‘On Truth and Lies in the Extramoral University’

Image: A manuscript page containing Nietzsche’s sentence, ‘Ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen’ [I forgot my umbrella]. N-V-7,171et172. Digitale Faksimile-Gesamtausgabe Nietzsches (DFGA), http://www.nietzschesource.org/, © Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, 2016-2023.

Convenors: Julia Ng (j.ng[at]gold.ac.uk), Svenja Bromberg (s.bromberg[at]gold.ac.uk), and Sultan Doughan (s.doughan[at]gold.ac.uk)

Time: Wednesdays, 4:00-6:00 pm UK time.
Venue: RHB 138 and online

About the seminar

CPCT’s annual research seminar meets on a regular basis and is open to centre members, graduate affiliates, and other interested staff and students at Goldsmiths and beyond. It aims to serve as a forum for philosophical work and critical conversation at Goldsmiths.

Taking its inspiration from the title of the famous essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, our research seminar this year poses the following question: what is the contemporary university for? By definition “extramoral” in the sense that it is premised on the pursuit of knowledge without the interference of power and authority—the classical loci of which were Church and State—the modern university nevertheless exists in a world driven by profit, riddled with war, and beset with an ever-unfolding polycrisis of environmental, racial, economic, technological, and geopolitical dimensions. What, then, is the role of the university vis-à-vis its extramorality or, indeed, its moral purpose? We wish in particular to interrogate the university’s role in truth-telling and truth-making, inter alia in relation to the era of post-truth, alt-facts, and now AI technologies that seem to have deeply unsettled classical definitions of knowing, certainty, and consciousness, and to questions of whose truth, when and where truth is that emergent pluricentric views of the world have opened up. “Extramoral” is, of course, also a play on the word “extramural,” and we wish to recall the 2010 student-led debates on the university’s purpose when tuition fees were first introduced. 

Convened by Julia Ng (j.ng[at]gold.ac.uk), Svenja Bromberg (s.bromberg[at]gold.ac.uk), and Sultan Doughan (s.doughan[at]gold.ac.uk).

A detailed session plan including links to readings can be found here.

This year’s sessions will be hybrid; to participate online, please register at the links below each session on the detailed session plan. Free and open to the public.

2024

20 November: Julia Ng (ECW) — Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf [Science as a Vocation]” (1917)

27 November: James Burton (MCCS) — Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found” (2015)

04 December: Sam McAuliffe (Visual Cultures) — Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’ (1971) and Thomas Docherty, ‘Inequality, Management and the Hatred of Literature’ (2019)

2025

22 January: Alberto Toscano (CPCT) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979) and Pierre Macherey, La parole universitaire (2012) 

05 February: Jeremy Larkins (Politics) — Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

26 February: Svenja Bromberg (Sociology) — Marina Vishmidt, ‘“Only as self-relating negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique’ (2022)

26 March: Deirdre Daly (CALL) — Alfred North Whitehead, ‘Universities and their Function’ (1928) from The Aims of Education and ‘The Aim of Philosophy’ (1935) from Modes of Thought

30 April: Samir Haddad (Philosophy, Fordham University) — René Haby, “Pour une modernisation du système éducatif” (esp. pp.1-10; Jacques Derrida, “Divided Bodies: Responses to La Nouvelle Critique“; Jacques Derrida, “The Age of Hegel”; Jacques Derrida et al., “Report of the Committee on Philosophy and Epistemology (1990)”

28 May (new date): Sultan Doughan (Anthropology) — Saree Makdisi, Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (2022); Introduction + Chapter 4 ‘Tolerance’

04 May, 12:30 – 14:00 (new date and time): Yaprak Yildiz (Sociology) — Michel Foucault, ‘The Culture of the Self’, 1983 Berkeley lectures

11 June: Dan McQuillan (Computing) — Ivan Illich, ‘Tools for Conviviality’