Yeah butt that is more like the kind of anti-intellectualism that is often more commonly displayed on popular culture and on this list where membership in the university is immediately seen as disconnected from "real" life, etc. It makes no sense to denounce the anti-intellectualism of the rightwing and then offer up our own leftwing version of it. Whatever this article is, it's not against universities. it is, in fact, pointing out that people come to the university with high ideals about the pursuit of knowledge and are confronted with the fact that the pure pursuit of knowledge doesn't really happen. They become disappointed and try to get the university to live up to its ideals:
"When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don't care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own."
This is at the heart of Wendy Brown's critique of a victimized identity politics that is based on resentiment: "we call it injustice, we get indignant." We simply engage in apolitics that wants what the "privileged" have. In other words, Agamben is criticizing the we want a piece of the pie politics common to various identity political movements.
He's saying that eventually people are realizing they are questioning what the pie is composed of to begin with.
I also think it's unfortunate that people can't appreciate the need for a narrative via propaganda to help inspire people to collective struggle, to help them understand who they are and how they are related to a history, present and future of collective action. When times get tough, when it feels like you can't possibly get involved one more time or try one more time, those narratives can inspire people to keep up the struggle.
About the author: "His analysis will henceforth aim to think through a kind of '<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivity>subjectivity without subject': humans are 'an effect', 'but this is not an essence nor properly a thing', but the 'simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality'. This 'coming community' opposes itself to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty>sovereignty, which reduces through the state of exception qualified life (bios) to bare life (zoe). "
I'm glad you posted this Eric because now I understand your comment about people being effects or artifacts.
shag
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)