When familiar words point toward unfamiliar realities

In Yoko Tawada’s (Reference Tawada and Emmerich2018) The Last Children of Tokyo, children develop new senses not because their old ones have failed, but because radiation has transformed what there is to sense. The familiar world persists – trees, buildings, grandparents – yet requires entirely different forms of attention. Languages stretch and break under the pressure of describing realities they were never designed to capture. When the vocabularies we inherited to make sense of the world become strangely inadequate to the worlds we now inhabit, what then?

Contemporary higher education faces precisely this linguistic crisis. Universities find themselves caught in the metacrisis – a condition where our approaches to understanding and solving problems have themselves become the source of new problems. Picture a climate researcher boarding a carbon-intensive flight to present findings about emissions reduction. An AI ethicist whose research depends on the same exploitative labour practices their work critiques. A sustainability coordinator in an institution whose operational logic requires endless growth from a finite planet. Each attempted solution reinforces the patterns generating the original difficulties. These contradictions probably signal something more profound than institutional failure – a civilizational transition that exceeds any institution’s capacity to manage or control. Universities, precisely because they embody these contradictions so completely, may be uniquely positioned to understand and potentially transform them. The art of working with brokenness, rather than achieving seamless functionality, could offer possibilities that wholeness never could.

Learning from stories of impossible conditions

This paper takes its methodological cue from how Tawada approaches such impossible conditions. In the novel, an elderly grandfather cares for his great-grandson Mumei in a near-future Japan where radiation has made the elderly inexplicably robust while children become increasingly fragile. The story unfolds through small, daily encounters – preparing meals, taking walks, navigating a world where familiar categories no longer apply. Rather than explaining or solving the crisis, Tawada allows her narrative to be shaped by it, developing forms of attention adequate to realities that conventional analysis cannot capture.

Following Tawada’s practice, this exploration attempts to embody through argument what Tawada demonstrates through fiction: thinking that allows itself to be affected by the very conditions it seeks to understand. Rather than pure ground-up concept development, this investigation assembles what we might call a “theoretical constellation” – allowing established critical approaches to affect and be affected by each other in the presence of university contradictions. Drawing on the Fitzpatricks’ concept of “surrender,” the investigation allows itself to be shaped by institutional realities while bringing the work of Han, Stengers, Latour, and others not as predetermined analytical tools but as conceptual partners in developing attention adequate to metacrisis conditions. This methodological approach recognises that theoretical work must be transformed through encounter with the specific dynamics of institutional life, creating space for forms of understanding that neither theory alone nor institutional analysis alone could generate. For universities experiencing metacrisis conditions, this suggests developing institutional capacities for being affected by contradictions they cannot resolve rather than rushing toward analytical closure that forecloses transformation.

But what does such methodological surrender actually look like in educational practice? Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics provides one way to think about it – not aesthetics as decoration, but as the fundamental distribution of what can be perceived, thought, and experienced within institutional life. His notion of “dissensus” suggests that rather than seeking analytical consensus that forecloses transformation, educational inquiry might create space for “the manifestation of a gap in the sensible itself” (Rancière, Reference Rancière and Corcoran2010a, p. 38). This connects directly to the Fitzpatricks’ surrender: both approaches require allowing institutional contradictions to affect our capacity for perception rather than rushing toward resolutions that might eliminate the very tensions from which new educational possibilities emerge.

The art of golden repair

Like poetry, this exploration doesn’t resolve contradictions but creates space where multiple realities can coexist without one colonising the others. Rather than applying external analytical frameworks to university problems, we develop forms of attention that emerge from within the conditions universities themselves create and inhabit. This means allowing our argument to be shaped by the temporal disruptions, linguistic displacements, and categorical breakdowns that characterise metacrisis conditions – not as obstacles to clarity but as invitations to different kinds of understanding.

How might such attention actually work in educational contexts? The convergence of Tawada’s narrative approach with kintsugi aesthetics – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold – offers one way of thinking about this challenge. We approach this practice not as cultural appropriation but as an invitation to engage with aesthetic traditions that modernity’s colonial matrix sought to marginalise. Unlike Western restoration that aims to make damage invisible, kintsugi acknowledges genuine breakage while investing precious materials in repair. The gold doesn’t make breaking beautiful – it marks where attention was required to hold fragments together. For educational institutions, this suggests responses that acknowledge rather than hide institutional stress while taking seriously what such stress reveals about how universities organise themselves. Then what would it mean to read institutional breaking patterns as information rather than simply problems to solve? When universities experience budget pressures, faculty burnout, or student mental health crises, the typical response focuses on immediate fixes – more funding, better wellness programmes, increased efficiency measures. But what if these stress points contain information about deeper contradictions built into how universities function? What if responding adequately means developing new capacities for institutional attention rather than returning to previous forms of operation?

Four movements through institutional contradiction

The investigation unfolds in four related movements, each attempting to embody the kind of patient and careful attention that transformation requires. We begin by tracing modernity’s formative story – exploring how particular philosophical and colonial processes came to shape what universities recognise as legitimate knowledge and how they organise intellectual life. This exploration reveals how the metacrisis emerges not from the failure of modern thinking but from its extraordinary success – its capacity to remake the world according to its own image while rendering alternative ways of knowing invisible or impossible. Building from this foundation, we examine how these deeper patterns manifest in the daily operations of contemporary higher education. Universities embody generator functions – deep patterns that create problems through the very mechanisms designed to solve them. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s analysis of temporal acceleration, Isabelle Stengers’ work on slow science, and Bruno Latour’s examination of hybrid networks, we explore how these thinkers’ broader cultural critiques help us look into why institutional contradictions intensify rather than resolve under contemporary educational pressures. This analysis leads toward a different kind of response – one inspired by kintsugi, which repairs broken pottery with gold not to make breaking beautiful, but to acknowledge damage while investing precious materials in holding fragments together. The exploration concludes by gathering these various threads to consider “crack literacy” – the institutional capacity to read patterns of breaking as information about systemic stress rather than individual failure, and to respond with forms of attention patient and costly enough to allow unprecedented possibilities to emerge from necessary repair work.

Rather than offering blueprints for institutional transformation, this paper invites a different kind of engagement altogether. Like Tawada’s characters learning to sense transformed realities, we may need to develop capacities for institutional perception that do not yet exist. In this sense, the concepts and connections explored here may require time to develop their full implications, like the urushi lacquer in kintsugi that needs weeks to cure into permanent strength. The invitation is not to implement but to be affected – to allow these ideas to work on institutional imagination in ways that immediate application might foreclose. The question is whether institutions can develop the sensitivity to read what their own breaking patterns are trying to show them about where attention needs to be invested. Perhaps the most honest response is acknowledging that these contradictions require ongoing attention rather than resolution – attention that institutions may or may not prove capable of sustaining.

