How can the place of dissent in the contemporary university be understood, given that critique today is but a shadow of the critique that once defined the university as the “critic and conscience” of society (University of Auckland Act)? One instance of such contemporary critique was the September 2011 series of protests at the University of Auckland against the corporatisation of the University that were led by the We Are the University (WATU) group and culminated in occupations of the General Library and the Business School’s Owen G. Glenn Building. Though WATU claimed the occupations as an “event” in the name of Badiousian emancipatory politics (Badiou, 2005; see Badiou 2012), to us its critique looked like disruptive opposition, a somewhat nostalgic gesture of sabotage in the sense “of breaking the [University] machine, or hindering [its] function” (The Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 74). Such polemic that disrupts the smooth operation of the University enterprise has critical value, but only “finite” value (Carse, 2013) because it is elitist and easily co-opted.

Here, instead, we develop a model that can enable us to account for changes in the university and the place of dissent within it based on the supplementation of Lacan’s theory of the four discourses – of the master (power), the university (knowledge), the hysteric (resistance) and the analyst (critique) – that structure society (Lacan, 2007; see Foucault 1997). Later, Lacan added a fifth discourse, that of capitalism (Lacan, 1978), which transforms the discourse of the master and informs the corporate university. We add a sixth discourse, that of dissent, which deforms the discourse of capitalism and informs what we call the “pluriversity” (after de Sousa-Santos, 2006). In the market-driven corporate university, the student-subject consumes knowledge to acquire a credential (and the academic-subject produces it to boost their status). However, the pluriversity creates multiple knowledges, driven by a process of collective subjectification (Guattari, 1995). It thus nurtures an everyday post-critical creativity, a social expressivity that has “infinite” value (Carse, 2013) because it is inclusive and open-ended.

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