Unarchive 9: In the Ruins of a University, the Archive Speaks

January 31, 2025

In the Ruins of a University, the Archive Speaks

At the end of his 1996 book titled The University in Ruins, Bill Readings invites readers to dwell, as the title suggests, in the ruins of the university. The ideological project of the modern university that shrouded Western cultural chauvinism in a universalizing humanism has collapsed under the market logics of what Readings calls the posthistorical, postdisciplinary University of Excellence. To dwell in the ruins of the modern university is to practice Thought, a “bare name” whose “meaning-effects” counter the presumed closure of institutional autonomy by holding open the political and axiological question of a dialogical thinking together.[1] “Thought names a differend” that indicates a “dissensus that cannot be institutionalized.”[2] As such, “it belongs . . . to an economy of waste. . . . Thought is non-productive labor.”[3] In the neoliberal era during which Readings writes, the twinned processes of financialization and computerization gave new meaning to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s claim in the Communist Manifesto that capitalism melts everything solid into air.[4] First, the generalization of the university’s functions throughout the knowledge economy and now their incipient automation with the advent of generative artificial intelligence should give us pause and encourage us to ask if not only the university but the entire edifice of formal education is not the latest in a series of “fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions” poised to be “swept away.”[5]

The history of Chile’s Universidad de Artes y Ciencias Sociales (ARCIS) is emblematic of the ruin of the modern university at the hands of neoliberal capitalism and its privatizing logics. The institution that would come to be called ARCIS was founded in 1982 as an instituto superior, a new category of private higher education institution sanctioned by Augusto Pinochet’s 1981 educational reforms. It would shutter in 2015 amidst a scandal involving possible financial malfeasance. The lesson of the ruin of ARCIS is that unless we attend to the material conditions of the possibility of thinking, infrastructure will take revenge on study.

ARCIS leveraged the dictatorship’s neoliberal policies promoting private higher education to the detriment of the public sphere in order to provide refuge to leftist and dissident intellectuals seeking to survive Pinochet’s murderous neoliberal authoritarianism that would deliver the Chilean public to the private sphere.[6] It would go on to become a focal point for the artistic avant-gardes beginning in the 1980s as well as the theoretical humanities and social sciences in the post-dictatorship period. Over three decades, ARCIS counted amongst its faculty, albeit mostly precariously employed, academic and artistic luminaries such as Alejandra Castillo, Tomás Moulián, Pablo Oyarzún, Nelly Richard, Gabriel Salazar, Willy Thayer, and Miguel Valderrama. It hosted countless more for seminars and talks, including Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Patricio Marchant, Toni Negri, and Jacques Rancière. Through its collaboration with LOM Ediciones, the university published field-defining works by ARCIS professors such as Moulián, Richard, Oyarzún, and Salazar. Equal parts intellectual hothouse and political hotbed, ARCIS was, in the words of its co-founder and longest serving rector Luis Torres Acuña, “a libertarian (libertaria) university” for the era of “the crisis of metanarratives.”[7] In the memory of Nelly Richard—one of its most celebrated theorists, founder of the first degrees in cultural studies in South America, and later Vice-Rector of University Extension and Publications—ARCIS was “an extraordinary, an eccentric project.”[8] But for all its accumulated cultural capital, ARCIS could not resolve the contradictions of its position: on the one hand, the desire to institute the democratic dissensus typical of the modern university’s conflict of the faculties at a time when the prevailing perception of an omnivorous capitalism rendered dissent meaningless and democracy feckless, and, on the other hand, the attempt to endow a private non-profit corporation with a truly public and democratic vocation, with the goal of living up to its popular characterization as la más pública de las privadas (the most public of the private universities).

