3.a little bit louder

Asad has a fantastic post on the strike, dealing particularly with the ramifications of the new policies for language and literature teachers as advancing rather than molliating casualization and thinking about the strike's relationship to the humanities. In the process, he gets Bordieuian:

Here I might return to the theme of "collegiality." The picket line, with
its chanting, drumming, singing - in short, its performativity - is by its
nature often carnivalesque: not only the ordinary collegial etiquette, but the
very habitus, or social and bodily disposition, of university life is suspended
by it. The result is an unleashing of pent-up energies and frustrations of many
kinds, including elements that exceed the basis of the conflict, such as the
offensive nature of the university's communications with graduate assistants.
This is why the defense of collegiality has become an important high ground to
the administration: harping on it allows the picket line's symbolic excess to be
depicted as a form of reactive immaturity. Paradoxically, immaturity is also
seen to be a form of belatedness: Sexton's euphemistic corporate terminology of
an "Enterprise University" and "University Leadership Team" leaves no room such
"dated" practices as strikes and protests, and the supposedly expired sixties
radicalism from which they are thought to stem. Just as the domain of the
humanities is linked to anachronistic countercultural protest, so then is the
social practice of picketing. On both counts, we're both too young and too old,
past our sell-by date before we grow up. This argumentative tack, however,
allows for the obfuscation of the original conflict. Even so, analyzed as a
cultural form, the picket line performs an important function: it inscribes and
instantiates the strike both to observers and in the minds and bodies of those
striking. As Louis Althusser might have said, it "interpellates" (roughly,
allows the self-recognition of) those who take part, and thus functions as a
radicalizing action. Insofar as it refuses collegial dialogue and substitutes
the implacable presence of the bodies of strikers, picketing only belongs more
purely to the category of action.

I find Asad's description of the picket line as a performative and carnivalesque space which deconstructs and disrupts the quotidian dynamics of academic labor explooitation compelling. The radical possibilities implicit in this kind of interruption were, after all, what fueled actions like this one, which I return to again and again because it was such a formative moment for me in how I think about what we are fighting for and how universities work (and how we can build new configurations of knowledge production and create new conversations and new ways of having them which challenge the neoliberal frameworks of University Leadership Teams and Roland Betts-led 15 Billion Dollar corporations. What is particularly interesting to me about Asad's argument is the move it makes to look at the polemicisists and polemics of collegiality as profoundly reactionary in a way which invites useful scrutiny of what's at stake in the idyllic phantasm of the university's proud (tacitly imperial) pastness and tradition and ownership of a bright, rich future raised by the Sextons and Stimpys and their analogues elsewhere.

We need to understand the strike as more than simple refusal to work and disruption of "business as usual." What new kinds of arrangements of academic labor, what radical reimagining of the university does the strike produce, and how do we create that new university "from the ashes of the Old Campus?" (As Ralph Chaplin might have put it were he still alive and had he not become a raving anticommunist in his later years.) These are questions our organizing will have to answer somehow. I'm kind of looking forward to it.