Friday 1 May 2015

Overthinking

One of the great tells of late capitalist economics becomes clear when we (or it ) turn our attention to education, where as a central imperative, it has to offer less and less for more and more.
There are so many paradoxes; the more western society advances, the less profit is made; and so the more 'education' has to be orientated to 'innovation' and latterly 'entrepreneurship' to prop up it up. What's more, the more education theoretically critiques the system itself, the more it is ineffectual as an agent of criticism (see higher education in the USA and UK).
The subject you are studying is no longer the point, at least not it's bare bones (take note all architectural students at the Bartlett or AA); as to the essential principles (long discarded as 'uninteresting' or paradoxically temporal), it is only 'innovation' in the area that is interesting to the machine. This is now couched as 'research'. If the 'research' is counterproductive to the system, it seems not to matter that much, it is still product (ineffectual), hence the volume of critical product increases (so supporting the system, or rather educational superstructure). You could call this over-thinking since any real problem has been left way behind.
Even if you are not in the slightest way interested in the processes of growth you might soon realise that as a student you are paying for a product that is busy anticipating it's own demise; that is, you are no longer learning about your subject, you are learning about capital's interest in your subject, and paying for it.
This is why Catch 22 is such a great book.

1 comment:

  1. AutoCAD is using this thinking to exploit architects and designers.

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