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 INGRID M. HOOFD

Higher Education
& Technological
Acceleration
THE DISINTEGRATION OF UNIVERSITY
TEACHING AND RESEARCH
Higher Education and Technological Acceleration
 Ingrid M. Hoofd

Higher Education
and Technological
Acceleration
The Disintegration of University Teaching and
Research
Ingrid M. Hoofd
Utrecht University
Utrecht, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-1-137-51751-7 ISBN 978-1-137-51409-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 201695056

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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 PREFACE

A huge number of academic books have been written over the last few
decades on the transformations of higher education, both positive and
negative, the world over. A quick search on the Internet on this topic
reveals more than a million titles, many of which have been written in
the last 20 years—indeed, publication numbers have risen exponentially,
productively addressing, yet hence paradoxically also validating criticisms
of current academic over-production. Why then add yet another book
to this already excellent and well-researched body of work on this topic?
The reasons for writing this particular book are in fact simple: they have
to do with what this book flags as a lack of self-reflexive depth concern-
ing the entanglements of the laudable ideals of the university and the
pernicious neo-liberal economy in many of such books, not in the least
concerning, for instance, that paradox of over-production. Indeed, many
of the more critical books in this genre propose that the university in
recent years has fallen victim to an immoral onslaught of neo-liberal poli-
cies and techniques that are imposed from the outside, leading to a host
of hitherto unseen internal and external issues and problems. While this
book does not necessarily disagree with this pervasive neo-liberalisation
thesis in the literature—in fact, it will regularly refer to the recent trans-
formation of higher education with that rather convenient shorthand—it
argues nonetheless that this common thesis fails to unearth the ways in
which the university actually projects a fundamental problem concerning
its own workings and ideals on a demonised ‘outside.’ So instead, this
book suggests that the apparently corrupting neo-liberalisation by ‘evil’
policy-makers and administrators is only a symptom of the economic and

v
vi PREFACE

technological acceleration of the fundamental and finally unresolvable ten-

sions and perversions that lie and have always lain at the heart of its actu-
ally very upright ideals of total knowledge and emancipation. This means
that the reasons for this contemporary corruption, as this book hopes to
show through a multitude of seemingly unrelated theoretical and practi-
cal examples, can be found in the myriad ways, at the level of teaching as
well as research, through which both staff and students presently seek and
in the past have sought to be loyal to these founding ideals. If such an
argument may to some perhaps initially appear as shockingly scandalous
or conversely as mere mischievous navel-gazing, this book suggests that
this argument indeed seeks to be somewhat scandalous and self-absorbed
as much as this book itself is precisely also a mirror image of the outra-
geous ambitions around the quest for scientific and social transparency
that constitute the workings of academia at all its levels. Far from being a
mere matter of theoretical playfulness though, this book wants to stress
that such idealistic yet pernicious workings are fundamentally entangled
with the misery inside and outside its walls, whether this concerns staff
burn-out and excessive adjunctification, the submission of student work
and life to an increasingly oppressive machinery of competition, or the
ways in which the university is tied up with the reproduction of social elites
locally and globally.
This book thus wants to make a case for the urgent need to grasp the
current perversions of the modern university, and especially how such per-
versions have been exacerbated in the recent decades at all its levels, exactly
through casting a fresh eye on those ideas and ideals of transparency,
equality, knowledge-gathering, and democracy. What is more, it wants to
unearth how also ideals about communicative or media transparency are
entangled in the production of theory and other academic practices, so
that we may understand the connections between modern techniques and
the role of higher education beyond the mere argument for empowerment
through media tools. To put it more explicitly, this book suggests that
this historical junction at which the tools and techniques of transparency
and emancipation have started to become near pervasive in global society
precisely also allows for the opportunity to shine some much-needed light
on the problems and dark sides inherent to this foundational enlighten-
ment quest. And because of the often intricate and at times extremely
subtle ways in which staff and student experiences and institutional work-
ings reveal themselves, a lot of materials in this book are anecdotal and are
gathered from the universities in Asia and Europe where I have studied
 PREFACE vii

and worked as an academic and administrative staff member. While this

obviously has its limitations, it also allows, this book hopes, for a careful
elaboration of the often liminal connections between these institutions,
the people that work and study in them, and the larger national and global
context in which this takes place. It is my hope that this book enacts a
careful analysis in this way also as a sign of care for all the people that are in
one way or another problematically affected by its workings, so that we all
may finally reassess not merely that perverse neo-liberal economy, but also,
and especially, the perversion behind the founding ideas and ideals that
have informed such an economy in a major fashion, since that economy’s
functionality in fact conspicuously often can be traced back to academic
research innovations and ‘improvements’ in teaching. Finally also, since
the main aim of this book is to shine a critical light on the institution that
led to its own conceptualisation, writing, and dissemination, it will refrain
from condemning any administrative layer as well as from providing a too-
easy resolution of all the contemporary tensions and problems around
higher education, as the obsession with easy resolutions is itself just as
much borne out of the aggravation of such tensions. Instead, it will by way
of a conclusion seek to raise the stakes by letting the question regarding
the acceleration of knowledge and emancipation fatally become a question
that seems ever more unresolvable. Only then, certain truly unforeseen
consequences may follow out of this book’s argument, as it itself just as
much partakes in the accelerated quest for transparency in which all of
academia will finally dissolve.

Utrecht, The Netherlands Ingrid M. Hoofd

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the culmination of various lines of thought around the recent
transformation of higher education which I explored earlier by way of
a couple of journal publications. For instance, sections of Chap. 2 have
been published previously in a slightly different form as “Singapore:
Bridgehead of the west or counterforce? The s[t]imulation of creative and
critical thought in Singapore’s higher education policies,” in Globalisation,
Societies and Education, special issue “The New Research Agenda in Critical
Higher Education Studies,” Vol. 8, No. 2, 293–303 (2010), guest- and
co-edited by Eva Hartmann and Susan Robertson. Chapter 3 meanwhile
contains modified parts of “Questioning (as) violence: Teaching ethics
in a global knowledge enterprise,” from Ethics and Education, Vol. 6,
No. 1, 53–67 (2011). And Chap. 4 lastly combines insights from “The
accelerated university: Activist-academic alliances and the simulation of
thought,” published in ephemera: theory & politics in organization, spe-
cial issue on “The excellent institution,” Vol. 10, No. 1, 7–24 (2010),
as well as those from “The Financialization of the Communicative Ideal
in the Activist Social Sciences,” from Global Media Journal, special issue
“Financialization, Communication, and New Imperialism: Meaning
in Circuits of Flow,” guest-edited by Mohan J. Dutta and Mahuya Pal
(2015). I wish to thank all the editors for agreeing to the reuse and partial
rewrite of these articles for this particular book.
Other people to whom I am very grateful because they have gener-
ously offered their thoughts and ideas for the theoretical conceptualisa-
tion of this book are Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Jeremy Fernando, and
Sorelle Henricus, as well as all those of my new colleagues at Utrecht

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

University who fruitfully remain critical of the recent transformations

of the Dutch university and the stifling internal surveillance culture that
ensued. I also want to thank the administrative staff at the Department of
Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore
and at the Department of Media and Culture of Utrecht University in
the Netherlands, as without their continuous labour behind the ‘scenes
of theory’ this book would not have been possible. And finally, I wish to
thank my partner, Sandra Khor Manickam, for her insightful and critical
notes on higher education in Europe and Asia, and also for her uncondi-
tional support for my work and ideas even at those appalling yet instructive
moments in my academic journey where I was sure the sly operations of
the supposedly noble institution of higher education had finally defeated
me. These accidents eventually turned out to be fortuitous—as accidents
also often tend to be—since they allowed me to gain a better understand-
ing between the ideal of total transparency and the stealth workings of the
modern university. It also allowed me to continue my work at Utrecht
University in a humanities faculty which contains many superb research-
ers and teachers who are in many ways even more seriously plagued by
the tensions and contradictions inherent in this ideal than those in my
former university. My heart therefore goes out to all the passionate and
disillusioned staff and students, in Asia and in Europe, currently labour-
ing under the negative fallout of the tyranny of transparency. I hope this
book will also provide some distance and solace away from all the peda-
gogical, administrative, and publication disappointments and pressures for
all of them, and help some of them understand that their emotional and
physical discontent is not their fault, but mirrors the university’s currently
exacerbated auto-immune illness.
 CONTENTS

1 Speed and Academic Blindness 1

2 Coercive Invitations of Universality 35

3 Idealistic Self-Delusions and the Limits of Nostalgia 65

4 The Double-Bind of/in Activist–Academic Research 99

5 A Fatally Wounded University? 139

Bibliography 153

Index 161

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Speed and Academic Blindness

THE TYRANNY OF TRANSPARENCY: ACADEMIA’S

AUTO-IMMUNITY
Conventional criticisms regarding the nature of the contemporary
university in most Western and highly developed countries tend to diverge
into two seemingly opposing camps. The contours of these two camps—
the neo-liberal managerialists and those decrying the university’s neo-
liberalisation—can be found in much academic literature as well as in the
larger journalistic and business presses. On the side of the neo-liberal man-
agerial pundits, claims are made that the university today is or will be of
better ‘quality’ after its internal restructuration and decoupling from cer-
tain kinds of state tax-derived funding. Due to universities finally having
been made part of the allegedly more efficiently run global financial system,
such pundits even often argue that academic research and teaching has
‘improved’ thanks to more practice- and consumer-oriented regulations
and transformations, and that money is no longer ‘wasted’ on inefficient,
unproductive, and inconsequential people and projects. On the other side,
among those who oppose or decry these neo-liberal transformations, the
argument goes instead that the superior goals of the traditional univer-
sity—those beyond the merely economistic and practical ones—have been
squandered under this new regime of consumer- and product-oriented
managerialism, and that this has in fact had a detrimental effect on the
quality, if not necessarily quantity, of research output and sound peda-
gogy. These critical commentators—and I would from the onset like to

