Can i dwell on what i scarce remember

No doubt, I ask for some indulgence when I say I think my course was a threat. But even if the capstone was, in fact, only a threat to my students and me—to what we thought before we undertook the course, to our tacit or explicit belief in meritocracy, our participation in the regime of scarcity, and our acceptance of the limits placed on us before we came together to study beyond those proscriptions—I think it is worth daring an alternative explanation. One way to think about this class is that we tried to insist on an unlimited means of production in our study together, and we tried to think of this unlimited means of study together in different dimensions.

The banking model of education is precisely a system of limiting the means of production to those who have the capital and those who can learn to operate within the strictures of credit and debt.

The means of study was unlimited because there was no material, no reading, no set of ideas we could not attempt to include. We would be limited only by how much work we wanted to do together. Perhaps aspects of quantum physics would be too much for us, but only because we decided to work on other things for now. But we also refused other ways to limit our means. Disciplines, most especially our own, would not limit us, and we would resist not only what was authorised by that discipline but also all the ways our discipline prevented access.

We rejected the suspicion that we were somehow disloyal or critical of business education. We rejected the assumption that we were neglecting business education or somehow not extending our business knowledge by reading whatever we wanted. Most importantly, we rejected the charge that some of our ideas might be dangerous or subversive.

We would also not be limited by what we understood, by an injunction to master our materials, to grasp everything in front of us. We allowed ourselves to read without understanding everything, without being able to summarise everything, and again, especially important in professional education, without being able to apply everything we studied. We did not reject movies because they were too popular or funny, and we tried to help each other with clips that were in different languages.

Film, cartoons, Shakespeare, music, chanting, paintings—all were welcome in the class. So why was the course not chaos? For one, our full employment of the means of study still took place in the university, in a structure of classrooms, schedules, programmes of professional study and our own learnt institutional comportment.

We ask questions of ourselves. Why are we attending university? How did we get here? Where are we going? What real value is education, including professional business education?

Did we expect to find fulfilment in our careers? Will we find a calling? Each other? It was, therefore, both highly organised with a very visible and common principle, and at the same time, always subject to revision. Both the students and I were trained to believe that the means of production for knowledge was indeed limited, and our access to them would in turn be limited.

All of these ideas are powerful because they are ideological, and they become inculcated not through propaganda but through practice, and in particular, through inculcation in the school system. As Paolo Friere famously explained, the banking model of education referring to how, in traditional educational methods, the teacher simply deposits knowledge into the student, like a person would deposit money into a bank; then the student is to withdraw this money at the appropriate time, like during an exam or for a job is precisely a system of limiting the means of production to those who have the capital, and those who can learn to operate within the strictures of credit and debt.

So we had a lot of work to do together before we could seize the means of production for ourselves. I had to trust that my experiences of study—many of which took place in autonomous spaces beyond the university—could be applied to a regular classroom of 40 students meeting for three hours once a week and repeated throughout the week in four different classes of students, with students in all.

I had to find ways to give the students a feeling that we were in this class together, that I was not their manager, not the only person who could claim direct access to the means of study. I tried to find a way to assure them that the means of production of knowledge were not a limited resource subject to property rights but boundless—a social wealth produced by all of us for all of us.

Most practically and immediately, I had to find a way for them to get relief from the tremendous pressure to get the right answer and then get the right grade. If I could not relieve them of this burden, we could not hope to study together in this way. This was so because the meritocratic culture had such a grip on them, but also because grading is a fundamental way to impose scarcity and force students to accept their limited access to a concentrated means of production.

Grading is a fundamental way to impose scarcity and force students to accept their limited access to a concentrated means of production. The way I tried to do some of this and the way the students tried their own versions of opening up the classroom were myriad, but one was especially important. Even before meritocracy uses grading to distribute access, even before it uses management in the classroom to restrict access, and even before it privatises these means through individuation, citation and expert opinion of ideas, it limits the means of production by distinguishing what is and is not a tool for the production of worthwhile knowledge.

For example, too often, traditional assignments, even in the humanities, will understand Freud as a means, and a film as raw material to be fed into that means. Why could the film itself not also be a means? Or traditionally, certain methods qualify as means, and others are just forms of consumption or realisation.

Thus, literary criticism is a method and is restricted to those who are qualified to employ it, yet while anyone can meditate, meditation is not a proper method; or indeed because anyone can do it, it must not be a proper means to producing new knowledge.

Only with the scarcity established by meritocracy does meritocracy then presume to solve the problem of informational access. Meritocracy then proposes measures to make sure even proper means are not widely available and accessible, not vulnerable to endless reproduction and mutation.

Thus, after Freud is distinguished, he must be further protected and restricted as a means though he can circulate widely as a product. Meritocracy only begins with this founding scarcity. However, when we began to question this false scarcity, students started to think with all kinds of means, and none of them prevented us from reading Mao or Fanon or any other designated or approved means.

The students wrote papers together about trips to museums, and they made films together about ideas they had studied. We tried to remember that any means was allowed in the room and that we did not have to get it right. We tried to get away from knowledge being personal, private property in those we read and in ourselves. I told the students that the class was graded on whether you studied together and not on what you achieved. Students did not all have to participate in the same way in study, but they should try to work together.