The story of modernity: how knowledge got divided against itself

Why this story matters

Before we can understand how universities embody the metacrisis, we must first trace the deeper currents that shaped what counts as legitimate knowledge and how intellectual life gets organised. The contradictions that now tear at contemporary higher education – the impossible demands for both efficiency and depth, both global relevance and local care, both critical thinking and practical utility – are not accidental institutional failures but symptoms of much older philosophical and colonial processes that continue to operate beneath the surface of academic life.

This is not a story we tell to assign blame or indulge in historical nostalgia, but because the patterns established centuries ago continue to generate the recursive problems that Schmachtenberger identifies as the metacrisis. Universities cannot address their contemporary contradictions without understanding how these contradictions emerged from modernity’s foundational assumptions about knowledge, nature, and human relationship. Like Tawada’s characters who find that their inherited languages no longer correspond to their transformed realities, we need to understand how the vocabularies that shaped higher education were designed for a different world than the one we now inhabit.

What follows is not a comprehensive exploration but an examination of how particular philosophical and colonial processes came to establish the deep patterns that still organise academic life – patterns that now produce problems through the very mechanisms designed to solve them. Understanding this formative story reveals why the metacrisis cannot be resolved through better management or strategic planning, but requires the kind of fundamental reorientation that only becomes possible when we recognise how thoroughly our current approaches are embedded in assumptions that may no longer serve the worlds we need to create.

The great sundering

There was once a time when the world was whole. Not perfect, not harmonious in any romantic sense, but connected in ways that made separation unthinkable. The rain knew the soil, the soil knew the roots, the roots knew the leaves, and the leaves knew the sky. Humans moved within this web, participants rather than observers, woven into patterns they helped create but did not control.

Then came the great sundering.

René Descartes (Reference Descartes1996), sitting by a fire in a small room in 1619, experienced what he called his “day of discovery” – the revelation that the thinking self could doubt everything except its own existence. Cogito ergo sum. Though scholars continue to debate whether this famous phrase should be translated as “I think, therefore I am” or “I am thinking, therefore I exist,” the fundamental insight remains the same – the establishment of the thinking subject as the one indubitable foundation for knowledge. But what was this “I” that thought? And what was this world that could be doubted, measured, known from the outside? In that moment of supposed clarity, the world split in two. Mind here, matter there. The thinking subject over here, the extended world over there. The knower separate from the known.

This was not discovery but manufacture – what Bruno Latour (Reference Latour and Porter1993) would later call the “Great Divide,” a purification that had perhaps never actually existed but which modern thought needed to believe in to function. Modernity created

The genius and tragedy of modernity lay in this double movement – proliferating connections while denying their existence. The Enlightenment built practical architecture upon this philosophical foundation. Max Weber (Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946) identified the process as disenchantment – Entzauberung – the clearing away of spirits and charms, the sobering recognition that the world was just matter in motion, governed by mathematical laws that human minds could decode. But this was, perhaps, the deepest enchantment of all.

The modern world practiced its own forms of sorcery, mobilising particular ways of thinking while making them appear natural, inevitable, universal. As Isabelle Stengers (Reference Stengers and Bononno2010) observes,

This was the ultimate trick – convincing the world that its own ways of knowing were mere projections while presenting one particular way of knowing as the revelation of reality itself. In fact, this philosophical transformation demanded a new relationship between knowledge and power. And it was Francis Bacon who mainly provided the blueprint for this new relationship. Nature, he declared, must be “bound into service” and made a “slave” through experimental investigation (Merchant, Reference Merchant2014). It is clear that the metaphors revealed how the new science imagined its relationship to the world it studied. Knowledge became power, and power meant domination.

The colonial matrix and the great machine

But this philosophical revolution did not occur in a vacuum – it was inseparable from the material processes of colonial expansion that were simultaneously reshaping the world. Here we must recognise the colonial matrix of power – modernity was not simply a European intellectual development but a global process constituted through colonial violence (Mignolo, Reference Mignolo2011). As Arturo Escobar (Reference Escobar2007) observes: “Modernity is not just a European phenomenon but the result of the constitutive relation between Europe and its others; there is no modernity without coloniality” (p. 179).

The European universities that became temples of modern reason were simultaneously institutions that excluded, erased, and appropriated other ways of knowing. The same Cartesian method that split mind from matter also split the rational European subject from the irrational colonial other. Indigenous knowledge systems that had sustained complex civilisations for millennia were dismissed as primitive superstition. What emerged was a planetary project that established one particular way of knowing as universal while systematically destroying alternatives – what Escobar (Reference Escobar2018) terms “the Modern/Colonial world system.” This philosophical and colonial transformation gave rise to a paradigm shift of unprecedented scale – the emergence of a rather mechanistic worldview that transformed not just how we understood nature, but what counted as legitimate knowledge itself. The universe became a vast clockwork, operating according to mathematical laws that left no room for purpose, meaning, or agency except in the human mind that observed it from outside.

It cannot be denied that modernity delivered remarkable achievements: vaccines that eliminated smallpox, antibiotics that saved millions, democratic institutions that expanded political participation, technologies that connected distant families. These were not side effects but direct expressions of its deepest aspirations. The problem was never with these aspirations but - and we cannot stress this enough - with the assumption that one way of reasoning could serve all purposes, that one method could answer all questions, that one world could contain all possibilities. Yet this success came at a cost. Galileo’s insistence that nature was written in mathematics meant that qualities that could not be mathematized – colour, taste, beauty, meaning – were relegated to subjective experience (Whitehead, Reference Whitehead1925). The world split into primary qualities (measurable, objective, real) and secondary qualities (felt, subjective, somehow less real).

The disciplinary archipelago

In universities, this cosmological shift transformed how knowledge itself was organised. What had once been natural philosophy – a unified inquiry into the nature of things – fractured into separate domains. Physics studied matter in motion, chemistry studied atomic combinations, biology studied living systems, each developing its own methods, languages, institutional structures. This was not innocent specialisation but a particular way of organising inquiry that made certain questions askable while rendering others invisible. Students learned to think in boxes. The rain that once knew the soil was now studied by meteorologists who did not speak to paedologists. Words themselves became disciplinary property – “nature” belonged to biology, “culture” to anthropology, “mind” to psychology, as if language could be carved up like territory.