© The Author(s) 2017 1

I.M. Hoofd, Higher Education and Technological Acceleration,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51409-7_1
2 I.M. HOOFD

state my sympathy and affinity, yet not complete agreement, with this
group—lament the neo-liberal university as one where the oppression of
numbers trumps the necessarily unmeasurable quality of fundamental sci-
ence and philosophy. As also Isabelle Stengers claims: objective evaluation
will eventually kill philosophy in the university (2011, 5). They moreover
often argue that the neo-liberal university has become a place where pro-
fessors and students are exploited by a management that is largely clueless
about the ‘true’ and more profound purpose of the university—that of
independently pursuing justice, knowledge, truth, and emancipation.
On the surface, it appears that these camps are miles apart in terms
of their ideological underpinnings and perspectives. Interestingly though,
while these camps indeed seem detrimentally opposed, both in fact also
assume that the university has largely turned into a ‘business’ like any
other business in our high-tech capitalist economy, for better or for worse.
The university, some of the neo-liberal pundits would have it, has to or has
become like any other industry, simply feeling the pressures that were for
decades already a staple to anyone working in the ‘real’ or normal world
of corporations and non-academic institutions. Academics can no longer
‘hide’ in the ‘ivory tower,’ clueless about ‘real’ society, and quite sim-
ply will have to make do with those limited money streams, performance
assessments, and key performance indicators like everyone else. Likewise,
those decrying the university’s entry into the global market lament the
extreme permeability of contemporary academia to economic forces and
oftentimes even urge a return to the ‘old’ independent university. In an
interview by David Senior for the critical journal Rhizome, well-known
media philosopher Siegfried Zielinski, for instance, “vehemently” pleads
“that they [again] be able to proliferate as gleaming ivory towers. Study
at the academy should be more than ever the offer of a protected time
and space where original thoughts and ideas can be developed and tried
out” (2006, n.p.). In his short indictment revealingly titled “From Ivory
Tower to Glass House,” former chairman of the Dutch Association of
Universities Karl Dittrich also chides the contemporary university for
having lost its original independence (2014, 161), even if he considers
the fact that universities nowadays are forced to be accountable to the
general public, a positive development. The idea that the traditional uni-
versity was somehow ‘walled’ or protected from the market or in some
ways even from ideological government forces—a safe haven for the free
flow of critical ideas, independent experimentation, and creative expres-
sion—therefore remarkably reigns in both camps. In short, whether the
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 3

story is that the neo-liberal economy has negatively encroached upon or

positively transformed the old university, both camps agree that the new
university will turn or already has turned out to be merely one business
node among the many capitalist enterprises today, ruled by managers with
business models that hail from ‘outside’ those old walls—again, for better
or for worse.
But is it now simply one such node, like any other? After all, to identify
the university as being ‘largely transformed’ obviously still does not trans-
late to a complete or total transformation, in which those ‘impractical’
and ‘inefficient’ elements have truly and utterly disappeared. Curiously,
for instance, as Steven Ward illustrates in his revealing book Neoliberalism
and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education, the new mana-
gerialism has led to lots of new inefficiencies, as money and manpower
are now wasted on incessant performance assessments (2012, 111). Also,
many decrying the new managerialism in higher education (and I am
thinking here of the stimulating work of people like Henry Giroux, Noam
Chomsky, and Stanley Aronowitz) are themselves in fact still working sol-
idly in or on the borders of academic institutions. What is more, if the
university is now indeed a mere business, one can still ask the question
of what business it really is or should be in; and this question is far from
‘academic,’ as the banal saying—banal in its assumption that such ques-
tions are merely ‘abstract’ and do not concern the ‘real’ world—goes.
Following this line of thought, one could then also argue that the very idea
that the university was not and should not be a business—in short, that the
university should still stand for the ideals of truth, emancipation, and jus-
tice—actually provides its highly merchandisable specificity or distinction
of its own goings-on vis-à-vis any other institute or company that provides
mere vocational training or only does applied research. Indeed, even the
neo-liberal pundits would want the university to be ‘marketed’ as a busi-
ness where its traditional ideals around creating a better society ‘add value’
to its contemporary projects and products. On top of this, the original
theories, ideas, and regulations of the neo-liberal market economy them-
selves were in fact first and foremost developed by economists and even
philosophers with either an academic position or at least with a solid aca-
demic pedigree; one may think here, for instance, of Walter Eucken from
the Freiburg School and Milton Friedman from the Chicago School. My
point here is that the borders between society, economy, or industry, and
the university as such, are and were also in the past possibly much more
permeable than the notions of ‘ivory towers’ and academic independence
4 I.M. HOOFD

or objectivity suggest. The university is then certainly today a certain kind

of industry, but also definitely not just any industry; it is still the one
location were typically reflexive questions of socio-economic purpose and
knowledge are dealt with in depth, even if sometimes by those on the
precarious borders of its officially institutional parameters. This very book
itself is exemplary of such a reflexive component that is still very much part
of the neo-liberal university: the question of what business the university
is or should be in, and indeed the complication of the conclusion that the
university in the past was independent from industry forces, is asked in this
book with an eye on the progression of its body of knowledge in favour
of a host of societal ideals like democracy, freedom, knowledge gathering,
and emancipation. That is after all its business, and that is what my pub-
lisher also knows to be an eminently marketable perspective.
This book argues that what we see emerge in the above confusion
between ‘true’ academic aspirations and ‘perverted’ economic incentives
through what some may find a muddled play on words that is marginal
to the discussion on higher education is in fact essential to understanding
how the seemingly oppositional narratives of the ‘demise’ or ‘revival’ of
academic quality actually find their origin in a conceptualisation of the ide-
als of the university and its role in society that neo-liberals as well as those
resistant to neo-liberalisation share. The odd case is therefore that the
university ‘succumbs’ to those neo-liberal theories, techniques, and tech-
nologies that it itself has produced or brought forth; the university today,
one could say, suffers from a peculiar auto-immune disease. And I would
suggest that this disease has been lingering in its core principles and aims
for a long time now. This book claims by way of some prominent think-
ers of such an auto-immunity or ‘self-deconstruction’ that the university
has always suffered from this curious affliction, but also that particularly
today, the technological acceleration of the neo-liberal economy brings
such an auto-immunity ever more to the foreground, which in turn leads
to an aggravation of fundamental tensions and blatant incompatibilities
within its dominion. So there is a historical continuity of auto-immunity
in the university project all the way from its aspirational beginnings up
until today that still persists, even if that continuous element has been
slowly but steadily displaced towards the imperatives of productivity, ‘free-
market’ ideals, and efficiency. This book then hopes to illustrate by way
of combining a plethora of ‘auto-immune’ examples of academic practice
with a perhaps unexpected theoretical perspective that this displacement
is possible because the utopian goals of emancipation, truth, and freedom,
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 5

which express themselves in research and teaching, have themselves from

the very beginning already been tainted by the demons of oppression,
falsehood, and exclusion. Bizarrely then, the fact or the insistence that the
university is not like any other industry will turn out to be precisely its prob-
lem. This is because the fundamental tension in its project—what Dittrich
in “From Ivory Tower to Glass House” calls its “immanent contradiction”
(in Dutch “ingebouwde tegenspraak,” 2014, 160)—that has historically
led to (the illusion of) progress through the scientific and philosophical
discussion and production of knowledge has indeed become ‘productive’
in the economic sense. Eventually, we will therefore find that at the heart
of the university lies a fundamental aporia that expresses itself exceedingly
today, in a curious reversal of its humanist values and stakes, as a more
obvious pretence or hypocrisy. This leads so-called knowledge workers at
many contemporary universities today to find themselves confronted with
contradictory feelings and schizoid situations: like, for instance, teaching
students the ills of social hierarchisation through education, while also
sorting them in hierarchical (alpha) numerical slots according to academic
performance. The university is therefore the one location in the current
economy where the basic conflicting duplicity following the exacerba-
tion of this aporia of Western Enlightenment thinking is most keenly felt,
though often suppressed or internalised by many such ‘workers’ and stu-
dents as either personal failure or a general incompatibility with its insti-
tutional demands.
So to reiterate, the radical proposition of this book is that the prime
mission or ideals of the university—namely those of total emancipation,
freedom, and the goals of knowledge accumulation—are precisely what
currently produce exceedingly unjust practices ‘outside’ and ‘within’
academia. These unjust practices that it produces on its ‘outside’ con-
cern those of the ongoing social stratification via so-called meritocratic
education and those of sociological, computational, and psychological
objectification of ever more cultures and groups, while the unjust prac-
tices on its ‘inside’ concern those of internal hierarchies, rankings, divi-
sions, gatekeeping mechanisms, and exclusions of all kinds. And because
the reproduction of its practices at base involve modern techniques and
technologies of knowing, this book suggests that rather than arguing for
a return to the supposedly ‘walled’ university, however sympathetic, gain-
ing a better understanding of the intersection of this problematic with
especially modern technologies of communication, visibility, or calcula-
tion is crucial to really thinking the modern university project differently.
6 I.M. HOOFD

The book therefore argues that the central problem of the university
today consists of the acceleration of academia’s unfinishable ideals by
way of an enmeshment with techniques and technologies of communica-
tion, calculation, and prediction. The quest for transcendence through
technologically aided omniscience and universal connection—after all,
the term ‘university’ comes from the Latin universitas or the ‘totality’ or
‘total community’—has resulted in the quest to render everything and
everyone transparent and understandable. As I will discuss more in depth
through the work of techno-pundit Paul Virilio, the current university
and its new forms of violence are therefore an outflow or intensification of
‘outdated’ humanist ideals and techniques, whose internal contradictions
have become usurped and constantly remobilised by neo-liberal capital-
ism and its machinery of acceleration. We see the auto-immune aspect
returning here as well, since that contemporary machinery of the accel-
eration of omniscience in many of its aspects—one need only to think of
early cybernetic research, innovations like the Arpanet, and engineering-
oriented models of communication as noise cancellation—has again also
been carried out at least in large part by universities (disturbingly often
with the help of military monies and establishments, about the significance
of which more later). In other words, the hopeful academic project of
‘exposing the world and humanity to the light of truth and emancipation,’
together with its damaging ‘evil twins’ of oppressive universalism, social
submission, surveillance, and colonialism, has caved in onto themselves
and become a near-pervasive technologically ‘exposing-itself’ of a funda-
mentally Janus-faced academia. This is also to stress that the ways in which
academic research has historically been part of Western imperialism should
be considered more closely when critically examining the faux-nostalgic
calls in many contemporary European universities for a ‘return’ to pre-
sumed ‘research autonomy,’ as well as when analysing the kinds of seem-
ingly perverse ‘knowledge-as-capital’ arguments made by contemporary
universities in the post-colonies. I will provide divergent examples from
the Netherlands and Singapore of such tendencies in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4.
In light of the above, this book therefore also wants to discuss the
relationship or interaction between academia and modern technology
as consisting of a more fundamentally entangled apparatus than most
critics of the neo-liberalisation of higher education, who see such tech-
nology as merely applied onto academia from the ‘outside’ or as mere
tools for use on the ‘inside’ consider it to be. As an example, Ward in
Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 7

