The Death of the University

Di Leo, Jeffrey R.

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-56351-5_10

Jeffrey R. Di Leo⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education ((PSGPCFE))

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Abstract

The image of dark academe is that of a rotting cadaver. It is depicted in the epigraph to this book, which comes from the chapter of Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et simulation) entitled “The Spiraling Cadaver.” Here Baudrillard briefly directs his theses on life, death, and the death drive toward the university. As we shall see, according to him, not only do life and death undermine capitalism, but once the symbolic enters the systems of capital, catastrophe is unavoidable. In terms of higher education, this catastrophe entails the death of the university, which will be the topic of this chapter.

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Notes

1.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Spiraling Cadaver [1981],” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 149.
2.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Spiraling Cadaver,” 150.
3.
Jean Baudrillard, “The Spiraling Cadaver,” 153.
4.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Los Angeles and London: Sage Publications, 1993), 22–23.
5.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23.
6.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23.
7.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23.
8.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23.
9.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23.
10.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23.
11.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 26.
12.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 26n2.
13.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 26n2.
14.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 26n2.
15.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 26–27n2.
16.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 27n2.
17.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 27n2.
18.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 27n2.
19.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23.
20.
While the dominant view is that Baudrillard is a postmodern theorist, there are some who argue his work has nothing to do with postmodernism. For Baudrillard as a postmodern theorist, see, for example, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner’s The Postmodern Turn (New York: Guilford Press, 1997) and The Postmodern Adventure (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), as well as Douglas Kellner’s Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989), and for Baudrillard as not a postmodern theorist, see, for example, Mike Gane’s Baudrillard, Critical and Fatal Theory (London: Routledge, 1991) and his edited volume, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (London: Routledge, 1993).
21.
In an interview with Anne Laurent, Baudrillard says, “L’échange symbolique et la mort is the last book that inspired confidence. … Everything I write is deemed brilliant, intelligent, but not serious. There has never been any real discussion about it” (Jean Baudrillard, “This Beer Isn’t a Beer: Interview with Anne Laurent [1991],” in Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane [London and New York: Routledge, 1993], 189).
22.
The chapter from L’échange symbolique et la mort that appears in the Semiotext(e) volume Simulations is also entitled “The Order of Simulacra.” However, the final section of this chapter, entitled “Kool Killer, or The Insurrection of Signs,” is omitted in the Semiotext(e) volume Simulations.
23.
The chapter from Simulacra and Simulation that appears in the Semiotext(e) volume Simulations is also entitled “The Precession of Simulacra.” It appears in its entirety in the Semiotext(e) volume Simulations.
24.
The text from this chapter is drawn from pages 7–19, 77–79, 85–87, 89–90, 92, 93–94, 96–97, 98, 107–108, 110–112, 114, and 116–117 of Jean Baudrillard, L’échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976).
25.
Notably missing from this version of Chapter 1 of L’échange symbolique et la mort is the first section, “The Structural Revolution of Value,” and the final two sections, “Political Economy as a Model of Simulation” and “Labour and Death.”
26.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 6 & 18.
27.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920], trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1950), 50.
28.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis [1940], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1949), 20.
29.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 20.
30.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 86.
31.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 109.
32.
James Strachey, “Editor’s Note,” in Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, newly trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965), 3.
33.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life [1933],” in Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965), 95.
34.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 106.
35.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 106.
36.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 106.
37.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 107.
38.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 107.
39.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 107.
40.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 107.
41.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 107.
42.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 169.
43.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 165.
44.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 169.
45.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 169.
46.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 438 [sec. 74]. Cited by Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 210n22.
47.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 210n22.
48.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 210n22.
49.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 210n22.
50.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 210n22.
51.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 210n22.
52.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 169.
53.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 169.
54.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 169.
55.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 170.
56.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 170.
57.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 20.
58.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 170.
59.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 174; my emphasis.
60.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 170.
61.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 170.
62.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 170.
63.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 170.
64.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 50.
65.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 76.
66.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
67.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
68.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
69.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 95.
70.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 95.
71.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
72.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
73.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
