The idea of the university as a heterotopia: The ethics and politics of thinking in the age of informational capitalism

Introduction: Malaise between the university and society

Historically, communities of higher learning and the societies that beget them have coexisted: in ancient Egypt, epistemological endeavours served government administration (Pedersen, 1997); from the Greek polis through to scholasticism, moral reflection informed communal values (Makdisi, 1989); and in East Asia during the classical age, the cross-fertilisation of ideas birthed an ethically codified elite (Acharya, 2012). More recently, in Prussia during the nineteenth century, academic freedom was added to the university to protect it from political interference (Hohendorf, 1993), while in the USA during the twentieth century professionalisation was incorporated to foster public service education (Miyoshi, 2000). Lately, though, relations between the university and society reflect a ‘malaise’ (Hutnyk, 2020: 127), with the culprit less a time and place than advanced liberalism. If its first component of neoliberal governmentality ‘inoculate[s] capitalism against the threat of democracy’ (Slobodian, 2018: 2), the second component, New Public Management (NPM), tolerates the survival of the idea of the university but stymies its realisation. ¹

Survival is the operative word, too. In its relocation from the acropolis to the agora (Cowen, 2007: 96), a chasm emerges between the university’s ‘intellectual and moral achievements’ (Rothblatt, 2013: 228). The authority of the former derives from the quantifiable accomplishments of the positive sciences, whereas the parsimony of qualitative attainments of the normative sciences engages them in a perpetual struggle for legitimacy. Within the straitjacket of NPM – do more with less – the disconnect generates an ethical impasse for critical scholars committed to the ‘public’ university as a forum for entrenching democratic ‘personality formation’ (Wittrock, 2013: 215). ² Likewise, a political dilemma emerges in societies overrun by information where spaces for critical thinking fall by the wayside. While the quandaries of advanced liberalism permeate society, the organisational battle in the university is conspicuous as faculty dedicated to critical teaching and creative learning clash with managers focused on instrumental pedagogy and marketable research. It begs the question whether an advanced liberal society can accommodate the Humboldtian idea of the university as an educational community. ³ Among others, Simon Marginson (2006: 54 and 47) notes the double act it requires, insofar as the university must ‘recover autonomy from state- and market-driven heteronomy’ and undertake ‘self-alteration…[to] develop unique forms of life’ that uphold its ‘capacity for criticism’. Despite these challenges, I claim we can salvage the Humboldtian iteration if we reimagine the university as a conduit of multiplicity, or heterotopia, vis-à-vis the info-comm society in which it is stationed.

With these goals in mind, I first substantiate the ethical threat of the NPM governing regime. ⁴ It turns on techniques of control exercised through high-speed technologies of computation, which break down communities of learning by individualising the accountability of each member. With faculty cajoled to become self-entrepreneurs, NPM subverts the critical vocation of the academic. In the second section, I look at the work of Scott Lash, whose philosophy uncovers the political threat of informational capitalism. With echoes of Jürgen Habermas, Lash argues that what characterises the info-comm society is the colonisation of the subject and the usurpation of thinking by incessant communication. Lash’s solution is to situate critical thought within the info-comm order and reboot critique as a media theory. However, his monistic understanding of techno-culture means Lash’s Informationskritik risks subsumption by it. I therefore draw on two further thinkers to consider an alternative solution to the ethical and political threats of NPM and informational capitalism. In a similar vein to Lash, Jacques Derrida (1983: 14, 2002: 202) believes the university’s ‘subjection to…informatisation’ menaces its ‘unlimited commitment to the truth’, and I outline his analysis in the third section. Unlike Lash, Derrida rethinks the university as the preeminent space of the prerogative of reason because, like Angelus Silesius’ rose – Die Ros ist ohn warum – reason flourishes there without motive. After purging Derrida’s dream of the university as an unconditionally free space, the question is what should such a home for reason look like as a social institution and what sort of critique can the university house to resist informational capitalism? In response, section four invokes Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as an institutional space that is both different and other. Further, in its exemplary form of the ship it is a site of exception, which gives the heterotopia an ambiguous relation to power considering it is an illicit space at the intersection of the oceanic and terrestrial. In the light of this spatial architecture, section five outlines the critical credentials of the university as a heterotopia that is both bank and archive. As a counter-space of difference within the social body, thought is banked for safekeeping in virtue of a threefold temporal dynamic upheld by the university, which diverges from the conflated time of informational capitalism. Lastly, if Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is to sustain a revised Derridean idea of the university, it requires a nominalist critique that is immanent to society and an archive of its practices. Contrary to Lash, the university is not consumed by informationalisation, but a site that is a counter-power to it.

Informational capitalism and the ethical threat of NPM

Informational capitalism is a politically motivated rupture with industrial capitalism (Parayil, 2005: 1). Yet it is not a result of the coextensive development of technologies of calculation and communication. Rather, information capitalism is redolent of historical struggles concerning ‘control over…information resources’ and continues the domination of the ‘capitalist mobilisation of society’ (Robins and Webster, 1999: 91 and 4). Notwithstanding, there has been a ‘protracted episode of accelerated information commodification’ since the 1980s, with self-employed producers of information enclosed by corporations, transformed into wage labour and their product – information – exchanged as a commodity (Schiller, 2006: 36 and 8–11). Inherent to this ‘new techno-economic system’ are techniques of planning and control (Castells, 1996: 14). These are relayed by technologies of mass rapid computation and spawn an audit society (Power, 1994). It gives rise to a ‘new social morphology’ that transforms experience and power (Castells, 1996: 500). In fact, for Shoshana Zuboff (2019: 19) they operate together: power assumes an ‘instrumentarian’ form in which technologies of surveillance ‘mine the intimate depths’ of our experience through 'personalisation', which gets commodified into behavioural data by corporations that use it to modify our behaviour.