certainly rightly claims that the digital knowledge economy, due to the
translation of information into bits and bytes, has forced a quantification
of performance indicators in academia, leading to the erasure and transfor-
mation of certain kinds of knowledge in the ‘hard’ as well as the ‘soft’ sci-
ences (2012, 126). Especially the humanities, says Ward, with their forms
and media of knowledge (like the monograph) that cannot be reduced to
sheer numbers, be disaggregated into sellable pieces, or be made to follow
the impetus of fast-paced output, suffer from this quantification (2012,
127). While I agree with Ward on this aspect of digitalisation, he does not
seem to consider the fact that the origins of these technologies as such,
as I mentioned earlier, not only stem from university research, but also
that the supposedly empowering qualities of technologies of communica-
tion and visualisation have in fact always been part of the university setup
from its inception in the late Medieval era and the early Enlightenment
in Europe—one may here think, for example, of René Descartes’ mecha-
nistic view of the material world, the crucial importance of inventions like
the telescope and microscope, or the ways in which the dissemination of
scientific ideas relied on book printing technology. It appears then that the
basic imbrication of academia with media technologies is one of a continu-
ous and ever-growing constitutional yet dialectical relationship, in which
these technologies eventually turn out to be much more than simply a
means through which research and teaching are carried out. Instead, due
to their constitutive enmeshment with academia’s auto-immunity, they
paradoxically expose themselves as facilitators as well as thwarters of the
academic ideal of total knowledge. Rather, the ideal of exposition and
omniscience, and the ways it is today carried out through modern data-
driven technologies and visual media aids, is, this book argues, itself just
as ambiguous and finally ungraspable (as their borders likewise cannot be
pinned down) as the nature of academia as such.
The book also hopes to demonstrate that in light of this, the central
logic of the university today, as a logical yet paradoxical outflow of the
ambiguity of such techniques of exposition and transparency, currently
consists above all in a pervasive ‘stealth’ functionality or unknown qual-
ity. This is because especially the cybernetic technologies that constitute
the core techniques of teaching and research today, as I will discuss later
on in this chapter, fundamentally rely on obscuring their own operations.
This in turn segues into the problem that the contemporary university
ever more successfully hides its internally oppressive operations in favour
of a false image of university ‘objectivity’ and of it ‘being at the forefront’
8 I.M. HOOFD

of knowledge, transparency, emancipation, and truth. This ‘stealth’ func-

tionality is, moreover, intimately connected to the militaristic logic that
inhabits contemporary digital technology, whose implications regarding
the university this chapter will explore especially via the work of Virilio
on science, technology, and vision. Due to this stealth logic of acceler-
ated transparency, a stifling ‘productivist’ principle—a term coined by Jean
Baudrillard, about whom more later too, in his The Mirror of Production
that seeks to expose a highly ideological idea of the human as an essentially
productive or creative agent—reigns in most contemporary universities,
relegating everything or anyone that does not comply with this logic as
not merely undesirable but also utterly incomprehensible, as some of us in
the humanities or theoretical sciences can attest to. It is this situation that
logically gives rise to aggravated tensions and schizoid experiences among
university staff and students; but it is also this situation that finally allows
this book to expose its hypocrisy. The irreducible unknown quality of the
university, in the form of a sort of libidinal antagonism, then pops up with
a vengeance in a time where one would least expect it. Such is the essence
of managerialism after all; guided by a principle that resides inside itself,
it will only strengthen this principle whenever it wants to banish it more
forcefully. Eventually then, the book proposes that the instabilities, incon-
sistencies, and ambiguities generated through this technological accelera-
tion also present an inappropriable possibility and a promise of a radically
alternative future by way of tracing academia’s constitutive contradictions
and injustices, which have led to it becoming its own fatality. The book
thus wants to make an argument for academic writing and engagement
that remains ‘fatally’ speculative, enigmatic, and opaque (perhaps espe-
cially in the hard sciences), so as to mount a polemical provocation that
remains beyond the tyranny of a total transparency feared by Virilio. This
strategy—if one could call it that—seeks to extend Baudrillard’s insistence
of mobilising a much more ‘fatal’ radical theory in order to make a struc-
tural difference. But before we arrive there, we must first take a closer look
at how this humanist aporia expresses itself in those texts that have theo-
rised the transformation of the university in recent decades and that reside
arguably closest to the ‘source’ of its crisis: the critical humanities. The
value of looking at such critical work in detail, besides these works pro-
viding excellent descriptions of recent academic transformations, resides
in the fact that they deal with the crises and paradoxes of the university
also on the level of their own rhetoric, and thus tend to explicitly dis-
play the struggles, tensions, and contradictions at the heart of academic
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 9

enquiry and writing. The exacerbation of the university’s auto-immunity

can therefore, I suggest, be conceptually, geographically, paradigmatically,
and historically located in and via these works.

THEORIES OF THE NEO-LIBERAL UNIVERSITY: HUMANISM

ACCELERATED
In order to further illustrate and deepen my proposition around how the
ever-present auto-immunity of the university project has today been swept
up by technologies of acceleration in the service of neo-liberalism, as well
as how academia’s ideals of freedom, empowerment, justice, truth, and
democracy have become displaced into the prerogatives of efficiency and
productivity, this book will, in the following section of this chapter, work
through the ways in which two of the allegedly most insightful commenta-
tors of the university of the past decades, namely Jean-François Lyotard
and Jacques Derrida, diagnose its current condition. Following from the
conclusions of these two commentators, it will in turn, in the last section,
mobilise two other commentators—Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard—
who may not have explicitly written on the university, but whose perhaps
more extreme provocations, according to this book, in crucial ways com-
plement the insights set in motion by Lyotard and Derrida. The purpose
of discussing these works is not merely to set up a theoretical framework
with which to complicate the rather too-easy arguments that merely indict
neo-liberal managerialism vis-à-vis the independence or neutrality of aca-
demic research and teaching, about which more in the next chapter. It is
also not merely to allow this book to tease out in the subsequent chapters
how such an accelerated auto-immunity and its ‘stealth’ functionality today
concretely manifest themselves in a plethora of examples, ranging from aca-
demic research agendas in the so-called hard as well as soft sciences to novel
pedagogical practices (like for instance Paulo Freire’s famous ‘pedagogies
of the oppressed.’) These agendas and practices namely present themselves
as opposing neo-liberal power but actually, as this book hopes to demon-
strate, comply with it under current techno-economic conditions. Rather,
it is to show that the production of so-called humanistic high theory, while
providing insightful analyses of the university, just as much suffers from
or tries to grapple with the ways in which the stakes around the university
have been raised in the era of cybernetic acceleration. To use the point
that also Stefan Collini makes in What Are Universities For, to rethink the
10 I.M. HOOFD

university from the tensions and notions that are distinctive of the humani-
ties makes sense, since it is the level of the how of academic argument that
gives us an important insight “about the nature of the intellectual activity
itself” (2012, 75). To put it more simply, the critical humanities display
the auto-immunity of the university more overtly because they find it their
duty to question even that very duty-to-question itself. This means that
we will be able to discern in these critical theories a way of thematising the
tensions inherent to the contemporary university in which a kind of reveal-
ing theoretical knowledge is ‘produced’ that nonetheless cannot help but
to conform, even if self-awarely, to a certain compulsory hope or optimism
around the academic project. While the purpose of this book is most cer-
tainly not to condemn or ridicule this optimism—how could it, when it is
itself just as much written in the hopeful spirit of critique—this discussion
seeks to bring to the fore how the finally aporetic ideals of the university
that all these theorists display are today swept up in technological accel-
eration; indeed, that technological acceleration and the concomitant over-
exposure of the university by itself finds its continuous nascence in such
ideals. Not only is their (and my) hope then a mirror image of a despair
concerning its current crisis or ‘demise’ in value, but more specifically, it
will demonstrate how the hopeful moment, in which the ideals that are
central to the university are reperformed, becomes the moment of produc-
tive complicity. As we will see later on via Baudrillard’s partial ridicule of
critical theory in The Perfect Crime, it is the assumption of a real (social
order) about which theory supposedly must create a ‘faithful’ description
that remains thoroughly complicit in this thwarted ideal. In short, this sec-
tion pivots around the provocation that the duplicity of the contemporary
university resides and has always resided in the very ruse of representing an
‘objective outside’ with the aid of ever more sophisticated techniques of
visualisation and communication. The acceleration of this ruse therefore
goes a long way back indeed and can be traced via the ways in which critical
theory keeps the spirit of this ruse alive.
As an example of how critical theory exhibits, as well as inhabits, the
aporia that the ruse covers over, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge deals with the transformation of aca-
demia and higher education in a most revealing manner. Written in the
late 1970s with an eye on the European and North American contexts,
one of the main arguments Lyotard makes is that the “computerization of
society,” as a corollary of advanced capitalism, will profoundly influence
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 11

knowledge production (1979, 6). Lyotard importantly argues that the

quantification and digitisation of information allows for the “commercial-
ization of knowledge,” which in turn will render certain areas of research
obsolete (1979, 5). More concretely, he maintains that the kinds of knowl-
edge that will be produced and the ways in which such knowledge is legiti-
mised will undergo a radical transformation, since knowledge production
from now on will have to conform to the logic of the digital machinery.
This is no doubt the valuable though somewhat simplified rendition of
Lyotard’s argument that many critics of the neo-liberal university, among
whom also Ward in Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring, have
picked up on. I would like to suggest, however, that many of these crit-
ics like Ward interpret the rest of Lyotard’s book in a slightly misguided
way, to the extent that they surprisingly miss out on a significant point
that Lyotard makes regarding the role of critical work. Ward concludes,
for instance, from Lyotard’s admonition about the ways in which digitali-
sation limits knowledge production, that the ‘victim’ of this situation is
all that research work that is “slow and superfluous” (2012, 120), so in
particular research in those areas—and the humanities are here again the
exemplary ‘slow’ field (but also so-called fundamental science)—that do
“theoretical, critical and speculative” work (2012, 122). The “standard-
ized positivistic methods” that reign in the neo-liberal university, accord-
ing to Ward, then lead to a “post-intellectuality” that “in some cases even
is irritated by so-called big questions” (2012, 122–123). Eventually, as
the “public-regarding notion of knowledge” declines, so says Ward, “the
idea that the university is a center of unbiased knowledge is too on the
wane” (2012, 125). Now while Ward’s argument certainly has its merit
in terms of facilitating a critical analysis of the alteration of contemporary
knowledge production, his narrative all too easily pivots around suspect
stereotypes not only of the so-called hard sciences, but also of the for-
mer ‘independence’ of the university and it supposedly ‘succumbing’ to
external market forces. As I have hinted at earlier, this transformative force
is not simply imposed from an ‘evil outside.’ More importantly, Ward’s
quick conclusion about critical and speculative work in the humanities,
while perhaps appealing to the vanity (like mine) of all of those doing such
work, problematically ignores Lyotard’s subsequent argument regarding
the actual intricacies around the transformation of knowledge. Against the
victimisation of speculation and critique, Lyotard explicitly warns in The
Postmodern Condition that it would be
12 I.M. HOOFD

tempting … to distinguish two kinds of knowledge. One, the positivist kind,

would be directly applicable to technologies bearing on men and materi-
als, and would lend itself to operating as an indispensable productive force
within the system. The other—the critical, reflexive, or hermeneutic kind—
by reflecting directly or indirectly on values or aims, would resist any such
‘recuperation.’ … I find this partition solution unacceptable. (1979, 14, ital-
ics mine)

