some more links about occupy wall street

George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici – Go to Global Revolution

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – The Fight for “Real Democracy” at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street

Jodi Dean has about a gazillion posts at her blog

article on Negri…

by Ed Emery, in Venice. Video of interview (in Italian) included.

via lemondediplomatique english edition

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).

biopolitics of the refugee body

Some initial (provisional) thoughts in articulating a biopolitics of the refugee body, from Paris, spring 2011.

*****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****

Refugees exist in a space of biopolitical indistinction. Neither the target of mass depoliticization within the camp (in this sense, their bare life pre-exists the topography of the camp – the very fact of movement illustrates a potentiality), nor the target of a Foucauldian “make live and let die” biopolitics, nor the multitude in action, refugees – more precisely the figure of the refugee – are productively inoperative; they exist within the political productivity of Exodus.

Paradigmatic figures:

• Roma/Gypsies
• “Travelers”
• Jews pre-1948
• Palestinians post-1948
• Native Americans (sovereigns without sovereignty)
• Nomads

The figure of the refugee exists as a threshold between a current and future political ontology. As a threshold, the refugee contains the potentiality to reconfigure all contemporary political categories – sovereignty, the nation-state, community… – but also contains its own negation.

The refugee has no dialectical opposite, because as Agamben shows, we live in a permanent state of exception which has no outside. This state of exception has not, though, rendered us all homo sacer. While the state of exception reveals homo sacer and its conditions of production, its dialectical pair is the sovereign:

sovereign <—–> homo sacer

But the specific conditions of the camp are topographically specific, an observation made by numerous social scientists. Rather than accept that refugees are homo sacer (an assertion negated by the very mobility constitutive of refugee status), and therefore exists within the sovereign <—–> homo sacer dialectic, we must understand that the refugee, produced in ever-greater numbers every day, is another figure that provides a line of flight away from the dialectic observed:

sovereign <——-> homo sacer

——–> refugee

Thus, the refugee is:

1. immanent to a state of exception (which predates both the State and the political)
2. a figure-to-come, a being of pure potentiality existing in being rather than being-such (see Agamben’s Coming Community)
3. productive, in that its very existence reconfigures the political
4. inoperative, in that its mode of being is as Exodus (“I would prefer not to…”)

So, the state of exception’s primary by-product is not homo sacer, he who may be killed but not sacrificed, but the refugee – the political figure unmoored from all traditional notions of politics, yet which retains an essentially political mode of being. Such is the ontological space opened by the refugee.

This ontological space is one of Exodus, or the continuous opting-out of appearance. Rather than risk the life or death choice of remaining in appearance, the refugee moves, thereby retaining potentiality. Recognizing the potential threat of the refugee, the State responds by attempting to keep refugees spatially fixed; understanding that there is no ‘effective’ response other than an absolute necropolitics/thanatopolitics of genocide.

State practices of border control, walling, citizenship/worker rights, and so on do not produce refugees (as conventional thinking has it) – the permanent state of exception does this – but are instead responses to the political Exodus of the refugee. (This even when the refugee did not exist as such.) Against Esposito, who positions biopolitics and the development of the modern state as an effect of the politics of immunity – a way of keeping the Other out – contemporary states are in fact effects of mobility – a way of keeping Us in. Slightly re-casting Agamben, the state of exception is indeed the ontological pre-condition of the modern state, in that the state responds in its genesis to the condition of Exodus.

Exodus —-> Refugee —–> State ——> Refugee ——> Exodus

 

more theses on biopolitics

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

*****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****

~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…

 

hardt and negri on Arab revolutions

Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers

Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, The Guardian

One challenge facing observers of the uprisings spreading across north Africa and the Middle East is to read them as not so many repetitions of the past but as original experiments that open new political possibilities, relevant well beyond the region, for freedom and democracy. Indeed, our hope is that through this cycle of struggles the Arab world becomes for the next decade what Latin America was for the last – that is, a laboratory of political experimentation between powerful social movements and progressive governments from Argentina to Venezuela, and from Brazil to Bolivia.

