Truth only known by guttersnipes

What the hell is wrong with me
I’m not who I want to be
I tried spot cream
And I tried it all
I’m crawling up the wall

What’s my name.. etc

Sir Muir Russell, an experienced former civil servant who oversaw Scotland's uneasy transition to devolution as permanent secretary to the Scottish executive from 1998 to 2003, insists Glasgow is not playing "brinkmanship" with Crichton, nor is the university planning to find the funding internally. Once the current first-year intake graduates in three years, Glasgow's direct relationship with Crichton will finish, he confirms. "That is the take-home message," he says. "I think that just has to be accepted."

From Guardian Education supplement 13 March 2007

And blind acceptance is a sign
Of stupid fools who stand in line

Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
Cause students are money
And our figurehead
Is not what he seems

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid

There's no future
No future
No future for me / you / anyone

So what? So what? So what?
I realise the truth as I get older.
I get to see what a con it is.

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunity, the ones that never knock

This is joe public speaking
I’ m controlled in the body, controlled in the mind

So punk, what have you got to say about all the shit that is going down? Ah, there’s the rub. What the hell has any of this got to do with punk? With the counterculture? What would William Blake or William Burroughs have to say? Why fight to save the poverty of academic life?

Good questions. Shame I have no good answers. I guess it is about how to attack complete control. You can do it through total refusal. To strive for total purity through denial of any links with the spectacle. But from my experience that leads to a kind of monastic existence, to the ideology of survivalists and fundamentalists who cut themselves off from any hint of collaboration with the wickedness of the world. From the evil of original sin. From contamination through participation in everyday life. Which, even if expressed as a political ideology has it roots in the gnostic belief in this world as the creation of a false god. But there is no god - neither true nor false or even just imagined . There is only ourselves out here on the perimeter where there are no spectacular stars. And I'll tell you this - No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn ..

But I love the friends gathered together on this thin raft. Somehow I am sure we know - but what do we know? That the city of light is also the city of night, which is William Blake via Jim Morrison. That the pursuit of purity is the pursuit of an illusion.

So -surrender to the spectacle? No. The spectacle is the illusion which purity pursues, the illusion that society = economy / economy = society. And that economy = rationality = reason so that to dispute the economic decision made by the University of Glasgow to quit their Crichton Campus is to dispute the rationality of the spectacle .

But does the spectacle really depend upon rationality to justify its existence as society as economy?

Logically, yes it does. Or so I argue. And since the SI dissolved itself in 1972, there is no-one left to contradict me.

Thus I defend my defence of the poverty of academic life. Or at least the particular poverty of academic life here - here being Dumfries and Galloway’s Crichton University Campus - on the grounds that ‘the truth is only known by guttersnipes’ .