Lyotard goes on to suggest that this kind of oppositional thinking is not

only outdated, but in itself may reproduce “the alternative it attempts to
resolve” (1979, 14). To explain this, he sets out to comprehend academic
research in terms of a kind of ‘game’ with a dual aspect. Allow me to go
into a bit of detail around Lyotard’s argument, as it will help shed light on
some of the on-the-surface sympathetic claims made today in defence of (a
return to) the authentic or ideal university, a defence often also expressed
with the dubious—because hiding the ways in which knowledge has always
been implicated in power—slogan of ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake.’ If
we want to discern the ‘business’ proper of the university, it would be para-
mount to look at its internal logic of knowledge production through the
sciences and the humanities. The ‘game’ that, according to Lyotard, is the
academic pursuit of truth, scientific and philosophical knowledge—no mat-
ter whether empirically or theoretically generated—makes the claim that it
accumulates evidence and insights towards an eventually complete compre-
hension of the world for the community of mankind—indeed, the aspira-
tion of the universitas. Science on its own then, says Lyotard, has never in
itself existed as a representation of the “totality of knowledge” because it
crucially relies on “another kind of knowledge,” which he calls “narrative”
(1979, 7). Science has always needed certain presuppositions and agree-
ments on what constitutes proof, before it could set out to formulate a
method of ‘acquiring’ proof. Or, as, for instance, Athanasios Moulakis,
in a book arguing for teaching humanities to engineers, puts it in Beyond
Utility: “It is because minds can meet by means of words, that science,
among other things, is possible” (1994, 103). Science therefore, concludes
Lyotard, constitutes itself in narratives that become its a priori—one may
think here of Descartes’ famous assumption that nature or some ‘evil
demon’ is not somehow tricking his senses, which allowed him to formu-
late an empiricism of knowledge accumulation. Lyotard here in particu-
lar mentions Pail Valéry’s humorous assessment of Descartes’ “Discourse
on Method” as in essence being a Bildungsroman. And what makes this
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 13

‘game’ even more curious and uneven, says Lyotard, is that science, while
vitally basing itself on such narratives, does in fact not consider narrative
knowledge as in itself constituting scientific ‘proof’ (1979, 24–25). Science
then, as he hinted at earlier on, “has always existed in addition to, and in
competition and conflict with … narrative” (1979, 7); all kinds of narra-
tive forms of knowing that are not ‘properly’ scientific, are cast outside of
science while actually residing in the very fundaments of science; narrative
knowledge is scientific knowledge’s constitutive outside, just as the ruse of
an objective reality is the constitutive outside of academia’s porous con-
ceptual walls. Meanwhile, philosophy (no matter whether it is practised in
the humanities or in the sciences) is different from science because, while
it also aspires to universal comprehension, at least ‘knows’ that its legitima-
tion runs through narratives and assumptions. Philosophy therefore, in its
reverse totalitarianism, instead sees science as only one among the many
available narratives of which it can take part.
We find here in The Postmodern Condition a revealing analysis of
the kind of conflictual entanglement of speculative and positivistic sci-
ence and philosophy that is part of the academic institutionalisation of
the Enlightenment thrust. I would suggest that this kind of conflictual
entanglement has today led to the acceleration of its unfinishable utopia—
that is, that the ideal of the university is in essence an ongoing perplex-
ity. We can namely deduce from Lyotard’s analysis that these two kinds
of knowing are not so much oppositional but indeed partake in aporetic
grounds—they give rise to what Lyotard calls an “endless torment”—a
conceptual impossibility (1979, 29). This is because for one, their inner
tension can never be resolved, as both are borne out of the same quest
for the totality of knowledge that nonetheless disagrees from the very
start; but what is more, there exists an unequal relationship within this
conglomerate of narrative and scientific knowledge games—science as
denigrating narrative, while narrative encapsulating science—that accord-
ing to Lyotard has led to the “entire history of cultural imperialism since
the dawn of Western civilization” (1979, 27). This is because this apo-
retic ideal needed to constantly project its inner conflict onto something
(or someone) external to itself. The very Enlightenment idea of prog-
ress and emancipation through knowledge acquisition and technological
innovation thus appears to be fundamentally entangled with the spread
of ‘darkness,’ antagonism, and exclusionary thrust that it can nonetheless
never shed as it is constitutive of that Enlightenment. Universities, says
Lyotard, have since their nascence then had a strong potential via their
14 I.M. HOOFD

universalising and imperialist function in terms of binding and empower-

ing a ‘people’ into a whole ‘public’ via the aspirations of scientific and
philosophical coherence and universality through constant suppression;
this was the role for which they were held accountable. But this binding
ideal will likewise fall prey to its constitutive limitation—or, if you will, to
the politics of scientific and philosophical legitimacy and consensus. This,
says Lyotard, led Alexander von Humboldt to conceptualise an imaginary
boundary between the university’s actual or internal aspirations towards
truth and knowledge as independent and ‘pure,’ while the ‘outside public’
was supposedly the locus where ‘dirty’ politics resided. In this way, Von
Humboldt could seemingly (at least for a couple of centuries) ‘save’ the
legitimacy of science and philosophy via the famous Bildungsideal—the
university as a place for the development of the good character of the
student-citizen, always working in the service of freedom, progress, rea-
son, truth, and emancipation (1979, 32–34).
But this ‘solution’ to the problem of rational universality was of course
founded on shaky grounds from the start. For it is after all in Humboldt’s
idea of the university and its materialisation in their particular national
institutional forms that we can discern the relationship between the hege-
mony of certain ideals of national ‘high’ culture and ‘absolute’ truth that
guide and limit knowledge production, and the elite classes (and races and
genders) of the time, who automatically come to attain the status of ‘rea-
sonable’ and ‘civilized’ citizens vis-à-vis the supposedly more primitive and
irrational groups in society, both at home and abroad in the colonies. It is
noteworthy that Lyotard, at this stage in his tracing of the aporia internal
to the university, similar to Jacques Derrida in “Mochlos: or the Conflict
of the Faculties,” equally refer to Martin Heidegger’s speech on taking up
his rectorship at the University of Freiburg in 1933 as a paradigmatic and
tragic moment in the history of universalist attempts at self-affirmation via
the binding together of ‘the’ people as the aspirational academic project
(Lyotard 1979, 37; Derrida 2004, 4). The ‘community of reason’ that
Heidegger’s university sought to serve and be an exemplary microcosm
of, turned out to be thoroughly infested with its own ‘evil’ irrationality of
fascism, which the recent uncovering of his Black Notebooks further attests
to. The covering-over of the fundamental tension within the institution
founded on Enlightenment aspirations can only ever be an act of violence
or exclusion that mirrors the violence of the social, and Heidegger’s initial
allegiance to Nazism is indeed a painful reminder of this. But simultane-
ously, I concur that the Heidegger affair also marks the moment where
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 15

the fundamental entanglement of European academia with the oppression

in its colonies started exhibiting its own aggravated expression at home:
an expression that aligns it to its relationship with the technologies of
modernity (and today, postmodernity). In light of this take on Heidegger
shared by Lyotard and Derrida, I would additionally like to point out
that Nazi Germany and fascism in general was obsessed with technologi-
cal innovation, progress, and transcendence, and that Heidegger’s philo-
sophical concerns after the devastations of the Second World War and after
his disappointment with the academic and fascist project interestingly and
logically turned to (as his most famous essay on the topic also titles) the
‘question concerning technology,’ which is closely connected to his argu-
ment on cybernetics and the ‘end of philosophy.’ More about the insights
and limitations of Heideggers’ thought will follow in Chap. 2.
Now Lyotard as well as Derrida of course refer to the tragic outflow
of the constitutive violence internal to the university that the Heidegger
affair illustrates, because it immediately reveals the ‘endless torment’ that
constitutes the basic politics of the quintessential Enlightenment institu-
tion. Such a perversion is thus internal to the academic project; indeed, it
is the unfinishability of its project of total illumination and universal com-
munity that drives it and keeps it going ‘forward.’ According to Lyotard,
this fundamental irrationality within the scientific and narrative ‘games,’ of
which contemporary academia is still the locus par excellence, for this very
reason (of attempting to erase or purge its own irrationality) also drives
an increasing formalisation of knowledge production. This is because sci-
ence and philosophy, by way of “certain formal and axiomatic presupposi-
tions” which they nonetheless seek to suppress as illegitimate knowledge,
find temporary legitimation around the truths that they produce (1979,
39). But this suppression always haunts science and philosophy, just as
Humboldt’s university was haunted by its own elitism and its constitu-
tive outside. The “seeds of de-legitimation and nihilism,” as Lyotard
calls it, (1979, 38) that became apparent after the so-called postmodern
turn, leading to his famous proclamation of the loss of the credibility of
the “grand narratives” (1979, 37), were thus already immanent to these
narratives. The history of academic research, as we will see later via Paul
Virilio’s work, in turn shows us that the tools, methods, and techniques
that appear to inhabit objectivity and rationality, and that appear to
‘extend’ the limited faculties of the mere human observer, then become
the paradigmatic mechanisms by way of which science keeps attempting
to deal with its ever-increasing layers of complexity, continuously trying
16 I.M. HOOFD

to fill one gap with another. Such ‘tools of additive proof’ will, however,
never add up to a universal and coherent ‘total’ knowledge, because they
can still never ‘proof their own way of proving.’ It is of course due to the
effort to deal with such ongoing complexity via technological formalisa-
tion that in the last decades computers have logically (in its double mean-
ing) entered the fray, even if at the same time they contribute, according
to Lyotard, further to “the ‘crisis’ of scientific knowledge” (1979, 39)
because the layering of ‘proof’ via logic will again give rise to increasing
speculation around the status of their truth-claims as ‘mere form’—or,
as Baudrillard would of course famously have it, as ‘simulations.’ It is for
this reason of the dubious role of formalisation via ever more sophisti-
cated or ‘intelligent’ machines that Virilio, as I will discuss later, seeks to
locate the contemporary irrationality and violence of Western science and
philosophy in the ways in which especially computers and other ‘tools of
enlightenment’ dissimulate this irrationality while also generating more of
it. Lyotard, on his part, claims that the ever-increasing expediency with
which computers provide knowledge starts to constitute its own domi-
nant truth-form, in which such efficiency and optimisation come to stand
in for “good” knowledge (1979, 44). It is at this moment in the history
of scientific knowledge production, says Lyotard, that now “instruments
are not purchased to find truth, but to augment power,” which leads to
a situation whereby the “idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation”
are abandoned (1979, 46).

