Gloss on Playing with Rules

From Gaming the System: “Without a doubt, McGurl’s comparatively steady poise is an asset, in so far as in its best pages, the work of The Program Era invites a response remote from the customary conflict mode, with its irresistibly predictable autocritical “problematizations.” But as we have noted, that, perhaps, is only one way of marking, in its contradistinctive change, in both of these undeductibly appraisable works, the danger of ending by merely, as it were, gaming the System: the custom Golumbia marks as a “style of authority,” and for which his final example is Bill Gates and S

From Gaming the System: “Without a doubt, McGurl’s comparatively steady poise is an asset, in so far as in its best pages, the work of The Program Era invites a response remote from the customary conflict mode, with its irresistibly predictable autocritical “problematizations.” But as we have noted, that, perhaps, is only one way of marking, in its contradistinctive change, in both of these undeductibly appraisable works, the danger of ending by merely, as it were, gaming the System: the custom Golumbia marks as a “style of authority,” and for which his final example is Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, two Harvard mathematics majors assured of their place in the ruling class, ignoring their courses, then cramming “like mad” for the final exam (199). That that risk remains in the end fairly distant, here, wastes nothing of the categorical imperative to regard it.”