can detect a program for redefining and restructuring the cultural, artistic and scientific spheres. In these texts, the relationship to the state, the economy and to industry is seen as problematic – a relationship that needs to be redefined and negotiated as a conflictual and productive one. At the same time the state is conceived of as an all-embracing, censoring, restrictive, authoritarian, quasi-logical authority with complicity-like identification, necessity and denial. The resulting conflicts and multivalences between the given functional and vital spheres with their respective institutions and industries do not just define modernity in its inception but also significantly characterize today’s economic, scientific and socio-political understanding. It is surprising how clearly Kant speaks of the influence of state, government, industry and economy on science and its organization in his 1798 text “Der Streit der Fakultäten” (2) (The Conflict of the Faculties) which was originally censored. The division of the sciences takes place “in the style of factories” and through mediation of “the government” without recourse to the “class of scholars” in “three higher faculties,” the theological, juridical, medical ones, and in three “lower” philosophical faculties. Kant untiringly reiterates that the three higher faculties are controlled and sanctioned by the state because “the government” uses it to “exert the greatest and most lasting influence on the people.” (3) He refers to “instruments of the government,” identifying them as ecclesiastical, legal officials and doctors who “immediately turn to the people made up of idiots” (4) which extends, in a downward direction, Kant’s tutelage, if not the intellectual disenfranchisement of the people. Irrespective of the orders given by the government, the “lower faculties,” the philosophical ones, are only responsible for truth and scientific interest. Here “reason” is allowed to speak the truth in public: “There must ... still be a faculty, which, independent of government orders regarding its teachings, cannot give orders but is free to judge everyone who has to do with scientific interest, i.e., with the truth, where reason must be entitled to speak in public: since without it the truth (to the detriment of the government itself) would not see the light of day. Yet reason is by nature free and cannot assume orders to take something to be true (no creed, only free credo).” (5) As is implied here, philosophy is ascribed a regulative, critical function not just intended to protect the sciences from state interventions, but is also supposed to influence the state and its instruments in a discursive way, via the medium of reason. Reason is conceived of as a bulwark against the state. The critique of reason is thus also potentially conceived as a critique of the state. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen” (Ideas on an Attempt to Define the Authority of the State) (6), written in the last decade of the 18th century, also follows this line of argumentation, that is to say, clearly defines the limits of the authoritarian, Prussian state felt by many to be arbitrary. Here “public education” also plays a prominent role. Humboldt, on the one hand, sees this as a necessary education for man to become a citizen, and on the other, attributes autonomy and critical scope to this education, as a consequence of which the state and its constitution itself are to undergo modifications: “However, here it is simply no longer salutary, when man is sacrificed for the citizen. ... A human so educated would then have to join the ranks of the state and to test the state constitution on himself, as it were ...” (7) Yet to what extent the Prussian state actually looked after its scientific institutions, cannot be just seen in the history of censorship, the appointment of professors, the division of the sciences, their exclusive history and the explicit and implicit identifications with the state and government structure. It is primarily also visible in the discursive struggle for free spaces, laicism and autonomy. But even where, for Schelling, science becomes an “ersatz for religion” and the “universal spirit” and “absolute knowledge” can be conjured up, it is still lamented that the academies are “instruments of the state which must be what the state defined them to be.” Schelling continues in a somewhat timorously critical tone, anticipating what threatens the sciences today. “The state would undoubtedly be authorized to completely do away with academies or to transform them into industries and other schools with similar functions; but it cannot aim for one thing without also seeking the existence of ideas and the freest scientific movement ...” (8) Ambivalence, the willingness of philosophy and university to identify and collaborate with the omnipotent state authority are reflected in those contradictory statements that can be found when leafing through a few pages of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Humboldt. Since the “constitution of the universities is too closely linked to the immediate interest of the state,” the appointment of university teachers must also remain “solely” reserved to the state. (9) This ambivalence between identification and rejection vis-à-vis the state can be explained by political history: the emergence of the German nation state – a difficult birth. In the wake of the defeat under Napoleon