THE COMPULSORY OPTIMISM OF THE ACCELERATED

ACADEMIC
From the above, one may find in Lyotard a perfect companion to a criti-
cal assessment of the contemporary neo-liberal university. But while I am
in almost complete agreement with Lyotard’s remarkable and visionary
‘report on knowledge,’ it is curious that he, at the stage in the analysis where
computers enter the discussion, starts finding recourse to a slightly more
apocalyptic rendition of the state of current academic affairs via an apparent
decoupling of power and truth. In the subsequent pages namely, he suggests
that especially the ways in which cybernetic machines allow for the “mas-
tery of reality” and, when disseminated throughout the general social field,
allow for “context-control” in favour of stable outcomes, that it becomes
the perfect machinery for the “self-legitimation” of capitalist systems
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 17

(1979, 47). In what follows, Lyotard foremost appears to want to rescue

philosophy and the sciences, and their quest for truth from an ultimately evil
capitalist world only concerned with what is “saleable” (1979, 51). But he
also goes on to argue that such an ideal stability, calculability, and predict-
ability of the system is only a very compelling “fiction,” as it will forever be
assuming an ultimately lacking positivism on which its model of efficiency
is based (1979, 55). The system then must give rise to new paradoxes and
tensions, which will lead to a renewed speculation, notably today exempli-
fied in the obsession with predicting futures via, for instance, ‘big data,’ but
also with a potential return to philosophical enquiry.
Oddly then, the proclaimed death of philosophy due to cybernetics
that Stengers also worries about, in fact, gives it new life, and Lyotard’s
text is proof of this. Lyotard in fact appears to make a small stab at his
own apocalyptic analysis when he likewise challenges “futurology” (like his
own) as one of those attempts at prediction that ultimately cannot account
for the irrational aspect of the academic enterprise (1979, 55). It is for
this reason, I surmise, that he curiously excuses his analysis in the intro-
duction for having a “somewhat sociologizing slant, one that truncates
but at the same time situates it” (1979, xxv). If we are to take this brief
moment of self-reflexivity in his text seriously, we might likewise read the
argument in The Postmodern Condition as being itself symptomatic of the
false divisions that our postmodern universities give rise to, namely that
mythical division between power and knowledge, or a concern with mar-
ketability vis-à-vis a concern with truth. Reading Lyotard in this way, one
could conclude that the so-called decline of grand narratives that Lyotard
so famously pronounces may then only be a superficial effect of a knowl-
edge society in which those grand narratives have not at all disappeared,
but that have instead sublimated or transformed into the technologically
aided goals of efficiency and predictability. It is therefore perhaps the way
(and I am of course speculating here as well) in which Lyotard in The
Postmodern Condition seems compelled in the final analysis to perform an
optimism around science and philosophy via an apocalyptic indictment of
cybernetic mechanisms—a move, as we will see in the next chapter, very
similar to Heidegger’s argument regarding modern technology—that really
constitutes the central problematic of the contemporary university. This
also means that the critical humanities, for all their being chided for their
‘negativity’ or ‘uselessness,’ actually provide the hope for a qualitatively bet-
ter future that remains imperative to the sustenance of the scientific project
and all its negative fallout via the accelerated techniques of destruction
18 I.M. HOOFD

and oppression. What is more, if such a reading can reveal that optimism
is a driving force of Lyotard’s piece, then that must mean that my book,
and the ways in which it productively engages the tensions within the neo-
liberal universities in which it was written over the course of a few years
with the help of all kinds of cybernetic tools so as to suggest the above
analysis, revolves around that optimism too. The grand narratives of truth
and emancipation have then not been abandoned at all; they rather are
now nearly everywhere, in the very oppressive and enabling machinery that
surrounds us as academics and social beings on a daily basis. We find our-
selves ever more surrounded by the suffocating ‘curse’ of social and scien-
tific progress, forever forced to empower ourselves and incessantly dig for
the ‘truth’ around increasingly confusing piles of information. The goal of
total knowledge seems closer to us than ever, yet at the same time seems to
slip ever further away from us.
This sentiment, that we are not by far out of the ideals that the uni-
versity historically has bestowed upon us but that these are also being dis-
placed, is also brought up by Jacques Derrida’s “Mochlos; or, the Conflict
of the Faculties” when he exclaims “The university, what an idea! It is
a relatively recent idea. We have yet to escape it, and it is already being
reduced to its own archive …” (1992, 1). I am presenting a brief discus-
sion of Derrida’s point here to further illuminate the aporia at the heart
of the university by someone who at the same time seems keenly aware of
the very problem of ‘illumination’ (an unresolvable tension my book also
shuttles between). The Greek term ‘mochlos’ (μοχλός) in the title trans-
lates as ‘lever’ or ‘keystone,’ and Derrida’s clever title therefore already
implies, as Dittrich also suggested, that there apparently resides a “con-
flict” at the heart of the idea of the university that also constitutes its cen-
tral mechanism. Derrida’s suggestion nonetheless also immediately dispels
the traps of romanticism or nostalgia regarding the function or responsi-
bility of the university in the past or as such. This is because he stresses
that that conflict, “breach,” or internal incoherence (1992, 7) has always
been somehow present in various more or less violent forms—the institu-
tionalisation of the classic Bildungsideal being one of them—while such
idealistic representations like Von Humboldt’s simultaneously functioned
as a cover for the university’s essential impurity. But such an obfuscation,
suggests Derrida, cannot last, as the university is just as much one of a
universal uncovering or transparency; its quest remains after all to render
everything knowable in the service of some greater good. This means that
such an obfuscation logically at some point will have to come to light as
 SPEED AND ACADEMIC BLINDNESS 19

well. The university therefore, according to Derrida, seeks to be respon-

sible by means of its incessantly revealing function, and has historically
performed that responsibility through the great Enlightenment con-
cepts like “the state, the sovereign, the people, knowledge, truth,” and
so forth (1992, 4). Crucially though, these concepts, while incessantly
reperformed and chanted today via the anti-neo-liberal activism of various
academic staff and students, essentially gesture towards an abstraction or
an absent, fictional addressee. ‘The truth,’ like ‘the people,’ is after all only
an imagined or fantasised universal, forever lying in some kind of future
or beyond, whereas its actualisation is, as we saw with Lyotard, marked by
heterogeneity, projection, and fragmentation. And this was always already
the case: indeed, Derrida says that in the past, or in a certain idealised
representation of that past, “one could at least pretend to know whom
one was addressing, and where to situate power” (1992, 3, italics mine).
It is this abstraction that constitutes, according to Derrida, its utopian
potential as a continuous crisis of legitimation, and trying to close off that
uncertainty of the validity of its project—as Heidegger indeed did with a
self-absorbed conception of the properly German university—marks the
ascendance of a crisis that in turn is thoroughly imbricated with a crisis
of the state, of metaphysics, and of technology (1992, 4). Derrida’s sen-
timent on this point also echoes Lyotard’s analysis in The Inhuman, in
which the latter describes the current state of the goal of (or reason for)
science and philosophy, which had been “dressed up in all sorts of dis-
guises: destination of man, reason, enlightenment, emancipation, happi-
ness,” as being “naked. More and more power, yes—but why, no” (1991,
54, italics mine). I concur that it is for this reason of the ‘nakedness’ of
the ‘why’ that the faux-nostalgic slogan ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’
is foundational as well as misleading, and that the great challenge of the
contemporary university lies once more in its thinking about—and never
quite being able to answer—what this responsibility consists of. Indeed,
Derrida suggests from the onset that everything revolves around the prob-
lem of the accountability of and for a community, in which neither what
to account for, nor who constitutes the “we” of this community, nor even
the exact where of this accountability can be located (1992, 1). We will see
in Chap. 3 that José Ortega y Gasset’s reconceptualisation of the Spanish
university in the interbellum era, for instance, makes the mistake of clos-
ing off these questions. There is therefore in this ongoing shadow play
always a more originary or “younger” responsibility to be had, dislocating
the only seemingly solid ‘old’ one (1992, 6). This responsibility then sim-
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 VERHAAL
VAN HET GEBEURDE
VÓÓR EN BIJ HET
PLANTEN VAN DEN EERSTEN
VRYHEIDSBOOM
TE
AMSTELDAM.

Heuchelijker dag heeft Amsteldam, en met het zelve reeds bijna geheel
Nederland nooit gezien, dan die van den 18 Januarij deezes Jaars,
(1795,) want op dien dag werd de hand geslagen aan de herstelling van
’s Lands Vrijheid:

Op dien dag sidderde gevloekte Dwinglandij,

En riep het beste Volk, triumph wij zijn weêr vrij!

Van tijd tot tijd hadden de Amstelaars, (om ons bij deezen alleen te
bepaalen,) hunne hoop op het eindelijke herstel der rechten van den
mensch en van den burger gevoed, [2]met den wonderbaaren voorspoed
der Fransche wapenen, welken zo zichtbaar door het Opperwezen
gezegend werden; die hoop werd brandender, toen men vernam, dat zij,
(Neêrlands Verlossers!) hunnen voet reeds op den bodem der republiek
gezet hadden; echter verflaauwde dezelve ook weder niet weinig door het
besef dat de dappere redders nog breede rivieren hadden overtetrekken,
aleer zij tot in ’t harte des lands konden doordringen, om door hunne
verschijning onze onderdrukkers den Vorstlijken Scepter uit de hand te
doen vallen; maar God betoonde allerzichtbaarst onze verlossing te
willen; Hij sprak, en zie daar de gezegde rivieren met zwaar ijs bevloerd;
dit zeker was niet alleen een werk van den Almagtigen, maar een bevel,
om doortedringen; ’t zelve geschiedde, en de Provincie Utrecht gaf zig
weldra aan de Franschen over.

Zo dra de tijding daarvan aan den Amstel gekomen was, zag men de
vreugde op het gelaat der Vrijheidszoonen dartelen; zij verzekerden zig
van hunne verlossing; doch begrepen tevens dat zij ook nu zelven de
handen aan ’t werk moesten slaan, te meer daar de Franschen zulks
reeds van hun gevorderd hadden.

