Eduard Freudmann wrote on the nettime list: : The Bologna process aims at an extensive convergence of European Universities with the Anglo-American education system. The aim is to enter competition in the global education market in order to strengthen university’s economic position and increase their research-dependent revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of standards are the basis and at the same time the precondition of this process: without standardization there can be no measurability, without measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition. Economization and the logic of competition are imposed at every level of knowledge production.

sotto voce: Standardization is inexorable as long as the Techno-social system has the energy input to expend on maintaining and propagating ordered sub-systems.

That energy input is, at base, the attention paid to it by the individuals who populate its institutional sub-systems.

When the Techno-social system runs out of energy input, it will gradually gain in disorder and degrees of autonomous freedom.

Learning takes place everywhere all the time. It is a mistake that you expect a state institution, an integral part of the Techno-social system to be a free and open system. It’s best to pay it NO attention and instead take your education fully into your own hands. Take your attention and give it fully to your peers, and you will learn everything you need to know. And at the same time, you will see the Techno-social system weaken as it loses your energy/attention input…

Leaning on/into the State in opposition only strengthens the reified/reifying bulwarks of State.

Walk away on a new self-determinate path and the State falls flat, crumbled edifice of artifice.

Liquidity and Flow (rather than Solidarity) from Sydney, where the #2 source of GNP to Australia is Corporate/International Education — it’s right behind #1 which is the Extractives/Mining Industries.

Not much difference between the two, somehow…

From Jordan on nettime: Maybe we need to EXTEND the market as a network, rather than resist it, developing ways of speaking through it.

Ted wonders what it would be like to assume that the intellectual vanguard “is in fact a reactionary force trying to protect its political patrimony by imposing traditional interpretations and ideals.” We have to be brave enough to realize to what extent this may be the case.

sotto voce: The vanguard is (should be!) that which is not engaged in criticism alone. The vanguard alights where action and word intersect. I was thinking that one measure of the efficacy of a critical point of view would be to see if that point of view could be translated into a way of living to be taught to a child! As an educator, I am seeing the glaring gap between the academic mind-set and the reality outside that students have to deal with and indeed is their milieu. I am not surprised when the answer to the question “what did you learn in the last 12 years of education that you use in your life?” is an uncomfortable silence from a roomful of young adults. They KNOW what they need, in many instances, the skills for humane survival, but they also need something to live for. They don’t get it through the system that built criticism.

Jordan’s observations about the futility and hubris in the thought of re-constructing a new way from parts of the old are quite accurate. That argument seems to be a repeat of those which vainly (in retrospect) dealt with deconstructing the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools. Naming and confronting the enemy simply strengthens it (whatever it is). Best to turn and walk away on a new path.

I hope the critics live for more than the sound of their own and others’ words in their ears and eyes. The network is alive. The vanguard needs to walk the walk at the same time as talking the talk: the walk and the talk must fly in synchronous orbit around a life that is engaged with those around it both in cyber extension and in physical extension. There are people doing this, and have been doing this (quietly) for years as Brad rightly points out.

To quote Saarinen and Taylor (from imagologies: media philosophy):

1. in the praxis-dominated world of ultra-tech, the politics of critique must take a new form.

2. the strength of theory is relative to strategies for action. action must lead, theory must follow. in opposition to mainstream modern western philosophy, thoeretical and conceptual reason must serve only an instrumental role and thus give up its previously unchallenged position of supreme value in itself.

3. critique that is restricted to the realm of the literate and remains a literary project is no longer feasible as an effective strategy for action. Argument and objective analysis, pure content, abstract thinking, logic, and evidence, these forces of the word-centered world have lost their creative potential. Literate reason and the literary critic have become relics of the past.

When can we shake this reliance on the weakness of abstract reason and instead forge interactions of dynamic presence and being?