'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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the university is finished
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October 23, 2005
Lars decribes the changes to universities under a neo-liberal mode of governance so well:
The university is over, everyone agrees with that. The dream is over, the university is finished, everyone says the same thing. There are no universities; there are money making machines, that is true, but no universities. There are no universities, and there are no students, that's clear enough. There are units of resource, but no students. And there are no lecturers. True, there are still some old professors, still a few left, but there are no lecturers. No one teaches. There is no teaching, just as there is no reading. Students don't read, staff don't read, no one reads, the university is finished.
The consequences?:
There is no Philosophy, not any more. There's no English Literature, not any more. True, there are professors of Philosophy and professors of English Literature, there are still a few people who remember how it was when there were universities, but they are coming up to retirement. There are a few professors around, but the university is keen to pension them off, to get rid of them, so the takeover can complete itself.
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I sort of agree with this, though I would say the madness and hysteria of the modern university is due to a statist Power as well as to a type of hyper-technological capitalism; humans, in low-cyberpunk fashion, are meshing with their machines, with their preferred products, with their computers, movies, automobiles, etc. Spend a few days at a UC or Cal State and mingle with "students": narcissism would seem to be operative term, as well as hedonism, a type of individualism fueled by pop culture and technology and, I would assert, a type of porno-consciousness. Machiavelli in the Silicon Valley or something. The New Left of the 60s and 70s was partly responsible for all of this, or the bourgeois liberalism was. The New Left hedonism merged with the Reaganite individualism, the militarism, and created this sort of superficially PC hipster, who perhaps recycles and does java code and then heads to the strip club in the evening with her homies.