Die verdienstelijke gezelschappen, welken in spijt van allen

dwingelandschen tegenstand, zig onderling hadden bezig gehouden, met
plannen tot eene revolutie te formeeren, of met de beste schikkingen bij
eene voorvallende revolutie te beraamen; deeze gezelschappen
oordeelden het nu tijd te zijn om het voorneemen ter uitvoer te brengen;
zij vergaderden in het logement het wapen van Embden, op den nieuwen
dijk, en zonden, van den geest des volks, over ’t algemeen overtuigd, van
daar (des middags ten 2 uuren,) eene Commissie aan den President-
Burgemeester Straalman, met verzoek van de weldenkende
Ingezetenen wapens te willen doen geeven, dat men anders voor de
geduchtste gevolgen niet konde instaan, want dat het volk over ’t
algemeen niet zoude wachten met de hun schandelijk ontroofde rechten
van mensch en burger krachtdaadig wederteëisschen; dat hij Straalman
verzekerd konde weezen, dat de revolutie op het uitbarsten stond; deeze
begeerde eerst zijne amtgenooten te spreeken, en beloofde derhalven
tegen 4 uuren rapport; maar ten half 5 uuren kwam reeds een Fransch
Officier in de [3]stad, met eene sommatie; des verzochten deeze de
commissie voornoemd, tegen half 9 uuren.——Intusschen was de
toegevloeide menigte volks naar ’t Wapen van Embden onbegrijpelijk
talrijk, en de vreugde die men er bedreef, met zingen, dansen, en
elkander geluk te wenschen met de vrijheid, onvoorbeeldig: terwijl dit
voorviel kwam de burger Krayenhoff als Adjudant van den Generaal
Daendels, in de stad, met eene Commissie aan Burgemeesteren en aan
den Commandant Golofkin, tevens tijding brengende van de hulp die de
burgerij van de Franschen stonden te genieten, zo zij zig zelven wilden
vrij maaken; zo dra dit bekend geworden was, weêrgalmde de lucht van
Vrijheid! Vrijheid! lang leeve de Franschen! lang leeve de Republiek! de
vergaderde menigte in het Wapen van Embden werd nu nog veel talrijker,
het gejuich veel luidruchtiger, en het dansen zo algemeen, dat geheel het
gebouw daverde: den gantschen nacht bragt men aldaar en elders, ja
zelfs op de straaten, met gejuich en vrolijkheid door; de ruiterij nam hun
patrouilles waar; doch, (dit was hun door den Commandant Golofkin
reeds bevolen,) deed niemand leed, en werd ook van niemand leed
gedaan; zelfs waren er verscheidene patrouilles die mede riepen: lang
leeve de Franschen! lang leeve de Republiek! en ook Vivat de Vrijheid!
het was of ’t nationaal lint over de stad regende, en ieder versierde er zig
mede.

Tegen 12 uure des avonds werd van de waag afgelezen dat Golofkin
den volgenden morgen van zijn amt ontzet was, en de burger
Krayenhoff hem alsdan daarin stond optevolgen.

Met de aankomst van den dag, verhief de algemeene vrolijkheid zig op

nieuw, en men zag voor het stadhuis weldra dien Vrijheidsboom planten,
van welken wij onze Landgenooten eene juiste afbeelding mededeelen,
en die ten eeuwigsten dage bij de Nederlanders eenige voorkeur zal
verdienen boven alle anderen (hoeveel prachtiger ook) die daarna gezet
zijn, of nog gezet mogen worden: onbegrijpelijk was de vreugde die bij en
na dit planten bedreeven werd; weldra was de boom in een gladde mast
veranderd; want ieder scheurde er een takjen af, (ja men klom ten dien
einde tot in den top toe,) [4]om er zig mede te vercieren, als met een
onwaardeerbaar teken van Vrijheid; het dansen rondsom den boom was
onophoudelijk, en met de streelendste blijken van égaliteit, alle deeze
vreugdebetooningen duurden bijna drie dagen lang, en werden door het
diepst van den nacht naauwlijks afgebroken.
Voords werd de oude regeering afgezet, en Volksrepresentanten
verkozen: de gevangene Heeren (wegens het bekende request tegen de
Inundatie) werden uit hunne gevangenis gehaald; vervolgends ook de
onderdrukte en gevangene burgers Verlem, Harger en anderen; allen
werden zij met koetsen naar ’t Stadhuis gereden, (na een tour rondsom
den Vrijheidsboom gedaan te hebben,) vergezeld van duizende juichende
medeburgers.

Deeze regels, waarde Landgenooten! oordeelen wij u bij de

nevenstaande afbeelding te moeten aanbieden.

Dat in de tuin van Nederland,

nog lang die boomen groeijen,
Dan zal de zinkende Amstelstad
weêr als voorheenen bloejen,
Verlost van ’t schaadlijk ongediert,
dat leeft van ’t sap der bloemen;
Dan zal nog ’t laatste nageslacht
den moed der Franschen roemen.

[1]
[Inhoud]
’t dorp Ouderkerk aan den Amstel
’t Vermaaklyk OUDERKERK, in ’s Lands historieblaên,
Gedacht; werd wel als schoon geprezen;
Maar nu ’t den Pruis heeft wederstaan,
Zal de eernaam voortaan dapper weezen:
Werd eertyds van dit dorp gemeld,
Nu wordt er wonder van verteld.
 HET
DORP
OUDERKERK
AAN DEN AMSTEL.

Dit Dorp behoort in den breeden rang dier Nederlandsche dorpen van
welken men kan zeggen dat zij zeer aangenaam gelegen zijn:
Ouderkerk ligt in Amstelland, anderhalf uur van Amsteldam, ten oosten
van den breeden rivier de Amstel, welke de tuinen of erven der huizen
van achteren bespoelt: de environs van het dorp zijn zeer grasrijk en
vermaaklijk, met veelvuldige wateren doorsneden: die environs moeten
weleer echter nog veel aangenaamer geweest zijn, naamlijk
boschachtiger, want tusschen dit dorp en Abcoude, zijn meermaals,
eenige voeten onder den grond, veele boomen gevonden; men weet
hoe winden en vloeden het eertijds houtrijk Nederland van veele zijner
bosschen beroofd heeft—de grond is in geheel den omtrek van
Ouderkerk veenachtig en moerassig—te recht noemt de zoetvloejende
Willink hetzelve, ’t luchtig dorp

Daar de Amstelstroom, al even prat,

Gevoerd op een kristallen wagen,
Zo glorierijk door heenen snelt,
En doet de zilvren baartjens vloejen
Om met een zacht en deun geweld,
Zijn groene boorden te besproejen;
Zijn boorden door geen mensch gewraakt.…

[2]

NAAMSOORSPRONG.
Het geen wegens dit artijkel aangetekend wordt, is gelijk ten deezen
opzichte meermaals het geval is, met twijfelingen doorweeven: in
vroegere dagen droeg het den naam van Ouder-amstel, om dat het
onder Ouder-amstel behoort, men wil dat het den naam van Ouderkerk,
in de plaats van dien van Ouder-amstel zoude verkregen hebben, bij
gelegenheid van het stichten van een Nieuwer kerk in Amstelland, het
geen zekerlijk aanneemelijk is, schoon men verschille in de bepaaling
welke die Nieuwer kerk moge geweest zijn; sommigen houden er de
tegenwoordige Oude kerk te Amsteldam voor, om dat deeze weleer den
naam van de Kerk in Nieuweramstel, of Niër-Kerk gedragen heeft; ’t
geen anderen ongerijmd voorkomt, het voor aanneemelijker houdende
dat er de Kerk te Amstelveen door verstaan zoude kunnen worden, om
de benaaming van Nieuwer-amstel, welke dat ambacht draagt: weder
anderen meenen dat men voor die Nieuwe Kerk te houden hebben die
van Nieuwerkerk, sedert lang in de Haarlemmer-meir verdronken—hoe
het zij, uit het een en ander is de naamsoorsprong des dorps nagenoeg
te gissen; althans nagenoeg voor zo verre ons oogmerk gaat; dit alleen
moeten wij er nog bijvoegen, dat dit dorp gemeenlijk Ouderkerk aan den
Amstel genoemd wordt, ter onderscheidinge van een ander dorp
Ouderkerk, dat aan den Yssel ligt.

S T I C H T I N G en G R O O T T E .

Wegens de stichting van Ouderkerk kan niets gezegd worden, alzo het
waarschijnelijk, met veele andere Nederlandsche dorpen eenen
toevalligen oorsprong zal hebben, die meesttijds gezocht moet worden
in de ligging, welke aanleiding gegeven zal hebben dat sommige lieden
zig op zulk eenen grond met er woon hebben nedergezet.

Wat de grootte betreft; het ambacht van Ouderkerk, bestaat [3]in vijf
voornaame polders, zamen groot bijna 3505 morgen lands, waarvan
voor Ouderkerk met Waardhuizen, en Duivendrecht, van ouds niet
hooger zijn geteld, dan op 1542 morgen, 380 roeden; zijnde sedert 30
morgen en 400 roeden daaraf vergraaven voor de bedijking van de
Diemermeir.

In de oude lijst der verpondingen van 1632, stonden voor Ouderkerk,

162 huizen, en in die van 1732, reeds 249 huizen en 4 molens: men
rekent dat er onder Ouderkerk omtrent 750 ingezetenen zijn, zo
mannen, vrouwen als kinderen en dienstboden, zijnde in deeze telling
twee kinderen, onder de agt jaaren, voor één persoon gesteld.

’T WAPEN.

Dit is even als dat van Amstelveen, met dit onderscheid dat voor
Ouderkerk op den ondersten balk twee kruisen staan, daar Amstelveen
op dien balk slechts één kruis heeft.

KERKLIJKE en GODSDIENSTIGE GEBOUWEN.

Weleer had dit dorp een ruime en luchtige Kerk, met een groot choor,
waarvan het dak verre boven dat der Kerk uitrees: de toren was
vierkant, en pronkte tot in den jaare 1674 met een hoogen spitsen kap,
die op den eersten Augustus van dat jaar, tot op het muurwerk des
gebouws nedergeslagen werd: de spits werd naderhand weder
opgebouwd, echter niet zo hoog, hoewel zij zig nog vrij verre vertoonde;
doch het gebouw geheel bouwvallig geworden zijnde, werd in den jaare
1774 afgebroken, en op dezelfde plaats eene geheel nieuwe en nette
Kerk gesticht: zijnde den eersten steen daarvan gelegd door den Heer
Balthazar Nolthenius, Zoon van den Heere Mr. Jeronimus
Nolthenius, toen Secretaris van Ouder-amstel: deeze Kerk heeft van
binnen niets bijzonders, hoewel zij van buiten eene zeer aangenaame
vertooning maakt. [4]

Ten tijde dat de Roomsche Godsdienst in deeze landen de heerschende

was, was de Kerk van dit plaatsjen toegewijd aan den Paus en
Martelaar Urbanus, wordende de Pastorij door de Hollandsche
Graaven begeven; het inkomen van den Priester bestond uit 39
rhijnlandsche guldens van zekere landvruchten, als mede uit de
voordbrengzelen van 6 morgen lands onder Abkoude, en evenveel
anderen onder het ambacht Ouderkerk.

Toen de Hervormde Godsdienst de heerschende was, werden de

Kerken van Amstelveen en Ouderkerk door een zelfden Predikant
bediend; doch omtrent den jaare 1595, viel desaangaande eenige
verandering voor, zodanig dat Ouderkerk zig in het kerklijke met Diemen
vereenigde, wordende deezen beide gemeenten bediend door den
Leeraar Lucas Ambrosius; naderhand Predikant te Amsteldam: toen
beide plaatsen in getal van inwooners merkelijk toegenomen waren,
ontving ieder eenen eigen Leeraar; gelijk ieder gemeente ook nog door
éénen Leeraar bediend wordt: beiden staan onder de Classis van
Amsteldam.

