Educated People

Educated People identifies a specter haunting the discourse of critical thought and it isn’t communism. It is the unseemly figure of the bourgeois individual, the obscene subject and agent of capitalist culture. This subject is the educated person, the protagonist of a historical culture rooted in human exploitation and a hypocritical social myopia, whose trajectory tends without shame toward the extinction of social and moral difference and the suppression of humanity’s spontaneous vitality and imagination.

Educated People recalls from the margins of intellectual history an assortment of radical thinkers who have been deemed useless to the existing imperium of thought, consigned to irrelevance by a system whose grotesque evaluations work relentlessly to reduce human experience to a passive commodity fetishism. Roy Goddard and Ansgar Allen write against a dominant academic convention that conforms to an idea of knowledge as refinable and progressing toward closure: a final and definitive identification of what counts as true. What is presented here is a series of fragments, the product of reading across traditions of philosophy and critique in the arts, history, and anthropology, a series of short pieces that often center on thinkers who have been deemed no longer apropos to a project of closure. These fragments are not so much aphorisms as experiments, tentatively ventured and assembled in such a way as to foster creative doubt and to provoke a more productive sharing and interaction of thought.