It's been a pretty rough week.  I sat through one of the most difficult meetings I've ever been party to.  That NYT article I shouldn't talk about here.  I have some difficult stuff going on in my family right now.  Two nyu undergrad activists were attacked by the cops and arrested the other night at an impromptu solidarity action with the incredible mobilizations across the UC system.  One of those arrested was a former student.  I hear a certain law student anarchist friend got hit with a police baton in Berkeley.   I got stuck in an elevator with about fifteen other people.  Actually that was pretty fun.  Etc.

I feel a bit better today, excited about organizing possibilities albeit mostly ones outside of my current comfort zone, and excited about my research and its political possibilities and talking a bit about them hopefully at the Minnesota conference in April.  I'm excited about the movements folks are building, the actions folks are taking in CA even if the regents just voted to up tuition by 32% in the next two years, which is obscene even by NYU standards, which are themselves obscene.

What is taking place there, and in Bern, and in Austria, is incredible despite the police repression and the neoliberal state's unflinching acceleration of its privatization/privation engine.  Another university isn't just possible, it's being made on the streets and in the occupied spaces of these movements every day.

But what about those whom the university's discursive practices and regimes of looking cast to its "margins?"  Specifically I am thinking - a more urgent question for the elite private universities, perhaps, than those which can still claim to belong to the public in however extraordinarily attenuated a manner and however attenuated and circumscribed a "public" - and when we say public we are never talking about the commons - about the service labor that makes possible the acts more traditionally associated with the "work of the university," the clerical and technical, service, maintenance, culinary and caring labor that supports the teaching, research, study and policing, the administration and investment and gentrification and enclosure, all the many things that universities do.  In california the UPTE and the UAW are on strike too, and some of the occupations are directly challenging worker firings, I know, but I worry about the extent to which student movement rhetorics marginalize and exclude such workers as subjects of the university.  But maybe too much time in grad school has led me to privilege word over deed, when what we should be paying attention to is not rhetoric but tactics and strategy and action, at the very least what's said in organizing conversations and in strategy meetings rather than in communiques and newspaper articles?  In New York, though, such concerns seem entirely absent from what some anarchists are doing.  Which is ok, I support them anyway, even as I wanna engage them critically, as others have done and continue to do, on their racial politics and anarchohipster exclusions and ennui and hypermasculinism.  Because I believe an organizing conversation can be as transformative and perhaps even moreso as/than a building occupation (and i am all about building occupations) and i believe a wider understanding of what the university is, who is the university, and what the university does, makes for a more radical set of questions and goals than those currently being put forward in some circles.  That's the kernel of the paper i want to give in MN, I think.

Anyway, as I get deeper into my research, I'll try to blog here more regularly.  I missed the GEO Strike entirely, and I'm not really providing the coverage of the UC struggles the title of this blog suggests I should be.  But i was about to quit blogging altogether before Eli suggested the group blogging experiment, and I think i still have blogging fatigue from four years ago, and I'm going to try to make this a useful space for me and for folks who are still reading this thing anyway.

GEO at university of illinois votes to strike

click for the press release

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE
GRADUATE EMPLOYEES’ ORGANIZATION REPRESENTS ONE OF LARGEST LOCAL
HIGHER EDUCATION BARGAINING UNITS IN THE UNITED STATES

URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS (November 7): On Monday, November 9th, the
Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will hold a press conference at 1:00 pm at
1001 S. Wright Street in Champaign, IL to announce the results of its
strike authorization vote.

Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of
participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.  With the vote, GEO
members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to
call a strike at any time.  The Graduate Employee’s Organization,
American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local
6300, AFL-CIO, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a labor
union representing all teaching and graduate assistants (TAs and GAs)
on the UIUC campus.  With over 2600 GEO members, and over 2600
graduate employees represented in the bargaining unit, the GEO is one
of the largest higher education union locals in the United States.

The GEO has been negotiating with UIUC administrators for over six
months. The GEO seeks a contract that will set the minimum salary for
a 50% nine month appointment at the University’s estimate of a living
wage for a graduate student in Urbana-Champaign and protect tuition
waivers for TAs and GAs. While the GEO presented the administration
with a full contract proposal on the first day of negotiations, the
UIUC administration declined to offer a counterproposal until August
11th, just four days before the GEO’s previous contract expired.  The
UIUC administration’s initial contract proposal sought to freeze GEO
wages for three years, reserve the right to furlough and layoff
graduate employees in good standing, and to count “in-kind”
compensation such as housing or meal vouchers toward the minimum
salary mandated in the contract.