These revolts have immediately performed a kind of ideological house-cleaning, sweeping away the racist conceptions of a clash of civilisations that consign Arab politics to the past. The multitudes in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi shatter the political stereotypes that Arabs are constrained to the choice between secular dictatorships and fanatical theocracies, or that Muslims are somehow incapable of freedom and democracy. Even calling these struggles “revolutions” seems to mislead commentators who assume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some other past European rebellion against kings and czars.

These Arab revolts ignited around the issue of unemployment, and at their centre have been highly educated youth with frustrated ambitions – a population that has much in common with protesting students in London and Rome. Although the primary demand throughout the Arab world focuses on the end to tyranny and authoritarian governments, behind this single cry stands a series of social demands about work and life not only to end dependency and poverty but to give power and autonomy to an intelligent, highly capable population. That Zine al-Avidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Gaddafi leave power is only the first step.

The organisation of the revolts resembles what we have seen for more than a decade in other parts of the world, from Seattle to Buenos Aires and Genoa and Cochabamba, Bolivia: a horizontal network that has no single, central leader. Traditional opposition bodies can participate in this network but cannot direct it. Outside observers have tried to designate a leader for the Egyptian revolts since their inception: maybe it’s Mohamed ElBaradei, maybe Google’s head of marketing, Wael Ghonim. They fear that the Muslim Brotherhood or some other body will take control of events. What they don’t understand is that the multitude is able to organise itself without a centre – that the imposition of a leader or being co-opted by a traditional organisation would undermine its power. The prevalence in the revolts of social network tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, are symptoms, not causes, of this organisational structure. These are the modes of expression of an intelligent population capable of using the instruments at hand to organise autonomously.

Although these organised network movements refuse central leadership, they must nonetheless consolidate their demands in a new constituent process that links the most active segments of the rebellion to the needs of the population at large. The insurrections of Arab youth are certainly not aimed at a traditional liberal constitution that merely guarantees the division of powers and a regular electoral dynamic, but rather at a form of democracy adequate to the new forms of expression and needs of the multitude. This must include, firstly, constitutional recognition of the freedom of expression – not in the form typical of the dominant media, which is constantly subject to the corruption of governments and economic elites, but one that is represented by the common experiences of network relations.

And given that these uprisings were sparked by not only widespread unemployment and poverty but also a generalised sense of by frustrated productive and expressive capacities, especially among young people, a radical constitutional response must invent a common plan to manage natural resources and social production. This is a threshold through which neoliberalism cannot pass and capitalism is put to question. And Islamic rule is completely inadequate to meet these needs. Here insurrection touches on not only the equilibriums of north Africa and the Middle East but also the global system of economic governance.

Hence our hope for the cycle of struggles spreading in the Arab world to become like Latin America, to inspire political movements and raise aspirations for freedom and democracy beyond the region. Each revolt, of course, may fail: tyrants may unleash bloody repression; military juntas may try to remain in power; traditional opposition groups may attempt to hijack movements; and religious hierarchies may jockey to take control. But what will not die are the political demands and desires that have been unleashed, the expressions of an intelligent young generation for a different life in which they can put their capacities to use.

As long as those demands and desires live, the cycle of struggles will continue. The question is what these new experiments in freedom and democracy will teach the world over the next decade.

a grammar of the multitude

As I prepare for my candidacy exams in Spring 2011, I’ll be posting reading summaries here. All block quotes appear in red and refer to the edition listed at the top of the post.

*****

Paolo Virno, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004). [Includes an introduction by Sylvere Lotringer, referenced below as "Lotringer"]

Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life lays out his vision of post-Fordism, culminating in the radical statement that “Post-Fordism is the communism of capital” (110).