The neoliberal governmentality that administers informational capitalism reorients politics by pulling the rug out from under the state as a well-being provider with a regulatory role on behalf of critics-cum-citizens. In its place, the scaled back state emerges with a supervisory function of guaranteeing free and individualising economic networks for consumers-cum-citizens. ⁵ A core element in this undertaking is NPM, which is the velvet glove that extends the iron fist of the market mechanism into organisational life. Such an imperative stems from the ancestry of NPM in laissez-faire economics. It assumes the public and private sectors differ merely by degree and that private accounting methods bring efficiency gains to public institutions (Lapsley, 2009). Here, neoliberal rationality stands political economy on its head in its depiction of deregulated markets as the bastion of ‘democracy’ holding out against the ‘bureaucracy’ of the regulatory state (Graeber, 2015: 10). Accordingly, the business view of managerialism, with a singular focus on efficiency and productivity, is propagated as the best form of organisational administration. ⁶

We see this in higher education, where the NPM governing regime sets out to transform the university from a community of scholars, which organises itself around the Humboldtian model, into workplaces that resemble ‘corporate menageries’ (Hutnyk, 2020: 123). ⁷ It is noticeable in a two-pronged strategy: first, property rights suggest inefficiencies if ownership (by society of the knowledge it funds) is separated from control (by the academic of society’s resources); second, principal–agent theory hypothesises the moral hazard of underperformance when the principal, viz. society (or its delegate, the state), cannot oversee the agent’s activity, or the academic output of faculty. As a remedy, NPM reduces the decision-making scope of the state to allow greater autonomy for the university. In exchange, organisational hierarchy is consolidated as university managers take over the levers of power (Schubert, 2009: 1225–6). ⁸ Such NPM strategies are symptomatic of the cunning of neoliberal governmentality: it promises greater freedom through an increase in the economic autonomy of the university, yet privatisation forces the university to seek extra-state finance, which risks the piper having to play a corporate tune that is in a different key to that of critical thinking; at the same time, political control is enhanced as managerialism subordinates the Humboldtian principle, libertas academica, to external state performance indicators, which invites in government meddling through the backdoor. ⁹

How are NPM techniques of surveillance manifest ethically for faculty with a vocation for critique? As intimated, formal NPM methods of verification dispense with informal relations of collegiality. As the latter are driven by a critical social vision and grounded in a curiosity to know, they are at loggerheads with managerial efficiency and its instrumental evaluation that is exogeneous to the university (Power, 1994: 11). Top–down control divides and conquers the community over whom it is exercised. Perpetual surveillance by techniques of auditing breaks down trust and individualises each member’s relation to extra-communal yardsticks, whether that of managerial excellence, which is controlled by government, or market accessibility that is dictated by customers (Canaan and Shumar, 2008). To this end, NPM demands that faculty become auditable subjects that are responsive to monitoring. In turn, their first-order activities of intrinsic value – teaching, research and service – are rendered into commodity form to make them amenable to NPM techniques of scrutiny.

These ethical changes correspond with Foucault’s delineation of neoliberal governmentality from that of its parent. Whereas the liberal subject is protected from power in virtue of an assumed autonomy, the neoliberal subject is the vehicle of it. To relay power through consumers-cum-citizens, neoliberalism cajoles us to take up the subject position of homo economicus, who as an ‘entrepreneur of himself [sic]’ dovetails as a governmental grid for the strategic exercise of power (Foucault, 2010: 226). ¹⁰ By internalising the NPM discourse to perform well in their first-order activities of teaching, research and service, faculty suffer from existential insecurity – reinforced by economic precarity induced by NPM ¹¹ – due to the constant monitoring of their second-order activity of performance. Further, faculty are forced into a ‘third space’ between academe and the market (Whitchurch, 2008), where their entrepreneurial skills must procure funds or engage the community. To normalise the increased workload, academic self-entrepreneurship is packaged in the language of choice. And while NPM appears to enhance the academic’s freedom to pursue research and teaching, it is only through interventions in their agency that faculty are governable. Just as the university ‘comport[s] itself to business’ (Hutnyk, 2020: 122), so academics buy into their ethical downgrading to entrepreneurial workers. More worryingly, NPM recuperates critical spaces ‘to create new regimes of…efficiency’ (Abélès, 2005: 22). Either way, the logic is difficult to resist, with faculty ‘compensated by the rewards of self-interest and marked by the promotion of efficiency in the service of the inevitable’ (Saul, 2005: 13). In short, as eminently governable vehicles of power the entrepreneurial subject internalises the belief that advanced liberalism is historically preordained and economically desirable (Brown, 2003: 38). It explains why the ethical gymnastics of NPM, which interpellates academics today, is to all intents and purposes a fait accompli.

Lash on the info-comm society and the political threat to thinking

Following Calhoun (2006: 10), who reminds us of the ‘obligation of critical theory to ask reflexively about…the institutional organization of knowledge’, section two undertakes a philosophical analysis of the political threat to the university. The culprit, informational capitalism, ushers in a symbolically violent politics to higher education on the back of a crisis of identity provoked by the clash between the performativity of NPM and the Humboldtian model. Let me initially defer to Derrida (1983: 19–20; emphases in original) for the conceptual stakes:

[the university is] a sort of supplementary body that…[society wants to] project outside itself and to keep jealously to itself, to emancipate and to control. On this double basis, the university…[is] supposed to represent society['s]…views, conflicts, contradictions, its play and its differences…. But with the relative autonomy of a technical apparatus,…the university has reflected society only in giving it a chance for reflection, that is also, for dissociation.

Anderson’s third choice inspires Lash’s Critique of Information (2002), too. He advocates replacing Ideologiekritik with Informationskritik to shield us from the ‘liquidation of [Kantian] maturity’ that informational capitalism portends (Stiegler, 2015: 3). For Lash, the political threat of the info-comm society is the degeneration of thinking. It occurs in a world where information is the principle of society, the key explanatory factor of its burgeoning new orders and the unifying principle of its disruptive processes. When this ‘logic of information’ becomes the leitmotiv of the economy, Lash (2002: 2–3) says the message becomes ‘the paradigmatic medium’ and takes the form of ‘communication’, which is byte-like, compressed, ephemeral, instantaneous and, to boot, beyond any ‘systemic conceptual framework’. To the extent information rules society – ‘information is not in society or related to society; information is society, and vice versa’ (Lievrouw, 2004: 147; emphases in original) – with communication its message and informational capitalism its engine, ‘sociality becomes displaced by a certain “informationality”' (Lash, 2002: 75). Moreover, as per Castells and Zuboff, the info-comm society transmogrifies power. In Lash’s (2002: 177–201) language, the circulation of power via systems of ideas, which constitute meta-narratives with a universal influence across time and space, has become redundant along with its nemesis, Ideologiekritik. Power is now informational and spatio-temporally merged with thinking. It has no pretence to universality as it is non-linear, discontinuous and contained in the immediacy of the particular. With knowledge just another cultural artefact that is packaged as information, thinking finds its right to roam in zones of reflection denied by the penetrative power of the networks of informational capitalism. In Derrida’s vocabulary, society reins in and reasserts control of the university through the conduit of information and the trojan horse of NPM.

