Document Type
Introduction
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard published the results of a study he was commissioned to write for the Conseil des universités du Québec in which he made the claim that, in a university system devoted to functionalism rather than experimentation, “it is safe to assume that responsibility for [experimentation] will devolve upon extrauniversity networks.” This proclamation may have been shocking to university administrators, who have often equated the university with knowledge as if such a linking were inevitable, but from Lyotard’s perspective of a growing, capitalist-fueled technocracy, and now ours, in which this technocracy has grown in size and nature (with the Internet) along with a university system that has, at all levels, devoted itself both to an increased integration with corporations and structural moves towards adjunct “plebocracies,” the prophecy seems relatively inevitable now. So, the university has more and more ceased to exist as such, as a separate entity, and thus even knowledge produced “within” the university structure cannot be precisely located there.
Repository Citation
Ouellette, Marc. "Editors’ Introduction: What is Outsider Criticism?." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss4/1