Robins, Webster and Cheney

Not Dick, but Lynne. The Harvard core currliculum report was intended to refocus the American educational system on the "classics" as the insurgence of post-modern academic practice in the post-war and Vietnam periods. The issue of credentials in the American context is political, for Cheney and others involved with the report anti-vietnam course work, deconstructon, poetry and a host of other things were destroying the basis of American identity, which was apparently really unstable in the 80's, I guess the Wonder Years didn't work. Robins and Webster clearly are writing about the British context, their history flows from a "skills" movement in the 80's. This is quite different from the culture war context in the US, however it is similar in that the meaning of education is definitely in flux. My question seems to roll this way, the university systems of England were apparently creatures of capitalism by the 80's, the problem with the post-modern university as such is that it's flux is part and parcel of capitalism. To use a really obtuse argumentation term, there is no uniqueness for this argument. What is the real danger if the forces of capitalism have already gotten control?

A second ticky-tacky thing, is there really that much of a difference between an appreciation of disorder and post-modernism? These folks want to play the Goldilocks and the Three Bears game with order to get the best of fragmentation while keeping fundamentalists and other various capitalists out in the woods. To conclude I want to invoke Nilo on the death drive issue, a conversion to some variant of radical democracy is boring. Embrace the possibility of destruction, the capitalists don't play fair in any democratic dialog, so why even try to live with them? The hard Zizek answer that would come out to most of these questions can be found in his reasoning, only by doing the hard, painful, delicious work of total refusal of capitalism in as much as it will destroy us with apocalyptic fantasies. So a few things to take away from this argument; first that anti-post-modern arguments are often quite similar to those on the right, that revolutionary marxism is interesting and that we need to pass plenty of cool points around.