and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire the attempt was made to create an ideological identity with the concept of the German nation. The concept of nation allows unity to be celebrated before it becomes political reality. The most important instrument in the process of national unification was to be a national educational program based on popular education, philosophy of history and linguistics. German language, German history and the instrumentalized concept of “Kulturnation” (cultural nation) constitute the backbone of the national construction. Humboldt and, in particular, Fichte attribute not only a nation-building function to the German language, they also see an “innere Grenze” (inner border) (10) in the national language – a border which held fast to a chauvinist, xenophobic and racist discourse. (11) Fichte as well as Humboldt do not define national unity in a territorial, ecological sense but rather in an anthropological sense referring to language so as to create a linguistic nationalism. “Language, however, is a work of the nation, and of the past ...” (12) A vocabulary geared to purification is designed for other purposes other than merely “idealist” ones. Categories and concepts such as “the universal,” “world literature,” “world peace” fulfill the function elsewhere fulfilled by territorially defined identifications. In coming decades, identificatory thinking encompassing the universal, absolute and global will once again be translated into reality by colonialist politics which will have even more catastrophal effects later. Fichte sees the ideal of education, the most important tool for the formation of the German nation in the Greek model of the unity between education and the bourgeoisie as a “bildung”-bourgeoisie. “Bildung” is seen as a concept representing an answer to the empirical impossibility of surveying the fragmented disciplines. It also involves a moral and ethic dimension related to the “orientation of the entire human existence.” Bildung essentially marks an ideal conceived of as freedom, universality and transcendence and ascribed to an ideal world order. The emergence of the German nation, closely linked to German Idealism, Bildung and popular education is thus a transcendent idea that is elusive in a political, geographical and historical sense – an idea which some statesmen in Berlin wanted to enforce in the thousand-year Reich. University and museum buildings, national literature, art, theater and opera with their national intellectual heroes and their monuments, bildungsromane (novels about the spiritual education of the main character) and picturesque illustrations of scholars were just as much political expression of the new nation as the emergence of sport associations, scouts and a concern with the people’s health and purity. When the French thinker Foucault needs an architectonic archaeology to trace disciplinary and power regimes, then, for Germany, there must be an analogous interest in investigating the educational complex which became so strongly institutionalized in this particular country. III. Education – Politico-economical Aspects of an Investment That the German model of education was allotted so much space is not prompted by a geographical and, even less, by a culture-centered preference but by other considerations. The long history of the effects of this model of education and science in Europe, which I have only sketched here, is even reflected in the opposite American models. The main motivation, however, is to be found in the renewed topicality of these texts and models to the extent that universities and national educational and cultural systems in Europe, too are subject to large-scale transformations and critiques in the wake of globalization, multi-culturalism and technologization. These developments have yet to be described in precise terms. Globalization is not just a new keyword that can be associated with late capitalism, post-industrial communication society but also an socio-economical, political and technological reality. Highly developed communication and transport technologies have created new paradigms of organizing activities in recent decades. This has resulted in an accelerated worldwide merging of economy, trade, production, information, consumption and their agents. In this process, national economies are increasingly being supplanted by transnational corporations (TNCs) with an opaque flow of capital, production, labor and information. The retreat of entire productions from the traditional industrial nations, unemployment, the disastrous rift between rich and poor worlds, economic mass emigration, racism, xenophobia, fundamentalism, neo-nationalisms, the loss of convivial possibilities of identification, right-wing extremism, loss of democracy, the loss of the political as a category of thinking, the subversion of state apparatuses through TNC power, increased worldwide exploitation of child and woman labor, scarce resources, ever-greater damage to the environment, organized crime on a national economic scale, slave trade and sex tourism are only some of the symptoms overshadowing the technological optimism of Bill Gates with regard to globalization and the New World Order and also invalidating Hegel’s homogeneous universal idea of the state. A global market is emerging, in which information, knowledge, and innovation are among the most important factors. Education, knowledge, information and know-how thus