on the commercialization of affective commons

These facades[1] employ a view of the interior goings of the university as an advertisement. The unavoidable performance of the students and workers in these spaces produces an affect which is then utilized to make the outsider want to be inside of the space the window excludes them from. This one-quarter inch of glass represents the invisible barrier that is the cost of tuition, of privilege, of consumer power. The very ethos of the university, so blatantly attacked by the university administration that has created this site of spectacle, is instrumentalized to attract potential consumers. These spaces offer the future consumer of the product its advertisement, a simulacrum of the university, a taste of the affect they might soon purchase and fully possess. But the advertisement isn’t on a billboard or a screen - the advertisement is the university itself.

This is obviously objectionable, a disgrace, a vulgar misrepresentation and exploitation of the university: a place of rigorous study, innovative design, unbounded artistic expression. But doesn’t the new-New School epitomize the dirty secret of the university in consumer culture? It is not the product we buy, but what it means, not the diploma but the experience. We, as students, purchase the guided formation of a better subject, a future self, a better self. We buy our futures. But isn’t this is the essential hope of education? It is not the study, design, or art itself that the university desires to create, but that these things affect us. We hope that the things we pay to learn in this place might make us part of a better world, which is currently, for the most part, miserable.

The logic of commercial capital in the age of affective labor has become fully (un)realized in the new-New School: simply by walking past a university building, pedestrians come face to face with who they want to be, who they wish they we were but are not: the student on the other side of the $200,000 glass. [2]

The students and workers inside are at once standing before you and in another world, in person and on the screen. And you could be them. You can see yourself sitting in that library, devouring page after page, writing a film, meeting your first love. The glass is only thing that stands between you and the smiling people in phosphorescent orange glow, the vanguardist concert, the truth, love.[3]

and for $200,000
you can glow too...

[1] Ray Fogelman Study Space, the University Welcome Center, Sheila Johnson
Design Center, the proposed 65 5th Avenue Concert and Retail spaces.
[2] FINE PRINT: the affect you pay to create will be expropriated in turn and
used to hook the next good consumer.
[3] This image is from the postmodern designs for the new 65 5th Avenue, the
building twice brought to life by occupations last year. Maybe they’ll give us a
star.