Planetary Kantsaywhere

Abstract

On the leading edges of multidimensional cultural evolution in an urbanizing capitalism that is becoming ever more cosmopolitan and competitive, universities promise contradictory blends of diversity, inclusion, and fair, open access to the inherent exclusivity of the means of production of inequality: human capital. In this paper, we extend David Harvey’s theorization of the urbanization of consciousness and accumulation by dispossession in order to diagnose the dangerous contradictions of transnationalizing educational meritocracies in contemporary cognitive capitalism. Competition is intensified through informational automation and infinitely expanding fields of quantified, bell-curve sifting and sorting of human aspirations and cognitive labor: so-called ‘world-class’ universities are sites of astonishing brilliance and pervasive anxiety, depression, and suicide. Cycles of valorization and devalorization of embodied human capital are accelerating with the systemic overproduction of competitive human achievement, creativity, and excellence. New scales of competition are reconfiguring inter- and intra-generational inequalities, sustaining a mirage of attainable, multidimensional perfection on the receding horizons of planetary human possibility. Today’s constellations of capital, code, and competition are producing an evolving planetary ethos best described as accumulation by cognitive dispossession; while some of its technologies are genuinely new, the essential logic is just a transnational, multicultural, and pseudo-postcolonial update of the utopian perfection portrayed in Francis Galton’s stillborn 1911 eugenics novel Kantsaywhere.