Miško Šuvaković Epistemology of Art - TkH

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duction radio or TV presentations of performing (for instance: J. S.
Bach’s) music. 174
In his two comprehensive studies 175 , historian of science and technology
David F. Noble discussed the transformations in the social,
economic and epistemological status of higher education in the age
of digitalization. Digitalization of the educational process refers to
the practice of online learning 176 established in the late 1990s. Online
studies appear as event of totalizing democratization in the practice
of learning, leading from a ‘closed classroom’ into any access point to
the net (Internet) system of digital communication. Totalizing opening
of educational practices and their simultaneous globalizing and
localizing – glocal – contingencies are essentially connected to respective
infrastructural transformations of the universities, academies and
other institutions of higher education, from venues of ‘educational
exchange’ to the realm of control and development of cognitive capital.
Changes, most importantly, in American institutions of higher education
during the 1980s and 1990s, had two, not altogether different
objectives in view:
i) transformation from educational into educational-research institutions,
no longer merely mediators or catalysts of ‘knowl-
174 Glenn Gould, „The Prospects of Recording“ and „Music and Technology“, from
Tim Page (ed), The Glenn Gould Reader, Vintage Books, New York, 1984, pp. 331-
353 and 353-368; Paolo Virno, „O virtuoznosti. Od Aristotela do Glena Goulda“,
in „Rad, Djelovanje, Intelekt“, from Gramatika mnoštva – Prilog analizi suvremenih
formi života, Jasenski i Turk, Zagreb, 2004, pp. 47-48. (Paolo Virno, A Grammar
of the Multitude – For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, New York:
Semiotext(e), 2004), and Miško Šuvaković, „Od poetike do filozofije rada“, in „Poetika
: rad – Tumačenje i postavljanje poetike“, from Diskurzivna analiza, University
of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, pp. 202-211.
175 David F. Noble, „Digital Diploma Mills, Part 1: The Automation of Higer Education“,
October no. 86, New York, 1998, pp. 107-117; David F. Noble, „Digital Diploma
Mills, Part 2: The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction“, October no. 86,
New York, 1998, pp. 118-129.
176 My experience with online learning is based on collaboration on the Adam Tempus
project between 2004 and 2007. This is an online web zones educational system
developed in the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden.
edge’, but production terminals offering ownership over one’s
project results and their proper sale on the knowledge market
(spanning from highly-developed industries, through media
systems, to industry of culture and entertainment); and
ii) transformation of educational institutions into possessors of
‘right of access’ to knowledge (namely, bureaucratically structured
and rendered knowledge), whereas the university is restructured
from a relatively autonomous social institution of
development and communication of human knowledge, into
a commercial enterprise which sells access to ‘packages’ of
knowledge and conditions wherein intellectual work is transposed
into cognitively deemed and marketed commodity. 177
Both transformations of higher education are sustained by infrastructures
catering for participation in profit-making ventures. This refers
to commercial corporations which support development, distribution
and networks of ‘online education’. For instance, one of such
companies affiliated with the Californian UCLA is ‘Onlinelearning.
net’, also known as ‘Home Education Network – HEN’. The new
structural relationship between universities and affiliated commercial
companies allows for controlled and advanced transformation of
traditional humanist education based on ‘intellectual activities of free
academic exchange’, or (in the case of art schools) education based on
‘creative activities and free development of creative potentials’ – into
intellectual or educational capital. Intellectual educational capital is
associated with target value and right of disposal of intellectual and
cognitive property. This shift was brought about when the system of
curricula as sum total of study programs, and study programs as sum
total of courses-syllabi, was transformed into a system of ‘products’
with commercial value attached – products to be sold or purchased,
in market terms. University, accordingly, becomes a commercial enterprise
which sells license, patents, or exclusive projects: namely,
production house marketing video footage, digitalized courses, CD-
ROMs and Web pages by means of control of the right of access
and copyright. Academic course, from an active and straightforward
177 David F. Noble, „Digital Diploma Mills, Part 1: The Automation of Higer Education“,
p. 109.