"Built pedagogy": The University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace

Abstract

Thus Karl Marx and his guardian angel announce modernity – an annunciation, winged and with a halo of capital. They were half right: today, transcendental capitalism, omnipotent and orbital, encloses the solid (the local worlds of producers) in the airy (the global world of corporates). We consumers go about our business enclosed in the atmospheres of offices, malls, gyms, apartments and cars, all air-conditioned “immune systems” (Sloterdijk 2009a). We are all somata in atmos: bodies in air. But, pace Marx and Engels, no-one today is actually “compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind”. Modernity is intoxicating, etherising. As Engels puts it, “[t]he real motives impelling [us] remain unknown to [us]” (1968). We cannot see the air we cannot but breathe.