technocapitalism

Andrew Reynolds reviews Stephen Schryer’s Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction, which argues for an instrumental form of intellectual labor in the service of broader social goals. Comparing novelists and sociologists representative of this new class, Schryer detects a self-defeating strategy in their rejection of collective instrumentalism in favor of individual dissemination of cultural education. Where Schryer closes by criticizing recent conceptions of an alternative economy of non-instrumental intellectual work within the university as a fantasy, Reynolds observes a “performative contradiction” at work in Schryer’s text and suggests that it is a good thing.

Countering Andrew Gallix's suggestion in The Guardian that electronic literature is finished, author Dene Grigar indicates that it may not be e-lit, but rather the institution of humanities teaching, that is in a state of crisis - and e-lit in fact could be well placed one to revive the teaching of literature in schools and universities.

The Politics of Information: fifth and final installment under the Technocapitalist thread.

Chris Carter and Greg Ulmer dialogue through e-mails on the mission of the FRE.

In The Politics of Information, v.4, Bousquet, Wills, and Co bring their critique home to Higher Education.

Marc Bousquet discusses university labor delivered in "the mode of information."

Tim Luke takes on the business of online learning.

Stephanie Tripp addresses Spectres of Marx, the text featuring some of Derrida?s most detailed encounters with both historical materialism and information technology.

Junk bond swami Michael Milken jumped out of prison a few years ago and into for-profit education. Ken Saltman submits Milken's latest venture to the light of day.

How to commodify "intellectual property" when the object, a text, is made of other texts, and each reading is a re-writing? The Politics of Information, Part 3, considers the identity of event and machine.