He begins with an elaboration of the multitude, based on Spinoza:

For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates 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 of interstitial form. (21)

The Spinozist multitude is juxtaposed against the “people” of Hobbes. For Hobbes, the state of nature was a multitudinous state, and the development of the social contract moved people from existing as many, the multitude, to existing as One, the people. Virno notes,

The concept of people, according to Hobbes, is strictly correlated to the existence of the State; furthermore, it is a reverberation, a reflection of the State: if there is a State, then there are people. (22)

Essentially, the State is endowed with a single will, that of the people’s. Much like Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude, Virno agrees that the multitude

shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign. (23)

Where Virno begins to deviate from Hardt and Negri, though, is through his articulation of the multitude and post-Fordism with Marx’s notion of the “general intellect” as articulated in the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse.

Virno departs from Marx, in that he claims Marx equated the general intellect with fixed capital. Virno insists that instead, “the general intellect presents itself as living labor” (106).

In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games.’ In contemporary labor processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive ‘machines,’ without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve. (106)

The shift in the paradigm of labor is essentially one from labor-time to productive-time. Even a brief example will make this clear: any contemporary individual with a cell phone understands that there has been a complete collapse between the time spent at work (formerly labor-time) and the time in which a person is now expected to be productive. When individuals employed even in the non-profit sector (in other words, individuals engaged in work with no connection to international stock markets, or other demands that a person be available beyond the “normal” work day) receive phone calls at home in order to troubleshoot the next ‘crisis,’ and the norm is to take laptops and cell phones into the home, it becomes clear that the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’ has utterly collapsed. This crisis – the crisis of the division of human experience into the labor sphere (poiesis), the sphere of political action (praxis), and the sphere of the intellect (the life of the mind) – is precisely the background of the multitude.

Virno extends this crisis into a critique of Foucault’s notion of biopower, and the contemporary studies of biopower. This is an oblique critique of Hardt and Negri, and needs to be understood as such. Virno notes,

The concept of “bio-politics” has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through to the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it. // In my opinion, to comprehend the rational core of the term ‘bio-politics,’ we should begin with a different concept, a much more complicated concept from a philosophical standpoint: that of labor-power. (81)

Biopolitics, for Virno, is necessarily linked to labor-power, or, the potential to produce. Under a Fordist economy, there is still separation between biopower and labor power, in that there are goods produced and exchanged in such a way as to maintain a division between the polis and the oikos. Under post-Fordism, where the good to be produced is immaterial, we can only operate on the level of life. One sells and buys an individual’s potential to produce as the primary commodity. It is for this reason that Virno writes:

Here is the crucial point: where something exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence. ‘Life,’ pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential. (82)

why is life, as such, managed and controlled? The answer is absolutely clear: because it acts as the substratum of a mere faculty, labor-power, which has taken on the consistency of a commodity. (83)

Virno concludes A Grammar with “ten theses on the multitude and post-Fordist capitalism” (95-111). These theses reiterate and extend the primary observations and arguments of the book, and culminate in his tenth thesis: “Post-Fordism is the ‘communism of capital’” (110). In concerning himself with the multitude as the primary figure of post-Fordism, Virno argues that post-Fordism is capitalism’s attempt to articulate many of the demands of communism without any of the emancipatory components, therefore preserving exploitation and alienation. He summarizes by saying,

This [the communism of capital] means that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. (110)

This taps into the revolutionary creative potential of the multitude, foreseen by Marx and Spinoza (among others) as the condition for communism and democracy respectively, but for capitalist and anti-democratic ends: the extension of exploitation in the immaterial scene as ‘common sense,’ in other words, a new capitalist hegemony.

In a rather significant way, what Virno does in A Grammar of the Multitude is return the multitude to a position from which to engage in class warfare. But this class warfare is no longer tied to the proletariat (Thesis 9, 109); instead, it hearkens back to the autonomist politics of 1970s Italy, which fought to include the unemployed and underemployed in the struggle against capital. By broadening the revolutionary class, as does Hardt and Negri, but maintaining a more faithful Marxist core, Virno (according to Lotringer in his introduction) imagines the multitude as a class looking for a struggle, rather than a struggle looking for a class (16).  Lotringer insists that Virno avoids “turning exile, or the multitude for that matter, let alone communism, into another splendid myth” (9). What Virno accomplishes is articulating the multitude as “a force defined less by what it actually produces than by its virtuality, its potential to produce and produce itself” (Lotringer, 12).

