Which it isn’t really – just a way of restating the central purpose here: identifying the privatisation of education and, in consequence, the marginalisation of the Arts, the ultimate purpose being the removal of critiques of capitalism and, more importantly, of critical thinking per se. The aim is to push the Arts out to the periphery, confining them to: the “heritage industry”; artefacts becoming mere “investment opportunities”; Arts degrees becoming the preserve of the rich.
We may not have actual fees in Ireland yet, but who can afford to study without significant input from their own, extracuricular, labour or their relatives, thus, their ‘choices’ become circumscribed by debt, in both senses.
In addition to this, in the TU, creativity must be harnessed to “what business wants”, the space for experimentation, for simple joy in the act of making (in old Scots, the word for poet was ‘makar’)/constructing/designing, constricted by the demands of “the market”. The creative (critical) act is limited by the need for employment, by apparent educators warning of the ‘skills’ business wants and the importance of marrying these with what already exists. The Nietzschean call, that “we must challenge the views of our forebears, not because they’re wrong, but because they exist” counts for nothing. The idea of the university as a site of challenge, debate and critique is being replaced by that of perpetuation (of what already exists). Put another way, that we should “know our place”. We have already been told that the TU “certainly won’t be teaching philosophy”, something widely quoted in newspapers. This, in itself, gives the game away: philosophy is about the perpetual why, the perpetual challenge to justify/prove that what exists, X, is in some sense or other “better than” what might exist, Y. Philosophy is the positing of the theoretical against the existent – to “Don’t look at it like that, look at it like this”. We might sloganeer here: All Art is philosophy, All philosophy Art.
Thus, philosophy represents a permanent threat to business, particularly if one is talking about moral philosophy. What business suggests is that everything can be run as a business, run for profit – whether that be healthcare, television stations or education. Business ‘thinking’ (call it that for the moment), however, is especially dangerous to those professions previously seen as ‘vocational’; business thinking cannot comprehend the idea of engaging in an activity, any activity, for anything but profit. Business turns vocational professions (for example, education) into career opportunities for the mediocre. In education, management engages in managerialism – an endless stream of petty bureaucracy ‘justified’ by an appeal to ‘transparency’, ‘consistency’ and ‘accountability’. Yet, if we interrogate these three terms, they all embody one quality: power. The power of the bureaucrat to interfere with, and constrain, the academic. To obscure this connection, the bureaucrat argues that they are merely fulfilling the demands of “the system”, the suggestion being that they would love to behave otherwise, but the system requires them to do X, Y and Z. “Computer says No.”
This ‘system’ destroys collegiality. The academic becomes just another wage labourer, increasingly alienated from their workplace and themselves. The satisfaction that they once derived from their human inactions with others is lost to systemically-controlled meetings. Codes of conduct and of practice replace authentic human exchanges (for both lecturers and students).
What we see is education being supplanted by training, by “skills acqusition” and by a system that demands rule-following at the expense of thought. Gradually, education is being absorbed into the “business system”, whereby the aim is to maintain the system, not to encourage independent thought. Regardless of discipline, students imbibe this kind of social interaction as part of their being-in-the-world; they are taught to be individuals in this specific sense, while, at one and the same time, being deceived into thinking that this is their choice. However, what they cannot do is choose to be an ‘individual’ in any way other than the narrowly-defined sense of ‘individual’ with which they are presented. This reinforces the major contradiction of capitalism: “the individual” is presented as the basic unit of society, and a central part of the definition of this ‘individuality’ is that one’s choices are one’s own, made freely…yet being “an individual” within capitalist society is very clearly delineated. To stray from the rules will result in penalisation (either literallly or metaphorically).
If we return for a moment to the idea of the human person and work. Marx argues that the highest expression of one’s humanity is the work one does. Labour of whatever sort or kind is the highest expression of your humanity, your self, an integral part of being human. Capitalism, on the other hand, imposes a kind of ‘dualism’: a work self and a real (authetic?) self. The work self labours to obtain money to facilitate the real self which exists outwith work. In regard to work, the slogan is “Never mind the quality, feel the wealth”. This dualism pits individual against individual, as Descartes pits mind against body and contributes to that proto-capitalist, christian notion of the “next world” making up for the privations of this one.
The market, of course, offers you the opportunity – with enough wealth – to create a pre-lapsarian world on earth. Expressly though at the expense of others; their ‘success’ is a direct threat to yours…but don’t question why this should be the case. Simply accept it as “the way things are”.
Murmurs from the Forest 