By the eighteenth century, this way of thinking had become a self-reinforcing system that produced the very conditions it claimed to discover. The more the world was treated as mere matter, the more it behaved like mere matter. The more knowledge was divided into disciplines, the more reality appeared to be disciplinary. Modernity cultivated the art of presenting what it fabricated as not fabricated by it, as imposed by the objects it interrogated (Stengers, Reference Stengers and Bononno2010).

The consequences accumulated slowly at first, then with gathering speed. The Great Acceleration – the period since 1950 when human impacts on planetary systems became exponential – was the working out of ideas first formulated in seventeenth-century philosophy and refined through centuries of colonial practice (Steffen et al., Reference Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney and Ludwig2015). Universities found themselves trapped within the very systems they had helped create, needing constant growth to survive while existing within economic systems that also required constant extraction from a finite planet. This is one of the fundamental challenges of our time – how to imagine and create worlds beyond the Modern/Colonial matrix that has shaped not only how we know but how we can imagine knowing. The story of modernity is the story of how alternatives were systematically eliminated, how the pluriverse was reduced to a universe, how many worlds became one world – and how that one world is now revealing its unsustainability.

For universities today, this history is not past but present. Understanding how we arrived at this point becomes essential for recognising why conventional approaches to institutional reform consistently reproduce the patterns they attempt to address. Yet this “story” of modernity’s trajectory – from Cartesian sundering through colonial expansion to disciplinary fragmentation – faces substantial contemporary resistance, or perhaps they are just different stories. In either case, there are those who see acceleration and disruption not as symptoms of civilizational crisis but as tools for transformation. These voices challenge the very premise that modernity’s patterns generate recursive problems requiring patient repair. For example, Srnicek and Williams (Reference Srnicek and Williams2015) envision a different future where the very speed Han identifies as destructive becomes harnessed for postcapitalist liberation, where technological acceleration serves emancipatory rather than extractive purposes. From this perspective, the temporal acceleration that fragments educational experience could be redirected toward social justice if properly orchestrated. Similarly, Christensen and Eyring (Reference Christensen and Eyring2011) argue that higher education requires more breaking, not patient repair – that universities must embrace “disruptive innovation” to survive, fundamentally restructuring their operational DNA through technological solutions rather than attending to institutional contradictions as meaningful information. McCaffery (Reference McCaffery2019) extends this logic, suggesting that institutional flexibility and rapid adaptation represent evolutionary advantages in an accelerating world rather than symptoms of deeper structural problems.

These voices assume that breaking generates innovation, that speed enables responsiveness, that market pressures forge necessary efficiencies. Latour himself offers yet another challenge to genealogical critique, arguing that scholarly work should move toward “assembling” rather than dismantling. “The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers,” he suggests, “but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” (Reference Latour2004, p. 246).

Yet perhaps the exploration of kintsugi and crack literacy that follows attempts precisely such assembly – not debunking university practices but creating conceptual space where practitioners might gather around institutional contradictions with different forms of attention. The question that emerges is whether what we will explore as recursive institutional contradictions require forms of assembly that resist the imperative for immediate construction, allowing time for patient attention to what breaking patterns actually reveal.

The metacrisis in higher education: when stories change direction

What happens when crisis becomes the crisis?

The term “metacrisis” emerged in the early 2020s to name something that existing vocabulary could not quite capture. Unlike “polycrisis” – from the Greek polys meaning “many” – which suggests multiple separate crises occurring simultaneously, “metacrisis” employs the prefix meta, meaning “beyond,” “after,” or “about.” This etymological distinction points toward something more troubling than multiple problems coinciding: a condition where our very approach to understanding and solving problems has itself become the source of new problems. Which raises an uncomfortable question: what happens when the cure becomes the disease?

Schmachtenberger (Reference Schmachtenberger2022) describes the metacrisis as emerging from “generator functions” – the deep patterns of thought and social organisation that produce cascading failures across multiple domains simultaneously. “The metacrisis,” he explains, “is not any particular crisis, but the crisis of the crisis-generating systems themselves – the underlying dynamics that make it such that our problem-solving creates new problems faster than it solves the original ones” (p. 15). This recursive quality distinguishes the metacrisis from previous civilizational challenges: our solutions have become indistinguishable from our problems, creating what Tawada might recognise as a kind of linguistic vertigo where familiar words point toward unfamiliar realities.

This is not to suggest that universities today operate exclusively through colonial/universalist frameworks. Universities have indeed made significant advances in diversifying epistemological approaches – what R’boul (Reference R’boul2022) terms the emergence of “epistemological polylogues” that create space for multiple ways of knowing to interact rather than compete. The extensive documentation of decolonising curriculum and pedagogy across disciplines (Shahjahan et al., Reference Shahjahan, Estera, Surla and Edwards2022) reveals genuine institutional efforts to challenge Western epistemic dominance. Universities have increasingly adopted community-based pedagogies, Indigenous research methodologies, and epistemic justice approaches (for examples of such practices, see Ocriciano, Reference Ocriciano2025). Yet these alternative approaches often exist within organisational structures, evaluation systems, and resource allocation processes that continue to reflect modern/colonial patterns of knowledge hierarchy and temporal acceleration. The metacrisis emerges precisely from this productive tension – universities simultaneously accommodate diverse ways of knowing while organising institutional life through logics that systematically undermine the conditions such knowledge traditions require to flourish.

Universities present a particularly acute case because they embody the metacrisis in its purest form: they are institutions explicitly created to solve civilizational problems through the systematic production of knowledge, yet the ways they now produce knowledge have become deeply implicated in generating the very civilizational problems they claim to address. Universities address climate change by producing research that depends on carbon-intensive conference travel and publication systems that accelerate the emissions their findings warn against. They study inequality while organising themselves through hierarchical structures that would make a mediaeval guild blush. They research mental health while creating working conditions that produce unprecedented levels of anxiety and burnout among students and faculty. Each attempted solution reinforces the patterns generating the original problems. This is not simply institutional hypocrisy – though there’s certainly enough of that to go around. Something more systematic appears to be operating, something that Byung-Chul Han (Reference Han and Butler2017) identifies as a fundamental transformation in how power functions that makes resistance nearly impossible by eliminating the conceptual frameworks through which resistance might be understood.

