clastres’ autonomism

In the opening essay of Society Against the State, “Copernicus and the Savages,” Clastres does two things. First, he demonstrates how ethnology has been captured by a kind of ethnocentrism that has made it possible to speak about societies without political power, a kind of evolutionary trajectory wherein there are ‘underdeveloped’ societies and ‘developed’ ones based on their proximity to the Euro-American norm of the State-form. Second, he convincingly demonstrates the importance of “the decision to take seriously, at last, the men and women who live in primitive societies…” (20). He concludes by stating that, 1) “Societies cannot be divided into two groups: societies with power and societies without power…” instead, “political power is universal, immanent to social reality…and that it manifests itself in two primary modes: coercive power, and non-coercive power” (22), 2) coercive political power is merely one kind of power, “a particular case, a concrete realization of political power in some cultures…” (22), 3) the political is present in societies even where political institutions are absent” (22-23).

He lays out the task of a general political anthropology, which is to be split into two lines of inquiry: 1) “What is political power? That is: what is society?”, 2) “What explains the transition from non-coercive political power to coercive political power, and how does the transition come about? That is: what is history?” (24) This is directly a challenge to a Marxist conception of social development. As Clastres notes, citing Lapierre, “the truth of Marxism is that there would be no political power if there had not been conflicts between social forces.” But Clastres answers with a question: “what of societies without conflict, those in which ‘primitive communism’ obtains” (25)? He does not argue that some societies have their political bases in conflict, by which I understand him to mean “historical” conflict in a Marxist sense: class conflict, or the dialectical opposition of the ruling class (the State) versus the laboring class (the proletariat).

What Clastres does in this essay is make the case for understanding the political autonomously from the State-form, and power autonomously from coercion. It is not that these things must always remain separate, but instead that when they come together we should not take these as natural conditions, but rather as conjunctural ones.

radical pedagogy: toward a minor education exam reading list

Area 1: Articulating Critical Pedagogy

Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983).

———, “Literacy and the Pedagogy of Voice and Political Empowerment,” Educational Theory 38(1), 1988: 61-75.

———, “Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope,” Democracy and Nature 9(1), 2003: 91-105.

———, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1), 2004: 59-97.

Henry Giroux and Susan Searles Giroux, “Challenging Neo-liberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 6(1), 2006: 21-32.

Curry Stephenson Malott and Bradley Porfilio, Critical Pedagogy in the 21^st Century: A New Generation of Scholars (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011).

Peter McLaren, “Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 432-462.

———, “The Future of the Past: Reflections on the Present State of Empire and Pedagogy,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedaogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 289-314.

———, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (Boston: Pearson, 2007).

———, “Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 6(2), 2010: 1-11.

Peter McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Reconsidering Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?,” Educational Researcher 29(3), 2000: 25-33.

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 10(3), 2010: 251-262.

Peter McLaren, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Nathalia Jaramillo, “Teaching In and Against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis,” Teacher Education Quarterly (Winter 2004): 131-153.

Matthew Smith, Jean Ryoo, and Peter McLaren, “A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Education and Society 27(3), 2009: 59-76.

 

Area 2: Critiquing Critical Pedagogy

Anne C. Bell and Constance L. Russell, “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,” Canadian Journal of Education 25(3), 2000: 188-203.

Gert J.J. Biesta, “Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education,” Interchange 29(1), 1998: 1-16.

James Campbell, “Education and its Discontents: The Pedagogy of Henry A. Giroux,” Critical Studies in Education 33(1), 1992: 96-109.

Jane Durie, “Emancipatory Education and Classroom Practice: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Perspective,” Studies in Continuing Education 18(2), 1996: 135-146.

C. Alejandra Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 47(3), 1997: 359-375.

Scott Ellison, “On the Poverty of Philosophy: The Metaphysics of McLaren’s ‘Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy’,” Educational Theory 59(3), 2009: 327-351.

• [Peter McLaren responds: “Afterwords,” Educational Theory 60(3), 2010: 391-393.]

