<nettime> No Future

[Michael H Goldhaber]

I waded through the essay with high initial hopes. But it mostly  
appears to be a swamp of assertions without much to back them. (Maybe  
my reaction is due to an American perspective.) Corporations do play  
an ever-more prominent role in universities, here as elsewhere, which  
is mostly deplorable, but what the essay  actually has to say about  
why this is happening , what it means, and what to do about it seems  
vague at best. As to the notion that strikes and other actions  
demonstrated the worker's reasserting their intellectual role vis a  
vis Fordism, that sounds hopeful but certainly does not accord with my  
reading of what happened, at least in this country. Nor does it bear  
on how universities have evolved. The prescriptions offered seem to  
have little to do with the critique, and seem highly implausible now,  
though something like them were taken up forty years ago, in '68.

Best,
Michael

On Dec 16, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Stevphen Shukaitis wrote:

> No Future
> Paolo Do
>
> from ephemera volume 8 number 3, "university, failed"
> (http://www.ephemeraweb.org )
>
> The Productive Centrality of the University in the Age of Cognitive
> Capitalism
>
> Today we often use the concept of "Cognitive Capitalism", or, indeed,
> Post-Fordist production, to denote a profound breakdown that has
> occurred during the last few decades. And when we speak about a
> "society of knowledge" we point out that today knowledge is the new
> tool of capitalist accumulation. Asserting this doesn't mean hiding
> the fact that in the complexity of the contemporary world, we cannot
> observe completely different productive regimes co-existing, as we do
> within the metropolis. Indeed, the majority of work done in a
> metropolis certainly isn't immaterial work: cleaners, janitors,
> salesclerks and storekeepers do not properly perform conceptual or
> symbolic manipulation.
>