The GEO understands that the state of Illinois is in dire economic
straits, but as University administrators pointed out in their FY 2010
budget request, this is the result of long standing deficiencies in
state level budget prioritization and not a sudden result of the
recent national recession.  Instead of championing the university’s
historic land grant mission, UIUC administrators have embraced the
national tendency toward the corporatization of the public higher
education system. Their consequent failure to secure adequate state
funding leaves the social science, humanities, and fine arts
especially vulnerable. Worse, it jeopardizes access to higher
education for many who have the capacity and desire, but not the
financial resources to attend the University.  If increased state
funding is also necessary to providing at least a living wage for all
campus employees, then the GEO expects the UIUC administration to
forcefully make that case to the Higher Education Appropriations
Committee, other state legislators, and the Governor.

Instead of advocating on the behalf of students and workers,
administrators were granting costly favors to state politicians.  The
former Chancellor diverted $450,000 of discretionary funds to provide
jobs and scholarships for politically well-connected but undeserving
applicants.  Another $400,000 went to the attorneys who represented
the University before the Governor’s investigative committee, and
another $550,000 to new faculty appointments for the former President
and Chancellor.  In this context, the GEO finds it hard to trust the
UIUC administration when it argues that there is not enough money to
provide a living wage.  From the GEO’s perspective, it appears that
budget priorities are simply out of place.  When campus revenues rose
by 7% in FY 2009, only 0.8% ($2.7 million) went to undergraduate
instruction.  Meanwhile, the Chief Information Officer’s budget rose
by 10.9 percent ($1.6 million), and the Division of Intercollegiate
Athletics budget increased 6.2 percent ($4.1 million).

GEO bargaining unit members teach 23.1% of all undergraduate course
hours at UIUC, and perform comparably to faculty in official student
evaluations of instructor performance as measured by the University of
Illinois’ Center for Teaching Excellence.   Yet our salaries draw only
6.5% of state funding, including salaries for GAs and Research
Assistants, who don’t teach.  By contrast, faculty salaries draw over
55% of the University budget.  Graduate employee labor is vital to the
fiscally efficient provision of the University’s core service,
academic instruction. Should graduate employee salaries be set to a
living wage, the University would still have a large pool of
inexpensive and high quality instructional and administrative labor.

GEO members have been working hard to avoid a strike.  Hundreds of GEO
members have participated in three major rallies, and GEO members have
also lobbied the Illinois House of Representatives Higher Education
Appropriations Committee, spoken with state legislators from
Champaign, actively informed campus community members about the
issues, and maintained a constant presence in Urbana-Champaign print,
radio and television media.  The Illinois Student Senate has passed
two resolutions in support of the GEO and the decision to authorize a
strike, and GEO supporters in the faculty senate are working to pass a
similar resolution. GEO members and allies will hold a rally at the
University of Illinois Board of Trustees Meeting in Springfield, IL on
November 12.

As with any labor negotiation, however, the most effective pressure
has been the threat of a strike. Only after GEO members at a General
Membership Meeting voted unanimously to file an “intent to strike”
notice did the University administration offer their first compromise
proposals.  Accordingly, the Coordinating Committee and Steward’s
Council of the GEO voted unanimously to hold a strike authorization
vote from November 4-6. By voting to authorize a strike, GEO members
have taken a vital step in holding the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign administration accountable to its stated commitment
to excellence in research and undergraduate education.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Peter Campbell, GEO Communications
Officer, odell.campbell@gmail.com, 253-222-5861, or the GEO office at
geo@uigeo.org, 217-344-8283, 1001 S. Wright Street, Champaign, IL,
61820.  Information about the GEO can also be found on our website at
www.uigeo.org.
###

TAs at McMaster University have called a strike for 8 am monday.  Info and updates here.

addendum to the last post

Couple quick clarifications, because that last post got a bit sprawling and sloppy.  I want to try to clear up some points quickly before I fall asleep.

1. Unoriginal, but I think the role of the student new left in '68 and "the sixties" is somewhat overemphasized.  What does the broader "revolt against work" look like inside and outside of the university?  How might Russo's arguments be recast if we place them within the genealogy of the "long 1960s" which begin sometime in the late 1930s and end, depending on whom you ask, somewhere around 1973?

2.  I edited the stuff on the salt metaphor to remove or at least mute somewhat the active/passive binary as a frame for the distinction i'm trying to draw, since that binary smacks of masculinism.  I'm not sure I redeem the metaphor, but it felt kinda glaring to me as it was.