Nirmala Erevelles, “Educating Unruly Bodies: Critical Pedagogy, Disability Studies, and the Politics of Schooling,” Educational Theory 50(1), 2000: 25-47.

Sandy Grande, “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis,” Educational Theory 53(3), 2003: 329-346.

———, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy, Decolonization, and the Critical Project,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 315-336.

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 463-487.

Wendi Kohli, “Critical Education and Embodied Subjects: Making the Poststructural Turn,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 511-520.

Patti Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 487-498.

Zeus Leonardo, “The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 5, no. 1 (March 2002): 29-50.

Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992).

• [Includes: Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 297-325.]

Jan Masschelein, “How to Imagine Something Exterior to the System: Critical Education as Problematization,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 521-530.

Gregory Martin, “The Poverty of Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Politics of Engagement,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 337-353.

William F. Pinar, “The Unaddressed ‘I’ of Ideology Critique,” Power and Education 1(2), 2009: 189-200.

William F. Pinar and C.A. Bowers, “Politics of Curriculum: Origins, Controversies, and Significance of Critical Perspectives,” Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 163-190.

Willem L. Wardekker and S. Miedema, “Critical Pedagogy: An Evaluation and a Direction for Reformulation,” Curriculum Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45-61.

Eric J. Weiner, “Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 57-77.

 

Area 3: Articulating a Radical Pedagogy

Pole 1: Ranciere and Anarchic Pedagogy

Gert Biesta, “Say You Want a Revolution…Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 499-510.

Gert Biesta and Charles Bingham with Jacques Ranciere, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Abraham P. DeLeon, “The Time for Action is Now! Anarchist Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Radical Possibilities,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (November 2006). [http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=67]

———, “Oh No, Not the ‘A’ Word! Proposing an Anarchism for Education,” Educational Studies 44, no. 2 (September 2008), 122-141.

Issue 42(5-6) Educational Philosophy and Theory – special issue on Rancière

Daniel Friedrich, Bryn Jaastad, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Democratic Education: An (Im)possibility that yet Remains to Come,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5/6), 2010: 571-587.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Richard Kahn, “Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 2009: 37-49.

Jennifer Logue and Cris Mayo, “Imagining the Future: What Anarchism Brings to Education” [review of Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective], Journal of Philosophy of Education 43, no. 1 (2009), 159-165.

Todd May, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Nina Power, “Axiomatic Equality: Ranciere and the Politics of Contemporary Education,” Eurozine, from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html [accessed July 6, 2010].

Jacques Ranciere, trans. Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Stephven Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle (eds.), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).

Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006).

———, “Anarchy in the Classroom,” The New Humanist 120(5), September/October 2005. [www.newhumanist.org.uk/1288/anarchy-in-the-classroom]

———, “Anarchism, Utopias and Philosophy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35(4), 2001: 627-646.

 

Pole 2: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and the Strategy of Refusal

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike”

“The State and the Bosses Only Understand One Language: Strike, Blockade, Sabotage,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-state-and-the-bosses-only-understand-one-language/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

“Infinite Strike,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/infinite-strike/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

Pole 3: Towards a Minor Education

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

 

biopolitics post-foucault exam reading list

Background Reading:

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Slavoj Zizek, Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso, 1995).

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Timothy C. Campbell, “Interview with Roberto Esposito,” diacritics 36(2), 2006: 49-56.

Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).

———,trans. David Macey, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003).

———, trans. Graham Burchell, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978 (New York: Picador, 2007).

———, trans. Graham Burchell, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France,1978-1979 (New York: Picador, 2008).

Karl Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, Capital vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

———, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).

Agamben:

Giorgio Agamben, trans. Michael Hardt, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

———, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

———, trans. Kevin Attell, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

———, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

———, trans. Luca di Santo, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

———, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Nudities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).

Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Autonomous Marxism:

Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Debating Empire (New York: Verso, 2003).

Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (AntiThesis).

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysius (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

———, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

———, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (NYC: Penguin Books, 2004).

———, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (eds.), Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).

Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Antonio Negri, trans. Maurizia Boscagli, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

———, trans. Timothy S. Murphy and Arianna Bove, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (New York: Verso, 2005).