assume an even greater significance than had already been the case in a social order in which mechanical and industrial processes provided the model for education, or “Bildung,” along with forms of national identification. An internationalized corporate culture tends to furnish the organizational model for all realms of society and to thus redefine the educational complex for itself as well. Universities in Europe will also no longer be clearly delineated from professional institutions of higher learning, an idea which had essentially been endorsed since Humboldt and Kant. This does not have to do with neutralizing elitist demands but with the instrumentalizaton of universities to pure training institutions which undermines the principles of their philosophical and reflexive, critical and autonomous tasks. Privatization in various forms follows suit to these tendencies, taking place either radically or partially and indirectly through increased cooperation – “partnerships” – with the corporate sector. Through privatization processes universities can be made very compliant, exclusive, productive and profitable. Nothing then is stopping these institutions from becoming universities of excellence (13) that are openly competing for students able to pay huge sums of money. In the United States, universities are normally run as purely economic operations with a strong diversification. Here the relations are based on competition between universities. Accordingly, professors must allow themselves to be evaluated in terms of their performance, quantified, paid and corrected. Investments do not have to be made only by students who are offered various individualized financing conditions as if they were purchasing a plane ticket. The universities themselves invest as well so as to be able to bind professors deemed academically attractive and excellent with financial offers reminiscent of star athletes. What is unfortunate is not the loss of an educational mission but also the subordination of the conveying of knowledge and critique to a market-economy calculation. Such a calculation is quicker in eliminating system-critical thinking and action than the still existing classical European universities whose autonomy and critique is at least constitutionally ensured. With such considerations I am not trying to say that private universities do not permit any criticism. At present, private American elite universities produce quantitatively and qualitatively more relevant critique than their European equivalents. They have at their disposal much better means and more flexible structures for inviting capacities from all over the world and for luring someone from his/her job. In this process, critique can be sold relatively well as a university commodity to be marketed in readers and anthologies. At the universities of excellence, critique is not only derived from a responsible critical self-understanding resulting from conflicts, but also is transformed into demand-supply products. As a result, contents are compromised and alternative thought beyond the constraints of market and demand becomes more difficult. Thinking then runs the risk of becoming a search for new markets in an attempt to follow given trends. Here, too, academic industry increasingly resembles spectacle culture. (14) Significant in this context are the most recent developments of university press which, in the United States, is the most important publisher of academic and critical literature. Such operations have become so commercialized that they have reduced to a minimum the non-profitable publishing of purely academic texts – the only possibility academics have to communicate meaningfully – since sales figures have become the true criterion for publications. Thinking and criticism may be allowed if they can be sold as a commodity. Relieved of educational and critical tasks, more flexible in their administrative structures and technologically connected, the new universities can also be more easily “globalized” with regard to their contents, procedures and media. English is increasingly emerging as an international lingua franca, becoming the university language in non-anglophone countries as well. One consequence is that in such countries local cultural identities and collective memory are negatively affected, if not impoverished and crippled. The impact of technology on the universities should not be underestimated, either. Universities have become “think tanks” that can be accessed and the knowledge they convey has become information that can be quantified in terms of bits. A globalized network society as an information society thus cannot do without universities geared to it. Knowledge represents a capital (15) which, besides the exclusion function, multiplies parallel to the wealth-poverty rift. For navigating in transnational capitalism it has become a prerequisite but also for socially meaningful survival. IV. Multicultural Education – a Curriculum Against Cultural Arrogance Differences guided by interests can be mediated, but not cultural and ethnic differences. Cultural identities extend through personality structures and are a result of long processes of socialization experienced as existential and value-defining. Value conflicts are thus more than just conflicts regarding distribution. Here we are dealing with valuations, conflicts and rights, in which disputes on objects, expectations and modes of behavior often conceal more