With apologies for my crappy camera phone, I noticed this on the tube today, an advert for Middlesex University:
The grey blurry text, which appears to harbour an image of Engels or someone in the background, is made up of a series of sentences beginning 'I want'. The first couple of lines, for example, say:
I want to do it before anyone else does. I want to explore London. I want time to think. I want to have a great social life. I want to get a great job when I graduate. I want to be close to home. etc
It goes on, with some typically twitter-era slogans such as "I want to advance my opinion", "I want real life experience", "I want value for money" and so on. Hmm..
Weirdly enough, I saw the poster just as I was finishing off Mark Fisher's rather fine recent essay/book Capitalist Realism. Allow me to quote from Fisher on his recent experience of working in Further Education colleges:
Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a conseqence of students' ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services.
No further questions.
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