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Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction: Knowledge and Technics
Prologue, c. 1800
Part I. Figures
1. Student Bodies and Corporate Persons
2. Greek Lines: The Geometry of Thought
Part II. Temporalities
3. Bricks and Stones: Time-Based Media
4. Sources: A Political Ecology of Cultivation
Interlude, c. 1900
Part III. Voices
5. Diffuse Illumination: The Silence of the Universal
6. The Dialectic of the University: His Master’s Voice
Part IV. Symbols
7. Frontier as Symbolic Form
8. Technopoesis: Human Capital and the Spirit of Research
Epilogue, c. 2000
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Reinhold Martin is professor of architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (2003); Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (2010); and The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City (2016).
Summary
What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.
Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.
Additional text
Combining historical detail with conceptual clarity, Knowledge Worlds shows how the modern university became the most important technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by organizing material objects and humans toward common ends. In doing so, Martin has written the first media history of the university.
