True standards are physical measurements. All other standards are evil metaphors of measurement created by systems of power to maintain control and to replace thinking. All standards are a form of virtual thinking–the law put in place to preclude any daily or ongoing assessment of values–to avoid all questioning. This is why I hate grants and would prefer that someone who believed in my art just chucked me enough money that I could be an artist without having to comply with “Standards” I had no hand in making and which, to me, an old tool maker who constantly measured, are no real measure of anything except arbitrary whim and the power of gatekeepers.
This is how it works: systems prove their “moral” or aesthetic aptness by imposing, maintaining, enforcing, and setting standards that then take the place of real and thoughtful assessment. Challenge to these standards by certain necessary “rebels” are accepted because, like comic consciousness, challenges to standards by tolerated individuals either proves the standard by way of contrast, or defines the standard by how it is “resisted or challenged.” Resistance to standards by unapproved bodies meets with censor (the Plato model)–in this country by the gatekeepers completely ignoring the “other” as substandard. So we have both standards as virtual thinking and internecine resistance to standards as the tolerated bad-boy and virtual alternative to the standard. So how do standards ever literally change?
When a system becomes enervated, when its power is threatened by the entropy of its own standards, then, the third person in this evil trinity arrives: reform. The system “reforms” its standards. All those counter-forces it could not kill, it subsumes–but as the new standard making machinery which it controls. So the “standard” changes or is over hauled, but the principle of the standard stays in tact: virtual thought, virtual aesthetics, virtual excellence. The system can never allow real thought except through the tolerated “mavericks” of its own systemic family. These mavericks often adapt watered down versions of truly new thoughts outside the system and make them palatable. This I call saming the changes.
The internet revolution has taken books and publication out of the control of the gatekeepers and the prevailing standard makers. So I predict the “reform” (which is already happening) will not be related to “publish or perish” but to “get grants get prizes, and funding or perish.” It will become more important to have a grant from an approved body of authorities and standard bearers than to have a book. This will be the new road to tenure in universities: you are funded by rather than you are published by. This will be every bit as false (all standards are false) as publishing, but it will prevail because it offers a standard. All systemic being seeks standards to replace real thought and real change. The purpose of standards is to avoid ongoing assessment. The purpose of reform is to keep any real changes subsumed into the system.
Hell, yes.