profound cultural, religious or ethnic rifts. In complex societies, in which the most diverse groups closely coexist, culture and knowledge are controversial objects in connection with education and the conveying of knowledge. Both culture and knowledge have to be renegotiated as soon as a group is favorized to the detriment of other groups. To teach what? To teach how? To teach whom? To teach in what language? These questions reflect both openly and tacitly those conflicts and cultural demands for hegemony that are generally typical of the political landscape of controversy. Differences of ethnicity, religion, sex and gender, class ideology and race already become manifest in a discriminatory way in the classroom. The no longer homogeneous, western European societies are now also confronted with such problems and these societies until now are poorly prepared to react adequately. German-Austrian “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) policy, Swiss “Saisonier” management, French assimilation discourse and the Schengen Agreement (European Union agreement on EU-border policy) – to name only four instances – are no longer sufficient for controlling multicultural societies in a meaningful, equal way without arrogance and discrimination. (16) In the United States, the situation is better regarding the awareness of this problem and attempts to solve it. This is best illustrated with a New York controversy. In 1989, a New York commission was asked to develop a “curriculum of inclusion” (17) as an educational concept for a pluralist, multi-cultural society which was to counter the systematic favorization of Eurocentric educational models. According to the report, European culture assumed the head of a table to which guests from other cultures had been invited through beneficence at best. The paper seeks to elaborate curricula on the basis of multicultural contributions of all aspects of society so as to be able to instill a greater sense of self-esteem in children from American-Indian, Asian-American and African-American families and to eliminate some of the “arrogant perspective” that children from European cultures have. Reactions were not slow in coming. A “Committee of Scholars in Defense of History” was formed. Their arguments were that the instruction of history was only a form of social and psychological therapy for promoting the self-esteem of children from minority groups, being reduced to a history of “ethnic cheerleading”. Further, the paper is accused of “culture of ethnicity,” “compulsory ethnicity” and “separatism” being conducted by “militants of ethnicity.” (18) The well-represented plethora of material and the differentiated reception of European cultural strands can be very easily misunderstood and abused as neutral, objective and “cultivated.” Traditions from other cultural spheres are viewed eurocentristically as “ethnic,” “exotic” and “secondary.” This, in turn, has an immediate effect on the self-understanding of the students. The same is true for the second reproach. Here again it is the representative predominance and authority of Eurocentric groups to generalize, with their colonial histories, their own ethnic affiliation and so-called “white skin” and to make them the measure of all things from which everything else deviates. Given the systematic reduction and discrimination resulting, for instance, from ethnic affiliation it is not surprising that these aspects play a crucial role in the life of minorities. The same is true when it comes to aspects related to gender or the selection of a sexual object. By the same token, each argument in favor of separatism conceals ideas of assimilation to the effect that marginal groups have to adjust to the dominant culture which is becoming increasingly difficult to define (not only in the United States). Regarding school and university politics, it is becoming increasingly evident that multicultural education is crucial for survival, if one wants to avoid those catastrophes which we keep witnessing on the fringes of Europe (e.g. in ex-Yugoslavia). The following aspects and issues will become central: difference and Otherness – in every respect – should not be negatively and depreciatingly understood, judged and represented. Difference is not a deficit but an enrichment and should be made understandable and treated as such. Any integration policy must focus on the question of what ethnic and religious characteristics can be accepted or opposed (e.g., genital mutilation of women, Sati, etc.) so as not to violate central democratic and basic human rights. What are the standards guaranteeing non-racist, non-discriminating education? What are the cultural contents mediated – e.g., literary, aesthetic, historiographical canons – which do not discriminate and misrepresent any of the represented groups and subgroups? How should knowledge be conveyed, given the fact that cultural, linguistic and socio-economical differences have a strong impact on performance in school, which, in turn, affects the position one assumes in society? How does a school deal with the fact that e.g., 30% of the students only poorly understand the language of instruction and are thus at a disadvantage? V. Cultural Studies – Nietzsche’s Rebirth in America from the Spirit of Pop Music As hardly anyone else Nietzsche was able to grasp the conditions in which cultural values are defined. The insights into the constructed nature and power-dependency of