Examining Reenactments

Reenactments appear to authorize academic capitalism’s fantasy that knowledge can be simultaneously newly produced, transmitted and its use taught in a single commodified form: simple, accessible, and democratized. A very few arresting reenactments can actually do this.

This fantasy of education and knowledge production — shared by politically progressive people as well as by conservatives in the culture wars, by promoters of national competitiveness, by various kinds of intellectual entrepreneurs — is not just an error to easily dismiss.

The longings it represents and sometimes can even realize, are the opposite side of the coin of the increasingly complex divisions of labor involved in knowledge production under globalization, of distributed production processes in what I call “telescoping layers of locals and globals.” These processes and their products require and develop new skills, pleasures and communities, recreating our very subjectivities, including us and being us in their only too metastasizing transformations.

Becoming a member of this class is going to allow and require you to let loose your curiosity and your interests in speculation. The contents, methods and theory used and commented on here span a range of those emergent and settled groups we will call “communities of practice.”