Tradesman show

Tradesman show

The proposal by Joe Carter of having a new type of universities league table, reminds me of going shopping. I have learnt from such excursions how a tradesman details all the features of the object of desire, in an effort to sell it to the customer. He or she lists, one by one, all the features to let you know that the object of desire is in reality what you really wanted already.

I have spent many days just looking at and listening to tradesmen/showmen listing all the detailed features of objects of desire and have been very amused by the shows. Even without buying anything from them, I learnt how much I didn’t know of my desires. With this I also reflected on the time the tradesmen wasted with their performances. I also, some days, reflected on how much the performances were in fact struggles directed and maneuvered by the alienating forces of capital.

The tradesman lists all the features of the object of one’s desire. The buyer is left with just a few options; if he/she is able to resist such desires (some would justify them as a natural given) he/she would list all the items composing the object and negotiate singularly on each one. Then he/she would highlight how the object is in itself composed of many parts which are themselves produced at a very low cost and of very low quality so that the overall price may indeed appear to be an extortion. For this the buyer must be an expert on quality. Philosophical debates can at this point be triggered.

Desires or not, the roles can sometimes be reversed and the confident tradesman can indeed show you what he has got in his house. He will teach you how to recognize a quality item and show you that his profit is very low. The same trader can play these two roles with two customers.

The best tradesmen have not attended Master in Business Administrations courses or read too much. They are in a world of their own. They are very adept superficial communicators and know that although the product is of very low quality, the dialogue with the customer is however a very central part of the enactment of roles.

As such, any information about the object of desire can be turned into an element to prize in turn, year after year. Most importantly, the customer must be enticed into wonderland world (’wonderized’) for brief stages of his/her life.

I can grasp the basics of business but it appears to me that the recent call of Joe Carter for better and bigger league tables is nothing other than a marketing exercise to ’wonderize’ lecturers and students.

League tables have been introduced because the reformer had the three main priorities of "Education, Education, Education" for his government; this in order to instil private sector values among the workforce at the base in colleges and universities and augment the perceived quality of courses.

Servant journalists have, with time, filled the vacuum created in the dialogue proposing such tables, in order to avoid a perceived trade-off in quality so that Higher Education can appear to bring a return on investment to UK society. At the same time, the university/college union leadership has firstly approved, then shared such performative thinking because, due to its logistic organisation, it has continued to root its interests in careerism and protectionism of the interests of the elite caste, not concerned at all with workers’ rights, which are generally witness to the labour movement.

Workers’ rights bring history to current times.

In this, league tables are a tool for the elite caste to control the workforce with rhetoric of improvement and efficiency, whilst servant journalists preach about performativity. Students themselves become slaves of such thinking, whilst the elite caste of senior management of universities move from university to university even if their origin one was rated at the bottom of the league the year before their move in the upward scale towards the heaven of the VC network. I have been impressed to see how this self-fulfilling prophecy is rooted in racism and discrimination in order to instill values of social Darwinism. In fact, control is not needed in order to improve quality and learning because both are always unfinalised and open. It is not possible to determine the outcome of learning except if the student is conceptualized in a particular manner.

For this the very aggressive words of Joe Carter - "League Tables are very popular with the public, which is why newspapers love to publish them and why they are probably here to stay" - are very explicative: the elite caste still wants to retain the tools of control.

Like in the tradesman’s show, the controller needs to sell more and more information; more and more features of such objects of desire to students and parents hoping that their debts can be a fruitful investment. On the other, the trader knows that by selling more information about the object of desire, such information becomes the tool of oppression on the factory’s production line.

There is genuine need to ignore league tables and re-establish a cordial and disinterested dialogue among the base and the students.

There is a need to reconnect with all the realities which have been made invisible over time, by servants and actors in search of authors.

Meody Boyce

For the foundation of a rank and file university movement in UK. Power to university workers at the base.

http://ucu-uncensored.blogspot.com