I went to a job talk today in 19 University Place - home to the language and literature departments at NYU. The talk was by a former TA of mine who works on visuality, trauma, and black diasporic women's bodies, for a joint appointment in compl lit and the megadepartment which includes American Studies. It was a good job talk. Afterwards in the subway i saw a flotilla of cops investigating violently racist graffiti someone had markered onto pylons and a door on the Downtown N/R/W/Q track at Union Square. Swastikas, "N______ must die," etc. The social geography of New York after gentrification is deeply racialized. Racialization being the "extension of racial meaning to a previously uracially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group." That's Omi and Winant. I taught it this morning.

On the way back home tonight I thought about the politics of academics "making trouble" in the university, frustrated by David Graeber's explanation that he really thought it was best for so much time to avoid "making trouble" in New Haven, to avoid "getting sucked in" to Yale's union "troubles." Of course, to Graeber's credit, when he needed to, he came down on the right side, at the cost of his job. I greatly admire him for that. But the notion that one can be an activist in New York and a professor in New Haven (and never the twain shall meet) greatly irks me. It irks me because the university is everywhere - New York, Baca Ranch, Abu Dhabi. It irks me because while not anarchistically correct, those many-headed struggles in new haven are so important, so innovative, so hybrid, that I think it's foolish to even try to ignore them or dismiss them. Granted, Graeber was junior faculty, and as for Westheimer at NYU, vocally supporting any of the Yale unions and GESO in particular - and especially when senior faculty in your department are trying to boot a graduate student for being a union organizer - is an easy way to derail your academic career. That's professionalization for you, which is one of the reasons why I find that Moten/Harney piece so useful.

A professional education has become a critical education. But one should not applaud this fact. It should be taken for what it is, not progress in the professional schools, not cohabitation with the Universitas, but counterinsurgency, the refounding terrorism of law, coming for the discredited, coming for those who refuse to write off or write up the Undercommons.

David Graeber's a brilliant scholar. He's, from the accounts of all my friends who studied with him while he was at Yale (i never had the opportunity to do so) a fantastic teacher. I loved his "The New Anarchists" and I started reading through "Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology" today and liked it very much too, though i think he's sometimes prone to oversimplifications and reifications about what "Marxism" is. My point is not to attack Graeber, whom, again, I admire, but rather to point out that even he is, or was, anyway -- one could argue he's rejected it now, a subject of this "counterinsurgency," a counterinsurgency against which we ought to be envisioning some alternatives.

Another University possible. Another New York is possible.