Is there a solution to the political threat to thinking from informational capitalism? Lash highlights two answers in philosophy, which have a common heritage in modern dualism. Firstly, epistemology surfs on a subject that attributes logical meaning to objects via the mirror of words; secondly, in ontology meaning is grasped through a direct experience of things. Both presume an independent world that can be thought from the outside: from the top–down by the transcendental subject employing a ‘dualism of height’; and from the bottom–up by the phenomenological subject deploying a ‘dualism of depth’ (Lash, 2002: 16–17). However, because forms of life lift up and collide with informationalisation that comes down into things, we experience a conflation of the subject with the object and discourse with the artefact (Lash, 2002: 215–16). Lash thus rejects dualism in favour of a realist monism of technology, where meaning is neither epistemological nor ontological but empirical. We now make sense of our biological, cultural, social and ethical forms of life through operationalising technological systems, which makes us human-machine interfaces within a cybernetic self-regulating network.

Processes of mediated and contingent social existence – identity at a distance – come at the cost of thinking. Beings-in-the-world are all at sea as beings-in-the-globe that are exposed, dispersed and externalised in info-comm flows, which have a tripartite impact on our forms of life (Lash, 2002: 15–16). As we just saw, they are flattened, or conflated by information; secondly, info-comm flows outpace our capacity for reflection; finally, their disembeddedness standardises meaning across space. Amalgamated, these three tendencies constitute the political threat to thinking, with beings-in-the-globe left to negotiate who they are in relation to spaces that are communicatively generic, though communally empty. Like the Frankfurt School before him – particularly Habermas (1970: 111–13), who locates the threat of industrial capitalism to democracy in a systemic ‘technological consciousness’ that impedes ‘making the foundations of society the object of thought’ – Lash sounds the death knell of reflection due to the info-comm society that stunts reflexive self-formation. ¹² In contrast to Habermas (1970: 118), whose Ideologiekritik yields a counter-rationalisation of the norms of the lifeworld to enable ‘unrestricted [public] discussion, free from domination’, Lash (2002: 17–18) says that under informational capitalism knowing is akin to doing and tallies with the flattening of the interiority of the subject, who now makes sense by ‘account-giving, it is “glossing”…. There is no time, no space for…reflection[; instead,]…reflexivity becomes practice; it becomes communication.’ ¹³

The question is what sort of critique is possible when theory itself is immanent to the info-comm order? For Lash, the creative alternative to the destruction of Ideologiekritik by techno-culture is Informationskritik. In the form of media theory, it replaces the progeny of modern dualism, or critical theory that explains and social theory that interprets, as both thinking and texts have become mediated objects. There is no longer the reader who reflects, but the user who tweets streams of consciousness and ingests brute facts that are consummated in a Baudrillardian ecstasy of communication. Yet if theory requires a place for thought to ruminate, a media theory that aspires to a critique of information might be a contradiction in terms. After Habermas (1990: 80–1), who wants to show the futility of radical critiques of reason that flout the rules of argumentative speech, Lash chances a ‘performative contradiction’ insofar as media theory is undermined by its prior assumption that the space in which it deliberates is eroded by info-comm flows. Nevertheless, Lash (2002: 77) resigns himself to the fact that a realist immanent Informationskritik is ‘our fate in the global information order’, though he is fully aware that media theory, which must make sense of high speed, transient and non-linear units of culture in the guise of communication, could fail as a critique of the order of which it is part. How, in a nutshell, can a critique of information ‘come from inside the information itself’ (Lash, 2002: vii)?

Lash responds by saying that what unites historical modes of critique, from Adorno to Habermas and Foucault to Derrida, is a dualistic frame. These philosophers diverge in their methods, but they all advocate a critique of the empirical from the standpoint of the post-Kantian notion of the transcendental, where thought is deployed as a critical weapon against practice. ¹⁴ How then does Lash propose critique can grasp technological forms of life from within? Firstly, he turns to Henri Lefebvre’s metaphor of the spider that extends itself in space by spinning a web (Lash, 2002: 10). Lash suggests we take on the spatial characteristics of the spider and transpose this materialist metaphysics to the info-comm society. Suspended in our individual webs, which constitute a virgin space attached to the network, we adopt a mode of reflection distilled from Walter Benjamin’s account of the decline of storytelling to think against informationalisation (Lash, 2002: 116–24). In this respect, Benjamin laments how the deep experience that is fundamental to storytelling, with its use of spatially or temporally distant values that act like cool media and ignite the imagination, is overwhelmed by industrial life and the rise of hot media, which dull the mind. In contrast to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus that moves backwards into the future, the retrieval of experiences by moving forwards into the past confronts us with our mortality. After Benjamin’s storyteller, we draw on experiences of difference far and wide and carve out a momentary space for reflection that is unsullied by communication (Lash, 2002: 130–8). Although it provides no more than a politics of melancholy, Lash (2002: 140) advises we accept it or succumb to the ‘politics of irresponsibility’ of informational capitalism.

If the defining feature of the info-comm society is the substitution of information as discursive social knowledge by information as artefactual cultural communication, the result is a ‘dis-informed information society’ that must defer to a media theory of the ephemeral (Lash, 2002: 141–6). The appropriate attitude to adopt is that of agonistic play with our techno-cultural existence by spinning webs that are spatio-temporal islands, or sites that are attached to but not yet assimilated by the network, from where we tap into the untouched meanings of deep experience (Lash, 2002: 157–64). As we have seen, sense-making is no longer the prerogative of a subject that stands outside practice, but the activity of subjects that render meaning through retrieval. It is a mode of self-formation that is external, resolutely empirical and immanent, which is necessary given Lash’s (2002: 76) argument that Informationskritik cannot operate outside the info-comm society.

