The Utility of Knowledge

Stanley Aronowitz sees the contemporary Research 1 university as serving a “technocratic regime”, and argues that “Technology presents itself as inherently ‘useful’ for meeting an infinite variety of human purposes. Anyone who challenges the value of this knowledge and invention is immediately labeled a Luddite, literally, an obstacle to ‘progress’. In [Clark] Kerr’s and Fritz Machlup’s discussions of knowledge industries, the role of the humanities and the non-policy social sciences in producing knowledge that may be politically and ideologically significant, but has little commercial utility, is given short shrift. . . So the tendency of humanistic scholars to distance themselves and their work from science and technology may well be an exercise in self-deception. We are all implicated in the fruits of the techno-university, even critics and opponents” (45). Again: technology has immediately apparent utility, which is why we find it so easy and so compelling to pursue understandings of better ways to apply it. Today’s values teach us to say about technology, “It’s good! It’s good! Now how can we use it more effectively?” Technology, after all, is inanimate, unthinking: how can it have effects on us, the shrewd and rational calculators who made it?

In precisely the ways by which it reproduces that ideology of utility and control, I think. A significant component of Aronowitz’s critique is leveled against Kerr’s privileging of research — the production of instrumentally useful knowledge — over learning, over undergraduate education. For Aronowitz, the utility of knowledge is immediately apparent in patentable products (recall Bok’s focus on biotechnology and pharmaceutical patents), but so far — in these first hundred pages — he hasn’t addressed the flip side of that concern: how do we value learning? While I have difficulties with some of Aronowitz’s approaches and positions, I certainly share his opposition to “commercial utility” as the instrumental standard by which to value education, and seek an alternative in education that is “politically and ideologically significant” (how much utility did — or does — Plato hold, even when he wrote about emerging technologies?). Such an education would be difficult to attach any utility-based value to, and of course, those on the right loathe such positions, clamoring for a university somehow (impossibly) free of politics or ideology, conveniently ignoring the political and ideological freight carried by the status quo.

But that’s precisely the way we think about technology, right? Free of politics and ideology; free of values; existing only as a neutral tool? But what Plato demonstrated was that a writing technology can indeed be “politically and ideologically significant”, and one wishes we would remember this today, when, “As job-panic has escalated, public colleges are responding by transforming themselves into vocational and technical schools” (55). When the economy drives all other concerns before it, we forget the lessons of the past. The catch-22 for me becomes that while I despise the ways in which we value all things according to how well they serve The Economy and want to attempt to come up with some extraeconomic or alternative mode of valuing intellectual labor, I also despise a system that reproduces economic inequality — and somehow those two things are inextricably intertwined. The obvious course, then, would be to ask: is there a way to think about technology via alternative modes of valuation that can also help us reduce economic inequalities? But that brings us right back to the set of circumstances where all ends serve the economy. Let’s turn it around then: what would it mean to reduce economic inequalities in order that colleges and universities might find themselves able once more to serve masters other than the economy?