Han’s violence of positivity: when solutions become sorcery

To understand how universities embody the metacrisis, we must first grasp Han’s analysis of “the violence of positivity” – a form of power that operates not through prohibition but through endless imperatives to optimise, achieve, and self-actualise. Traditional disciplinary power worked through external constraints: “You must not.” But contemporary power operates through what appears to be freedom: “You can do anything. You should optimize everything. You must achieve your potential.”

“Today,” Han (Reference Han and Butler2012) writes, “exploitation does not happen against the will of the exploited. Rather, the exploited believe that they are realizing themselves” (p. 6). This creates a more total form of control because it eliminates the possibility of resistance by making subjects complicit in their own domination.

Universities exemplify this dynamic with extraordinary precision. Students experience academic pressure not as imposed burden but as opportunity for self-optimisation. They compete for admission to increasingly selective programmes, accumulate credentials that promise future success, optimise their performance across multiple domains simultaneously. When they burn out, fail, or struggle, they interpret these outcomes as personal inadequacy rather than systemic contradiction. “I should have worked harder,” they think, rather than “Perhaps this system is insane.”

Gert Biesta’s (Reference Biesta2022) concept of “educational anaesthetics” captures this dynamic well – educational practices that, rather than awakening students to the world, “induce a state of slumber” by encouraging them “to stay with themselves, to pursue their own learning trajectories, regulate their own learning, define their own learning needs, but never interrupted, never turned, never stopped in their tracks” (p. 222).

Faculty internalise parallel patterns with professional devotion. We pursue research agendas that align with funding priorities while experiencing this alignment as intellectual freedom. The impossibility of meeting combined demands for excellence in teaching, service, and scholarship gets interpreted as individual failure rather than structural violence. “I need better time management,” faculty tell themselves, rather than questioning why intellectual work has been organised like factory production.

This form of power proves particularly insidious because it transforms subjects into what Han (Reference Han and Butler2017) calls “entrepreneurs of their own existence.” They become “simultaneously exploiter and exploited, master and slave, in ways that eliminate the conceptual frameworks through which domination might be recognised and opposed” (p. 9).

The temporal sorcery: how universities destroy the conditions for education

This violence of positivity that transforms subjects into entrepreneurs of their own existence operates not only through psychological mechanisms but through the very organisation of institutional time. Han’s analysis of “dyschronic time” reveals how the violence of positivity operates through the systematic fragmentation of temporal experience in ways that eliminate the conditions necessary for the activities institutions claim to value most highly. Originally conceived as spaces for skholé – what Masschelein and Simons (Reference Masschelein and Simons2013) describe in their analysis of schooling as “free time” that creates a particular time, space and matter through suspension from daily economic and political occupations – universities historically shared this educational foundation. While Masschelein and Simons focus on primary and secondary education, their thoughts about skholé prove crucial for understanding what higher education is currently like. They argue that skholé functions through “de-privatisation or de-appropriation,” creating conditions where both students and teachers can be freed from assigned social roles to engage in study and exercise disconnected from immediate economic or political utility (p. 45). This scholastic time allows for what they call “suspension” – a temporary withdrawal from predetermined social positions that makes genuine encounter with knowledge possible. Yet Han (Reference Han and Butler2017) observes that “time as a scarce resource leads to a particular temporal regime, which one could call ‘time without time.’ It is a time that does not allow for rest, duration, or completion” (p. 23). Universities, despite their historical connection to scholastic time, have become primary sites where such temporal conditions are systematically destroyed, making genuine educational encounter increasingly difficult.

Academic calendars embody this temporal regime perfectly. Semesters divide education and more specifically learning into arbitrary units that optimise bureaucratic efficiency rather than intellectual development. Courses compress complex subjects into standardised timeframes that usually prevent the patient dwelling that understanding requires. What Han (Reference Han and Butler2017) calls “the art of lingering” (Verweilen) – the patient dwelling with phenomena that allows their complexity to reveal itself over time – becomes not just difficult but literally quite unthinkable within university temporalities.

Students rush through reading assignments to complete course requirements rather than allowing texts to transform how they think and see the world. Faculty produce research outputs to meet evaluation criteria rather than pursuing questions that might require years of patient investigation. The temporal rhythms that would make genuine education possible become obstacles to academic success. What universities may have lost is what one of Tawada’s characters recognises as the difference between “supervision” and “observation” (p. 79). Contemporary universities tend to supervise – measuring productivity, tracking outputs, monitoring engagement. Observation would require the temporal patience that Han identifies as disappearing under conditions of acceleration, the capacity to attend to how time actually moves through bodies and communities rather than controlling how it should move. When institutions supervise rather than observe, they fragment temporal experience into measurable moments rather than allowing the sustained rhythms that meaning-making requires. Under these conditions, both students and faculty lose access to what Han (Reference Han and Butler2017) calls “narrative time” – temporal rhythms that create coherent meaning through sequence, development, and completion. Instead, they inhabit what he describes as “atomized time” – fragmented moments that resist integration into meaningful patterns (p. 45).

Stengers’ slow science: learning to be affected vs. Fast knowledge

But how might universities work differently with time and knowledge production? Isabelle Stengers’ distinction between “slow science” and “fast science” provides crucial guidance for understanding how the metacrisis manifests specifically through knowledge production practices. “The point,” Stengers argues, “is not to slow down science, but to resist the obligation to go fast, to resist the pressure that makes us mobilize innovations without taking the time to think through their consequences” (Stengers, 2007 p. 87). Fast science operates through apparent efficiency: rapid publication cycles, immediate application of research findings, quick responses to emerging challenges. Yet Stengers (Reference Stengers and Muecke2018) reveals how such apparent efficiency actually undermines the capacities that make science valuable for addressing complex problems. Fast science produces what she calls “ready-made science” – knowledge that can be quickly mobilised for predetermined purposes rather than developed through patient engagement with phenomena that might challenge existing assumptions.

Universities embody this dynamic perfectly. Research often gets organised around funding cycles that require predetermined outcomes rather than open-ended inquiry. Publication pressures reward quick results over sustained investigation. Interdisciplinary collaboration gets structured through administrative frameworks that eliminate the time necessary for different knowledge traditions to genuinely affect each other. But Stengers (Reference Stengers and Muecke2018) reveals something even more troubling: fast science eliminates not only temporal patience but the fundamental epistemological capacity for “learning to be affected” by the phenomena under investigation. “Learning to be affected,” she explains, “means learning to be affected by what is not obvious, by what does not conform to our expectations, by what comes from elsewhere” (p. 58). This capacity proves essential for addressing challenges like climate change that exceed existing conceptual frameworks and demand forms of attention that can be genuinely surprised by what they encounter. What might such attention actually look like? In Tawada’s novel, Mumei develops this form of perception when “the map of the world was starting to look like an X-ray of his own internal organs” (p. 85) – an ability to see external structures and internal vulnerabilities as intimately connected, to allow what appears distant to affect what feels most interior. This capacity may emerge through vulnerability itself, through being affected by realities that conventional frameworks cannot accommodate. Slow science would take time to develop such sensitivity. It allows phenomena to reveal aspects that quick analysis would miss. It creates space for “thinking in the presence of” complex realities rather than thinking about them from positions of detached observation.

