What remains opaque is how study learns to imitate itself. Under neoliberal conditions, the radical vocabulary of creative inquiry — risk, experimentation, openness — is absorbed into metrics of institutional value.
Critique becomes something measurable, rewardable, optimised, and available for return. Like the hot dog, registered here through staff accrual points, it offers a recognisable form assembled from processed remnants: shaped, coloured, stabilised, and made saleable. It resembles the thing it claims to be, while replacing substance with simulacrum.
Brown’s account of neoliberalism as the economisation of social and political life is useful here because it shows how education is recoded through the logic of human capital. Study is no longer approached primarily as a space of public, critical, or intellectual formation, but as an investment in future value. In this context, the language of criticality, experimentation, and radical practice can remain fully visible while being emptied of political force.
THEORY/PRACTICE DASHBOARD v12.1
Reference: Brown, W. (2015) ‘Educating Human Capital’, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, pp. 175–200.