The academics to come will be stronger than us and better than us, I said to H. They’ll be taller, for one thing, and have magnificent haircuts. They’ll have enough money for great haircuts and great shoes, I said. And they’ll exercise more regularly than us, I said. They will achieve an exemplary work-life balance, I said.
They’ll look at our 3 or 4 books and laugh; they will have produced 3 or 4 books while they were studying. It’s no struggle for them. Their books will write themselves and no one will read them, I said. You think few people read our books today, well in the future, no one will read anything, I said. Books will pour from the academics to come and no one will even notice them, I said. It will be pure career capital, I said. Proof of an ability to teach and to profess, I said.
The real business will be raising income, I said. They’ll learn from interactive programs how to put research proposals together, I said. They’ll be taught that from the first. And every university will have a Centre for this or that, an Institute for this and that. Two lecturers and a postgrad will make for a Centre, I said, and three lecturers and two postgrads will make for an Institute, I said. There will no departments as such, I said, only self-funding Research Institutes, linked together in order to maintain the interactive programs which will teach future students, I said. They will allow the virtual learning environment to sustain itself, I said, and concentrate on the real business of the university, which is raising money, I said.
They’ll all be 6 foot tall or more, the new breed, I said to H. They’ll be taller than us and better than us. They will find us amusing. How they thought they suffered, they’ll say to one another, that lazy generation before us! How they whined about the simplest task! But of course they will not be hampered by archaic management structures. Privatisation in 2010 will do away with them. Now the university will become a network, a superefficient rhizome, I said, spreading out all over the world.
University will link to college which will link to school, I said. And the whole education system will be wrapped around the idea of life-long interactive learning, I said. The worker will be responsible for herself from now on, I said. She will have to find suitable courses for herself. Her skill-set is everything; she will carry a portfolio of such skills from one temporary job to another, I said. It’s a brave new world, I said. So much initiative! I said. Forget the Foucauldian idea of a disciplinary society, I said. This will be a society of control, I said. Worktime is all time, I said, and the network is all.
Wages will rise, I said, as older, less productive and adaptable academics are laid off. There will be efficiency savings as layers of management are cut away. The network will make sure of that I said. It will spread its tentacles into everything I said. The network will be used to justify everything, I said. No more human agency, just the network, I said. The network and its priests, I said. The philosopher-priests who sing about the network and its marvellous power of autopoesis, I said.
But what they love is capital, I said, and what capital has made of the world. They love the idea that capital is a self-organising system. They have simple boyish wonder at the inventiveness of capital, I said. They love capital and they are the agents of capital. Nihilism completes itself, I said, when capital believes and desires in our beliefs and desires. When the takeover is complete, I said. When there is nothing but the network and the circulation of information, I said.
The men and women of the new world will be taller than us and better than us. Now and then they will break down, but they will be repaired again. A few days out, a month’s sabbatical, the new regime will be infinitely flexible, I said. Now the worker is responsible for herself, she can take career breaks and sabbaticals, I said. And those periods between jobs she’ll annex for personal development. Time to work with the interactive programs from Microsoft to update her skills. And there will be a great deal of updating, I said. The world will be moving, and she’ll have to move with it, I said.
The tall ones, the better ones, the machines who never break down will soar above us. Oh they’ll take care of us, I said, they’ll appear at charity functions, I said. Money will flow from them to us, I said. But they’ll jaunt from country to country, I said, they’ll flow as fast as capital. Capital will sing and celebrate itself in them, I said. Capital will shine in the brightness of their eyes and the whiteness of their teeth. LASIK and veneers, I said, they’ll have had that from the first, I said.
How white their teeth and how bright their eyes! The teeth and eyes of capital!, I said. LASIK and veneers, I said, and plenty of exercise. For their bodies are sleek, too, I said. Their bodies are bodies of panthers and tigers. They slink from place to place, I said, and couple in dark corners. Capital loves itself in their slim arms and tanned backs, I said. There’s no excess fat in the network, I said. You’ll have to move and move fast. You’ll have to be on the ball, a self-motivator. There will no room for the word ‘we’. Local affliations, yes, little teams, sometimes – teams who will barely meet face to face. But no ‘we’.
But what they don’t understand is that this new appeal to nature, the new rhetoric of evolutionary theory is an extension of the same vile network which laughs in their laughter. That laughing in their laughter in their bright eyes and bright teeth is the laughter of capitalism. The fittest survive, they laugh, those with the broadest skill-set, those who are tallest and slimmest and have had LASIK and veneers. It’s evolutionary theory, they laugh. Darwin said it all, they laugh. It’s the selfish gene, they laugh. They’ll never say any of these things, they hardly know they think them, but it laughs in their laughter and flashes from their white teeth and their bright eyes. It believes in itself in their slim bodies. It prays to itself in their gym-trained muscles.
Capital is stripping itself down to a bare frame, I said. It is emerging as such and is unashamed. Sheer and unadulterated Capital is coming out into the open, I said. That’s what the 80s and the 90s prepared us for, I said. Capital is here and it is obvious. Capital is natural and eternal and falls everywhere like light. No transcendence need be posited. There is no mysterious abyss, no night of the world. Nothing is hidden, everything is here and it is quantifiable and measurable.
There are those who can work and those who cannot work. There are those who are able and those who are unable. And to those who can work will come the fruits of work. And to those who are able will accrue the skills that are needed for work. The others will be divided into the deserving and the undeserving poor. For the former, skills training and a subsistence income. For the latter, alcoholism, madness and drug abuse and all of them beneath the indifferent light which falls on everything. Alcoholism, madness and drug abuse beneath the sky which has driven them to alcohol, madness and drug abuse.
No one can see the light of capital like the alcoholic. No one faces the face of capital like the mad. No one can know it like the one unemployed and undeserving, the one who is exiled from work. It is unbearable and it is streaming down. And it will find you. The madness of that light will find you. It is indifferent to you but it will find you. You weave between the three-wheeled pushchairs but it knows you and it follows you. It is only in that light that you will know your shame.
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