 

more on critical pedagogy

So I posted a bit ago on critical pedagogy (CritPed), and got some interesting responses. So, I want to clarify a few things.

My first response came by email from Peter McLaren himself. A second response, posted publicly so I’ll refer to it more concretely, came from Barry Kanpol, Dean of the School of Education at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). After I got over the initial shock of having two quite high profile people having actually read my blog, I took some time to formulate a bit of a response, which I have posted here.

Peter’s response to my blog post came after a series of sincere and productive emails, which he sent me at my request. I had asked him at the Bergamo Conference to send me some resources discussing “absolute negation.” He graciously did so. I guess he came across my blog post and was a bit surprised, because he emailed me a series of substantial comments. Basically, he asked me three questions:

1. Is it fair to claim that he has a bad reading of Hardt and Negri?
2. Is it fair to hold him solely responsible for answering his own calls to action and/or research? Or hold him solely responsible for all of what CritPed needs to do in the present and future?
3. What about my assertion of critical pedagogy’s reception as “hysterical conspiracy theory” actually has to do with what critical pedagogy actually is or does?

Barry Kanpol’s response, found in a comment on my blog post itself (here), centered around his own critique of CritPed in the McLaren tradition. He essentially asks what does McLaren’s work have to do with “real” teachers dealing with issues of de-skilling? He seems to assert that CritPed, at least coming from McLaren and his acolytes, has nothing to do with our ability to train teachers, and he asks me to consider:

1. that CritPed has more to do with developing leadership styles than illuminating any critique of the educational system, and
2. to position schools of education in a space where they can assume a critical public identity while knowing also when to step back and allow things to develop without them.

At least that’s what I can gather about what he’s saying. I have picked up Kanpol’s book on CritPed in order to figure this out.

So, I’ll respond to each question or comment above in order. First Peter:

