Re: GPA's, ranking-culture

Phil Graham (pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au)
Sun, 06 Jun 1999 16:54:14 +1000

At 23:35 05-06-99 -0400, Pedro wrote:
>At 12:25 AM 6/4/99 +1000, you wrote:
>Now I am musing, how DID we create such a discourse? That must provide a
>big part of the answer.

Yes, even the idea of it is somewhat counterintuitive, eh? Perhaps even
hopeful? It's kind of like the concept of "eternity" perhaps being a
(dialectical) response to self-reflexive creatures fully aware of their
temporary living.

>Looking back it seems the notion affected the masses before Greece to the
>French Revolution more recently, and the discourse just evolves.

Greece was a little more Orwellian, no? They seemed quite happy with, or at
least resigned to, the concept of "more equal pigs", so to speak, much like
the Jacobins in France during the various revolutions there.

>Could you elaborate on what you mean the "logic of homogeneous exchanges"?

I'm talking specifically about hegemonic systems of artefacts like money,
number, artefacts of technical (and to a lesser degree, "everyday")
language like "globalisation", for instance; concepts under which
everything "that matters" can be reduced, quantified, and thereby
ostensibly controlled.

Even the concept of "equality" is an artefact of this logic, but only by
negation (in this sense, the precise opposite of what seems to be "natural"
and "everywhere"). It seems that the force of this logic is such that
everything that is said to be important at any given time is subsumed under
it. It's getting more slippery now, though, because the urge to quantify
stuff like Trust (eg, the "social capital" project) is building an enormous
head of steam. It is as if protagonists of this approach think that once
"things" like trust can be quantified, then they'll _really_ matter and
will be taken into account.

>Is that like the Greeks or USA founding fathers whose discourse was carried
>in slave/caste contexts, us/them, or our rights and theirs??

No, but that seems to be its manifest form throughout history.

hedgingly, homogenously, hopefully
Phil