If, as Readings would have it, to dwell in the ruins of the university is to perform the non-productive labor of dialogical and axiological thinking in and through difference, ARCIS represented an attempt to do just that under the most improbable circumstances. This thinking is not “reason speaking out publicly” in “solitude and isolation” guaranteed by the functional differentiation of spheres of modern life as represented by university autonomy.[9] Since the only public sphere under Chile’s neoliberal dictatorship and equally neoliberal democracy was privatized, ARCIS instituted a radically free thinking that was as radical and free as it was private.

Since its founding in 1982 as a limited liability partnership between Torres, Franex Vera Hermosilla, and Michael Weiss Enger, ARCIS was perpetually precarious. This was in part due to the fact that ARCIS conceived itself “as an institutional space that could not be reduced or assimilated to the market . . . an alternative being . . . in opposition to the times.”[10] According to Pedro Domancic, who joined the board of directors upon the conversion of the institute into the university in 1989, this meant that “university management did not adhere to business principles only vocational ones. Financial flows were not safeguarded . . . [and] there was no oversight of revenue or expenses.”[11] Heeding the vocation to perform the traditional functions of the modern university was both an act of opposition and cause for its ruin.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, ARCIS sought to stabilize its precarious financial situation by pursuing an audacious growth strategy, opening satellite campuses in underserved areas across the country while also expanding the Santiago campus with the acquisition and rehabilitation of an erstwhile foundry that became known as Campus Libertad. The growth strategy failed, Torres resigned as rector in 2002, and the new leadership—following in the footsteps of other private universities in Chile—chartered a real estate company capitalized with the university’s only low-risk asset in order to attract investors and stabilize its financial outlook. The so-called “solidarity investors” that they attracted were the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and the Chilean-Cuban businessman Max Marambio.[12] In subsequent years, the seven-person board of directors, half of whom were active in the PCCh, would maneuver more of the university’s assets into the real estate company, wrest from the university’s shared governance bodies the power to appoint the rector, and win back accreditation from the National Accreditation Commission—essential for enrolling those studying on government-backed loans—which at that time was led by Eugenio Díaz Corvalán, who would later be found guilty of bribery and corruption for selling accreditation to more than a few private universities during his tenure.[13]

Following the 2011 student movement that sparked a decade of massive mobilization laying waste to the hegemony of Chilean neoliberalism, the PCCh began to distance itself from ARCIS and finally decided to cut ties in 2012 as the party set its sights on joining other left-of-center parties to form La Nueva Mayoría, the coalition that in 2013 would elect Michelle Bachelet to her second and final term as President of the Republic. With higher education reform topping La Nueva Mayoría’s agenda and former student leaders and PCCh militants Karol Cariola and Camila Vallejo running for seats in the House of Deputies, the party’s involvement in an insolvent and possibly fraudulent private university presented an unsightly contradiction. But before the PCCh’s departure, Marcos Barraza, President of the real estate company’s board and representative of one of two organizations linked to the PCCh that together held seventy-five percent of shares in the company, paid dividends to shareholders that may have contravened the non-profit status of the university—although a government commission set up to investigate the matter was unable to establish this as fact.[14] Shortly thereafter, the university lost its accreditation on the grounds of insolvency, and the real estate company sold off ARCIS’s remaining Santiago locations. Eventually the university proved unable to pay its vendors and ultimately its employees. Over four years, students responded by regularly occupying university buildings, workers went on strike, and both groups staged petitions for government intervention in front of the Ministry of Education. In August 2017, the provisional administrator appointed by the government determined that ARCIS could not be righted, moved to liquidate the university’s assets, and arranged for its remaining students to complete their degrees at the Universidad Católica de Maule. By the time the remaining faculty and staff were dismissed in February 2018, most had been working for fourteen months without pay.[15]