———, trans. James Newell, Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Jason Read, The Micropolitics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

more theses on biopolitics

As I continue to refine and develop working theses on biopolitics, I will continue to post them here.

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~It is important to remember that the concept of biopolitics has a prehistory (see Aristotle, Arendt, Esposito). Foucault is a threshold figure who articulated the concept from its prehistory into the “biopolitical moment” of the present. Having popularized the term and shifted the discourse of contemporary politics, Foucault deserves much credit for acknowledging a largely ignored problem in political theory after the Enlightenment.

~ Biopolitics is not properly “political,” as biopolitics represents a struggle over biological life itself. Biopolitics is the threshold concept that can go in one of two directions (at the least): 1) the thanatopolitics of Nazism, or 2) the productive biopolitics of genetic engineering (see N. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself). In either direction, the ‘worldliness’ of human life is reduced to either: 1) the least possible threat to the social body, or 2) the ‘fullness’ of life as measured by a) the lifespan, b) reduced disease, c) lowered heart rate/blood pressure/etc., or d) other biometrics. This is supported empirically by looking to the Western democracies, where arguments of ‘worldliness’ are reduced to the “clash of civilizations” played out for the very life of the social body. There is no meaning here, just life.

~ If biopolitics is meaningful in capitalist society, it is because life = labor, and more specifically, life = labor power (see Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude). Biopolitics has no inherent value, as such, but historically situated takes on a limited meaning in the realm of the production of (extreme) surplus value. What Marx saw in the machine (see Marx, Grundrisse), biopolitics under capitalism produces human machines capable of repairing themselves, taking on a life of work with no work/life distinction, and a gratefulness of the machine to its master for ‘improving the life’ of the machinic worker.

~ Biopower, as described by Hardt and Negri, is the transforming of extreme surplus labor into a socially productive value: excess = biopower = multitude. But this transformation seems necessarily limited, specifically due to the disappearance of politics (see Arendt). Articulated in a sphere of rights, constitutionalism, and constituent power, biopolitics as ‘world-production’ does not open onto a new politics; it merely repartitions the “right to life” and the “right to rights” and their attendant institutions (i.e. collective bargaining, ‘Arab democracy,’ etc.).

~ Unlike Arendt or Foucault, Agamben sees biopolitics as the paradoxical core of what we think of as politics today. Arendt seems nostalgic for an ideal Greek past; Foucault genealogically demonstrates how a concern for life entered into discourses of government(ality). Agamben, though, sees biopolitics as the ontological foundation of modernity, with roots going back to Greek and Roman thought. Refining Arendt, he argues that the ban is a relation of inclusion through formal exclusion, which creates an absent ground upon which modernity is constructed. What is new is not biopolitics, for Agamben, but the mass production of homo sacer, which renders visible the ontological paradox of modernity.

~ Given the historical connection between politics and violence, it seems necessary to move to a paradigm of non-violence. The shift to biopolitics, then, makes sense, because it operates within a bounded territory as the protection and production of life, rather than the protection and production of politics. However, we know this to be untenable, since biopolitics’ internal violence is the ban, and the necessity of division (of inclusion and exclusion) within the hegemony of the nation-state form opens up the internal violence into our everyday lives. By affirming biopolitical governance, we are consumed with the violence (which we do not see as such) of the friend/enemy, insider/outsider distinction. The ban, the paradigmatic violence of modernity, is masked by a series of naturalizations: natural citizenship, allegiance to the nation-state, the sanctity of borders, sovereignty…

 

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics: toward an immaterial unionism – outline

A while back I posted a first rough draft of an essay I’m working on called “Academic Labor and the New Paradigm of Class Politics.” I’ve now expanded the title to include the subtitle “Toward an Immaterial Unionism,” and I’ve revised it to follow an Introduction – Theses – Proposal format a bit more conducive to the zine/polemic sensibility that I’m going for. I’m hoping to have a draft sufficiently completed to distribute on Monday, February 21, 2011 at the GESO panel discussion, “Emerging Trends in Higher Education: The Changing Face of Academia.”