Derrida on the community of critique and the time of the university

Albeit perspicacious, Lash’s take on the info-comm society is not without hiccups. Firstly, his perspective on the relationship between being and technics – the condition of culture, which also makes technics the prosthesis of the human – is ingenuous. ¹⁵ Because Lash accepts the liberal point of departure of a pristine subject that is free of technics, he can only conclude that critical thought is suffocated by informational capitalism. Yet Stiegler comprehensively scuppers the view of Lash’s beings-in-the-globe that exist outside technics. As the species without any essence, we are beings-in-default. We are dependent on technics and all the better for it once we sober up to the fact that it is our milieu of individuation; that is, processes of becoming always occur in respect of the culture of a collective, which is embedded in technics. ¹⁶ Secondly, Lash’s claim that critical thought since Kant depends on transcendental claims, which stand over against the empirical, is moot. Apart from Lash’s homogenisation of diverse modes of critique, the gap is really a heuristic device, with critique – and here it borders on a quasi-science – aspiring to generate claims whose content resonates beyond the context of their production. Even though our embodiment always has the last laugh, the ambition for reason to be autonomous in its practice – and its constant undermining by the empirical – is not a cue to abandon critique in favour of a media theory of informationalisation, but an injunction to historically anchor it. Although Lash correctly interprets the political threat of the usurpation of spaces of thinking by the info-comm society, his totalisation of the tradition of critique and fetishisation of the dualism divide means he can only envisage a media theory at the other extreme of informationally overloaded social space. Yet even he acknowledges that in such a location Informationskritik may well be a contradiction in terms.

Notwithstanding, the ethical hazard of NPM and Lash’s concern about the political danger to thinking from the info-comm society remain. How we confront them depends on reconfiguring the university’s spatio-temporal architecture. In section four, I unpack three conceptual nuances of heterotopia, which is a prelude to considering the spatial dimension of these sites as a model for sustaining the idea of the university in section five. The aim of the current section is to investigate the temporal aspect, or the idea itself and whether it is still viable given the twin threats of informational capitalism.

To understand his meditations on the purpose of the university, it is useful to recall that for Derrida humans are indistinguishable from technics, most notably in the form of writing, which enables language that in turn nurtures thinking. ¹⁷ Against this background, Derrida (1983: 4–5) presumes that what separates the human animal from other species is the curiosity to know. Because we constantly amass percepts through the impulsion of visual perception, a desire to ponder them is seemingly spontaneous. Our subjection to seeing in turn prompts a culturally conditioned cogitation of the images we accumulate. Yet if seeing produces a will to know, how do we go the extra step to learn something about these images? Derrida says hearing enables us to acquire the skills necessary for the mind to transform its images into concepts. Seeing and hearing allow us to observe and listen, which are the cornerstones of knowing and learning, respectively. It is this ocular–auditory dyad that gives the university its Humboldtian purpose as an interactional space of research and teaching: given our will to know and concomitant yearning to learn, the most coherent and exchangeable form in which humans undertake them is writing; or, as a place that aspires to good practices of documented reason, the university complements our bio-social being that apprehends the world through seeing and hearing. ¹⁸

The type of reason Derrida has in mind is that of logic and truth. Putting aside the former, the latter concerns a problematisation of truth in relation to its context of production, ethical imperatives and genealogy (Derrida, 2002: 202–3). Firstly, the reign of reason is aggravated by the context of informational capitalism and its ‘techno-economic networks’, which have the invidious effect of commodifying research that is the product of a creative bringing-forth, or poesis (Derrida, 1983: 11). Secondly, as we saw in section one, ethical imperatives are revamped by the NPM governing regime. It produces academic self-entrepreneurs, who by accepting the historico-economic pedigree of advanced liberalism buy into the obsolescence of the university as a space for thinking critically. Thirdly, the genealogical problematisation of truth concerns the political threat by the info-comm society to ‘the principle of reason’, and Derrida (1983: 8) puts the onus on the university to defend it. An obvious place to start is the reason for the principle of reason itself, yet Derrida says there is none. Still, this is not a cue for society to reassert control over the university. Instead, it is better to acknowledge the abyss beneath the groundless ground than gloss over its absence, which might invite the usurpation of the idea of the university. ¹⁹ Notwithstanding, Derrida (2004: 85–7) insists the university has an unconditional right to reason, with the facticity of the right derived from the Humboldtian value of demarcating knowledge from power. In line with Kant (1979: 29 and 22), who says the university neither accepts any ‘command to hold something as true’, nor has any ‘command to give’ other than to ‘speak out publicly’ (Kant, 1979: 29 and 22), Derrida (2001a: 14) concludes the university should be the ‘ultimate space of critical resistance’. Its sole duty is to constantly ‘reflect upon…and set down’ the reasons why it accords itself the privilege of an unconditional right to think in a space free of power (Derrida, 2001a: 15).

These problematisations of truth are designed to uphold the idea of the university by showing how it both constitutes a community, which is at a critical remove from informationalisation, and engenders a temporally distinct institution that can be trusted with an absolute right to reason. As a community of thought, one of the core tasks for the university’s critical scholars – or what Derrida (2001b) calls the rejuvenated ‘humanities’, with genealogy tracking the radical changes in the concept of the ‘human’ and revealing the necessity for the humanities to become transdisciplinary – is to unmask the ruses of reason induced by the impact of informational capitalism upon its conditions of possibility. ²⁰ Derrida’s call to arms reiterates his Kantian influence to think the university as an unconditional transcendental space. To bring Derrida down to earth, it is useful to summon Stiegler again, who points out the conditionality of the autonomy of the university upon its political context. ²¹ It raises the question of what sort of critique can keep an eye on reason and consciously avoid the modern transcendental position, which Lash only circumvents by embracing the high-risk stakes of Informationskritik?

Critical history, which takes social practices as its point of departure due to the intertwinement of knowledge and power, is arguably such a critique. Its nominalism discloses the politics inherent to thinking, with the genealogical bent of critical history uncovering subjugated knowledges and marginalised subjectivities from the archives of reason. ²² Nominalism finds its fullest expression in Foucault’s critical history of the contingency of social life, where naming categories and the knowledge that informs them are interwoven with mechanisms of division and techniques of control. Critique is punctual to its time and engaged in its place. By unpacking the nominalist lineage of the category or concept under investigation, for example, sexuality or deviant, critique is a tactical weapon that destabilises taken-for-granted ways of thinking in the present, which makes the future potentially otherwise (Dalgliesh, 2017: 223–7). A critical history of how informational capitalism has installed itself as an economic discourse of legitimacy with ethical and political effects is a timely complement to Lash’s Informationskritik. As an immanent critique of the historical conditions of possibility that circumscribe the authority of reason, critical history pushes back via a counter-surveillance: firstly, of the NPM governing regime that moulds the subjectivity of university faculty by rewarding the performative logic of academic self-entrepreneurs at the expense of scholars engaged in critique; and, secondly, of the politics of the info-comm society that hinders thinking tout court.

