Da marketização da Universidade

It strikes me that a real problem with the university system is that, intellectually, it is becoming the only game in town. Scholars have no other place to go, scientists few, and even as university departments themselves become less and less concerned with ideas, almost anyone whose work is in any way related to the life of the mind — artists or journalists, for instance — becomes more and more likely to have to spend at least some time employed by one. These two phenomena are related. The best thing that could happen to universities would be to face a little competition.  

It’s helpful to remember that universities have faced effective competition before, and benefited from it. Most 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers had nothing but contempt for universities, which they saw as corrupt, pedantic, moribund, and medieval; they preferred to write for the general public. The modern university was a bid for renewed relevance. Similarly, in the mid-20th century, it wasn’t the French academic system but nonuniversity groups and institutions like Georges Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie (which was not a college), the Existentialists, or even professional psychiatrists like Jacques Lacan, who invented much of what we now think of as French theory. In each case, the real innovators were much closer to artistic and journalistic circles — which are now, ironically, themselves being drawn into the university — than to academe. But it can hardly be said that academe did not come out better for the competition.  

One reason is that there was a lot of money floating around. It wasn’t hard for maverick intellectuals who might otherwise end up in the post office or rural schoolroom to find at least enough money to live on. Perhaps the easiest way to begin to de-bullshitize academic life would be to do something about the current precarity of intellectual life.  

In fact, the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is one of the most compelling arguments in favor of a policy of universal basic income. One common objection to simply providing everyone with the means to live and then allowing us to make up our own minds about how we see fit to contribute to society is that the streets will immediately fill up with bad poets, annoying street musicians, and vendors of pamphlets full of crank theories. No doubt there would be a little of this, but if 40 percent of all workers are already engaged in activities they consider entirely pointless, how could it be worse than the situation we already have? At least this way they’d be happier.

David Graeme, Are you in a BS job?

Domingo no mundo (58)

Kees van Dongen, Sur la dune, 1927-30.

Mau feitio

Considero a literatura uma coisa essencial e acho que, se ela não é essencial, não deve ser manifestada.

Hilda Hilst, Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem.

Há meio século a bater em retirada

Bom. A questão do ensino secundário toca-nos muito de perto. [...] Há quem exija diplomados capazes de se entregar imediatamente a carreiras técnicas de formação rápida: o país está necessitado de químicos, de físicos, de mecânicos... Há quem o deseje para que os seus filhos se promovam socialmente, quer dizer... para que atinjam uma situação superior à atingida pelos seus pais ou para que se mantenham na destes. Há, por último, uma minoria que aspira a um ensino secundário formativo em sentido amplamente humano, a um conjunto de estudos que confira aos estudantes uma visão do mundo completa e suficiente.

Os primeiros defendem um ensino secundário especializado quase desde o princípio; consideram-no como uma propedêutica para estudos superiores. Os segundos, um ensino secundário simples, que facilite a ascensão sem grandes esforços mentais. Os últimos, hoje batidos em retirada, são partidários de estudos difíceis e aparentemente inúteis.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista; crónica de 1965.

Outros tempos

Making students cry is definitely out of bounds now (accusations of bullying would instantly follow). But as a survivor of this regime (as I believe, in different ways, we all were), I would make two observations. First, I think for me it was an appropriate way of recognising how difficult the things I was now being asked to do were, and just how much it made your head hurt to try. They were tears of frustration at one’s own inability to run before one could walk.  

But second, it wasn’t bullying in any real sense because we all knew that she was on our side, and was pushing us as hard as we could to think better and harder. One of the ways that came over was in just how much time she made for us. Our essay supervisions were scheduled for an hour but often lasted for twice that long (how irritating that was for the person timetabled next I cant imagine!). We went on it seemed until we had argued through everything there was to argue… as if her time was yours, as if her real aim was to get you to get your head around the problem, unsettling and tear-jerking as that might be.

Mary Beard, aqui. 

Domingo no mundo (57)

Império Mughal, Senhora sob uma árvore, 1760.

Vida: modo de usar (6)

The Stoics thought that there are two aspects of human nature that should be taken as defining what it means to live a good life: we are highly social, and we are capable of reason. Therefore, to ‘live according to nature’, as they advised us to do, means to apply reason to the improvement of the human polis. In turn, the way to accomplish the latter is to improve one’s judgment (the faculty of prohairesis, which distinguishes us from any other animal species), and to exercise the four cardinal virtues of practical wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.

 Skye C. Cleary & Massimo Pigliucci, Human nature matters.

