ABSTRACT
Some time ago the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow, penned A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, reconfiguring Gibson's dangerous dystopia as the liberal paradise once dreamed of by Jefferson and de Tocqueville (and look where we are now); a paradise beautifully realized in Gabriel Axel's film, Babette's Feast. Here, the elders of the dour Protestant community can share with the gourmet general a table prepared by the finest chef de cuisine ever to delight Paris and all can depart sated by the certain knowledge that their principles have been upheld, that they have righteously abstemiously or rightfully indulgently or right creatively possessed the feast and, in doing so, denied no one. The feast, of course, was – at least subsequent to its preparation – inanimate and so indifferent to possession. There was, furthermore, quite enough to go around. Formal education, however, is centrally concerned with the possession of individuals and with the establishing of scarcity through its careful distribution of places and menus at its table: below the salt, literacy; above the salt, literature. All of course on the basis of merit. The question with which we are concerned here is, to what extent can the very highly visible and accessible (at least to those of us above the salt in the metropolis) activities in Gibsonbarlowville and its villages work transformatively on the institutions of formal education?