Finally, from an institutional perspective the university adjudicates struggles over the meaning of truth, or of everything within the purview of the language of reason. It accounts for the duty of the university to continuously question itself from within, as well as to perform critical analyses of the extra-institutional manifestations of reason that do not conform to the principle of it (Derrida, 1983: 16). In virtue of its obligation to foster critical thinking within an autonomous, institutional space that takes on board the entanglement of knowledge as info-comm flows with concomitant techniques of power, the Derridean university offers society an image of itself. Though he wrote at the birth of the mining of the minutiae of molecular life by informational capitalism, Derrida is far from naive about the ethical and political threats it poses. Putting aside his peculiar affirmation of the idea of the university as a pristine space atop society, Derrida believes the vitality of the university can be upheld through awareness of the menace of informationalisation, which is the common thread of his later writings (Mui and Murphy, 2020: 456). He also encourages experimentation with new institutional forms in a space that is safe from NPM, such as the Collège Internationale de Philosophie. ²³ Lastly, Derrida (1983: 19–20) says the institutional time of the scholarly community has a threefold character that is at odds with the collapse of time and attendant melding of experience under informational capitalism: firstly, an intramural time, which allows the university to maintain its independence from the info-comm society; secondly, a genealogical time that enables a turning back – via a critical history, I propose – to analyse the politics in the thinking that has got us where we are; and, thirdly, an eternal time, which fosters fundamental research that gestures at where we might go.

Foucault on heterotopia as a space otherwise

With Derrida’s philosophical and institutional ideas on how the university can prosper in mind – plus the tweaks from Stiegler on its conditionality and Foucault on a pertinent form of critique – we require an organisational assemblage to support it. ²⁴ Is it sufficient to simply embed a rejigged critical thought inside a campus enclosed by walls, gates and guards when the info-comm flows that undermine it travel through cables, antennae and waves? Rather than think the university as simply another institutional space, where the NPM governing regime imposes a self-entrepreneurial ethics and the politics of techno-culture disarms thinking, we must conceive the university as a special site within the social body that can nurture Derrida’s intramural, genealogical and eternal moments of time and embed critical history as a safeguard against the threats of informational capitalism.

Motivated by his experience as an outsider in Tunis in 1966 (Faubion, 2008: 31), Foucault’s (2008: 17) intuition of certain spaces as heterotopias, or extraordinary places with their own rites that ‘reflect’ and ‘invert’ the institutional ordering of society, offers a resource to reassemble the university. A year later Foucault lectured on heterotopias to an audience of architects in Paris, which was published as ‘Des espaces autres’ in the year he died, 1984. Of the three main English versions, the first appeared in 1986 under the title, ‘Of other spaces’ (translated by Jay Miskowiec), a second version, ‘Different spaces’ (translated by Robert Hurley), emerged in 1998 and a third, which kept Miskowiec’s title (translated by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter), surfaced in 2008. Before speculating in the next section on the university as an assemblage with the character of a heterotopia, I first untangle three conceptual intricacies about these singular sites.

Let me begin with the translation of autre. Hurley’s choice of ‘different’ is grammatically correct as well as etymologically closer to the mark. On the other hand, Dehaene and De Cauter (2008: note, 22–3) render autre as ‘other’. They imagine heterotopias as junctions of both alterity and difference. A heterotopia in the philosophical spirit of Hurley’s ‘different spaces’ would then be related to the social order in the capacity of a counter-space, which avoids readings of it as a harbour of difference walled off from the sea (Soja, 1996). And a heterotopia in the institutional sense of Dehaene and De Cauter’s ‘other spaces’ would be unique within society, albeit dependent upon it, which makes it a counter-power. It also circumvents interpretations that celebrate heterotopia as an untouched space of alterity (Hetherington, 1997). To amalgamate Hurley’s philosophically ‘different spaces’ with Dehaene and De Cauter’s institutionally ‘other places’, which tallies with Foucault’s (2004: 15) understanding of ‘ces espaces différents, ces autres lieux’, I subsume them under Robert Harvey’s (2017: 103; emphases in original) notion of ‘spaces otherwise’: des espaces autres are spaces apart that are ‘elsewhere than where you or I live’, yet they are not severed from the social and as a counter-power remain ‘uncannily and insistently here’; it makes them an uninhabitable counter-space that is ‘different, apart from us’, yet our relation to them means heterotopias are ‘inextricably, uncannily part of us: part of us is there’.

The second problem stems from the concept espace. In the first part of ‘Des espaces autres’, Foucault (1998: 175–6) offers rudimentary remarks on the shift from time to space in modern thought. Thinkers of time, such as Hegel or Darwin, theorise historical narratives oriented around singular events, which disseminate across time in a centrifugal manner and eventually dominate experience. Inversely, the focus on space that Foucault notes marks an era of cultural multiplicity where synchronous events from around the world flow centripetally and are experienced instantaneously. In the epochs of time that predate our epoch of space, pre-modern life centres on hierarchical spaces. People occupy a station and look up the hierarchy to the beyond. They are subjects of preordained roles that are internalised as a ‘soul’. These spaces of localisation are superseded by spaces of extension in the modern epoch. With its notion of infinite space, the limitlessness of horizontal extension levels the hierarchies of localisation. People take up a dynamic position and see society as a mobile arena. They are subjects of autonomy that is internalised as a ‘self’.

The shift from time to space – or really the increasing salience in some lives and societies of space over time – demarcates the contemporary epoch. Space, Foucault (2008: 15) posits, is now ‘given to us in the form of relations between emplacements’, which predominates modern space as extension (that prevails over pre-modern space as localisation). Further, spaces today are no longer primarily internal: on the back of deterritorialisation, local and extended spaces cease to be exclusively inside history, whether expressed as a bounded territory, culture or economy; and people, who previously were assigned fixed positions or acted as free agents in territorialised spaces, stop conceiving the world from Bacherlardian inner spaces, such as the soul or self, and instead find themselves positioned in a ‘network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’ (Foucault, 2008: 14). Foucault (1998: 177, 2004: 14) shifts our attention to ‘outer spaces’ (du dehors), as networked space exteriorises us, it gets us ‘out of ourselves’ (hors de nous-même). People become subjects of spatial orders. Their positions are those of nodes in the ensemble of relations that constitute seamless space as emplacement. In these ‘relations as series, trees, or grids’ (Foucault, 2008: 15) – what we now call networks – subjectivity is created through a permanent agonistic joust between immanent agency and networked society. Physical places, such as the shopping mall, hospital ward or panopticon, double as constructors of immaterial spaces once a set of human – viz. social – relations get engendered through them. Lastly, Foucault (2008: 16) reveals how networked spaces ‘torment and confuse’ us – an ethical threat – and produce an experience of the ‘erosion of our lives, of our time and our history’, which invites political threats to thinking by those keen to shore things up.