Today, the tangible remains of ARCIS are two of its former Santiago locations—Huérfanos 1728, unoccupied and seemingly abandoned, and Huérfanos 1710, which now houses the law school of Universidad Bolivariana, another struggling private university—as well as approximately 10,000 volumes donated to the University of Chile in 2022 which constitute the remains of the ARCIS library that had not succumbed to mold, mildew, or water damage in the basement where they had been stored following the university’s closure (Figure 1).[16] Campus Libertad, the physical manifestation of the university’s highwater mark in the late 1990s, was razed in 2022 and replaced with a luxury apartment complex (Figure 2). It is almost too poignant that the university should be physically erased by the real estate speculation that consumed it from within and that members of the Communist Party would oversee its collapse. The parable of ARCIS reminds us that the true heart of the neoliberal university is capital itself: financialized real estate in the case of ARCIS and other Chilean universities, or the endowments that function like private equity funds under the guise of universities’ non-profit status in the U.S. context.

Although few tangible traces of the university remain, it dwells in the memories of those who participated in an audacious yet failed experiment to place private higher education in service of the public good. Pablo Oyarzún, who taught courses at the institute in the 1980s, recalls that ARCIS “was a small place that was highly concentrated and therefore dense . . . with discussions, with affect, with personal tensions too,” where “taking a political position wasn’t separate from one’s philosophical or artistic or any other position. They were one and the same.”[17] According to Pablo Langlois, among the first cohort of ARCIS art students and later a professor of studio art at the university, ARCIS “became the most important art school of its time. . . . That it would call itself conceptual in that era . . . was unthinkable.”[18] In the memory of Willy Thayer, who headed the Department of Philosophy in the late 1990s, ARCIS “could be thought of as a kind of Paris 8,” a reference to the storied Parisian university founded in response to May 1968 that would become synonymous with French theory, thanks to faculty members such as Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. ARCIS had a “voraciousness . . . because the university’s condition was contemporary theory which was, generally speaking, quite enigmatic, even untranslatable in that context.”[19]

These memories that I and others have begun to collect form a phalanx against the oblivion of the perpetual present of life under capitalism.[20] Perhaps this is what it means to dwell in the ruins of a university that once served as the infrastructure for study as opposed to dwelling in the ruins of the university, that idea which only ever exists in its myriad instantiations. The thinking of irreducible difference that corresponds to Readings’s ruins of the modern university is a thinking that issues from an idea. By contrast, the memory of a university is the presentation of a conjuncture, a thinking that issues from a historical and lived experience and that may serve as a model for current and future action. ARCIS is what Walter Benjamin, a key theorist for so many at the university, would call an allegorical emblem or dialectical image whose shockingly paradoxical form “sets thought in motion” or else “like an intellectual short circuit gives off sparks that suddenly illuminate the familiar if they don’t set it ablaze.”[21] ARCIS is such an emblem that sheds light on both neoliberal culture and the modern university through the shockingly paradoxical juxtaposition of its private, neoliberal institutional form and its public, intellectual vocation.

As an educational institution, the university is entrusted with reproducing a culture through its youth. As a knowledge institution, it is entrusted with archiving traces of the past to produce new knowledges. The university preserves, produces, and disseminates; it archives, creates, and educates. The ruin of ARCIS was its failure to conform to the marketplace for higher education services which has reoriented the imaginary of education toward the narrow logic of investment and return. The rise of the neoliberal university has also challenged the modern university’s creative and archival roles.

