After-postmodern University and “1968”

Humbolt started the Modern University when he founded the University of Berlin in the beginning of the 19^th century. It was the “University of Culture”. In the second half of the 20^th century emerged the Post-modern University or, as Bill Readings used to say, the “Post-historical University”, and also as he wrote, the “University of Excellence”, that replaced the University of Culture. According to Bill Readings, the students’ French movement of 1968 was ambiguous between the former two models of University: the Ancient University and the Modern University. They did not want the oldest model or the modern one. In a certain way that movement helped to establish the University of Excellence: a kind of excellence that has no center point for the university except “the excellence itself” instead of the idealistic aim of Culture for the former Modern University. Felix Guattari was enthusiastic for the movement of 1968, but he became disappointed after the eighties, because he saw that cultivation of “subjectivity” was not valorized and he adverted that if someone do not take care of its own subjectivity, “something” outside would have power over it. So, he used the term “ecosophy” to explain an idea of ecology of the external but also the internal environment inside the human being. Readings just lived until the apex of Postmodern Era and he saw in the University something happening similar to what Guattari thought about subjectivity. They both did not see the coming of the After-postmodern Era and the weakness of pragmatism, efficiency and Excellency. Toward the University goes one cannot say, but it is neither “modern” nor “postmodern”… Maybe the after-postmodern model could come from theories and practices of transdisciplinarity and complexity.