During a very long action-planning meeting during the second Yale strike of 2003, a fierce debate erupted over whether, as some termed it, to plan a "hard" building occupation (barricades, a la Columbia 1968) or a "soft" one (more of a sit-in, not resisting police, etc.) My response to this then was to note that a building occupation is not a penis, and that it becomes problematic to speak of direct action as "hard or soft" both in gendered terms, and from the standpoint of sometimes fetishizing the tactic at the expense of strategy.
Carrying on the dubious phallus metaphor, however, to one WSN columnist who has long opposed GSOC, the Graduate House of Delegates, NYU's new company union on which I and some 34 or so other GSOC supporters sit and hold a supermajority, apparently, is a testicle. Which makes GSOC an evil veterinarian or something, i suppose.
Moskowitz accuses GSOC of having verbally sabotaged the HOD and suggests that our only goal is a union contract and we will thus not take seriously the opportunity the HOD provides. My response to this is threefold: first, it is the NYU administration , not GSOC, which is currently responsible for the skepticism most graduate students , whether or not we support GSOC, (which most of us have time and again demonstrated that we do) hold for the HOD. As its constitution is currently written, the HOD's ability to improve working conditions and protect graduate employees is risible. There was never an up or down vote on whether or not we wanted a house of delegates or an "assembly of graduate assistants", instead these was crammed down our throats by the administration and its well-compensated agents. Indeed, when given the opportunity to speak, GA's in GSOC's bargaining unit have repeatedly voiced majority support for the university to negotiate a new contract with the union. If there has been any sabotaging of the HOD, it's come from the sordid and cynical history of its establishment and the bankruptcy of its constitution as currently written.
As both a GSOC member and an HOD delegate, I am committed to seeing the HOD through, pushing the mechanism as far as possible to meet the demands of graduate employees on this campus. The HOD won't be "useless," for me, at least, until such a time as it has been proven completely incapable of doing so. I see the HOD not as a threat, but as a tool.
The second half of Moskowitz's piece concerns itself with whether or not the university is a democracy, with a putative difference but interdependence between "wealth production" and "knowledge production." We pay money to the university so we can enjoy pure knwoeldge, pure culture. The difference between "wealth production" and "knowledge production," then, makes the university an idealized space of Arnoldian cultural production, into which movements for participatory democracy and radical reconfiguration represent an unwanted, intrusive outside. The interdependence between the two rationalizes and seeks to render normative academic neoliberalism and the Enterprise University's logics of real estate speculation, capital accumulation, and the bottom line. But this supposed difference is specious and arbitrary. Knowledge production is wealth production these days, as Moskowitz would understand if he ever stepped into an immunobiology laboratory. And thus this supposed interdependence relies on reified and useless categories and is woefully incomplete, failing to yield any accurate picture of the ways in which knowledge production has long since been a capitalist enterprise.
It is this neoliberal morphology of capital "penetration" (there go those genital metaphors again!) which the academic labor movement is uniquely poised to transform. Put succinctly, this is why we need a union.
I think we've had variations on this argument before, but I feel compelled to reiterate:
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that the language of hardness/softness or of penetration is necessarily a sexual metaphor. Of course it can be read that way (and maybe, consciously or not, by many people it is). Still, a baseball can be thrown much faster and farther than its Nerf equivalent, and hardwood floors are a lot more durable than those made out of pine or other soft woods, and a virus is pretty harmless until it penetrates a cell membrane. None of these descriptions are about sex, I'm reasonably confident. Things other than penises can be hard or soft and are sometimes capable of penetration, and I fear (maybe this is naive or prudish of me) that looking for sexual metaphors everywhere may do more harm than good.
At the time, given the gender politics of the UOC in the manner in which the conversation was taking place, I think it was a useful intervention. But yes, you're right. I've been in meetings in which people have invoked the specter of the phallus in ways which I dont think were particularly useful, or which were far too totalizing. I probably should not get further in to this.
ReplyDelete