In the same year that The University in Ruins appeared, Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer published a strikingly similar assessment of the idea of the university, both in general and specifically in Chile, which since the 1973 coup had served as the laboratory for the neoliberal counterrevolution. Much like Jean-François Lyotard’s 1980 “report on knowledge” to the Conseil des Universités du Québec, Thayer’s The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University approaches what would become the neoliberal university from terrain prepared by the postmodernism debates that, like so many epochal shifts, had looked toward technology to mark the passage of time into human history.[22] Thus, according to Thayer, the rise of networked computing technologies—“informatics” and “telematics” in his parlance— will subsume the university’s archival function, its “gathering principle.”[23] Technological subsumption is at the same time the explosive dissemination of the university’s erstwhile roles throughout society. In the jurisdictional language of the German idealists who cemented the idea of the modern university at the start of the nineteenth century, Thayer tells us that the techno-social matrix of postmodernity heralds the dissolution of an ideal university autonomy into the actual heteronomy of the capitalist marketplace. Indeed, the postwar period has witnessed an increase in the organic composition of capital, and not only in the core countries of the capitalist world system. Although the incorporation of science and technology into the production process (what we commonly refer to as automation) was so consistent that Marx saw it as definitory of the capitalist mode of production, the intersection of autonomation with the globalization of just-in-time supply chains in the neoliberal era led many analysts to speak of the rise of immaterial labor, the knowledge economy, communicative and cognitive capitalism. According to this view, the production, legitimation, organization, and preservation of knowledge—acts which were once performed by the university on behalf of the state in the service of capital—are now directly embedded in the regime of capital accumulation itself.

Thayer emphasizes the importance of the modern university’s gathering principle not only because it expressed a much older desire for omniscience in Western theology and philosophy, but also because the gathering, ordering, and archiving of knowledges represented one of the modern university’s prime utilities for its modern benefactor, the ascendent nation-state. Although Thayer, like Lyotard and many others, dates the rise of the modern university to the 1804 founding of the University of Berlin, it was in fact the universities of Göttingen and Halle that in the eighteenth century discovered a new social function for their moribund, medieval institutions—namely, the training of bureaucrats to staff the modern state.[24] Recalling Max Weber, that modern state is characterized by bureaucratic management through paperwork, the Aktenmäßigkeit of bürokratische Verwaltung.[25] It should come as little surprise, then, that the founding of the University of Berlin coincided with the highwater mark of “governmental obsession with total documentation and with the increasing importance of the archive . . . considered the ‘soul’ or the ‘memory’ of the Prussian state.”[26] If the modern university is no longer functional to the neoliberal era of capital accumulation, it is not only because sites for the production of knowledge have multiplied across public and private spheres, but also because computer technologies have usurped the university’s gathering or archival role and replaced them with far more capillary forms of control. Cybernetics, the forerunner of today’s internet, was after all the science of communication and control.

As any educator knows, the growing penetration rate of internet access and mobile computing have raised questions about the goals of education in an era when the mnemotechnical infrastructure of the internet obliterates living memory and the mimetotechnical operations of large language models undermine the distinction between logos and phōnē that once policed occidental boundaries of the human. Today the archive and education are fused, short-circuiting the idea that learning involves the memory or reproduction of any thing at all. Today it is the machine that learns and the archive that speaks. By the logic of Marshall McLuhan’s “medium-prosthesis,” whereby every extension of the human body affects an amputation,[27] the archive’s ability to speak at once obviates the performance of much immaterial labor while casting us deeper into the oblivion of capitalist amnesia.

In the era of its technological subsumption, the waning of the university’s archival and creative roles highlights the importance of its educational one. There is little debate that the neoliberal university is an agent for the reproduction of racialized capitalist society, whether through its credentialing hierarchies of knowledges and knowing subjects or its pedagogy of debt that inculcates self-managing ways of life compatible with repayment. Even so, critics of the university have begun to see in education a potential glitch in the code or a way to unplug from the server altogether. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, the university is no longer a place for study but an apparatus for professionalization, for the privatization of the social individual, and the elaboration of legitimation narratives that conceal its antisocial core. Thus, “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one,” for to study, one must steal away from the university into the undercommons.[28] Put otherwise, we must steal from the university the dead labor time crystallized in privatized knowledges that are the cultural properties of capitalist modernity.