1. I will admit that it is perhaps unfair to state outright that it is a “bad” reading of Hardt and Negri because, as Peter pointed out in his email, he only had a few moments in passing comments to refer to them and his comments were focused more on Derrida than Hardt and Negri. Point taken. However, based on Peter’s comments about the multitude and about immanence, I do believe there is room here for a substantial critique of Peter. In the first place, philosophies of immanence (including Hardt and Negri’s and those of Deleuze and Guattari), do not disavow the notion of transcendence. Indeed, D&G are quite clear in discussing the idea that there are real transcendent forms out there and, indeed, we constitute them all the time (i.e. the State, language, and so on). However, these things are not produced from no-where; instead, D&G take an anti-theological approach, in the sense that any transcendent form is actually the consequence of a plane of immanence or a series of planes of immanence, converging, interacting, and producing a particular assemblage. Assemblages can be, and often are, transcendent. It does not mean, however, that they are a synthesis, or the end product of a dialectical progression. This is the primary differentiation between Hegel from Deleuze and Guattari (at least on this specific issue). Hardt and Negri pick up this version of immanence, based in Spinoza rather than Hegel, in part because it no longer relies on contradiction and negation as the motor of historical progression, but has (at least) an equal focus on production, productivity, and imagination. Finally, there were Peter’s comments that were along these lines: that if we rely too much on an immanent version of the multitude, then what we have is a pure voluntarism, where the multitude is passively sitting back and waiting for the right revolutionary moment to reveal itself. I think this is actually the direct opposite of what Hardt and Negri assert – and the best example of this is the Seattle 1999 WTO protests and those which have been inspired by them (although this does raise the specter of the battle for the soul of Seattle 1999 from different “left” viewpoints, which I won’t take up here).
2. Again, my former blog post on CritPed could be construed incorrectly to hold Peter solely responsible for the development and future of Critical Pedagogy. One thing I do not want to do is construct Peter as a paper tiger for me to take unfair pot-shots at. However, a simple GoogleScholar search reveals something quite interesting: aside from articles written by McLaren himself and the equally influential Henry Giroux, the majority of other search results are either the popular critiques of CritPed by Ellsworth, or articles by the core critical pedagogues who mostly cite Mclaren and Giroux. So, you get, on the one hand, Giroux and McLaren as the dominant voices in CritPed directly, or on the other hand, McLaren and Giroux as the dominant voices in CritPed indirectly. Either way, it is clear that McLaren is one of the the most important and influential figures in CritPed, which opens that figure up to a certain level of critique. It is almost impossible to escape speaking of Peter McLaren when speaking of Critical Pedagogy, and I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. It is to say, though, that any critique of CritPed is going to come with a critique of McLaren, and this is not the same thing as holding him up as the sole figure and future of CritPed.
3. What I meant about CritPed coming across as hysterical conspiracy theory is twofold: a comment on rhetoric and a comment on scholarly practice. I think, for quite some time, CritPed in general has become an exercise in polemic rather than scholarship. I want to be absolutely clear here that this was in no way directed only at Peter. The context of my last CritPed post, upon reflection though, can be read that way, and I did not intend it that way. I don’t have any books or articles handy right now, but what I can say is this: in the most recent version of Life in Schools, as well as in Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire, there are numerous moments where strong assertions are made about capitalism, the American government, the FBI and/or CIA, and so on (which I may be, actually, inclined to agree with) but are not cited. As a scholar, my first reaction is usually, “ok, I see that, but I want to know more, where should I look?” As convincing as I find much of CritPed to be, I am often left wondering where to go next because the scholarly practice of verification is left out. Perhaps this is a bit old fashioned, but I think citation and references are important. And this is why, I think, CritPed is seen by so many as an exercise in hysterical conspiracy theory. They get images of angry, red in the face Marxists screaming about the FBI wrongfully arresting dissenters and rather than being directed to things that verify that they were true they are left to just trust the author. Maybe I’m wrong here, maybe I missed the references (it’s been about 3 years since I read Life in Schools). But I do know that in teaching classes with pre-service teachers and in taking classes with MA and PhD students in education, this notion is a dominant one. What I want is less polemic and more scholarship.

And now to Barry…

1. One of the most pressing problems in anything we call education today is this myth of leadership and leadership style. If CritPed is best used to develop a leadership style, then I want nothing to do with it. If there is a better way to fall directly back into the neoliberal, capitalist paradigm which CritPed is critical of, I can’t imagine it. Yes, CritPed is mobilized to get teachers and students interested in and ready to change the world; yes, CritPed is often mobilized within K-12 and higher education settings specifically to critique the practices taking place within those institutions. However, what a good critical pedagogy should not be doing is allowing us to fool ourselves into thinking that developing a good leadership style is worth anything. Organic intellectuals, activists, and students do not need “leadership style,” they need the capacity to act, a wholly different philosophical question (one which I will take up another time).
2. Any good critical pedagogy, one worthy of its name, must put the school of education (and the school itself) under erasure. Institution building, wherein schools of education use a critical pedagogy to develop a critical public stance for community development, is missing the point entirely. For time and space, this is also a question I will develop at a later time. For now, though, suffice to say that what critical pedagogy highlights, I think, is precisely the problem of schooling, not schooling as a solution to anything.

To summarize, Peter commented in his email to me that he was surprised that I would state that I was interested in critical pedagogy then seem to be so dismissive of it. I don’t think I’m dismissing it at all, nor do I think that my criticism of it is unfair. In this sense, I am echoing Peter’s call for a double negation. I am NOT a wage laborer :: I AM not a wage laborer – does not negate the fact of working for wages. Isn’t the entire point of this double negation to open up a space toward which to move when one in fact no longer participates in capitalism? If this is the case, then my statement “I am NOT a critical pedagogue :: I AM not a critical pedagogue” holds within it both a negation and a radical affirmation that critical pedagogy is precisely what I am doing and what I am interested in. I’m just interested in it in ways that may not seem intelligible to what I would call more traditional Marxists.