Een Weeshuis is op dit Dorp niet; de weezen en geallimenteerden

worden onder de ingezetenen besteed.

De Roomschen, die onder Ouderkerk zeer talrijk zijn, hebben er twee

Kerkhuizen.

WERELDLIJKE GEBOUWEN.

Onder dit artijkel kan alleen het Rechthuis gebragt worden, zijnde voor
een dorp-gebouw, vrij ongemeen; vóòr hetzelve staat, 1656,
waarschijnlijk het jaar van deszelfs bouwing: in een der muuren zitten
drie kogels door de Pruissen daarin geschoten.

REGEERING.

Deeze bestaat, wat het crimineele betreft, uit den Bailluw, en in het civile
uit Schout, zeven Schepenen en een Secretaris: vier Buurmeesters
hebben, met Schout en Schepenen, ’t bewind over de gemeene zaaken
van ’t ambacht.
De Ambachtsheer kan onder dit artijkel niet ongenoemd blijven, en des
kunnen wij ter deezer gelegenheid ook voegelijk aantekenen dat de stad
Amsteldam deeze Ambachtsheerlijkheid in [5]den jaare 1731 aangekocht
heeft voor eene somma van 25.100 guldens: de sterfheer is gemeenlijk
een der Burgemeesteren van Amsteldam, zijnde thans de Wel Ed.
Achtb. Heer Mr. Nicolaas Faas; de Ambachtsheer oefent echter het
gezach niet uit zig zelven, maar alle zaaken, raakende het ambacht,
worden hem aangediend, en door het collegie van Burgemeesteren
afgedaan, gelijk zulks ook omtrent alle andere heerlijkheden, de stad
toebehoorende, plaats heeft: weleer was de Bailluw zelf Ambachtsheer,
en de goedkeuring of afkeuring van een’ Predikant stond aan hem
alleen, zijnde dit amt tot den jaare 1715, door de oudste geslachten van
Holland bekleed.

VOORRECHTEN.

Hier onder behooren de twee bruggen die op het dorp gevonden

worden; eene van dezelven ligt over den Amstel, naamlijk aan de
noordzijde bij het Rechthuis, en de andere over het water de Bullewijk
genaamd, aan de zuidoostlijke zijde van het dorp: aan beide die
bruggen moeten de doorvaarende schepen, en de daarovergaande
menschen, beesten en rijtuigen, tol betaalen, zijnde het zelve een
inkomen voor de stad als bezitster van de Ambachtsheerlijkheid: in den
jaare 1745, werd het bruggeld verpacht voor ƒ 3000 guldens;
Amsteldam is natuurlijker wijze ook verpligt daarvoor de beide bruggen
te onderhouden, niet alleen, maar ook de straat die aan derzelver
vleugels ligt.

BEZIGHEDEN.

De aangenaame ligging van dit dorp verschaft hetzelve veel

levendigheid, door de menigte wandelaars welken zig ter uitspanninge
derwaards begeeven, maar nog meer door de onnoemelijk veele
rijtuigen welken als onophoudelijk afgaan en aankomen: deeze
levendigheid wordt niet weinig bevorderd door de veele kostbaare en
aangenaame tuinen, welken langs den breeden Amstel gelegen zijn, en
meest toebehoren aan voornaame Amsteldamsche Kooplieden, welken
aldaar de handelzorgen vergeetende, de duffe comptoirlucht voor den
frisschen adem der [6]Natuur verwisselende, ook dikwijls Ouderkerk
gaan bezoeken; al ’t welk het dorp geen gering voordeel aanbrengt;
voeg hierbij het Portugeesche Jooden Kerkhof, ten oosten van de Kerk,
aan de Bullewijk gelegen, ter oorzaake dat op hetzelve menigvuldige
begraavingen geschieden: maar ook wordt Ouderkerk niet weinig
verlevendigd en bevoordeeld door de gestadig doorvaarende schuiten
van Amsteldam, naar Utrecht, den Haag, Delft, Rotterdam, Gouda, als
mede verder nabijgelegene plaatsjens en terug; als mede door de
turfschepen en ponten, die van alom de turf uit de veenen naar
Amsteldam en elders heenvoerende, veelal den Amstel afkomen; wij
zwijgen van eene menigte rijtuigen welken, om verder optetrekken, dit
dorp passeeren: de som bovengemeld, waarvoor de tol te Ouderkerk
verpacht wordt, bewijst genoeg dat het dorp op verre na niet onder de
stille dorpjens geteld moet worden.

Er worden voords die handwerken en neeringen uitgeoefend en gedaan,

welken voor het burgerlijke leven onontbeerelijk zijn; veelen
opgezetenen geneeren er zig ook met den veeteelt, en de turffabriek.

GESCHIEDENISSEN.

Hoe weinig betekenend dit dorpjen, met betrekking tot het Land in ’t
algemeen, of tot het nabij gelegen trotsch Amsteldam in ’t bijzonder,
schijne te zijn, wordt het echter in de Vaderlandsche Historie dikwijls
genoemd, en in het belangrijke fak, dat met onzen tijd begint, bekleedt
het voorzeker eene hoofdplaats.

Hoe geheel Amstelland om zeker bedrijf van Gysbrecht van Amstel,

door de Kennemers onder water gezet en verwoest werd, zullen wij
breedvoerig moeten verhandelen als wij over Amsteldam in het
bijzonder zullen spreeken, hier zij het derhalven genoeg aantetekenen
dat Ouderkerk in dien vreeslijken nood mede niet weinig heeft moeten
lijden, ’t geen ligtlijk te begrijpen is wanneer men nagaat dat alle de
landerijen van geheel Amstelland, in eene openbaare zee veranderd
werden: dit gebeurde [7]omtrent den jaare 1204: eene vergoeding voor
dien grouwzaamen nood was eene stille landlijke rust van ongeveer
anderhalf honderd jaaren, want eerst in den jaare 1567 verschijnt
Ouderkerk weder op het Nederlandsche Staatstooneel, naamlijk ten
tijde van Hendrik van Brederode, die door het aanbieden van het
bekende smeekschrift aan de Hertoginne van Parma, bij de
Spaanschen verdacht geworden, en reeds uit zijne Heerlijkheid Viaanen
verdreven zijnde, zig met eenige bende in of nabij dit dorp nedersloeg,
en zig aldaar bleef oponthouden, tot hij naar elders den wijk nam: zes
jaaren laater, wierpen de Spanjaarden eene schans op rondsom het
Kerkhof en de Kerk van Ouderkerk, ter gelegenheid van de belegering
van Haarlem: dit kleine dorpjen is verder (in 1577) het middel in de hand
der Algemeene Staaten geweest om Amsteldam, toen de eenigste stad
die nog Spaansch gezind was, aan de zijde van Oranje, of wel aan
hunne zijde te brengen; want zij lagen in het dorp veel krijgsvolk, ter
handhavinge van hunne bevelen om aldaar zwaare convoijen en
licenten te vorderen, van alle de goederen welken uit Amsteldam
gevoerd en derwaards gebragt werden; de stad reeds toen eenen
wakkeren handel drijvende, vond zig daardoor ook zodanig bezwaard,
dat zij, om zig van dit jok te ontheffen, besloot den Algemeenen Staaten
te vergenoegen, en de zijde der Spanjaarden te verlaaten.

Sedert dien tijd bleef dit dorp wederom in rust tot op den 30 Julij des
jaars 1650, toen het ten getuige verstrekte van eene daad die eenigen
gaarne uit ’s Lands geschiedenissen gewischt zagen; dezelve is echter
te dikwijls geboekt om ooit door de vergetenheid ingezwolgen te kunnen
worden.

Willem de Tweede, Prins van Oranje, zig door de regeering van

Amsteldam beledigd achtende, wegens den geweigerden toegang in
den vollen raad, zowel als wegens andere Vaderlandlieve gedraagingen
van dien kant, besloot de stad bij [8]verrassching te overrompelen,
welken gevaarlijke aanslag echter, door eene gunstige bestuuring van
de Voorzienigheid, verijdeld werd, door het verdwaalen des krijgsvolks,
wegens de donkerheid van den nacht, en eenen zwaaren stortregen:
Graave Willem van Nassau, Stadhouder van Friesland, was het
geheim bevel van deezen aanslag opgedraagen; gelijk deezen dan ook
met zijne bende te Ouderkerk zijn hoofdquartier verkoos; wordende ten
volgenden dage door eenig krijgsvolk, uit Nijmegen, Utrecht, Arnhem,
Zutphen, Zwol en Doesburg versterkt, doch het dorp geraakte dien
overlast weldra kwijt, doordien de Prins en de Regeering van
Amsteldam tot een minnelijk verdrag kwamen, waaraan de waare
Patriotsche Heeren Bicker echter de aanzienlijke waardigheden,
welken zij in de stad bekleedden opofferden.

Van dien tijd af vinden wij wegens de geschiedenis van Ouderkerk niets
bijzonders gemeld, tot op onzen tijd toe; maar nu heeft het zig eenen
eeuwigen naam verworven, door de manlijke verdediging der Patriotten
aldaar, tegen de als in de wapenrustinge geborene Pruissen, die op den
7 September des jaars 1787, „in ons land vielen, om der Prinsesse van
Oranje voldoening te bezorgen, wegens voorvallen”, kunnen wij met
zeker geacht schrijver onder onze tijdgenooten zeggen, „welke hier de
plaats niet is om dezelve te onderzoeken”; wij blijven, met hem, „alleen
staan bij de dapperheid der patriotten, die bij Ouderkerk zo duidelijk
gebleken is, dat wanneer alle de posten tegen de Pruissen op eene
zodanige wijze verdedigd waren geworden, de geëischte voldoening
van dat hof, waarlijk zo spoedig nog niet zoude gevolgd zijn.”

Ofschoon wij in onze beschrijving van Amstelveen reeds, dat dorp

betreffende, een genoegzaam breed verslag van deeze
allergewichtigste omstandigheid gegeven hebben, kunnen wij echter
niet nalaaten, bij deeze gelegenheid het volgende nog te voegen;
zamen kan het dienen om een recht duidelijk [9]denkbeeld van de
aangelegenheid ter dier plaatse en tijde te kunnen vormen.——Dus
vinden wij het bedoelde geboekt, „Na de Pruissische troupen dan op de
grenzen van Gelderland en Holland de steden Gorcum, Nieuwpoort,
Schoonhoven, en anderen, na weinig tegenstands, ingenomen hadden,
rukten zij verder na beneden, om alle de posten te overmeesteren, en
vervolgends Amsteldam, en andere steden, de zijde der Patriotten
toegedaan, te bedwingen: eenige posten werden gemaklijk, anderen
niet zonder groote moeite veroverd, en voor sommigen stieten de
Pruissen, meer dan ééns, door den moed der Vaderlandsche burgerij,
het hoofd; de Hertog ziende dat niet alles zo gemaklijk gaan zoude, en
ook door berichten vernomen hebbende, dat er zeer veele posten sterk
verdedigd zouden worden besloot tot eenen algemeenen aanval.”