Universities struggle with this distinction because they remain organised around modern epistemology’s fantasy of neutral observation. Research subjects become objects to be studied rather than agents capable of affecting researchers. Knowledge gets extracted from communities rather than developed through collaborative relationship. Students consume information produced by expert faculty rather than participating in collective inquiry processes that might change everyone involved. Even interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches – often celebrated as innovations – represent attempts to reconfigure what was once the norm: the unified inquiry that characterised natural philosophy before the disciplinary fragmentation of the eighteenth century.

Latour’s translation networks: the hidden hybrids of university life

These temporal and pedagogical contradictions connect to an even deeper institutional paradox that Bruno Latour’s analysis of “translation” and “hybrid networks” helps clarify. Translation describes the actual processes through which knowledge gets produced: scientists work with instruments that mediate between human and non-human agencies; researchers depend on networks of collaboration that exceed any individual’s comprehension; knowledge emerges through experimental practices that transform both investigators and phenomena under investigation.

Universities depend entirely on such translation networks. Climate research requires collaboration between atmospheric scientists, computer modellers, field researchers, indigenous knowledge holders, policy analysts, and non-human actors including ice cores, weather stations, and satellite data. Even seemingly abstract philosophical work emerges through networks that include libraries, conferences, peer reviewers, and intellectual traditions that span centuries and continents. Yet universities must simultaneously maintain “purification” practices that deny the hybrid character of knowledge production. They organise research into discrete disciplines as if different domains of reality existed independently. They separate theoretical from practical knowledge as if thought could occur outside the material networks that sustain it. They maintain distinctions between objective research and subjective experience as if knowledge production could occur outside the cultural relationships that actually enable it.

This creates what Latour (Reference Latour and Porter1993) recognises as the fundamental contradiction of modern institutions: they “allow the practice of translation on the condition that it be bracketed, countered, and symmetrically denied by a practice of purification” (p. 42). Universities must acknowledge the collaborative and hybrid character of knowledge production in their actual research practices while maintaining official commitments to individual expertise, disciplinary autonomy, and objective neutrality that such practices make impossible.

Climate change makes this contradiction unsustainable because it reveals the hybrid networks that universities depend on while denying. There is no “natural” climate that exists independently of industrial civilisation’s effects. There is no “objective” climate science that occurs outside the political and economic relationships that both enable and constrain such science.

The metacrisis emerges precisely from this gap between what universities must do to function and what they officially claim to be doing. Each attempt to resolve the contradiction through better management, clearer policies, or strategic planning is likely to only intensify the underlying tension, creating new problems faster than the old ones can be addressed. This recursive dynamic brings us back to Tawada’s point about language breaking under pressure: universities find themselves using vocabularies designed for a different world than the one they now inhabit.

The metacrisis as educational paradox

These analyses converge to reveal universities as perhaps the purest embodiment of the metacrisis: they are institutions explicitly designed to solve civilizational problems through knowledge production that have become the primary mechanisms through which knowledge production generates civilizational problems. Universities embody Han’s violence of positivity by transforming learning into self-optimisation that eliminates the temporal and attentional conditions necessary for genuine education. They exemplify the elimination of Stengers’ “learning to be affected” by organising research around fast science imperatives that prevent the patient sensitivity that complex problems require. They depend on Latour’s hybrid networks while maintaining purifications that make it impossible to work consciously with such networks.

This creates an educational paradox that exceeds conventional approaches to institutional reform. Universities need to cultivate practices adequate to challenges that their own organisational structures make difficult to address. They must develop sensitivity to consequences that their operational logics systematically obscure.

Schmachtenberger (Reference Schmachtenberger2022) suggests that addressing the metacrisis requires “adequate sensemaking” – forms of collective intelligence that can work with rather than against the complexity of contemporary conditions. “The question,” he argues, “is whether we can develop the collective intelligence necessary to navigate the phase transition we’re in without causing more harm than the problems we’re trying to solve” (p. 28).

Universities may be uniquely positioned for such work precisely because they embody the contradictions they would need to address. But recognising this paradox creates an opening. If universities are the metacrisis in microcosm, they may also contain the seeds of its transformation. The contradictions that make university life increasingly difficult might be precisely the breaks through which different forms of educational relationship could emerge – if institutions could develop what we will explore as “crack literacy” – the capacity to read such breaking patterns as information rather than exclusive failure, and to respond with forms of attention patient enough to allow unprecedented possibilities to emerge.

Attention to the Cracks: Kintsugi as metacrisis response

What if the metacrisis is teaching universities something similar? In Tawada’s irradiated Tokyo, the old man understands that breaking is not failure – it’s information. Each crack tells a story about stress patterns, material properties, the relationship between force and form. The art lies not in preventing breakage, but in reading what the breaking reveals.

Enter kintsugi (金継ぎ), the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold – a practice that begins not with philosophical reflection but with the material reality of breakage. When a ceramic bowl cracks, conventional Western restoration seeks to hide the damage, making the object appear untouched by accident or time. Kintsugi follows a different logic entirely. The artisan carefully collects each fragment, assessing where the break has occurred and how the pieces might be reassembled. Rather than using invisible adhesives, the repair involves urushi – a natural lacquer derived from tree sap – mixed with powdered gold, silver, or copper. This mixture serves both structural and aesthetic functions: it binds the fragments together while creating visible seams that trace the history of breaking and repair.

The process cannot be rushed. Urushi requires weeks to cure properly, demanding a temporal patience that contradicts contemporary expectations of immediate restoration. The resulting object functions as well as before – it holds water, serves tea, participates in daily ritual – but it carries the permanent record of its breaking. The golden seams do not conceal damage but transform it into something else entirely: not celebration of breaking, but acknowledgement that breaking happened and that careful attention was required to hold fragments together differently. We approach this practice not as cultural appropriation but as an invitation to learn from aesthetic traditions that modernity’s colonial matrix sought to marginalise – recognising that such engagement requires the kind of patient attention to difference that colonial extraction systematically eliminated. The golden seams become visible evidence of transformation – not hiding the damage but marking where precious materials were required to hold fragments together. For universities caught in the double-bind of the metacrisis, kintsugi offers something more radical than reform: a reorientation toward working with institutional damage through worthy repair rather than cosmetic fixes.