What we need is a radical pedagogy, moving toward a minor marxism, toward a minor education.

association of american geographers 2011

So, after a bit of confusion, it seems that things are taking shape for the 2011 Association of American Geographers conference in April. The CFP I posted yesterday did not attract enough papers to hold a full paper session, so that has been scrapped. However, I will be taking part in a panel discussion with the No Borders title and theme.

Also, due to the cancellation of the paper session, the No Borders organizers put me in touch with the organizers for two other sessions happening at AAG that might take my paper. I am still waiting to hear from them. However, if I don’t hear back by about noon tomorrow, I will submit on my own and see what happens.

Due to a strangely restrictive, I think, word limit for abstract submissions (250 words!), I had to revise my proposal a bit more. But I think I have it refined to the following:

Abstract: Current scholarship on human migration, immigration, and refugees seems to be condensing around two distinct poles: studies that privilege the geopolitical and studies that privilege the biopolitical. These poles are beginning to constitute distinct research paradigms that do not communicate with one another. This is problematic in that neither the work on refugees from a geopolitical standpoint nor studies of refugees from a biopolitical standpoint seem to fully capture the complexity and connections which occur within practices of refugee and asylum policing. In short, the refugee body does not map onto our current conceptions of biopolitics (Hardt and Negri, Foucault, and/or Agamben), and studies in geopolitics often ignore the material practices of the State as they interact with the bodies attempting to cross borders. The current paper will attempt to refine a conception of biopolitics unique to the refugee body as its foundational figure. This biopolitics is a necessary component of a conception of sovereignty (and geopolitics) as co-constitutive with one another. The biopolitics of the refugee body is constitutive of contemporary sovereignty; contemporary sovereignty is constitutive of the biopolitics of the refugee: together they form a zone of indistinction that casts new light on a form of governmentality which Didier Bigo refers to as the “banopticon.”

 

anarchist geographers

So, I just submitted a paper proposal and offered to be on the panel for the following conference notice I received. It was a bit last minute, because I half forgot about it since I’ve been so busy lately. I basically submitted what I posted here, just cleaned up a bit. Not being a geographer, I don’t have a ton of confidence that I’ll get in, but I figured that I should submit since the topic so clearly touches on my dissertation project.

Here’s the CFP:

¡No Borders!  Towards a new political geography of “immigration”

Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (Seattle April 12-16, 2011)

While from a historical perspective, the global system of migration controls is relatively new, it has become largely naturalized in both policy making circles and geographical scholarship. This lack of a critical perspective on international boundaries themselves results in a reading of ‘immigration’ that privileges the perspective of the state and inherently casts border crossing as a problem that needs to be solved. In solidarity with broad based movements for immigrants’ rights, however, a growing number of activists and scholars around the world have taken up a call for a politics that does not take the existence of borders, controls over the movement of people, or differential access to rights based on citizenship status for granted.  We seek participants for several sessions at the AAG who are interested in thinking through what it means to engage in geographical scholarship or organizing work from a “no borders” or “freedom of movement” perspective.

For example:
* How can geographers doing work on immigration and borders ground their work in a freedom of movement framework?
* What already existing or emerging forms of political thought and action are challenging the global system of migration controls?
* How do these challenges intersect with other struggles and bodies of political theory? (for example, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist traditions)
* What does it mean to advance a “no borders” politics in an era of rising anti-immigrant sentiment?

We seek participants for both a paper and panel session, and envision a format that prioritizes open discussion, rather than formal presentations.  If you are interested in being a part of these sessions, please send a brief abstract (for the paper session) or expression of interest (for the panel) to Hunter Jackson (hunter.jackson@gmail.com <mailto:hunter.jackson@gmail.com>) or Jennifer Ridgley (jen.ridgley@gmail.com <mailto:jen.ridgley@gmail.com>) by October 18th.  We welcome participants at all stages of their research and careers.