Moten and Harney’s undercommons resembles what I elsewhere call “study without ends” in the plural, for, in addition to seeking an escape from ends instrumental to capital accumulation, this study also performs the endless work of reproduction that produces inexhaustible, indeterminate commons.[29] In other words, what study without ends produces are those human beings who are always in excess of the abstract domination of systems of our own making. Study without ends is not Readings’s Thought, however, for it is not simply non-productive labor but rather reproductive labor—less the activity that fills an aristocratic leisure time and more the everyday work of producing the sociality of society so prosaic that it is often discounted as work, much as feminized persons know only too well. To insist that education is the reproductive labor of study—as opposed to understanding education as credentialing, job training, or the hoarding of symbolic and cultural capital—is to short-circuit the value proposition of the university for capitalist society.

We should not mourn the ruin of the modern university. Nor should we mourn the archival speech of the learning machines that is forcing the crisis of the professional managerial class whose training formally constituted the neoliberal university’s raison d’être. The excessiveness of our sinew, bones, and synapses for the purposes of capital accumulation has always signified real material precarity as well as political promise insofar as both rest on our autonomy from capital.

The photograph of what remains of the ARCIS library is an emblem of the ruin of the modern university that contains another. When the librarians of the University of Chile went into the damp and dingy spaces where the volumes had been stored, they chose to preserve as many student theses as they could. Pictured through the door and stacked in another room (Figure 1), these ephemera of study at the margins of the modern archive are an emblem of the care work of librarians, archivists, and others that constitutes the evidentiary commons of history the materiality of which may preserve it for some time from being subsumed by the synthetic language of our speaking digital archive. Perhaps like study, this care work is tending to an undercommons of the archive, an archive without ends.

 

Notes

For their feedback on a draft of this essay, I would like to thank the participants in a roundtable discussion of the Early Career Scholars Collective sponsored by the Bucknell Humanities Center.

[1]. Readings, The University in Ruins, 160.

[2]. Readings, 161, 165.

[3]. Readings, 175.

[4]. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 476.

[5]. Marx and Engels, 476.

[6]. Chile pioneered financialized, private-sector-led growth of higher education in the developing world. While the United States was long an outlier for its robust private higher education sector, which enrolled approximately thirty percent of all students in the USA throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it no doubt provided a model for growing the higher education sector in its imperial dependencies in Asia (42 percent enrollment in private higher education) and Latin America (48 percent) (see Levy, “Global Private Higher Education,” 706).

[7]. Acuña, Historia de Arcis, 108, 109. When used as an adjective, libertario may also be translated as “anarchist,” in the same sense as the English-language usage of the word in “libertarian socialism.”

[8]. Richard, Conversation with Bret Leraul.

[9]. von Humboldt, “Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschatlichen Anstalten in Berlin,” 255; Kant, Conflict, 28.

[10]. Acuña, Historia de Arcis, 137.

[11]. Figueroa, “Crisis en la Universidad ARCIS” (translation is mine).

[12]. Figueroa.

[13]. See González and Gúzman, “Las pruebas que confirman la venta de acreditaciones de universidades privadas”; Mönckeberg, Con fines de lucro, 265–343.

[14]. Ojeda, “Mineduc no logra establecer lucro en la Universidad Arcis.”

[15]. Comisión de Educación, “Informe del Administrador de Cierre Dr. Jorge Rojas Neira.”

[16]. Villavicencio and Salas, Conversation with Bret Leraul; Prensa UChile and Comunicaciones Subsecretaria de Educación Superior, “U. de Chile recibe donación del patrimonio bibliográfico de la Universidad ARCIS.”

[17]. Oyarzún, Conversation with Bret Leraul.

[18]. Langlois, Conversation with Bret Leraul.

[19]. Thayer, Conversation with Bret Leraul.

[20]. Bobadilla and Guerrero, Cuerpo gráfico para una escuela ausente.

[21]. Adorno, “Benjamins ‘Einbahnstraße’,” 28.

[22]. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.

[23]. Thayer, The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, 8–24.

[24]. See McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany 1700–1914.

[25]. Vismann, “Out of File, Out of Mind,” 160.

[26]. Vismann, 160–61.

[27]. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 63–70.

