We are frequently face-to-face with an impossible reconciliation between, on the one hand, the reality of study, of knowing as defiance and resistance, of the certainty that imagining a better world is our obligation and often the only respite, and, on the other hand, the institutional sites of domesticated knowledge that while commodifying, can only approximate the real thing.

Study is a life-making activity more than anything, and knowledge is the trace of meaning it affords. Mutual recognition is necessary for study because our lives do not make sense on their own.

The neoliberal university can function only by selling knowledge, an end for which disciplines become an apt means. But knowledge cannot be bought and sold, for it is the trace of life given meaning, and the universal equivalent is an absence of meaning.

Allan Kaprow speaks to this in a comment we came across in a piece by Riccardo Venturi in Antinomie:

L’artista dedito all’happening è destinato all’insuccesso, “poiché gli happenings non possono essere venduti e portati a casa; possono essere solo sostenuti. E a causa della loro natura intima e fugace, solo poche persone ne possono far esperienza. Restano isolati e orgogliosi. I creatori di tali eventi sono anche avventurieri, perché molto di ciò che fanno è imprevisto” (Kaprow 1993, Essays on the blurring of art and life, ed. Jeff Kelley)

Our translation back into English:

The artist dedicated to the happening is destined to fail, "because happenings cannot be bought and brought home; they can only be sustained. And because of their intimate and fleeting nature, only a few people can experience them. They rest isolated and proud. The creators of such events are also adventurers, because much of what they do is improvised."

By "insuccesso" here must be understood a commercial failure: happenings are ill-suited to commercialization and so the artist dedicated to their creation cannot monetize them and is consigned to penury and starvation. This is more than coincidence, for surely the uncommodifiability is part of the artist's attraction in the first place?

Kaprow speaks as well to our struggles as teachers within institutions, when we are asked to carefully divide our class into form and content, and to reduce form to a mechanism for "content delivery." And if we are deliverers, then our problem is inherently logistical, from which there is a clear path back to the conceptual arrangements of capital.