ABSTRACT
Carl Schmitt’s The Buribunks details his prophetic vision of the buribunkian project to record each moment. This chapter argues that Schmitt himself could not have foreseen the splendid adherence to buribunkian principles that has occurred in the post-millennial age. After tracing the weave of influences that have contributed to this inevitable success, the chapter will contemplate the perfect form of Buribunkdom in modern society – a rigorous diarisation of every moment not only prospectively, but simultaneously and retrospectively. The technologies of recording have now enabled encoding supremely adapted to this most critical task. This chapter will proceed to illustrate the impact of careful diarisation on the activities of the person, so that not only can we say scribo ergo sum, but also that we become the sum of what we write. We do not exist outside our record because our record contains all that is worthy of recording. Finally, we will meditate on Schmitt’s potent reflection on universities as contributors to the ‘dead, life-opposing, formulaic mud of scholasticism’ as a worthy rejoinder to the ‘sad experiences of the scholastic centuries’. In the twenty-first century, we see a welcome inversion: the shift from speculation to actuality. In the modern university, we see – finally – Buribunkdom correcting the excesses of centuries of dreamers gazing into the theoretical. We see – finally – lowly intellectual drills replacing all forms of academic vanity. The intimate marriage of methodology and mundanity, facilitated by the university’s managerial classes, has enabled Buribunkdom to reach its true and highest form, elevated from an individual to a collective activity.