Based on his premonition that, with the conflation of time that gives rise to the epoch of space, we are assailed by heteronomous sources of meaning, Foucault’s (2008: 16–17) interest in social space is piqued by those sites in the network that have the ‘curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations designated, mirrored, or reflected by them’. ²⁵ These ‘spaces otherwise’ take the form of either a heterotopia or a utopia and stand alone. Like a blossoming rose, they are sui generis. As ‘rhetorical machines’ (Faubion, 2008: 33), heterotopias offer a means to think the invidious ethical and political effects of informational capitalism. In contrast, other sites within the space of emplacement are defined by the tree- or grid-like relations that anchor them. They are relatively unremarkable, even non-spaces, since the physicality of place constrains the relations possible and limits a social space from developing, and in this respect they echo Lash’s communicatively generic but communally empty spaces of the info-comm society.

The third conceptual conundrum is less one of translation than how to read Foucault’s paradigm case of a heterotopia. In the same paragraph, he says the vessel (le navire) or ship (le bateau) – not quite synonyms, but we can indulge Foucault (2004: 19, 1998: 185) – is the heterotopia ‘par excellence’, with the ocean a ‘boundless expanse’ (l’infini) that is presumably analogous to terrestrial networked society. Foucault (1998: 185) then declares that the corsaires, who sail a certain type of vessel, represent the greatest ‘reservoir of imagination’ of a Braudelian long-term modernity stretching back to the sixteenth century. The ambivalence centres on the semantics of corsaires and how we decipher Foucault’s exemplary case of the heterotopian site of the ship, which has philosophical and institutional implications.

Interestingly, Hurley renders corsaires as ‘corsairs’, but Miskowiec and Dehaene and De Cauter translate it as ‘pirates’. However, a corsaire in the period Foucault schematises is an exceptional kind of seafarer, namely, a ‘privateer’. ²⁶ Despite the historical romanticisation of their profession, corsaires were not only pirates but mercenaries: corsaire originates from the lettre de course, a document with the sovereign seal authorising the addressee to engage in state piracy; but a lettre de course could also contract the addressee into war on behalf of the sovereign, either for a specific assignment within the spatial confines of a sea route, or a despatialised expedition across the seas limited in time to the accomplishment of the mission. ²⁷ Because the French state was incapable of financing a navy, corsaires offered a timely service. Through piracy they enriched themselves and filled the coffers of the state, while their military operations brought the corsaires further commissions at the same time as defeating France’s rivals for hegemony of the seas. ²⁸ Granted a legal right to plunder and wage war on behalf of sovereign power, these state-sanctioned pirates were guaranteed immunity from prosecution for their pillaging, though not for their conduct of war as corsaires were like all combatants subject to its honorary codes ( Lettre de Course, 2022). Otherwise, pirates and corsaires constituted a site of exception, the former because it outwitted the law and the latter because it was sponsored by the state to break it. In all but name, though, both were outlaws (hors-la-loi).

The mystery is whether Foucault was aware of the difference between pirates and corsaires, or the illegal bandits of the seas and the legalised pirates of the state. Further, did he appreciate the dual role of corsaires as booty hunting pirates and mercenary trackers of enemies of the state? If so, why did Foucault not differentiate corsaires from pirates, and both from other seafarers? It would allow him to distinguish those (mostly commercial) ships in the ocean of emplacement via an ontology defined by their relationships, such as country of ownership, flag of convenience flown or cargo carried, from the galley of the corsaire as an exceptional site where the imagination roams free in virtue of its character as a floating space that is a crossroads of the politico-economic forces and socio-cultural ways of the world encountered in each port of call. Foucault could then propose that most vessels are equivalent to the non-spaces of society, with only the galley ship that sails on its own terms properly speaking a heterotopia. In such a scenario, what would be its significance: in its status as a space otherwise, would it be a site of normative exception that has a mirroring effect to mitigate the homotopian tendencies of the social body; or perhaps it would be a legal exception – an offshore haven, albeit of wood on water rather than an island in it where tax regulations advantage the rich, or a Humboldtian university where freedom of thought privileges critical thinking – the state strategically exempts from codification; or would a heterotopia simply be untouchable by law, an extra-legal site that is beyond juridicalisation due to the limited territorial reach of sovereign power? Insofar as these spaces of the different and other represent heteronomy that cannot be comprehended by legal rationality, it would confirm their heterotopian character as unique sites where thinking and acting are experimental and creative, which the clutches of power have yet to catch wind of. Most radically, is Foucault (2004: 19) claiming the entire ocean – which might explain his more generic concept, le navire, or vessels of any sort and not just sailing, commercial or galley ships – is a heterotopia vis-à-vis the grounded socius, which implies a planetary terraqueous space of emplacement in which the oceanic is the space otherwise to the terrestrial? Whence a world of sailors, or the few who are different and other, and peoples, or the many that are the same and identical.

We can only speculate, but there does seem to be a ‘spectral’ (Huffer et al., 2018: 77), nay proscribed character, about the heterotopia conceived as a corsairesque site. It is further evident in Foucault’s (1998: 185) conclusion where he considers how lamentable those cultures would be that allowed ships to disappear, as along with them go dreams, adventure and the corsaires themselves, and in their place arise the nightmare of conformity, surveillance and a police state. Such a development would make networked society a legally endorsed homotopia, with only corsaires in their spaces that are different and other capable of seeing it in a critical light. Nowadays, the state no longer calls on corsaires and instead sanctions certain sites to undertake the task of seeing things otherwise. These heterotopias are incited to be the exception to the rule as it applies to society, with the Humboldtian university historically commissioned as a permissive space of critique. Its special status is justified by the incapacity of reason to be an autonomous principle that is up to these tasks, hence Derrida’s university as a space that constantly reiterates the groundlessness of the will to reason, with such a gesture of humility enabling the authority of reason in analyses of its perpetual distortion by social practices. It behoves the university as the teller of the principle of reason and the scribe of its social manifestations. Indeed, the illicit spirit of heterotopia is evident in Foucault’s examples of sites that are at the limits of the normatively acceptable, and often on the wrong side of the law as well: the cemetery, where erstwhile citizens finally escape biopower; the brothel, where society turns a blind eye to extra-legal contracts; the motel, where behaviour that flouts social norms is indulged; or the colony, where the state of exception of the colonised is upheld by a necropolitical order (Mbembé, 2003).