norms and values was certainly a consequence of his classical philological studies. As a historical discipline, such studies were involved in the ideological process of the national construction of Germany’s state unity. Nietzsche, the tragic and controversial philosopher, often suffered from his insights which he expressed in an ambiguous and problematic way. His preoccupation with the crucial issue of value definition, among other things, has made a central figure of reference in theoretical discussions in the United States. The calling into question of culture, nation and American self-understanding is not independent of a diversity of protest movements to which black liberation, feminism, gay and lesbian movements belong, to name only a few. These developments were accompanied by a radical critique of the premises of an aesthetic modernist understanding of culture and art considered to be repressive. Listener and spectator became important and the interdependence of high culture and everyday life became ever more compelling. Semiotic regimes of an advertisement-intense consumption world, together with a wide range of cultural offers, did not just attract sociological and ideology-critical attention. They were also ascribed affirmative cultural meaning. Discussions on “high and low culture” are only an academic expression of developments dissolving a traditional, “Bildung”-bourgeois understanding of culture and art. This process has been described by Critical Theory represented by Horkheimer, Habermas, Benjamin and others since the thirties and fourties of this century. Popular culture become increasingly widespread; it was studied and historicized. Transformation resembling the changes in cultural production and reception can also be noted in those academic studies which have emerged on a large scale since the eighties in the United States as Cultural Studies. (19) Cultural Studies developed from a certain reception of, inter alia, the Frankfurt School, the Burmingham School, French post-structuralism, deconstructivism, psychoanalysis, and neo-Marxism. Today they predominate the literature and language departments of American universities, in addition to art academies. Through a very fertile reception and an even more intensive, politicizing interdisciplinary production of theory, separate chairs were created specifically for special areas. Conflicts between all of these studies and the more traditional institutes are often very bitter and sometimes described as “cultural wars.” (20) To be sure, not only ideological and weltanschauung differences lurk behind such relationships but also existential ones. At the very dynamic, profit-oriented universities whole institutes have to “sell” themselves, and their staff is constantly in danger of losing their jobs. Tenure posts are often the exception to the rule. Autonomy, criticism and resistance within the (often transnational) economic operation of the university can often experience a financial out which is dependent on trends and numbers of enrollment – one of the most important financial resources of US-universities – which, however, also always conceal political motives. (21) Cultural Studies is largely made up of anti-hegemonic, strongly interdisciplinary, critical studies dealing with diverse ethnic, sexual, gender- and class specific minority issues, political activism, neo-marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, multiculturalism, technology critique, globalization, media, ecology, everyday culture, kitsch and pornography. In this way, new university careers are built. The main actors are usually politically committed and engaged intellectuals who, at least until recently, did not have any classical institutional careers to show given their background or social status. Often they had to assert their position on the basis of their special social, ethnic, sexual, gender or ideological background so as to be able to gain authority and interest. History of philosophy is neglected, while the main texts of traditional history of philosophy and literature are productively reread in search of “logocentrism,” “essentialism,” “eurocentrism,” “sexism” and “totalization.” Media and every sort of visual, acoustic and audio-visual production is studied and analyzed. Primarily conditions of representation are critically viewed and the question is posed: “who speaks from what position with what self-interest about whom.” In sum, research focuses on the “back side” of history, its forgotten, ignored,misrepresented aspects, that is, all regimes against which modernity, reason and history have formed themselves. In Cultural Studies there is also interest in one’s own praxis which is reflected on and criticized as a political and “organic” one – see Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals.” (22) Any sort of intervention in the various theories which are seen as tools is allowed and desired. It can be blended further with textual and non-textual facts and artifacts from all walks of life which often makes it difficult to ascribe such products to institutional realms. (23) Theoreticians sometimes also work as artists, musicians, DJs, curators, university professors, taxi drivers, bar men/women and even as sex workers and vice versa. (24) Only a few successful persons become members of frequent flyer clubs, accepting commitments outside of the university in addition to university-related theory tourism for which, for