Something to chew upon for the cheerleaders of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’

Now reading The Utopia of Rules of David Greaber. The book contains a great second essay on how our neoliberal research infrastructure has only brought us new technologies of simulation (just a ‘superfast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mailorder catalogue’) while the big breakthroughs expected in the sci-fi imagfination of the 1970s and 1980s to be just around the corner have failed to materialize. Graebers answer is simple and plausible: because research has become corporatized and bureaucratized, which in Graebers conceptual framework boil down to the same. Graeber: ‘in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic’.

Greaber then goes on to illustrate this with his own experiences as an anthropologist/social theorist at different universities in both the US and the UK. I will quote in full, because this is such a powerful section that it is best kept in the choice of words of the author himself:

‘In both countries , the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative paperwork….

In my own university, for instance, we have not only more administrative staff than faculty, but the faculty too are expected to spend at least as much time on administrative responsibilities as on teaching and research combined…

The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by increasing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals, book proposals, assessments of students’ job and grant applications, assessments of our colleagues, prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conferences, workshops, and universities themselves which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students and contributors…

The result is a sea of documents about the fostering of ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’ set in an environment that mights as well have been designed to strangle any actual manifestations of imagination and creativity in the cradle…

I have seen the result in my own field of endeavor. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the US in the last thirty years. We have, instead, been largely reduced to the equivalent of Medieval scholastics, scribbling endless annotations on French theory from the 1970s, despite the guilty awareness that if contemporary incarnations of Deleuze, Foucault or Bourdieu were to appear in the US academy, they would be unlikely to make it through grad school, and if they somehow did make it, would almost certainly be denied tenure…

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketeers…

If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell the prospective scientist they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover…

That is pretty much the system we now have…. (Graeber 2015: 133-135)’

Hence the absence of any technological breakthroughs and hence the sacralization of the limited breakthroughs we did have, a digital revolution that is basically a more advanced version of entertainment technologies we already had and a series of pharmaceutical breakthroughs (ritalin et al.) which are not about curing cancer but about deafening the emotional responses to the managerial madhouse that we’ve created.

Let the technotopists of the third industrial revolution chew on that.