„Bij het geven van het wachtwoord, op den 30 September, des

gemelden jaars, beval hij dat alle Generaals en Commandanten, des
avonds ten zes uuren zig bij hem zouden moeten vervoegen; dit
geschiedde, en zijne Hoogheid deelde alstoen aan zijne Officieren de
bevelen uit, op welke eene wijze de aanvallen den volgenden morgen,
den eersten October, ten 5 uure eenen aanvang zoude moeten
neemen.”

„Zodra de seinschoot,” waarvan wij onder Amstelveen gesproken

hebben „gegeven was, geraakte alles in werking; alomme werden de
patriotsche posten aangevallen, die gedeeltelijk genomen, en
gedeeltelijk met de grootste dapperheid verdedigd werden; kunnende
wij niet nalaaten hier nog bij te voegen, dat waar de verdedigers
moesten bukken, zulks meer toeteschrijven was aan bedekt verraad, of
onkunde hunner bevelhebberen, welken geen orde onder hun volk
hielden, dan aan het volk zelf; dat dit waarheid is blijkt onder anderen uit
den aanval op Ouderkerk.”

Om ons thans bij dit dorp afzonderlijk te bepaalen, zullen wij hier den
stand der Pruissischen troupen, bestemd om Ouderkerk te attaqueeren,
opgeeven. [10]

„De Ritmeester Van Kleist, stond met een detachement ligte infanterij
in de kleine Duivendrechtsche polder.”

„De Ritmeester Zuizow met zijne ligte infanterij, en de Capitein Tschok

met eene compagnie Grenadiers van het regiment van Budberg
stonden op den weg van Abcoude, naar Ouderkerk, bij zig hebbende
een stuk geschut van zes, één van drie pond, en een houwitzer,
benevens de lijfcompagnie curassiers tot hunne ondersteuning.”

„In de Ouderkerker polder moest de Major Ledebur met zijn compagnie

en twee stukken zesponders geposteerd staan, doch deezen kon op
den bepaalden tijd daar niet tegenwoordig zijn, doordien hij over
Mijdrecht en Baamburg had moeten marcheeren.”

„Aan den kant van den Uithoorn stonden 30 Jaagers en twee

Compagniën van Budberg, onder bevel van den Capitein Kokerits,
zonder grof geschut, benevens een esquadron paardenvolk van den
Major Kram.”

„Deeze troupen nu hadden bevel om Ouderkerk te overmeesteren welk

plaatsjen tot zijne verdediging vier onderscheidene batterijen had, die
aan het dorp lagen, en die het den Pruissen meer daar ééns te heet
maakten; men zag daar dat zij deinzen en vallen konden.”

Dat de Patriotten dapper geschoten hebben, hebben de Pruissen zelven

getuigd, daar zij zeiden: „De Patriotten vervolgden ons met hunne
kanonnen onophoudelijk te beschieten; na veele vergeefsche
onderneemingen, en na dat de hooibergen in brand gestoken waren,
werden onze Jaagers door het geschut en door de vijandlijke
scherpschutters, genoodzaakt zig te retireren.”

„De gemelde vier batterijen die zo wèl bestuurd werden, waren op

deeze wijze gelegen: eene lag er bij de hooge brug, bij de
droogmaakerij, welke brug afgebroken was, terwijl deeze batterij met
een twaalfponder en twee zesponders [11]verdedigd werd; recht tegen
over dezelve lag eene andere bij den zogenaamden krommen hoek,
gemonteerd met twee drieponders, een derde lag op den weg na den
Voetangel, op dezelve waren twee zesponders geplaatst; en op de
boerderij voor welke deeze batterij op den weg lag, had men achter het
huis voor het molenvliet eenen drieponder geplaatst: eene vierde batterij
was opgeworpen, op het zwarte weggetjen, en met twee stukken van
zes ponden bewapend.”

„Zo wel het dorp als deeze batterij waren bezet door Amsteldamsche
burgers, door eenigen uit de Geldersche brigade, door Friesche
Auxiliairen en Jaagers, door een gedeelte van het corps van den
beruchten Salm;” wiens gloriezon door een schandelijke en eeuwige
eclips niet verdonkerd, maar geheel onzichtbaar geworden is! „en
voords door eenige Kanonniers en Artileristen, uit Amsteldam en uit de
Auxiliairen: het bevel over deeze zo gewigtige voorpost van Amsteldam
was opgedraagen aan den Wel Ed. Manhaften Heer F. H. de Wilde,
toenmaals Capitein der Burgerij van Amsteldam, en de Vaderlandsche
bende aanvoerende, onder den tijtel van Lieutenant Colonel.”

„De natte en doorweekte grond van Ouderkerk, als ook de menigte

grachten en slooten, verhinderden dat men uit den Duivendrechtschen
polder iet van belang kon verrichten: de bruggen waren veelal
afgebroken, aan veele toegangen doorsnijdingen gemaakt, eenige
anderen waren met geschut bezet, zo dat de Pruissen alhier eene
hevige verdediging te gemoet zagen, en de uitslag deed zien dat zij hier
niet mis gerekend hadden, want deeze voorpost van Amsteldam werd
met veel dapperheid en beleid door de Patriotten verdedigd.”

„Met het seinschoot namen ook hier de onderscheidene aanvallen

eenen aanvang, en de bezettelingen die terstond toonden dat zij deeze
vijandlijkheden te gemoet zagen, gaven den Pruissen een zeer
gevoeligen morgengroet terug.” [12]

„De Colonel Kokeritz, kon van den kant van den Uithoorn niets
verrichten; waarom een Capitein, wiens naam niet gemeld wordt, uit
overdrevenen ijver, met eenige manschappen uit dit detachement
voordrukte om te recognosceeren, wordende hij door een
cardoezenkogel doodgeschoten.”

„In de Ouderkerker polder, alwaar de compagnie van den Capitein

Ledebur stond, en hoewel alleen geschikt tot eenen valschen aanval,
verdedigde deeze zig echter met zo veel manmoedigheid, uit het klein
geweer, dat deeze compagnie eenen wezenlijken lof verdiende.”

„Op den weg van Abcoude naar Ouderkerk, alwaar de Capitein

Tschock, de Ritmeester Zuizow, en de Luitenant der Artillerij Jacobi
met hunne onderhoorige Manschappen, en drie stukken geschut
stonden, werd van beiden de zijden een allerlevendigst en hevigst vuur
gegeven: aan de zijde der Pruissen werden alle houwitsers, granaten en
kogels gebruikt, zonder echter de bezetting veel nadeels toetebrengen,
en de vijand was genoodzaakt meerder ammunitie te doen aanvoeren,
hoewel hij door de smalte van den weg geene stukken geschut meer
konde plaatsen: na dat het gevecht eenen geruimen tijd geduurd had,
en bijna geheel op ’t laatst, rukte aan de zijde van den
Duivendrechtschen polder, op den weg naar de Bullewijk eenige
manschappen met een stuk geschut aan; deeze manschappen, waren
op bevel van den Capitein Tschock met schuiten overgevaaren, en
plaatsen hun stuk geschut recht tegen over eene batterij der bezetting,
om dezelve te dwingen; doch de verdedigers deeden eenen zo hevigen
uitval, dat de vijand terstond de vlugt nam, en het stuk geschut bijna in
handen van de bezettelingen gevallen was.”

„Gemelde Capitein rukte daarop onverschrokken naar de batterij, en bij

aldien de manschappen, die aan de overzijde van den Amstel post
hielden, hem behoorelijk hadden kunnen ondersteunen, ware het niet
onmogelijk geweest, denzelven te veroveren; [13]doch dit ondoenlijk
zijnde, en de Patriotten als leeuwen vechtende voor hunne zaak, was hij
genoodzaakt te wijken, met achterlaating van eenige dooden en
gekwetsten, de Major Diebits, hoewel meer geschikt tot een aanval
tegen Duivendrecht, dit ziende, deed alle mogelijke moeite om uit den
Ouderkerker polder, hem ter hulpe te komen, en vuurde met zo veele
hevigheid en onverschrokkenheid, als wilde hij eenen etna bestormen,
doch het mogt hem almede niet gelukken den moed der Vaderlanderen
te bedwingen, en de batterij inteneemen.”
„Ondertusschen duurden deeze gevechten wederzijds van des morgens
5 tot 8 uuren, waarna de Pruissische troupen genoodzaakt waren van
voor Ouderkerk de wijk te neemen, doch omtrent ten elf uuren, kwamen
de gevlugte manschappen van Amstelveen 1 te Ouderkerk aan, waarop
men,” (nog den moed niet verloren geevende, in tegendeel, met eene
waare krijgsmans beraadenheid,) „eene batterij tegen den weg, langs
welken zij gekomen waren, deed opwerpen; voords ging men met alle
magt de batterij versterken tegen eenen nieuwen aanval; welk werk tot
één uure op den middag werd voordgezet; doch toen kwam er bevel uit
Amsteldam dat het volk van Van Salm, naar de Kalfjeslaan moest
trekken, alwaar mede eene batterij was opgeworpen, zijnde toen de
wegen, welken van Amstelveen op den Amstel uitkwamen, bezet.”

„Daarna vertrok ook de Geldersche brigade, en toen ook moest de

Lieutenant Colonel De Wilde, hoewel de Pruissen geweeken waren
voor zijn beleid en het gedrag der Patriotten, tot zijn grievendst
leedwezen aan de Amsteldamsche burgers en de overige manschappen
bevel geeven om mede optebreeken; dit geschiedde, hoewel
onvergenoegd, echter met veel bedaardheid, zo dat alle de ammunitie
tot de minste kleinigheid toe, mede naar Amsteldam gevoerd werd,
waarmede zij omtrent ten vier uure in den middag, in de stad
aankwamen, gelijk ook alle de manschappen der andere ontruimde
voorposten, welken van het overgaan van Amstelveen, en het verlaaten
van Ouderkerk, in tijds bericht bekomen hadden;” zij weeken, [14]ja maar
zij weeken als helden, als Batavieren nog niet ontaart van den
voorvaderlijken moed: niet te onrecht zongen wij elders die helden dus
toe:

Ja gij zwichtet——met uw zwichten,

Zwichtte ook ’t magtig Amsteldam;
Amsteldam, waaruit u voorraad,
Voorraad en versterking kwam:

Ja gij zwichtet, niet uit lafheid!

Lafheid! des waart ge onbekwaam;