Against Value in the Arts and Education [Paperback]

This challenging collection explores the aporias of value with great energy and gusto, questions the social consensus implied by ethical criticism via negative dialectics enlisting Kant, Hegel, Blanchot, Derrida, Beuys, Nancy, Foster and a few others. Such an effort calls up Geulincxs motto of Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (Where your value is nothing, you will want nothing) upon which Beckett founded his refusals. If values are ubiquitous in our market societies, it is up to a contrarian Nothing to interrupt the circuits of power and open new portals of discovery.The tyranny of value, of calculability, is evident in every facet of contemporary education. This book contests that tyranny through critique and refusal. It is relentless and passionate, full of disgust. It reads like a manifesto, a call to arms. For anyone seeking to understand what we have come to and what we have lost this is the place to start  this is a serious and searing counterblast to the cruelty of numbers.Against Value is a remarkably astute critical intervention, and one that our?contemporary moment - both cultural and political - desperately needs. The language of value has itself become a means through which the essential threat that art poses to our social norms can be contained and constrained. This book?menaces that political conservatism, restoring the very possibility of a criticism that might actually go?towards changing our society. That, though not the?value of the?book, is the point.This fascinating and multifaceted collection questions the audit culture currently destroying the arts and education. The assembled authors expose a pervasive and allegiance-demanding regime of value that parades itself as rational but is deeply and madly self-referential and empty.? These arguments are frightening in a sense, as they ask us to take the first halting steps into an unknown territory where we re-learn how properly to defend what we really love--without regard to everything's sl³"