Ideas, says Sande Cohen, have attained "commodity" status in the academy, and knowledge is now seen as another capitalistic "industry." In Academia and the Luster of Capital, Cohen both reveals and interrogates the specific and material workings of this economy of the marketplace of ideas.
Cohen uses paradigms from Baudrillard, Lytoard, Deleuze, and Guattari to assemble a "war machine" against the well-oiled apparatus of self-preservation and self-reproduction of the academic institution. In detailed and concrete arguments, he challenges accepted theories of criticism, especially university-based myths. Academia and the Luster of Capital constitutes a compelling statement for the abandonment of legitimating, officiating paradigms of thought in all academic disciplines, and outlines possibilities for the emergence of the new in thought in action.