/lit/ - Literature

>>13003571
the idea of a kind of mutual hostage crisis was also an idea explored by Baudrillard too, in his usual ways. the ways in which we fall into kind of fatalistic traps with each other, guided all the way there by a kind of ideological animus-possession that brings us into these weirdly fatalistic waltzes...

i mean even now, consider the culture at a place like Evergreen. the students at Evergreen have basically outplayed the faculty at their own game. there they are, they've *paid the money,* and they want something in return for it. well, now it's the admins who are in the hot seat, because it's very hard for them to say exactly what it is that they now have to sell - that is, if it's not the entire university apparatus. *if all you ultimately have is the brand,* and that this really cannot be in any way *contractually* ripped out of your hand, then fine, you've got that, and if you are now *selling* this thing as a sign or symbol of academic pedigree, that's fine. it's your brand, after all.

but these are things that Heidegger partly anticipated way back in the 1930s, when he already could see that the university was going to become a multiversity. and now here we are today, with the institutions having been so thoroughly deconstructed on the academic plane that now it's coming from the *economic* plane, and why wouldn't it? everybody knows that the heist has happened, it's all power and discourse, and all of this has been sold. so now what? well, we rebrand this and give it the seal of the institution. your client base - the students - are coming to the institutes to get what they want to get, which is the seal of legitimacy, but the authority of those granting the seal has been so spectacularly compromised in this process that the only thing to do next is basically just have the students award it to themselves, on demand. why not? this is one of the most fascinating things the close analysis of capital relations can teach us: the money is powerful, true, but there are some things *even more powerful,* and what those are it is very hard to understand, much less predict. if you make your universities thoroughly capitalized, then it's only fair that buyers become owners, and any attempt to claw back at the eleventh hour a little more un-saleable prestige still lingering around the brand, in the hopes of milking it further through another few financial quarters, seems like a game that inevitably had to be exposed for what it was.

and it's not like we haven't seen this kind of thing *before,* either. this is hardly new. it's not like 20C totalitarians of every stripe weren't social justice warriors themselves, or that Bonaparte himself scripted his moment of glory to include taking the crown from the clergy and laying it on his own head. or, if you will, the Reformation, and Luther taking his stand against the Church. this is no accident: it is human, all-too-human, and enormously powerful in a symbolic sense, then as now.