ABSTRACT
What does Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus have to do with the Evaluation Machinery? A lot, surprisingly, as we shall soon demonstrate. Building on the considerations about time offered in the previous chapter, the discussion of a topical passage from this classic philosophical text will help us substantiate the notion that the Evaluation Machinery’s prevaricating impact consists fundamentally in the destruction of the time of study, that is, scholē. However, where the very element of scholarly existence fails, the scholar himself – whether he be a researcher, a teacher, or a student – is crippled in his constitutive being. The “temporicidal” action of the Evaluation Machinery is not measurable in terms of chronometrical time. Independent of the actual number of hours, or the recorded length of the time periods, which are absorbed by evaluative practices at the expense of other, supposedly “free”, activities, the decisive aspect is that scholē as such is thwarted by the prevailing “central directive” that what counts in the end, and hence “at all times”, is the countable bottom line and the will that wills that bottom line, since that will wills itself in the first place. In fact, the periodicity and the timing of evaluative episodes merely serve as a reminder that the threat to scholē – the imminence of which is in and of itself an annihilation of scholē – is relentless and unremitting. That threat finally shows itself, so to speak, as the basso continuo and the defining action of the Evaluation Machinery.
