Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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dominance of the traditional university is an array of think tanks (Cockett, 1994),
research and development sections of private corporations and pressure groups
that generate and use information/knowledge for reasons of efficiency and effectiveness.
For instance, commentators now speak of the ‘corporate classroom’ that
is as large and significant as universities and colleges inside the United States.
It is easy to list a roll-call of some of the major players: Bell Laboratories,
IBM’s R&D sections and Pfizer’s employment of scores of PhDs appear to many
observers to be ‘just like a university’ – except that they have different priorities
and principles which guide their work.
Moreover, that personnel move with increasing ease between universities
and these alternative knowledge/information centres indicates that higher education
is being changed from within to bring it into line with performativity
measures. Any review of developments in higher education in any advanced
economy highlights the same trends: the advance of the practical disciplines and
the retreat of those that find it hard to produce ‘performance indicators’ which
celebrate their utility. Boom subjects in British higher education over the last
generation have been the likes of law, computing, and business and management;
every British university now boasts a clutch of sponsored professorships – in a
restricted range of disciplines; it is becoming common for universities to offer
training programmes for corporations and even to validate privately created
courses; there are sustained pressures to make education ‘more relevant’ to
the ‘real world’ of employment by inducting students in ‘competencies’ and
‘transferable skills’ which will make them more efficient and effective employees.
Lyotard extends this argument to the whole of education, insisting that it is
motivated now by criteria such as ‘how will it increase my earnings potential?’
and ‘how will this contribute to economic competitiveness?’ This is a transformation
that not only has an impact on schools and universities but also changes
the very conception of education itself. In the view of Lyotard, performativity
criteria mean there will be a shift away from education perceived as a distinct
period in one’s life during which one is exposed to a given body of knowledge
towards ongoing education throughout one’s life, to be undertaken as career and
work demands so dictate. In the words of Lyotard (1993), ‘knowledge will no
longer be transmitted en bloc, once and for all . . . rather it will be served “à la
carte” to adults who are either already working or expect to be, for the purpose
of improving their skills and chances of promotion’ (p. 49). This is to repeat the
orthodoxy of current educational policy, where ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘flexibility’
are dominant refrains.
Third, and a consequence of this redefinition of education, established
conceptions of truth are undermined, performativity and commodification leading
to definitions of truth in terms of utility. Truth is no longer an unarguable fact
and the aspiration of the university; rather truths are defined by the practical
demands placed on the institution. This development is a defining element of
postmodernism, since the replacement of TRUTH with a ‘plurality of truths’
means that there are no longer any legitimate arbiters of truth itself. The upshot
is that, to quote Lyotard (1988), truth is merely a matter of a ‘phrase regime’,
something defined by the terms in which one talks about it.
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