"Another University Is Possible"

Yesterday, two people told me about a conference which was to take place this weekend and of which I'd been heretofore utterly unaware. It turns out that this conference, the Global Left Dialogue's 2005 Left Forum was really a reworking and reimagining of the Socialist Scholar's Conference, which I went to once when I was seventeen, mostly to see Noam Chomsky speak at the opening plenary, and which I'd found sort of uselessly sectarian and seemingly mired in very old debates which I found relatively useless as someone trying then to envision what anarchist organizing could look like in the context of a New York city high school (this was before Seattle, and before the Fieldston Revolutionary Anarchist Collective of Activist Students, which I won't take the time to explain here, but felt the need to namedrop for nostalgia's sake.)

The conference's new incarnation seems to have shed much of the old sectarian baggage, the Spartacists and their fetishized commodity politics banished to the sidewalks outside the CUNY Graduate Center and the DSA affiliation kept quiet if still present at all in an attempt, one speaker told me, to reconfigure the event in accordance with the plethora of "Social Forums," organized throughout the globe. My curiosity piqued, I decided to attend some of Saturday's events. I went first to a panel titled "Postmodernism and Democracy, featuring Jan Riehman of Union Theological Seminary, David Ruccio of the journal Rethinking Marxism, Duke University Lit Theorist and Toni Negri collaborator Michael Hardt, and my undergraduate advisor, Michael Denning. Some observations: most claimed to dislike both of the words by which the panel's topic was defined. Michael (Denning) grappled with this problem by reworking and to some extent reconfiguring some key points he made in his Devane Lecture from 2001 regarding "The Democracy" and the historical relationship between the state and the social. He also put Hardt on the spot, playfully wondering aloud at the meaning behind Multitude's concluding invocation of "The New Science of Democracy: Madison and Lenin." (I for one, wish I'd asked whether or not the link made between St. Augustine and the wobblies in the "Intermezzo" of Empire was solely an account of the historical trajectory of small-r republicanism, or, indeed, as I have sometimes suspected, a slightly bizarre Dylan reference.

Riehman seemed the most frustrated with Postmodernism, and also the most willing to engage in twenty-year old arguments the others wanted to declare no longer worth rehashing. While not discounting the need for some changes in the tools of critical analysis, Riehman was skeptical of the "post" as beyond approach explicitly embraced in Empire. He openly expressed frustration with, even contempt for those whose work employed formulations of "immaterial labor," which led Hardt to interject, "you mean me?" I don't wish to downplay the problems in Hardt and Negri's praxis, because I believe their are many, but I am not sure that H&N's account of informatized labor and production (I believe they use this word more than immaterial, though Munoz has borrowed my copy of Empire and I am thus unable to verify this assertion,) is as atomized or reified as Riehman wanted to claim today. Hardt's response to this question and to an audience member's question regarding the relevance and or constitution of the working class and the need for new methodologies was to launch into the "Symptoms of Passage" riff, again from Empire, which alleges that Postmodernism's embrace of fragmentation and hybridity occurred decades after global capitalism had already recognized the value of such tools, make what its proponents envisioned as a liberatory praxis of joy and freedom (the rebellion against grand narratives and unitary truths) was indeed more a "symptom" of the cultural logics of the new forms of empire than a means of countering it. Hardt's argument was more or less as compelling and as effusive in person as in print, though Hardt himself strikes a far more sympathetic and far less incendiary pose in the flesh than on the page.

The second panel I checked out concerned the neoliberal university, was presented by Michael Denning's working group on Globalization and Culture, and dealt, with the exception of Naomi Paik's paper on the implications of the neoconservative project of HR 3077, primarily with questions raised by Yale University's history and present of struggle. On the eve of next week's strike, Dan Gilbert spoke powerfully of GESO members as a new sort of activist public intellectual. He also powerfully summarized the legacy and future of industrial unionism on Yale's campus, something which has contributed a great deal to the strength and vision of the movement in New Haven. REDACTED used the pernicious planetary pillaging of Farallon Capital Management to look at means of fighting the global university's neoliberal agenda on a global scale, while Sumanth Gopinath looked at CCNE and CORD in the context of Social Movement Unionism and Michael Denning's own formulation of the "University-Hospital City." Denning, for his part, spoke of universities as engines of globalization and insisted that "another university is possible," locating the Yale struggle in the context of global social movements in a way I've been trying to do for years and failing in comparison.

I seem on the threshold of entering into a new struggle at a very different university with its own set of crises and antinomies, assuming I enroll in NYU's American Studies program, which I probably ought to do. This feels strange; the Yale fight and the social movement built in New Haven over the past sixty-five/thirty-seven/twenty-six/fifteen/7 or so years has played -- and even now continues to play a major role in forming my intellectual and political (in the broadest Gramscian sense) concerns and projects. Listening to the Initiative panel reminded me of the centrality of the experiences of student organizing and solidarity to how I understand myself as a constituted subject, something half-forgotten amidst four months of near-seclusion, inactivity, and depression. It also pushed me to add, in whatever way I can, new contributions to this dialogue, and perhaps this is as good a way as any to think, in very broad terms, about what I want to be doing in graduate school. In the meantime, I'll be going up to New Haven Monday morning, or maybe Sunday evening(?) and joining picket lines for in the third strike at Yale University in barely two years as this fight to constitute a new global/urban commons continues.




Edited 2:00 PM to fix a link, elaborate on the "symptoms of passage" argument, and fix some awkward wording.