If they tried and turned in the work, I would give them the best grade I could under the rules of the university. We used the imposition of this bell-curve to discuss the meritocratic regime we were trying to evade.

The bell curve appeared to us like such a violation of what was supposed to be a natural meritocratic order because it was not just preserving this supposed naturalness but creating it, decreeing it, through its violent application. I also used the opportunity to talk with the students about the history of the use of the bell curve, including its notorious applications to humans, and in particular to IQ. The significance of this history did not escape them.

It also led to a discussion I had every year with my students in the capstone. Not only would it work better if I could give everyone an A, it would also be more consistent with how we were trying to study. A few students worried about this. I took it as evidence that breaking the meritocratic ideology took a lot of practice. It was perhaps like my residual concern over whether the students would evaluate me well.

The capstone was not a utopia, and anyway, study does not propose to dwell in such a place. Seizing the means under such a meritocratic regime meant, in the short term, more work and not less, but it was self-directed work, and that is why we enjoyed it together.

Meritocracy features so prominently in the university because the means of production in the university are so evidently plentiful. The threat of an outbreak of study is ever-present. But the business school has an even more particular relationship to meritocracy because its managers are themselves so restricted from the means of production.

In other professional schools, students can expect to be taught by those who practice. A medical school is staffed by doctors and a law school by lawyers. A certain number have moved into research, but they have direct experience of the means of producing law and medicine, and even of the patients and criminals who actually produce the means they use, as Marx reminded us Greenberg, , Business school professors have, by and large, never managed, led or even worked in business organisations.

There is a lengthy discourse on this difference, but it is devoted to more effective management of the means, not seizing them.

Most doctoral students working toward PhDs work in the mode of a university science lab, toiling away on a subset of a dataset overseen by a senior professor who himself has, at best, consulted with businesses, but most likely not managed or led one. They also produce elaborate literature reviews of journal articles, where lists of authors form a wall of property rights around the means they are employing. With a dataset and a literature review, they find a problem and build a model to solve it.

The model usually already exists and is modified for their purposes or put to new use with new data. In other words, they are like miners who must buy their shovels at the company store on credit. They dwell in a universe of privatised means. They owe their first position to their supervisors who put them on a few papers in exchange for data work or literature searches.

They must now buy access to another dataset to start work on the articles that will get them tenure, and keep up with the literature for the theories they will cite.

But their experience from the beginning is restricted. For the most part, they begin lecturing about business without any experience or firsthand access to the means of production in any business, and with plenty of experience that is severely limited, hierarchical and remote. In other words, they are installed in perhaps the most meritocratic universe of any part of the university. It should be of little surprise that this meritocratic severity shows up in their classrooms, where the first thing they do is buy case studies to teach.

Having experienced the privatisation of the means and its regulatory restriction in their own training, they impose an even more severe lesson on their own undergraduate business students. Repeatedly inculcated to accept this property regime and lack of access, students are simultaneously exhorted to distinguish themselves for grading and supposed employment placements.

Competition erupts among the students in this artificial scarcity. They learn that what they gain in access to the means must be at the expense of those around them. They also learn that they deserve their access, and those around them do not.

They come to accept that their own access will be limited, and they will have to keep working hard to expand this meagre access, or even to maintain it. But this is not just a lesson these students learn about business education, or even the business world, but about society—about Singapore.

Because if there is one abundance of means they encounter other than their university, it is their city. Indeed, our class and the city mixed in several ways. The students went out into the city in groups on different projects over the years. They went to contemporary art exhibits and performances, adapted several social and ethnographic experiments out in the cityscape, filmed around the city and drew from our own family, educational and social lives in the city.

In the last semester I taught the course, after I had been told I would not be renewed, I finally made good on my lecture on the bell curve and awarded all students in my four capstone courses 83, the threshold grade for an A. It was the logical outcome of our discussion and our study. But when the university found out, they asked me to reconsider. I reconsidered and then released the grades of 83 again to the students. The article itself, however, gave room for a description of the course and even an explanation of our reasons.

We had taken our challenge to the city itself. Many condemned the grading for not recognising the hard work and talent of a selection of students. But many others said it was about time someone drew attention to the overly competitive quest for grading. As for the university, they could not fire me twice. Singapore is, of course, a model. It is a model of state-led development successfully presenting itself as a model of the free market and global trade.

It presents like this particularly in financial services and logistics, but increasingly in other technologies, and most recently in education export services and the contemporary arts. Yet the underlying and real accomplishments are not what businessmen and political leaders elsewhere in Southeast Asia admire.

They are drawn to its one-party rule and controls of free speech, free assembly and dissent—including, of course, labour dissent. In this sense, the Singapore model is not a model at all, but an exception. Moreover, it has always been an exception. Chosen over rival regional cities from Batam to Penang to be the midway port of the opium trade route, its economy was always subject to special state intervention by the British for this purpose. Opium farmers distributors in Singapore integrated this lucrative trade with pepper and chebula farms, local mines and public works and logistics.

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