The depth of breaking

When pottery breaks, the crack often follows lines of weakness that were always already there – stress points built into the clay during formation, tensions between different types of material, places where the firing process created internal contradictions. The break doesn’t create these fault lines; it reveals them. Similarly, the metacrisis isn’t breaking the university so much as making visible the contradictions that were always present in its structure.

So what has broken? The question itself may assume a prior wholeness that kintsugi does not require. When “the university is, after all, a Western idea” gets invoked as self-evident foundation – as if this settles the matter – it reveals precisely the naturalised Eurocentrism that crack literacy attempts to read as information rather than accept as ground. The story of modernity we have traced before focuses on European philosophical and colonial processes, yet what we recognise as universities emerged through multiple civilizational traditions: Nalanda’s sophisticated epistemological frameworks in India (427 AD), Sungkyunkwan’s Confucian scholarship in Korea (1398), Al-Qarawiyyin’s Islamic learning in Morocco (859 AD), the Aztec calmecacs’ integration of cosmic and practical knowledge, African Ubuntu-based educational systems, alongside the mediaeval European institutions that later claimed universal status (Ocriciano, Reference Ocriciano2025). What broke was perhaps not some essential university form but the colonial fiction that one particular institutional model could represent universal higher education. Rather than seeking to restore some imagined wholeness, crack literacy reads the actual breaking patterns – where do institutions fracture under stress? What do these fractures reveal about competing values and impossible demands?

Consider the university’s foundational paradox – or rather, foundational paradoxes, since these fault lines are multiple. As explored through the story of modernity, the university promises both critique and compliance, both questioning everything and producing useful citizens, both universal knowledge and particular cultural transmission. These tensions have generated tremendous creative energy for centuries (and also much less desirable effects). But under metacrisis conditions, they become literally impossible to hold simultaneously using conventional institutional logic.

The traditional response is to choose sides – either embrace the market fully or reject it entirely, either go global or stay local, either prioritise efficiency or care. But what if these dichotomies themselves are part of the problem? Kintsugi suggests something more unsettling: that the fragments of institutional life might need to be held together precisely because they cannot be reconciled. Not because their tension generates beautiful possibilities, but because working with rather than against such tensions may be the only way institutions can survive their own contradictions without fragmenting completely. This requires developing “crack literacy” – the ability to read institutional breaking patterns as information rather than mere failure. When universities experience budget crises, the crack often runs along the line between teaching and research, or between humanities and STEM, or between tenured and contingent faculty. These breaks reveal the stress points where different value systems meet. What kind of institutional response might acknowledge all of these values without pretending they can be harmoniously reconciled?

The temporality of gold

Kintsugi cannot be rushed. The urushi lacquer – a natural tree sap that hardens into an incredibly durable finish – mixed with powdered gold must cure slowly, sometimes taking weeks to reach full strength. Archaeological evidence suggests that urushi has been used in East Asia for over 9,000 years (Webb, Reference Webb2000), prized for its resilience and beauty, but it demands patience. This temporal requirement is not incidental but essential – the urushi needs time to form bonds that will hold for a long a time.

Universities experiencing metacrisis face enormous pressure to respond quickly – to adapt rapidly to changing student needs, to innovate constantly, to produce immediate solutions to complex problems. But what if responses that matter require something different from speed? Rather than “temporal translation,” what if institutions need to develop what we might call “temporal resistance” – the capacity to resist the imperative for immediate response when deeper forms of attention are required?

Some aspects of institutional life do need immediate attention. What Biesta (Reference Biesta2020) calls the “qualification” domain of education – ensuring students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate their immediate contexts – demands constant responsiveness to changing economic and social conditions. This qualification dimension, while crucial, has increasingly come to dominate educational discourse, overshadowing what Biesta identifies as education’s equally important “socialization” and “subjectification” functions (Biesta has written extensively about this, see Biesta, Reference Biesta2020 for example). Yet institutions face a temporal paradox: they cannot abandon qualification functions, but focusing exclusively on them may undermine the slower processes through which deeper educational transformation becomes possible.

But rather than resolving this tension, what if universities learned to hold it? The kintsugi artisan doesn’t choose between structural integrity and aesthetic possibility – both emerge through patient attention to how materials want to cure. Similarly, institutions might develop practices that work with rather than against their temporal contradictions.

This temporal complexity connects to what Biesta (Reference Biesta2022) identifies as the difference between educational “aesthetics” and “anaesthetics.” Educational aesthetics seeks “to awaken students for the world and, through this, awaken them for themselves” by directing attention toward what might be “good, important, worthwhile…to pay attention to” (p. 222). Educational anaesthetics does the opposite: “rather than awakening students and trying to keep them awake, it induces a state of slumber” by encouraging them “to stay with themselves…but never interrupted, never turned, never stopped in their tracks” (p. 222). Universities caught in the metacrisis increasingly often operate through such anaesthetic practices, systematically eliminating the forms of attention that working with complexity requires.

Rancière’s (Reference Rancière2006) understanding of aesthetics proves crucial here, extending the argument we developed in our introduction. For Rancière, aesthetics is not about beauty but about “the distribution of the sensible” – what can be perceived, thought, and experienced within a given configuration of social reality. While we earlier explored how universities might create space for “dissensus” rather than rushing toward analytical consensus, here we can see how educational institutions operate as aesthetic regimes in Rancière’s sense: they determine not only what counts as legitimate knowledge, but what forms of sensory engagement are recognised as educationally valid. The metacrisis reveals how university aesthetic regimes have become increasingly restricted, privileging only forms of attention that can be quickly assessed and immediately applied while systematically excluding the patient, uncertain forms of engagement that complex problems require.

The gold in kintsugi serves multiple functions. It binds the fragments together structurally. It does create new aesthetic possibilities. But perhaps most importantly, it marks the site of transformation visibly, permanently. The golden seams trace the history of breaking and repair, creating a temporal map of the object’s journey through crisis and renewal. For universities, this suggests that responses to metacrisis should leave visible traces – not hiding the fact that transformation was necessary, but acknowledging the ongoing work of institutional repair.