[28]. Moten and Harney, The Undercommons. See also Meyerhoff, Beyond Education.

[29]. Leraul, “Surplus Rebellion, Human Capital, and the Ends of Study in Chile, 2011.”

 

Works Cited

Acuña, Luis Torres. Historia de Arcis. La épica de un sujeto. Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores, 2016.

Adorno, Theodor. “Benjamins ‘Einbahnstraße’.” In Über Walter Benjamin, 27–33. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990.

Bobadilla, Felipe Baeza, and Claudio Guerrero. Cuerpo gráfico para una escuela ausente. Santiago de Chile: Galería El Corregidor, December 2022.

Comisión de Educación. “Informe del Administrador de Cierre Dr. Jorge Rojas Neira.” Cámara de Diputados, May 28, 2018. https://www.camara.cl/verDoc.aspx?prmID=133849&prmTIPO=DOCUMENTO COMISION

Figueroa, Juan Pablo. “Crisis en la Universidad ARCIS: cómo entró y salió el Partido Comunista del negocio de la Educación Superior.” Ciper Chile, August 12, 2014. https://www.ciperchile.cl/2014/08/12/crisis-en-la-universidad-arcis-como-entro-y-salio-el-partido-comunista-del-negocio-de-la-educacion-superior/

González, Mónica, and Juan Andrés Gúzman. “Las pruebas que confirman la venta de acreditaciones de universidades privadas.” Ciper Chile, December 10, 2012. https://www.ciperchile.cl/2012/ 12/10/las-pruebas-que-confirman-la-venta-de-acreditaciones-a-universidades-privadas/

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. “Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschatlichen Anstalten in Berlin.” In Wilhelm von Humboldt. Werke in fünf Bänden: Volume 4, edited by Andreas Flitner and Kalus Giel, 255–66. Darmstadt: Cotta, 1960.

Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. New York: Abaris Books, 1979.

Langlois, Pablo. Unpublished conversation with Bret Leraul. Santiago de Chile, December 14, 2022.

Leraul, Bret. “Surplus Rebellion, Human Capital, and the Ends of Study in Chile, 2011.” A contracorriente 14, no. 2 (2017): 283–307.

Levy, Daniel. “Global Private Higher Education: An Empirical Profile of its Size and Geographical Shape.” Higher Education 76, no. 4 (2018): 701–15.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469–500. New York: Norton, 1978.

McClelland, Charles E. State, Society, and University in Germany 1700–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1994.

Meyerhoff, Eli. Beyond Education: Radical Study for Another World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Mönckeberg, María Olivia. Con fines de lucro. La escandalosa historia de la universidades privadas en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Random House Mondadori, 2013.

Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Ojeda, Andrés. “Mineduc no logra establecer lucro en la Universidad Arcis.” Diario UChile, November 11, 2014. https://radio.uchile.cl/2014/11/11/mineduc-no-pudo-establecer-si-hubo-o-no-lucro-en-la-universidad-arcis/

Oyarzún, Pablo. Unpublished conversation with Bret Leraul. Santiago de Chile, December 15, 2022.

Prensa UChile and Comunicaciones Subsecretaria de Educación Superior. “U. de Chile recibe donación del patrimonio bibliográfico de la Universidad ARCIS.” Universidad de Chile, January 26, 2022. https://uchile.cl/noticias/183975/u-de-chile-recibe-donacion-del-patrimonio-bibliografico-de-la-arcis

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Richard, Nelly. Unpublished conversation with Bret Leraul. Santiago de Chile, December 14, 2022.

Thayer, Willy. The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University. Translated by D. Bret Leraul. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025.

——. Unpublished conversation with Bret Leraul. Santiago de Chile, December 14, 2022.

Villavicencio, Jeanette. Unpublished conversation with Bret Leraul. Santiago de Chile, December 6, 2022.

Vismann, Cornelia. “Out of File, Out of Mind.” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher, 160–61. Routledge: New York, 2016.