instance, the art world offers sufficient opportunities. Only few, however, can really make a living doing this. There are also enough people doing such studies who are able to make ends meet through their privileges, while taking a cynical stand vis-à-vis these critical studies. Yet the majority of the engaged producers, students or consumers of these Cultural Studies remain under the sway of their otherness, stigmatized and often forced to lead an instable, discriminated life, since social changes are slower in taking effect than writing texts which can be read or rejected as a fad. One should also not forget the conditions in which some texts were written, i.e., in prison, exile, poverty and misery, and that some texts are still censored in their origin countries. A radical internal critique, as can be found in Critical Theory, which detects power relationships in every form of reason, sometimes also drives Cultural Studies to the limits of its legitimation and its self-understanding necessary for its institutional existence. Language and orders of discourse, along with the instruments and institutions ascribed to them are radically called into question and revealed to be a power regime. Sande Cohen, for instance, who calls himself an “ex-historian,” sees in historical thinking wish projections consisting of objectivities structured in language which no longer represents more than a confusion of thinking and desire. He endorses a non-institutional, non-academic, “critical nihilism” that is able to manage without intellectual values in which he only sees university schemes and narcissistic interests without forgetting their catastrophic prehistory in Nazi Germany. (25) (Death through “final solution” in Germany was an academic, rational, historically founded and researched enterprise). Non-authoritarian, “passing” (Deleuze), “untimely” (Nietzsche) speech against the current and the institutions. Cultural Studies and Critical Theory are intended to have immediate emancipatory consequences and to effect progressive change of the political and cultural landscape. This is not only achieved in the United States. Multicultural and emancipatory movements of a variety of sorts – e.g., groups also fighting AIDS (Act Up) – receive theoretical and ideological backing. The result can be in reactions and often reactionary backlashes. Discussions on the constitutionality of minority programs criticized or viewed as ghettoization and of the systematic promotion and inclusion of minorities can be cited as instances of this. There is also a manifest fear of the critical study and suppression of western cultural canons or of the demise of clearly structured and unified disciplines as a consequence is fragmented text productions, often resembling rhizomes and depreciatingly referred to as “case studies.” By the same token, there is an unease vis-à-vis the concentration of individual stories and objects of a seemingly innocuous everyday world with its genealogies, in which intelligence, ideologies and micro power structures are traced and criticized. The reactions to financial and institutional cuts as well as real political repressions are, however, even more massive. Almost all public funding of contemporary art has been eliminated in the United states through political interventions. Often critical discourses also lose all meaning when they are imprudently implemented grosso modo by half-hearted bureaucrats. For instance, the results of bilingual education in California have been disappointing. Everywhere even on university campuses, efforts to ensure integrity or a misconceived identity policy also risk leading to new segregations, unproductive situations and new discrimination. Consequences of Cultural Studies and the related cultural and political activities not only affect US-American institutions but also Western Europe where there are realms involved with Cultural Studies, even if under different circumstances. Such activities are usually geared to art, culture and in part university-policy purposes and practices. There are also those striking instances in which even those figures whose texts and positions in part constituted Cultural Studies today, on occasion, succumb to reactionary deformations, denying or denouncing their own history of emancipation. (26) Regardless of whether Cultural Studies become completely institutionalized or disappear again, are successfully exported or yield a US-import to exclusive European art clubs, are denounced in their current form or declared moot, the problems preceding critical thinking remain. A multicultural, pluralistic, democratic, non-arrogant, inclusive policy of education open to heterogeneity is essential for society to survive. By the same token, an understanding of criticism, theory, culture and art should not be corrupted either by corporate culture, consumerism, the spectacle culture industry or by state influences, or sold out. Independent, autonomous, critical universities and art academies which should not be at the mercy of TNCs, neo-nationalisms and transcapitalistic state policy play just as central a role as every critical individual who comes into contact with them. Yet it is more likely that I will prove to be a naive, helpless dreamer with regard to autonomous, critical, (non)topical and productive universities that are not institutionally overcoded. Rainer Ganahl, January 1997 1 Paris 1970.
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