the culture show

Consultants are an essential ingredient in modern bureaucratic power, lubricating its machinery...the consultants themselves lacked much understanding of creative work, so tended to dismiss its inherent value. The consultants were paid, then departed...

What have top managements to gain by employing consultants? In part, the consultants presence sends an ideological signal that power is being exercised..By hiring consultants, executives at the centre can shift responsibility for painful decisions away from themselves. The central unit commands but avoids accountability...In creating social distances which divorce control from accountability, consulting reveals a fundamental shifting of bureaucratic ground, a reformulating of inequality, increasing social distance...

Rapid turnover at the top can have this effect; there is then no-one in power who has shown commitment to the organization, who has experience of its problem, who can serve as a witness of the labours of those below. In part, the sheer disconnect between centre and periphery dispels the belief, at the periphery, that a particular human being is really in charge.

--Richard Sennett.

Of course, Sennett is primarily talking about 'cutting-edge' industries but it has important ramifications for the public sector and for universities if we think of the growing role of administrators, managers, wafflers and bureaucrats-people who have no idea whatsoever about education and, it has to be said, no real interest in it either.  

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When did it begin, this idea of the individual on his own, free in a way? Locke, Descartes? Life was a show, a mechanical show, while all along the real thing, the real deal, was somehow buried behind all that dross, behind the games of language. Hannah's 'second turning inward', the unencumbered self, thinking of oneself, for oneself. But the first?

The gnostics,then, the divine spark within, temporarily trapped in a matrix of deception. The "punctual self": 'extensionless', timeless...an image of God? The world is but a stage and we play our part-sometimes well, at other times with much folly and gaiety.

Culture, truth-seeking, the whole point of it all was supposed to be about breaking free from contingency. Not: I am what I am. Either that or the decadence of giving in to all the flux, adding to it, even, or the false idols of king or country, tribe or nation, money and property...Simone's 'false infinities'.

In the beginning, Hans Jonas tells us, life was everywhere. But soon, the satanic mills strike up. What gets decided is the result of a kind of statistical analysis or brute power or the whole thing's an absurd game and it doesn't matter a jot which way it turns. From dualism to nihilism. The lust for the world turns the world into a desert...

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The simple life. If we ever understood what we need, truly need, and if could take a step in that direction much would be resolved. One can say with great ease what one is against. But the quality of our understanding lies in the quality of our attachments.