A type of written confession

The most common reason for keeping a diary in the seventeenth century was to keep an account of providence or God's ordering of the world and of individual lives. Ralph Josselin called the diary he kept between 1641 and 1683 'a thankfull observation of divine providence and goodness towards me and a summary view of my life'. As Isaac Ambrose put it in 1650, a diarist 'observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God'. Diaries also allowed their authors to meditate regularly on personal failings - a type of written confession in a protestant world that had rejected the need for a catholic priest to mediate sins. Or the diarist could count his blessings, and give thanks for births or marriages or seek consolation for illness and death. In an age when life in this world and salvation in the next were both uncertain, diaries were a way of making sense of and ordering existence. In short, they reflected the intensely introspective and anxious, self-examining religiosity of the seventeenth century, particularly (though by no means exclusively) among the 'hotter sort' of protestants, such as the presbyterians, independents, baptists and quakers.

Sobre os diários do século XVII, aqui. 

Domingo no mundo (56)

Asmus Jacob Carsten, Baco e Cupido, 1796.

Frock consciousness

Virginia Woolf na Vogue.

My thoughts about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write about them, led me to Virginia Woolf and the term she coined: ‘frock consciousness’. On 6 January 1925, at the beginning of her diary for that year, she wrote: ‘I want to begin to describe my own sex.’ That thought recurs in the diary as the months go on and it is cast, increasingly, in terms of clothes. ‘My love of clothes interests me profoundly,’ she wrote. ‘Only it is not love; and what it is I must discover.’ This was the year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, which brought her to literary prominence; the previous year she had sat for her photograph in Vogue. For that she chose to wear a dress of her mother’s, which was too big for her and long out of fashion. To plant it in the most famous fashion magazine in Europe was to make a statement, however ambiguous. And the experience of the sitting prompted a further thought: ‘My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc. These states are very difficult … I’m always coming back to it … Still I cannot get at what I mean.’

Rosemary Hill, What does she think she looks like?

Vera de Bosset Stravinsky

Martine Franck, Nova Iorque, 1979.

Inge Morath, Nova Iorque, 1978.

Os olhos também crêem

Casual spontaneity is often as elaborately constructed as Instagram’s more polished images. Earlier this year, Leandra Medine Cohen, the founder of the lifestyle blog Man Repeller (1.9 million Instagram followers), posted “How to Take a Good Instagram Photo: A Theory,” in which she admits as much. “The paradox, of course,” she writes, “is that we know (inherently at this point) how much effort might go into a selfie, but we’re willing to accept the pretend sheen of ease.” But enjoying that pretense of apparent spontaneity doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve collectively lost all grasp of the truth. For their intended audiences, these images don’t seem like contrived attempts to pass off stylized setups as everyday life but instead imply dedication to the aesthetic, a pure commitment to trying to influence. In its way, this is as “authentic” as any document that purports to capture unvarnished reality. 

For influencers, authenticity tends to be bound up with aspiration: an image is “true” if it captures and triggers desire, even if the image is carefully and even deceptively constructed. The feeling it inspires in the midst of scrolling is what matters. They draw on the ambiguity between what is real and what is possible. And after all, what could be more inauthentic than an image from an influencer that fails at seeming influential? Being liked, capturing attention, connecting with an audience: on Instagram, these incentives are not a corruption of reality but the basis of it. So a post whose strategies for garnering attention are legible conveys something essential about the “facts” of the moment that begat it. Traits like spontaneity, vulnerability, and beauty are as “real,” by Instagram’s standards, as the attention they get in being effectively signified. Instagram teaches users to decode and navigate these sorts of “deceptions” on their own terms, which is a large part of what makes it compelling to use. 

A kind of vertigo ensues if we try to assess lifestyle-oriented images in terms of their level of truth. Instagram is consumed not as bona fide reality but a hyperreality, in which representations refer to other representations, not some supposed truth outside the app. There is no natural beauty, just “natural” beauty. No candid shots, just shots that read as “candid” by the code of conventions that effective influencers have mastered — demonstrating that mastery over the conventions is how one establishes one’s influence. There is no “reality” against which to measure the particular beauty or mood or lifestyle an image is designed to evoke except itself. Using something faked, edited, misleading, or out of context to attract attention isn’t the platform’s problem but its point. There is no “fake news” on Instagram. 

But there are fake audiences. There’s no telling how many of Instagram’s 800 million users are bots; the only estimates of the number of fake accounts (8 percent as of 2015) come from the platform itself, though independent analysts have suggested bots could make up closer to 30 percent of total accounts. While the company does shadow-ban insubordinate users and delete some bots, it has not launched a large-scale effort to purge them since the “Instagram rapture” of 2014, in which millions of bots were deleted for the sake of preserving “genuine interactions.” After the rapture, Instagram received thousands of pleas from despondent users begging to have their cherished ghosts back.

 Adrienne Matei, Seeing is Believing.