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Introduction

A Brief History and Rationale for Unions

Thesis 1: The crisis of the university is experienced momentarily, but is in fact the condition of the university’s historical existence.

Thesis 2: The university functions in the economy today as the factory yesterday.

Thesis 3: Given the function of the edu-factory in siting and (re)producing immateriality, unions as a response to academic working conditions are insufficient.

Thesis 4: An academic union, as a manifestation of the common university, is a decisive intervention in the edu-factory.

Thesis 5: The university cannot be saved; it must be reconstituted.

Proposals

Bifo writing on facebook and The Social Network (movie)

Taken from Jodi Dean’s blog. I’m no longer on facebook, so I’ll link back to her blog, which links to the original facebook post.

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by Bifo Berardi

Financial capitalism and precarious work, loneliness and suffering, atrophy of empathy and sensibility: these are the themes that we may extrapolate from The social network the excellent movie by David Fincher.

The story that the movie is about is the creation and early diffusion of the social network Facebook: an enterprirse in the age of  financial semiocapitalism. But the focus shifts on the psychological side of the evolution of the Internet, in the framework of the info-acceleration and stimulus-intensification that the broad band has made possible. Love friendship affection – the whole sphere of emotionality is invested by the intensification of the rhythm of the infosphere surrounding the first generation which learned more words from a machine than from the mother.

Although the narration of the beginnings of Facebook, and the following legal conflicts and trials corresponds to the real story, biographical details (for instance the end of a love relation in the first scene of the movie) are not necessarily true, but they are useful for a full understanding of the affective side of social life of cognitarian labor force.

The main character of the film, Mark Zuckerberg may obviously be described as a winner: he is the youngest billionaire in the world, he is the owner of a company that in a few years has become well known worldwide with 500 million subscribers. Nonetheless it is hard to see him as a happy person, and he can be described as a looser if you think of his relation with women, and colleagues. Friendship seems impossible for him, and the success of his website is granted by the artificial substitution of friendship and love with standardized protocols.

Existencial unhappiness and commercial success can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: Zuckerberg, in the Fincher movie is so skilled in the interpretation of the psychological needs of his generation because loneliness and affective frustration are his intimate psycho-scape.

Desire is diverted from physical contact and invested in the abstract field of simulated seduction, in the infinite space of the image. Boundless enhancement of disembodied imagination leads to the virtualization of the erotic experience, infinite flight from an object to the next. Value, money, financial excitement: these are the perfect form of the virtualization of desire. The permanent mobilization of psychic energy in the economic sphere is simultaneously the cause and the effect of the virtualization of contact. The very word “contact” comes to mean exactly the contrary of what it means: not bodily touch, epidermic perception of the sensuous presence of the other, but purely intellectual intentionality, virtual cognizability of the other. Hard to predict which sort of mutation is underway in the long run of human evolution. As far as we know this virtual investment of desire is currently provoking a pathogenic effect of fragilization of social solidarity and a stiffening of empathic feeling.

The genius of Zuckerberg essentially consists in his ability to exploit the suffering energy of the crowd, collective loneliness and frustration. The original idea of the website comes from two rich  Harvard’s twins named Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who want to hire him as programmer. Zuckerberg pretends to work for them, and actually takes hold of their idea, although he is much more able than they in linking the project to the psychical needs arising from contemporary alienation.

Did Zuckerberg steal the idea from those two undergraduates?  Yes and no. Actually in the Network it’s impossible to distinguish clearly the different moments of the valorization process, because the productive force of the net is collective, while profits are private. Here we find the irremediable contradiction between collective intelligence in the net and private appropriation of its products, a contradiction which is shaking the very foundation of semiocapitalism.

