Perplexing the Liquid University

Abstract

Recent confrontations across institutions of higher learning in South Africa have brought into sharp focus that universities, though they may market themselves as spaces of critical citizenship, are not satisfying the desires of a large section of the students who occupy them. The outbreaks of protests that are untidy and discomfiting – students disrupting classes, occupying the built fabric of the university, or staging spectacular demonstrations – have signaled the possibility that the economy of knowledge-exchange symbolized by universities is exclusionary for these students. The psychic cost of these disruptions has yet to truly be measured. But what has become apparent is that we have entered a transitional after-moment that warrants reading. Indeed, as the surging waters of ‘Fallism’ ebb from the university, it becomes necessary to rethink the ways in which the forms of violence enacted by the universities to defend their solidity demonstrated the limitations of their current form. This article is impelled by the notion that there is no single ‘university’ approached by both students and the network of employees who orchestrate its functions. It asks what other potentials might be realized if we think of the university as a liquid space, rather than a rigidly unyielding one.