Developing institutional sensitivity

The kintsugi artisan must develop exquisite sensitivity to materials – how the ceramic holds together, how the urushi flows, how the gold powder settles into the seams. This is not technique in the narrow sense but a form of material attunement. As Stengers (Reference Stengers and Bononno2010) writes, “Learning to be affected means exactly this: one does not know in advance what a body or mind may come to be capable of, as a function of the encounters and devices that ‘make it experience’ or teach it to be affected” (p. 57).

Universities practising kintsugi-response would need to develop such sensitivities – to the stress patterns in their communities, to the crack formations appearing between disciplines, to the places where different knowledge systems create friction. This requires developing forms of institutional attention that can be affected by local conditions rather than rushing to implement predetermined solutions, adopting decontextualised frameworks, or submitting to what Ball (Reference Ball2012) calls “traveling policies” that ignore the particular dynamics of specific educational contexts.

Consider how differently this approaches the metacrisis than typical institutional responses. Instead of strategic planning that projects future scenarios, kintsugi-thinking asks: what is this particular pattern of breaking trying to teach us? Instead of efficiency measures that eliminate redundancy, it asks: what new connections want to form across these apparent divisions? Instead of crisis management that restores normal operations, it asks: what unprecedented forms of relationship might emerge from working with rather than against these contradictions?

The politics of precious materials

What does the gold represent in institutional terms? In kintsugi, the choice of precious metal is not arbitrary decoration but a statement about value. The repair is worthy of the object being repaired. The gold costs something – it requires investment, commitment, genuine care. This matters because it distinguishes kintsugi from merely cosmetic responses to institutional crisis.

In universities, such repair would mean responses adequate to the complexity and importance of what’s at stake. Not quick fixes or efficiency measures, but approaches that take seriously both the institutional conditions that enable educational work and the communities such work serves. This might mean experiments in governance that create space for multiple ways of knowing. It might mean new forms of scholarship that work across the boundaries between academic and community knowledge. It might mean temporal arrangements that acknowledge both immediate pressures and longer-term possibilities.

The gold also makes the repair visible rather than invisible. Western restoration typically aims to hide damage, to make objects appear untouched by time and accident. But kintsugi insists that the crack and repair becomes part of the object’s essential history and becoming. For universities, this suggests owning rather than hiding their involvement in the metacrisis. Yes, universities have contributed to environmental destruction through their research priorities and institutional practices. Yes, they have reproduced social inequalities through admissions policies and curriculum choices. Yes, they have participated in extractive relationships with local communities and global knowledge systems. Kintsugi-response doesn’t deny these damages but asks: how might acknowledging them openly create conditions for different kinds of relationships?

Crack literacy: reading institutional breaking as information

What emerges from this exploration of kintsugi and institutional contradiction is the need for what we might call “crack literacy” – a concept developed here to describe the capacity to read patterns of breaking as information about systemic contradictions rather than individual failure or manageable problems. While this approach emerges from our analysis of universities caught in metacrisis conditions, it may prove relevant for understanding institutional stress across educational contexts and potentially other organisational domains where structural contradictions manifest as recurring operational difficulties, though such broader applications would require careful contextual translation that cannot be anticipated here.

Crack literacy might operate through what could be described as a fundamental shift in institutional framing, though whether such shifts prove sustainable remains an open question. Rather than treating institutional breaking as problems that demand immediate solutions – and these stress patterns certainly do require responses, though perhaps not the kind that restore previous functionality – this approach suggests dwelling with contradictions long enough to understand what they reveal about deeper structural patterns. The “crack” reveals where institutional logics create impossible demands, those recurring budget crises that consistently pit teaching against research, governance conflicts that surface around the same structural contradictions semester after semester, or patterns of burnout that concentrate along predictable institutional fault lines with depressing regularity. These manifestations might be read not as implementation failures or evidence of inadequate management – though there may be plenty of both – but as information about systemic design patterns that exceed the capacity of individual strategic planning to address.

This diagnostic capacity requires what might be called “institutional patience,” though cultivating such patience within institutions designed around efficiency imperatives presents obvious contradictions that may prove impossible to navigate. The ability to dwell with contradictions long enough to understand what they reveal about deeper structural patterns, rather than rushing toward interventions that reproduce the conditions they attempt to address, connects to Stengers’ “learning to be affected” but applies this concept specifically to institutional perception (Reference Stengers and Muecke2018, p. 58). It resonates with Han’s “art of lingering” but without assuming that patient attention necessarily generates positive transformation (Reference Han and Steuer2017, p. 23), and it acknowledges Latour’s recognition that institutional contradictions emerge from complex assemblages that exceed individual control (Reference Latour and Porter1993, p. 42). For university leadership specifically, crack literacy might offer a critical alternative to what Alvesson and Spicer identify as “functional stupidity” – organisational processes that discourage reflexivity and substantive reasoning in favour of narrow technical compliance that creates the appearance of effectiveness while systematically undermining the very capacities complex problems require.

Functional stupidity, as Alvesson and Spicer define it, refers to “an absence of reflexivity, a refusal to use intellectual capacities in other than myopic ways, and avoidance of justifications” (Reference Alvesson and Spicer2012, p. 1201) – a description that may sound familiar to anyone who has attended strategic planning retreats where predetermined outcomes masquerade as consultative processes. Universities practising crack literacy would presumably resist such functional patterns by developing institutional capacities for reading stress patterns as information rather than rushing toward solutions that restore the appearance of normal operations, though whether institutions can actually sustain such resistance remains doubtful given the pressures they face.

Crack literacy offers no romantic promises about institutional transformation or harmonious outcomes. Reading institutional breaking patterns as information does not guarantee that working with such information will generate solutions, and it may reveal contradictions that cannot be resolved within existing institutional frameworks – a possibility that may prove more common than administrators would prefer to acknowledge. Moreover, developing crack literacy requires forms of attention and temporal commitment that may be impossible within institutions organised around efficiency imperatives and immediate responsiveness to external pressures, creating a recursive problem that mirrors the metacrisis conditions this approach attempts to address. The capacity for diagnostic patience assumes forms of institutional security and resource access that may not be available to those most affected by institutional breaking patterns, raising questions about whether crack literacy becomes another form of privilege disguised as institutional wisdom.

