Stay in Exile

You.

Yeah, you, the one behind the computer screen with the saucer eyes and granola crumbs in your whiskers.  Don’t look around to your left and right.  We’re talking to you, potential collaborationist, potential disrade.  Wearing that ironic shirt, reading Foucault and listening to an album that’s so off-the-wall indie it’s the theme song from Full House on repeat for 83 minutes.  There is a subtle intimation of distortion at the beginning of minute 51, but no other added effects.

We want you to bask in our joy at the recent news that Bob Kerrey will remain as president of The New School for two more years.  Weeks ago, when he announced his resignation, we conceded a small defeat.  But we had been duped.  How genius: he was really just announcing his future resignation!

[insert generic manifestation of happiness here]

“I will be leaving no later than the summer of 2011, when my contract expires,” he wrote in a recent statement.  “This will give me one full year before the human contract expires, according to the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.”

That Kerrey is staying pleases us, but if his control of New School’s pseudo-community is further weakened – i.e., his ability to extract value from the student-commodity does not match the optimal rate of profit – we will advocate his smooth removal.  In his place we will install a young woman of color, a hip administrator of capital: She reads Chomsky, she listens to Democracy Now!, she loves your radical politics. Your senate will cower before her identity, your student groups will balk before her working-class background. With your impotence, she will drill deeper into your soul than you could ever imagine, reaping profit off your pathos. You’ll lust after your own submission like it was a Saturday night in a Williamsburg club where the band “Act Interested while We Feign Relevance” is headlining.

After all, what is required of management is changing now.  Especially in the university.  For decades, their job was painless: student groups, issue activists, and identity-driven radicals would jeer: “Funny Funny Funny!” to which management would reply in effective subsumption: “HA HA HA!”

But with the Exiles, more direct methods of subjection are required; they are not placated by the usual tricks.  Their time-barricades impede progress; their progress impedes time. Authorities must not be afraid to physically obstruct them.  Authorities must be counterrevolutionary time condoms in order to block the transcendence of the revolutionary time sperm and the magnetic egg of the future. The vortex must be closed.

We see eye-to-eye with The New School in Exile, but we reside at opposite poles.  They want no hierarchy, and we want so much of it that there is no bottom rung, just a bottomless gorge of unending strata.

In other news, we in The New School in Collaboration have adopted a new diet in accordance with our principles.  The total commitment of some Exiles has led them to Veganism.  We, on the other hand, now adhere to Barbaro-cannibalism.  We are Barbaro-cannibals.  We are strictly human consumers, but we don’t just eat any human.  They must be obstinate ones.

“You savages!” you exclaim.  “You won’t get away with this evil!”
“Waiter,” we hold up our pointer finger with class.  “We’ll take that feisty one over there.  It’s a real fighter.  We recommend a three-year stint in a Federal pen to tenderize it.”

In still other news, you are a copy of a copy of a copy in the total beauty of the commodity form.  That “creative” dance move you think you pulled last night at your weekly “I’m a Unique Person” meeting was actually used by your father at a Burlesque House in Seoul in 1954.  When you were a child he would channel his army days and crank out that move around the apartment.  He had forgotten that he had stolen it from a commercial for this one window cleaning solution.  The gist of the ad was that the product caused its consumers to dance in funky fashion.  Much profit was made.

Embrace your copy-hood or be damned.  Embrace your copy-hood or be damned.

– The New School in Collaboration

NB. We used to be activists once, we believed in change. It got us 30 cents and some dumpstered high-tops. We had some successes. Sold some cleaning solution. Cleaned the windows but didn’t change the view.