This movie is an interesting view on life and work in the age of precarity. The word precarious

means aleatory, uncertain, unstable, and it refers not only to the uncertainty of the labor relation, but also to the fragmentation of time and the unceasing deterritorialization of the factors of social production.  Both labor and capital, in fact have no more a stable relation to the territory and to the community. Capital is flowing in the financial circuit and the enterprise is no more based on material assets, territorialized, but it is based on signs, ideas, information, knowledge and linguistic exchange. The enterprise is no more linked to the territory and work process is no more based on the community of workers, living together in the factory day after day, as it takes the form of ever changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. Cognitive workers do not meet in the same place every day, but stay alone in their connected cubicles, and answer to the requests of ever changing employers. The capitalist is no more signing agreements in order to exploit the productive energy of the worker during his overall working life.  He is no more buying the entire availability of the worker. He is hiring a fragment of available time, which is a fractal, compatible with the protocols of inter-functionality, and recombinable with other fragments of time.

Industrial workers experienced solidarity because they met each other every day and were members of the same living community, and shared the same interests, while the net worker is alone and unable to create solidarity because everybody is obliged to compete in the labor market and in the daily fight for a precarious salary. Loneliness and lack of human solidarity is not only characterizing the net worker, but also the entrepreneur. The border separating work and enterprise is confused, in the sphere of cognitive work. Although Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire, the way he is spending his work day is not dissimilar from the way his employees are spending their work day. They all are sitting in front of a computer and type on the keyboard.

The main character of the movie – the Zuckerberg described by Fincher, has a friend, only one: Edouard Severin, who becomes the financer of the starting Facebook enterprise. When the success of the enterprise is guaranteed and demands new financers, Zuckenberg does not hesitate to betray his only friend.

This perfectly depicts the personal relations in the sphere of financial world, but unfortunately this is also depicting relations between workers. Although the movie speaks of a billionaire, it’s also telling the story of social condition of labor. The impossibility of friendship in the present condition of virtual abstraction of sociality, and the impossibility of building solidarity in a society that is turning life into abstract container of competing fragments of time.

 

Bifo on wikileaks

Full post here: http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/bifo-on-the-arrest-of-julian-assange/.

“What does the experience of Wikileaks teach us? That the military was paid to suppress civilians, that diplomats had been paid to sugar the pill; this we already knew. But that was not the lesson that comes from Wikileaks.

This experience, rather, teaches that the diffuse network of the Cognitariat can challenge and beat the institutions of power. In these structures (military, diplomatic and financial) are cognitive workers: computer programmers, journalists and technicians, who are rapidly discovering the infinite power of collective intelligence.

The battle against the dictatorship of financial idiocy, of Semiocapitalism, has begun.”

fear/anguish: the psyche of mobility

Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude is turning out to be pretty fantastic. Here’s some thoughts on “Day One: Forms of Dread and Refuge.”

Fear and anguish, through Kant and Heidegger, are articulated as a dialectic that has implications for distinguishing “the people” from the “multitude.” As Virno notes, Heidegger asserts that fear “refers to a very specific fact,” while anguish “has not clear cause which sparks it off” (32). He goes on to say, anguish is “provoked purely and simply by our being exposed to the world, by the uncertainty and indecision with which our relation to this world manifests itself” (32). Virno then pushes this dialectic onto the opposing conceptions of “people” and “multitude,” in that the concept of “people” is “closely bound to the clear separation between a habitual ‘inside’ and an unknown and hostile ‘outside’” (32-33). However, the concept of “multitude” “hinges upon the ending of such a separation” (33).

Interestingly, he claims that the fear/anguish dialectic is groundless, for three reasons:

1. “one cannot speak reasonably of substantial communities”
2. “Today, all forms of life have the experience of ‘not feeling at home’”
3. the traditional model of stimulus (dread) – response (seeking refuge) is wrong; “Above all, we protect ourselves; then, when we are intent on protecting ourselves, we focus on identifying the dangers with which we may have to concern ourselves” (34).

This inversion of the stimulus-response model of dread/seeking refuge forces us to look upon enclosure practices and discourses of interiority/exteriority in a different way. Practices of confinement and exclusion, for example refugee detention camps and physical barriers such as walls, are an attempt at turning the multitude into a people. They are practices and technologies of differentiation, separation, and hierarchization in the face of a multitude, a “plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic or interstitial form” (21).

Confinement and exclusion produce a paradox: to reduce the multitude into distinct and coherent communities of peoples which are then reunited into a One, a “people.”