74.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
75.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
76.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 172.
77.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 173.
78.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 173.
79.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 173.
80.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 173.
81.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 147.
82.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 147.
83.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 147.
84.
Jean Baudrillard, Oublier Foucault. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1977. An English translation of it appeared a few years later as “Forgetting Foucault,” trans. Nicole Dufresne, Humanities in Society 3.1 (1980): 87–11. This translation was later reprinted in Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, intro and interview by Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).
85.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 147.
86.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 147.
87.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 147; italics in original.
88.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 150.
89.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 151–152.
90.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 152.
91.
The use of the terms “savage” and “primitive” in Social Exchange and Death is unsettling and, arguably, inappropriate. However, it also appears to be deliberate. According to William Pawlett, Baudrillard uses these terms deliberately, aiming to achieving three objectives: (1) to draw attention “to the disreputable past of anthropology”; (2) to offend liberal and humanist sensibilities wherein people feel guilty about their positions of power and wealth, and use politically correct language to assuage their guilt; and (3) to foreground the radical difference between Western practices and non-Western practices (William Pawlett, Jean Baudrillard [London and New York: Routledge, 2007], 50).
92.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 155.
93.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 155.
94.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 154.
95.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 154.
96.
This includes Jacques Lacan’s Imaginary Order, that is, the preverbal order wherein the infant identifies itself as an entity unified with both its biological dependence on its mother and its surroundings; and the Real Order, that is, the order beyond the Imaginary and the structure and representation of the Symbolic, which is only accessible in jouissance (fleeting moments of joy and terror). Also, Baudrillard’s notion of the symbolic is very different from the Symbolic Order of Lacan, that is, the order that emerges with the acquisition of language, wherein the subject only interacts with the world through various forms of representation and structures of meaning. Regarding the Lacanian Real Order, Baudrillard writes, it “is no longer given as substance, nor as a positive reference; it is the always lost object that cannot be located, and of which there is nothing ultimately to say. A delimited absence in the network of the ‘symbolic order,’ this real retains however the charm of a game of hide-and-seek with the signifier which traces after it” (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 208n10). Still, comments Baudrillard, at least there is something more going on in Lacan in contrast to Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose idealism leads him to reduce the symbolic to the imaginary (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 209n10).
97.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 154.
98.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 175.
99.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 175.
100.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 175; Baudrillard quoting Bataille.
101.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 175.
102.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 176.
103.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 177.
104.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 177.
105.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 179.
106.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 138.
107.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138.
108.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 179.
109.
“La grande ruse du capitalism, nous le verrons, est de canaliser, de détourner les forces d’anéantissement, la pulsion de mort vers la croissance” (Gilles Dostaler and Bernard Maris, Capitalisme et pulsion de mort: Freud et Keynes [Paris: Albin Michel, 2009], 9); my translation.
110.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 179.
111.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 174.
112.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 197.
113.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 58.
114.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 58.
115.
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 174.
116.
This shift is already apparent in Seduction (De la seduction, 1979), the major work that follows Symbolic Death and Exchange. Here Baudrillard now argues that the death drive is but one of two major oppositions in Freud, the other being seduction, which is the “lost object” of psychoanalysis. Whereas the death drive was discussed earlier in Symbolic Death and Exchange, this new book, Seduction, aims to focus on the other side of the opposition: “The Freudian oeuvre unfolds between two poles that radically put into question the intermediary construction, these poles being seduction and the death drive. We have already spoken in Symbolic Exchange and Death of the latter, considered as an inversion of the earlier psychoanalytic apparatus (topical, economic). Regarding the former, which after numerous turns links up with the death drive by some secret affinity, one has to say that it appears as psychoanalysis’ lost object” (Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990], 55).
117.
In general terms, biopolitics in view of Foucault’s work comes to refer to the management of populations and the resources necessary for their survival through various types of accounting and record-keeping by the state. Its development coincides, argues Foucault, with the emergence of a new type of economic man (Homo oeconomicus). Whereas the classical conception of economic man was “the man of exchange, the partner, one of two partners in the process of exchange,” the neoliberal conception of economic man “is not at all a partner of exchange,” but is rather “an entrepreneur,” that is, “an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Braham Burchell [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008], 225–226). Thus, neoliberal society, the hyper-driven market society wherein economic man operates as an entrepreneur, comes to bear in significant ways in any and all considerations of biopolitics.

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College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, University of Houston-Victoria, Victoria, TX, USA
Jeffrey R. Di Leo

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Di Leo, J.R. (2024). The Death of the University. In: Dark Academe. Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56351-5_10

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56351-5_10
Published: 28 April 2024
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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