Предаване и производство на знанието в съвременния университет
Transmission and Production of Knowledge in the Contemporary University

Summary/Abstract: The institution of University is the subject of number of ambiguities that are being fomented and provoked around its status and within its practices, as knowledge is no more a self-evident value in itself and there are good reasons to ask about the purpose and the future of the University’s basic activities and operations: the production and transmission of knowledge. Besides external pressures (among which the Bologna process), there are strong challenges that are coming from within, such as the critique of the academic knowledge for its part in the processes and practices of oppression and exploitation in contemporary society: critiques done by the student movements in the 60s and the 70s and differently by Michel Foucault and his followers. Avoiding Foucauldian pessimism as well as another revolution of 1968, the logic of development of the social and human sciences is traced in a dieretic scheme (coming a classification by Wallerstein). The institutionalized system of social sciences is the exact historical accumulation of failures to realize an ideal to which only economics to a certain extent approaches. Sociology has a double status because it belongs both to the ‘bad’ line of history, anthropology, political science, and to the ‘good’ line of mathematised ‘exact’ (and ethnocentric) social sciences which culminate in economics. Sociology reflects the unsolvable dilemma of the system as a whole, its driving force and its bad consciousness. It is in this field that may testify to the ultimate defeat of the social sciences The line of division is described in the terms of Giambattista Vico as a line of splits between ‘topical’ and ‘critical’ method. Constitutive opposition of the system is the opposition between the topical and the critical paradigms. The system is driven by the desire to achieve the critical ideal: at each of the consecutive attempts the system generates a new science which proves to be just another topical construction. This critical situation has a solution, which is also the answer to the question what to do about the transmission and production of knowledge in the contemporary situation: we should shift from savage theorizations to self-reflected theory and to conceiving theoretical preoccupations as theorizations of practices (an example of this procedure is Freud’s constitution of psychoanalysis). What we need is the recognition of the irreducible heterogeneity of social practices, which means that we should no more remain closed into the unique educational or transmission practice within the institution.

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