Rather than offering solutions, crack literacy might serve as a prerequisite for responses that prove adequate to the complexity of contemporary conditions, though such adequacy cannot be guaranteed and may be impossible to recognise when it occurs. It might manifest as decision-making processes that can hold contradictory logics without forcing false unity, evaluation systems that distinguish between systemic stress and individual performance, or governance structures that acknowledge rather than conceal ongoing institutional repair work. However, such manifestations would require contextual translation that cannot be prescribed in advance but must emerge from patient engagement with the particular dynamics of specific institutional situations – assuming such patience proves sustainable within institutions that reward quick responses and measurable outcomes.

The question that emerges is whether institutions can develop the sensitivity to read what their own breaking patterns attempt to communicate about where structural attention needs cultivation, recognising that such cultivation offers no guarantee of resolution but may create conditions for responses adequate to contradictions that conventional approaches consistently reproduce. Perhaps the most honest acknowledgement is that these contradictions may require ongoing attention rather than resolution – attention that institutions may or may not prove capable of sustaining, and that may reveal as much about the limits of institutional form as about possibilities for transformation. Yet if universities could develop such capacities for reading their own stress patterns, they might become laboratories for forms of institutional life that have not yet been imagined – spaces where the contradictions that tear apart contemporary civilisation could be held together differently, creating conditions from which unprecedented forms of educational relationship might emerge.

Binding contradictions

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of kintsugi is how it handles the relationship between fragment and whole. The broken pieces do not disappear into some new unity, nor do they achieve harmonious reconciliation. They remain visible, distinct, particular – and often in tension with each other. The binding doesn’t eliminate conflict; it creates conditions for conflict to remain present without destroying the whole. The bowl holds together differently than it did before breaking – more complex, requiring more careful attention, demanding different forms of care. This isn’t about making conflict “productive” in any instrumental sense, but about developing institutional capacities to live with irresolvable tensions without either fragmenting completely or forcing false unity.

This offers universities a profoundly different approach to their constitutive contradictions. Not resolution – which may be impossible – but reconfiguration. Instead of trying to eliminate the tension between market and mission, what if institutions learned to live with this tension in ways that do not tear them apart? Instead of choosing between global relevance and local rootedness, what if universities became spaces where these competing demands could coexist without one colonising the other?

The metacrisis reveals that these contradictions cannot be eliminated – they’re built into the structure of modernity itself. But they might be reconfigured, bound together differently, made to work in service of possibilities that transcend their apparent opposition. The university practising kintsugi-response could become a kind of ongoing experiment in binding contradictions creatively, carefully and respectfully. This requires developing institutional capacities that do not currently exist in most contexts –new forms of decision-making that can hold multiple logics simultaneously. Yet perhaps these capacities are not entirely absent. In certain contexts, where people are not afraid of dealing with uncertainty and trying new approaches because the alternatives have become too troublesome, too dangerous, or too limiting, such experiments already emerge. These practitioners resist premade and decontextualised solutions, working instead with the particular dynamics of their specific situations. They mostly exist in the shadows of institutional life, operating quietly beneath official structures. Perhaps it is time for such practices to shine through gold – to become visible and valued rather than hidden. But in most institutional contexts, these capacities remain unavailable, suppressed by systems that reward only predictable outcomes and quantifiable results, making their cultivation an urgent educational priority.

Living in the cracks: reading breaking as information

From Tawada’s irradiated Tokyo to the golden seams of kintsugi pottery, we have traced a path through institutional contradiction that refuses the comfort of resolution. The metacrisis reveals universities caught in what Rancière (Reference Rancière and Corcoran2010) would recognise as “the presence of two worlds in one” (p. 37) – institutions designed to solve civilizational problems that have become primary mechanisms for generating those problems. Yet this recursive trap may also be their greatest opportunity for developing forms of attention that do not yet exist.

What emerges from our exploration is not solution but a different type of institutional perception. The golden seams in kintsugi pottery do not make breaking beautiful – they mark where precious materials were invested because the repair was worthy of what was broken. Such work requires responses adequate to the complexity and importance of what’s at stake.

The question becomes how such attention might actually develop within institutions designed to eliminate it. The Fitzpatricks (Reference Fitzpatrick and Fitzpatrick2020) remind us that poetic inquiry requires “total involvement, suspension of received notion, pertinence of everything.” This is not method but surrender – allowing inquiry to be shaped by the very conditions it seeks to understand. For universities caught in metacrisis, such surrender might mean allowing institutional contradictions to affect how they organise knowledge rather than rushing toward analytical closure that forecloses the tensions from which new possibilities could emerge.

What would such institutional surrender actually look like?

This is what repair teaches: that damage contains information about how things were made, where stress concentrated, what could not hold. The bowl that emerges functions in daily life – it holds water, serves tea, participates in the ritual of care. But it carries the visible history of its breaking, the golden seams marking where careful work was required to hold fragments together.

Universities experiencing metacrisis might develop similar capacities for institutional repair. Not returning to some imagined golden age of higher education, but learning to work consciously with contradictions that cannot be eliminated because they’re built into the structure of modernity itself. This requires institutional sensitivity to consequences that extend beyond immediate applications – the capacity for being affected by what does not conform to expectations, as Stengers (Reference Stengers and Bononno2010) describes it (p. 57). It demands temporal rhythms that allow complexity to reveal deeper patterns – the patient dwelling with phenomena that Han (Reference Han and Butler2017) identifies as “the art of lingering” (p. 23).

Such institutional development cannot be mandated through strategic planning. Like urushi that requires weeks to cure into permanent strength, these capacities develop through practices that operate on different temporal scales than those demanded by immediate institutional pressures – yet this slower development may be precisely what enables institutions to address problems that quick fixes cannot reach. These practices often emerge quietly, existing in the spaces between official structures, developed by practitioners who resist decontextualised solutions in favour of approaches responsive to particular institutional dynamics. Such experiments remain largely invisible within formal institutional narratives, operating through what we might call underground networks of care and attention.

The crack teaches this: information about stress patterns demands response worthy of what is breaking. This means acknowledging that the contradictions tearing at institutional life are not problems to solve but tensions that require new forms of structural integrity. The question is whether institutions can develop the sensitivity to read what their own breaking patterns are trying to teach them about where precious attention needs to be cultivated. Perhaps the most honest response is acknowledging that these contradictions require ongoing attention rather than resolution – attention that institutions may or may not prove capable of sustaining.

The crack is not an invitation – it’s information about structural stress that requires ongoing attention rather than resolution. Like Tawada’s characters learning to sense transformed realities, institutions may need to develop capacities for reading their own stress patterns – capacities that do not yet exist but which the contradictions themselves might teach. Whether institutions can sustain such attention remains an open question, one that may be answered only through the patient work of institutional repair.