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics

Feedback please! I’m working on this for 1) the GESO website and 2) for some circulation in discussions on academic labor.

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Why would graduate students need a union? is one of the most common questions GESO activists come across while organizing the campus. Answering this question, GESO activists usually focus on our ongoing struggle for transactional benefits such as an increased minimum stipend, better health benefits for students and their families, a formal grievance procedure, and other issues. Rarely, though, do we get an opportunity to discuss larger themes and trends in higher education and political economy. In an effort to make the GESO website as useful as possible, we’d like to take the opportunity to address one of the primary reasons that a graduate employee union (and unions for adjunct and full-time faculty as well) is absolutely necessary: the paradigmatic shift in the United States from an economy of material production to one of immaterial production.

Stated simply, unionism is no longer confined to the realm of the trades (carpenters, electricians, pipe-fitters, etc.) or manual labor (longshoremen, migrant farmworkers, etc.).

The early days of unionism saw the creation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO, the IWW; later, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) were formed to bring unions to new areas of the labor force. Even teachers were unionized in many places by the early 1900s (National Education Association, 1918; American Federation of Teachers, ). The growth of unions in the 20th Century  can be largely attributed to the maturation of a capitalism based on the mass production of material goods. This form of mass production brought with it a rash of problems the likes of which had never really been seen before: children missing limbs from industrial loom accidents, the black lung deaths of coal miners in Appalachia, and so on. Recognizing that government intervention was unlikely, and unable to combat the supposedly free labor contract on an individual basis, workers in the early 20th Century banded together to demand rights including fair wages, retirement benefits, injury and accident compensation, child labor prohibitions, and many other things we take for granted today in any workplace. Individually, a worker could not demand sick leave from the employer who literally exercised a power over the worker that dictated whether he could eat that night, let alone feed a family. Collectively, though, thousands of workers could force an employer to meet these basic demands. The peak of the material labor pact came in the wake of the New Deal and World War II and lasted until about the 1970s.

Decades of reasonable profits and a stable middle class weren’t enough, though, and with the OPEC oil crisis, capital began to push back. Beginning in Chile in the 1970s, then in Britain and the U.S. in the 1980s, neoliberal capital began to take root: outsource material production to countries where labor was not demanding a living wage, insource the production of new knowledge and innovation that would drive an economy without labor (a capitalist’s wet dream!). While we cannot know if we are at the pinnacle of this wave of capitalism, we can certainly say that the U.S. national economy is largely destroyed in favor of a global economy, the regional iteration of which is focused on producing knowledge, affects, and financial instruments – essentially, our economy has shifted to producing immaterial goods.

The university is one of the primary engines in the new economy, and graduate students are essential to the functioning of the university. Graduate students (and other contingent academic labor) have replaced material laborers in function, if not necessarily in experience. [It would certainly be ridiculous to claim that the experience of a graduate student in the humanities is equivalent to the dangerous life of a coal miner in 1920 West Virginia.] What is clear is that the labor required to drive the new economy is not coming from the factories, it is coming from universities.

Most of you are probably thinking at this point, ok, but still, why do we need a union, grad school is only a few years long and then I’ll go on and be a professor (or perhaps for those of you in engineering or some such department, a job in the private sector). If this were 1975, we would say, no problem, tough it out. However, the academic landscape has shifted dramatically: in 1975 the ration of tenured to non-tenured faculty on campus was 75::25; today it is directly reversed, part-time and contingent faculty now make up 75% of the academic workforce, with tenured positions rapidly falling below 25%. The sad reality is, most of us will leave OSU with an advanced degree and then go on to a pastiche of part-time academic jobs with little security, no academic freedom, few benefits, and wages so low that we’ll look forward to a lifetime of debt repayments. A graduate employee union certainly does not guarantee a fix to all of these problems, but it forms a particularly important foundation for a new class politics that can help 1) to alleviate the financial burden on grad students to hopefully reduce debt loads and increase the array of post-graduation opportunities and 2) to build a university-wide coalition of labor activists to not only protect wages and benefits, but also to create a democratic workplace.