PROOF OF PURCHASE: APPEAL TO THE YOUTH

Proof of Purchase: Appeal to the Youth

  In 1880 anarchist, Peter Kropotkin wrote a stirring address to young men and women preparing to enter the professions entitled "Appeal to the Youth".   In this fervent appraisal of social and professional misery, Kropotkin arrives at a conclusion of putting one’s education towards the revolution. The following text reconsiders this dynamic that churns out students for a capitalist economy under now the shifted post-industrial paradigm.  Amidst rising tuition, the ever-expanding collaboration between big finance and universities perpetuating inescapable student-debts it is perhaps time to reconsider the academic dream.  The following text is in memory of Appeal to the Youth. 

You are a drop out.  A high-school drop out, or a directionless colleges drop out, or a cynical-semi-pretentious-university-liberal-arts drop out.  Or perhaps you are the type of drop out who might have technically graduated, but it was done in such a way that by the time you got to the last semester you realized the uselessness of your degree, the mediocrity of your thirty something professors, and the inevitability 'self-employment" or the "service industry".  Or perhaps, you are none of the above. You are simply a reader. 

Regardless there are enough degrees and diplomas that have been awarded or not awarded to an endless cycle of students to warrant a few thoughts on the subject of knowledge and the proof of purchase.

These questions about the accreditation of knowledge are—like so many questions that occupy the current airspace of mainstream dialogue—are being launched almost wholly on the basis of assumptions.  There are perhaps still a number of assumptions about to be made. For instance there is a supposition that you are not the type to give much credence to the wild rants of FOX news, and inversely that you are also a tad too pragmatic to believe that this time the Green party might take power.  And there is an even more precarious assumption that you are not one to be entirely consumed by every ironic fashion statement, which might give you the opportunity to display the savviness of your vanity.  This is not to say that you have no sense of style or keeping up with appearances.  But rather, that on occasion your insecurities drift from the reflection you see in the mirror to what lies beyond your windows.  No, instead you are a levelheaded individual with at least a luke-warm heart.

Academia was your gateway drug. That special moment, which you might take some time to reflect upon, and you wonder what drove you to take the initial puff that lead you down a road of massive student debts and unfulfilled mastery. Initially you thought you might become a researcher, unearthing the obscure reaches of knowledge for the betterment of humanity.  However, as this goal became clearer, it also became more apparent that the relevant research would be owned by the university or would be bought by the corporations funding the university or your scholarship. 

Maybe you have found work in your field. On the frontiers of science perhaps, but working as the token youngster in an office full of overweight, humorless work-o-holics.   And as they suck the life slowly out of you, and the youthful grin that allows you to bare the fact you are corporate lobbyist for corporate science, only reminds you that the rebellious rock you listened to in high school or college had fed you a lie.

Or, you were never drawn to sciences.  The impact of new discoveries in mathematics, and medicine had little interest for you. Instead, you looked to the hyper-visuality of contemporary society, the massive cultural sway of looks, and it is here that you found your passion for knowledge.  The aesthetic field: so wide and open, it encompassed everything from fashion, to art, to music, architecture, politics, language.  It is the field in which you were expected to remake the world in your own image. However, what precisely does the originality of your vision of the world do to the world? .

After studying semiotics, visual culture, you began to wonder: what is the impact of dressing the part of empathetic citizen, or other modes of political-posturing?  Does posture effect the body-politic?

Or perhaps, awash in the sea of ironic disembodiments, you may find the logical next step might be to reflect upon the dynamic between civil-rights and increased visibility of minorities in the mainstream image culture.  Concluding that the voracious capitalist appetite of images is in fact one of the best weapons to fight for equality. … you might awkwardly admit to yourself: thing are different because of the celebrities you find so hollow.  Things are different because of people like Ellen DeGenerous, because of Bill Cosby, because of Boy George. Because these people represented difference within the mainstream imagination and made the marginal seductive, those margins now had voice through visibility. Tolerance through familiarity?

But then, there are those instances in which intense bigotry rears its ugly head, and doubt takes hold.  You are nervous about the efficiency of these visual manipulations.  You are nervous that the progress made in the aesthetic fields is only progressing the way things look.

Even worse, perhaps your research, the research you receive acclaim for within the academic context, was regarded by the outside world as irrelevant entertainment for intellectuals in your field. Or perhaps, there was a particular teacher, which so impeccably embodied the narrative of the ivory tower that in his or her stuttered voice you could hear the voice several generations of students who became teachers of the same curriculum that had been passed down to them in stuttered voices.  This education and this knowledge had little to no value in a job market, with the exception of teaching another generation of unemployable academics.  It seems like some kind of tragic excess in a complex monotony.   No, perhaps these moments never happened during your studies. However it's entirely probable that you at least speculated that these epiphanies would one day shatter your academic dreams.  And speculation is often ample reason to take action.  This is one pole and there is always the thought that more education will solve the problem.  Just one more educational fix might put you in the right direction.  One more dissertation and you might find yourself elsewhere, somewhere relevant. You would like to fight the good fight but it is unclear where exactly that is located.