The university as a heterotopia

What is the philosophical and institutional mileage of heterotopias? In addition to the ambiguity of the three concepts just discussed, there remains some leeway to interpret these sites: Foucault (2008: 17, 1966) himself speculates on a future ‘heterotopology’ but concedes it is still ‘a science in the making’; secondly, a keynote address to those outside one’s field of expertise but on their (architectural) terms is always somewhat speculative; and, thirdly, the text is a transcription of Foucault’s lecture and the stenographer may have missed the technical nuances of key experimental terms, which is compounded by the fact that a lecture is immune from the rigours of writing. Not surprisingly, much of the literature today proposes 'bewilderingly diverse' interpretations (Johnson, 2013: 791). Even so, in Foucault’s tentative ‘spatial analytics’ (Boyer, 2008: 53) a heterotopia captures the imaginary sense of space (espace), which symbolises a self-contained zone, as well as the idea of a place (lieu) that is connected to its environs. Or, as we have just seen, heterotopias are both different and other. They demarcate (a space) and designate (a place), hereby constituting a normatively ambivalent, even nefarious, site within the interstices of networked society. In line with the original medical term, a heterotopia is dislocated, non-pathological tissue. It is an apparition that is out of place (ektopia) – a ‘spatial and morphological anomaly’ (Sohn, 2008: 43) – yet dependent on healthy tissue for its existence.

From the above we see why a heterotopia should not be confused with its sibling, utopia: firstly, it is an unreal place that is nowhere (outopia); secondly, a utopia has a direct relation to real space in that it seeks to perfect current society; and, thirdly, as a future state that transcends society, a utopia is archetypically a good place (eutopia). To some extent heterotopian and utopian sites form a continuum, with the former an ‘effectively realised’ utopia (Foucault, 2008: 17). However, a heterotopia does not realise a future Shangri-la. Instead, the heterotopian site is a ‘spatio-temporal unit’ (Defert, 1997: 276), less to be studied than treated as a ‘method that…meticulously’ depicts the incongruities and contradictions of networked society (Johnson, 2013: 795). In this sense, a heterotopia is closer to an effectively realised dystopia of the present, especially when dressed in corsairesque clothes. Finally, the notion of a continuum resonates with Foucault’s (1998: 179) speculation on sites that offer an ‘intermediate’ experience. Like the mirror, these sites are utopian, as I see ‘myself there [in the mirror, a placeless place] where I am not’, yet the mirror also allows me to see myself connected to everything that surrounds me in the ‘absolutely real [place from where I look]’, which makes heterotopias spaces of ‘in-between’ experiences as well (Foucault, 2008: 17).

Because, as ‘sites of resistance’ (Topinka, 2010: 55), heterotopias offer a ‘simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live’ (Foucault, 2008: 17), they are a stimulus to critically confront informational capitalism. Somewhat prophetically, Foucault charts the otherwiseness of heterotopian sites that avoid assimilation into the mosaic world of concurrent and contiguous networked spaces. As a gathering of the by-products produced by the ordering mechanisms of society that divide, classify and subjectify, a heterotopia is imbued with a ‘demonising imagination’ (Faubion, 2008: 39). It facilitates a counter-surveillance by Derridean guardians, who provide society with a chance to reflect on its political orderings, and by Foucauldian scribes that allow people to invert their institutionalised ways of ethical life. In this sense, a heterotopia is a protuberance of society where critique in the form of critical history is on call, in much the same way that Lash’s spider’s web protrudes the network in which the media theorist’s Benjaminian Informationskritik operates.

We have unpacked the philosophical import of heterotopias, but what are their institutional features for constructing a university assemblage? Firstly, they are universal. Even if context determines their form, heterotopias cater for a crisis by containment (the loss of male virginity during military service) or delocalisation to a specific site (the loss of female virginity during the honeymoon). As societies preoccupied with moral crises declined, the universal element of heterotopias as a site of deviation from social norms gained traction, which is manifest today in institutional sites that cater for the abnormal (the prison) and outcast (the old age home). Secondly, heterotopias mutate. They change function according to the mores of society, with the same site shifting location to a different place to realise a new purpose (in line with the modern distancing from death, cemeteries have moved from the centre to the periphery of cities). Thirdly, heterotopias are polyvalent mirrors. Through compartmentalisation they juxtapose in a single site the contradictions, paradoxes and tensions of the world beyond (the garden is sacred from and symbolic of the myriad relations of society). Fourth, heterotopias are temporal sites of discontinuity, or heterochronias. They take an eternal form by accumulating time from a specific moment, which signifies a break with what went before (the museum stockpiles objects to preserve them from the ravages of time). Alternatively, heterochronias take a fleeting form of absolute chronias and find expression in a festive mode (the fairground on the outskirts of the city for a fortnight). Fifth, heterotopias are orifical. Restrictions on access make them isolated but penetrable sites. By setting conditions for entry, admission is limited (body temperature checks in the swimming centre). Even when one gains entry, there is ambivalence in the interior of the site (the anonymity of room service in the love hotel) or further rites of passage to undergo (the grey zones of tenure and promotion in academe). Sixth and finally, heterotopias are bi-functional: they are sites of illusion that expose the real spaces of everyday life as even greater illusions (visitors consume Disneyland as a fake experience to avoid the fact that their lives outside are an even greater simulation of a reality that no longer exists); ²⁹ and heterotopias are sites of compensation, which offset the disorder of social space by providing a respite of perfected sorts (the gated community from the perceived turmoil of the world outside) (Foucault, 2008: 18–22).

Does the idea of the university encapsulate a heterotopian site of deviation, mutation and polyvalence with heterochronic, orifical and bi-functional characteristics? Strangely, Foucault does not mention the university as an illustration, and contemporary scholarship mostly follows suit. Apart from Paul Patton’s (Huffer et al., 2018: 82–3) idea of the academic conference as a networking site, Belinda du Plooy’s (2018) university as a productive site for a new South African identity, or the critique of NPM techniques of pedagogical control by David Gosling (2014), there are few attempts to think the university’s connection to society on the basis of a heterotopia. ³⁰ However, in the spirit of Thomas Müller’s Raumdeuter – an interpreter of space (Wilson, 2020) – I would like to argue it personifies such a site.