Speculations about ‘the Man’.

Disillusioned by the speculative failures and the lack of engagement outside, you might be faced with a decision to work within the existing structures in bad-faith or dropout and resist these structures.  The speed at which we speculate the future of our own real-world failings is perhaps at the root of this addiction to knowledge.  To delve into the history books and grand narratives of revolution gone awry, is a two-fold activity.  On the one hand perpetuating the myth that revolutionary impulses and utopian thinking as a historically proven flaw. And on the other hand you have a faint or perhaps even strong inkling that through a sophisticated understanding of these events we might .... really make it work this time. But to turn these understandings of social movement into an activated production of history now, you were often left breathless, turning you head side to side uncertain where to begin. 

There were points in history in which it might make sense to try and rally you against the dominant structure.  However at this point it is unlikely that you would exclaim “fuck the Man” in response to these institutional dead-ends, because faster than these camp words hit your tongue, the failures of these very sentiments overwhelm the desire to say anything at all. The long history of “fucking the Man” and drop-out culture could be generalized as a wagering of utopian alternatives against the unbearable weight to conform to the ready-made structure. But at this the wager has been collapsed into both promise and threat, that “fucking the Man” is only to be blissfully swallowed into the throat of a new market.

Furthermore the words ‘the Man” and a rally against “him” aren’t even likely to sit right in your own throat.  The trouble for you is perhaps that there is no “Man” as-such, no pure patriarchy to indict. Instead you are left with a complex collective responsibility and guilt to struggle with.  It is difficult to find the right slogan. Let alone the correct intonation to rally around this ‘struggling with’.  The fuzziness of this ‘struggle with’, and the absence of the ‘struggle against’ might mislead you for a brief moment to believe that you are tongue tied in the face of neo-liberal soft-power tactics, which you had read so much about.  And yet, this narrative of soft-neo-liberal power did not coincide with even vague survey of the current paradigm in which people lose their jobs for saying the wrong thing, wars are seen as inevitable aspect of state politics and pacifism being seen as akin to lunacy. Perhaps the incapacity to conceptualize struggle in the absence of the “against” prefix might elucidate the coercion to accept this repressive new status quo.

THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING or PROOF OF PURCHASE:

And now you find yourself looking to qualify and quantify your education. 

The old saying “the proof is in the pudding”, which implies that the evidence of a process (pudding in this case) is found in eating, and the taste of the final product.  This old adage could perhaps be inverted to direct your attention to the ingredients of your education–the structural make-up that caused the malaise of intellectual indigestion.

The exorbitant costs of the university leaves you with unsatisfying taste, and unsatisfying answers.  And yet, you may find yourself still wanting more education, still wanting answers to these questions. You want another fix. 

Perhaps it the poor taste of overpriced tuition that has been building the sticky foundations of the emergent vigilantly educational systems? These are the fertile grounds for which divergent rogues pedagogies like political think tanks, experimental art schools, alternative health academies have proliferated.  Like most dropouts, these once marginal institutions slowly grow under the shadow cast by dominant educational systems. Slowly building an unintentional mutiny of learning.

In your addiction to knowledge you ponder the possibility to learn differently. Perhaps it is this production of a different structure/system, the production of a different pudding with other economic and social ingredients that might allow you to finally prove something other than perpetual failure?  Somehow the inability of education to quantify its worth in anything more than varied rating systems and debt, seems at heart of current inability to agree on standards in education like whether or not Evolution should be taught in elementary schools.  This is not simply a post-secular drama.  Nor is this simply an issue of information overload.  What we are discussing is essentially a deregulation of thought.

How can you regulate or de-regulate your learning? To cope with a loss of intrinsic values, which the University was founded on, now rhetorical and financial value go into overdrive.  Survival is reliant on the propagation of one’s own value.  So while the big universities like Harvard, Yale, Columbia use aggressive tactics like academic celebrity to wager their cultural capital, other Universities in Europe once state funded and free to students put a new price tag on education to regulate the value and insist that learning is not a necessary extension of labor, but instead a luxury commodity. And it is on these desperate tactics of self-justification through celebrity and market management that one might exit the falsified regulatory manipulation.  It is this point that the unlikely-hood of being against the man could find resistant value.  And rather than regulating against privatization of education one might instead invest in one’s own private learning communities divest ourselves of the debts the hierarchical value of studying under idols and “the man” who we idolize. We have accrued enough debt that we are beginning to not only educate against the free market solutions, but locate such an education somewhere outside or at least left of field from the market.  

In any case, there are other options:

Months of drinking and anxiety medication, coupled with working as a telemarketer, or a waitress, or a bartender.  This in combination with a your particular level of education will likely at some point or another bring you to the "enough is enough" state where you feel intense self-doubt about your accomplishments and/or an equally intense certainty of the fact of your imminent potential.

Where this will go you don't know.  The glamour of the Ivory Tower.  The degree that sits at your parent's house.  The loads of voluntary labor that goes towards beefing up your CV.  The book burning of all your textbooks and notes.  The sum total of booze that allows you to feel good about your education or employment.  This is the proof of purchase.