With few exceptions, modern societies have formal sites for seeing and hearing in a common language of understanding, which is Derrida’s justification for grounding the idea of the university in reason. One could also say it is a deviation, whether from instrumental, pragmatic or affective modes of thinking that pepper mainstream life, or from the skeletal ethics and political downsizing inherent to informational capitalism. And the deviation is encapsulated in the intramural, genealogical and eternal time of the university, which Derrida asks us to cultivate in opposition to the implosion of time that negates reflection in networked society. Or, as lay people say facetiously but not without reason, the ivory tower provides a refuge for the socially awkward academic, whose inability to fit is a deviation of sorts. ³¹ Secondly, universities mutate and move in accordance with the needs of society. They have been secularised – though as yet neither decolonised nor decarbonised – via their affirmation of autonomy, diversified into research, stretched to alleviate elitism and subjected to the corporatisation of informational capitalism with its ethical and political menace. Typically, it involves a switch in location from the city centre to the suburbs, a pandemic fuelled migration to online education or an extension across space of the branch campus (with the global brand university following in the footsteps of its colonial precursor that set up shop on indigenous lands). Thirdly, the university is polyvalent to the point of its own downfall. In the single site of the campus, it reflects the diverse and often incompatible interests of space outside the campus. Disparate fields of society, from engineering projects and the policy whims of government to a nation’s history and bio-social needs, are funnelled into disciplines and become the object of knowledge.

Fourth, where the heterochronic nature of a site is concerned, the university is both out of sync and over synced. Schematically, the interpretive orientation of the normative sciences gives them an eternal form, or what Weber terms a quality of unsurpassable ‘fulfilment’. They advance by focusing through the rear-view mirror on an archived stock of accumulated wisdom, whether the musty place of the library or odourless space of data banks. For their part, the positive sciences take a fleeting form and are radically chronic. Their Weberian quality is that of ‘outstripping’ existing knowledge and is inherent to science as a vocation. It makes the positive sciences forward looking. They stand or fall by the distance they establish from their historical origins, together with the immediacy of their impact. ³² Fifth, the university is a classic orifical order. Entry to the site is fiercely competitive at the formal level, but how far one advances depends on the networked informality of teams of research, funding allocations, departmental cliques, committee membership and teaching distributions. Ironically, in the space where what you know ought to count the most, the driver of networked social space of who you know has its place, too. Lastly, the bi-functionality of the university fulfils the twin tasks of illusion and compensation. Indeed, along with Derrida we could argue the university is grounded in the illusion of the existence of a reason for reason; at the same time, the university reflects this abyss onto society. It reveals the artifices put in place there by reason, which are a necessary medicine against nihilism. Conversely, the tendency to gloss over the absence of a ground for reason gives the impression the university is a perfect space from which to unmask the contingency of social practices. And the campus as a smart, self-contained and walled place fuels the fantasy. Thus, one is lucky to work there in Derrida’s intramural time, which temporarily spares one from the dromospheric effect of ‘time poverty’ that characterises contemporary social relations (Wajcman, 2014: ch. 3), with students indulged the luxury of a hiatus in the idyllic compensatory site of the university between secondary school and the self-styled real but disordered topos.

Conclusion: The idea of the university as bank and archive

By way of conclusion, we return to Marginson (2006: 47) who says reimagining the university must factor in all three of its constituent parts: its inner capacity for self-alteration; the institutional framework of higher education; and the wider context in which the university is located. The second is positive if we frame it as internationalisation with an ethical mission (Dalgliesh, 2024); and the third, in the shape of informational capitalism, is the harbinger of the negative ethical and political baggage of the self-referential ‘bullshit discourse’ of the NPM governing regime and the info-comm society, respectively (Lorenz, 2012: 600–1). What about the self-alteration of the university, or what Anderson earlier called its permanent tensions, is there a blueprint for its organisational renovation? Bringing together the preceding discussion of different and other – sometimes proscribed – sites, I propose the university assemblage inspired by the Derridean supplementary body and modelled on a Foucauldian heterotopia for our networked times, which is not to say the university already is but merely that it could be the spur for the requisite self-alteration into a site that resembles both bank and archive.

As other, the university is an institutional counter-power and, without any power to command, a toothless one at that. It is only an authority on reason, and a society that stands by the principle of it deposits the concept of it in the university for safe keeping (in much the same way we deposit our valuables in a bank). This explains why the university has a Derridean duty of self-reflection, as critique must justify why it is accorded an indefinite intellectual property right to reason. On this understanding, and in line with the first moment of bi-functionality of heterotopia, the university offers society the chance to constantly challenge itself and face its illusions by unabashedly looking at itself in the academic mirror. It accounts for Derrida’s notion of the university as a supplementary body that reflects society – or a Foucauldian site that inverts it – to the extent that Derrida envisages society keeping the university jealously to itself and wanting to control it.

As different, the university is a philosophical counter-space. With its conditional right to reason comes an obligation of documenting the shortcomings of society each time it asks reason to underwrite the universality of its practices (Veyne, 1993: 5). The archive that it establishes has the potential to incite change by those who fall foul of ordered social life. Of course, the days of the critical scholar as a universal intellectual that legislates for society are long gone. Instead, the critical historian uses their expertise to produce interpretations of social practices. It is these analyses that are indicative of the second aspect of bi-functionality of heterotopia, whose perceived perfection offers compensation for those outside that suffer the shortfalls of reason. Again, it is a role that corresponds with Derrida’s idea that the university is a supplementary body that represents the illusions of society as contradictions – or a Foucauldian site that contests networked social space – which clarifies why Derrida says society projects the university outside itself and desires its emancipation.

Such an iteration of the university is arguably a bulwark against the ethical and political threats of NPM and informational capitalism. And the absence of a foundation for reason and the impossibility of its universal reach without the assimilation of the different or other are in most instances fortuitous, otherwise we would be faced with the homotopia of a totalitarian society. In any case, one needs to be sober about the university: as a bank it is the purveyor of reason, nothing more and radically insufficient because it lacks a ground for it, which in turn accounts for the academic duty to repeatedly survey reason; and as an archive the university is the merchant of critique, although the critical scholar settles for the role of scribe, offers interpretations only and makes no direct intervention in society. Still, the university as a heterotopia is a site for inverting and contesting informational capitalism in the name of upholding spaces of critical thinking in our networked society. And it is vital to the social existence we moderns and the offshoots of it have come to expect, because as I have endeavoured to show if the personification of a heterotopia is the ship:

‘[or a] piece of floating space, a placeless place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean,...[then in civilisations] without ships, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police that of the corsairs’ (Foucault, 1998: 185).