3.  I feel lately like I'm always a) defending politics organized around the point of production to poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites and b) defending, in both the abstract and in reference to historical and current contexts particular forms of unionism as radical and deeply important struggles.  I am sick of this, and I hate it when people look at me like I'm a trotskyist or something.  I mean, really, let's have a more nuanced understanding of the political and its molecular and capillary operations.  Or can we think in Gramscian/Stuart Hallian/ terms about the many sites and forms of struggle and contestation?  Which isn't to say I'm not in solidarity with poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites or people who get organizing around work but want to see the union as an always already compromised form or something.  I'm just not a fan of sectarian squabbling.  Well, unless (and I'm going to get shit for this) the ISO is involved, in which case I tend to have a rather short fuse based on past offenses, like lying at membership meetings, threatening to punch me in the face, etc.

I may have more to say on these subjects later.  For now I postpone Harvey & my diss in favor of Ruthie Gilmore's Golden Gulag.

Academic Neoliberalisms, comparative and otherwise

I just finished, this morning, Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart, which is a really brilliant account of the history of feminized labor and evangelical reformations of gender in the making of christian capitalism.  The first half adeptly sketches out the ways in which it's the immaterial, affective labor of entry-level Wal-Mart employees which makes possible the Ozarks' shift from the anticorporate populisms of the fin de siecle West to the christian corporate familial politics which obtain in the cultural politics of the world which Sam Walton stood as an imperfect metonym for.  Moreton's an excellent labor historian, and her grasp of how these transformations occur and the implications of her rereading of the history of the late twentieth century U.S. are profoundly important.

The second half of Moreton's book deals largely with the role of the corporate-religious-university nexus in the nationalization and globalization of Wal-Mart's corporate presence and (and through) its increasingly evangelical mode and ideology of "free enterprise," its connections to the surging new right, missionary evangelism and free trade neoliberalism in Latin America, and accumulation by dispossession and enclosure on an increasingly global scale.  The university - actually three universities - University of the Ozarks, Harding, and John Brown (not the militant abolitionist) - serve as sites of social reproduction, suturing the products of Wal-Mart workers' affective labor to the Republican Party, the New Right student movements (especially Students in Free Enterprise, or SIFE,) missionary christianity, and the origins of neoliberal globalization.

Moreton's description of the relationships between these universities and the growth of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. resonates for me with this week's readings in two important ways.  First, it offers an account of the kinds of classed destinies of the university and their relationships to students and study which are very different either from the kind of subversive criminality of the latter gestured to by Moten and Harney in the interview i discuss in a previous post, or in the episteme-wrecking shifts Alessandro Russo makes the case for in his essay "Destinies of The University."  Like Eli M, I have some difficulty with the rather broad rejection of "classism" as a social analytic for post'68 academic capitalism-or-whatever.  My problem, I think, is that there's too much slippage, Russo's "classism" is too broad and unwieldy a term, conflates neoliberal rearticulations of class into racialized and biopolitical representational frames with a political dissappearance of class as political demand, something I don't really see evidence for.  If the New Right found rather ingenious new ways to articulate race and class, the two were hardly strangers before 1968, and in both the U.S. and in Europe, new social movements have often transformed and expanded rather than discarded the class and labor politics of earlier movements.  Moreton's book, in fact, suggests how even in the absence of a labor metaphysic, the politics of class and the surplus labor of proletarianized women service workers lie at the heart of the rise of the largest corporation and employer in the U.S. and Mexico and do so in part through an ideological state apparatus organized around evangelical conservative universities which offer an important new explanation for but do not in any way debunk the ways in which class and the social relationships of accumulation and exploitation which class constitutes, structure both the social and the university.   Clearly the borderless subjects of Gokce Gunel's insightful ethnography of folks whose lives are affected by a U.S.-inspired, corporate, private university with a secluded, gated campus in northern Istanbul, are also relevant to the ways Moreton traces the movement of students, from Panama and Honduras and Mexico to the Ozarks and back, filtered through evangelical universities daily prayer meetings and Wal-Mart's corporate expansions into the global South.

I guess this has been more about Moreton than the polygraph journal.  That's in part, I think, because the essays in the journal I was most struck by were Morgan Adamson's great essay on "The Financialization of Student Life," the tail end of which I saw her present at the Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis in April of last year, and Eli M and Isaac Kamola's piece on enclosure and struggles over the university's commons, which I also first encountered as a presentation at the same conference.  And I've been thinking about that roundtable with Marc Bousquet and Fred Moten and Stafano Harney some more, thinking about study and how it might or might not be in excs of labor.  I've been thinking about the claim Moten and Harney made in a fantastic essay on professionalization and exodus in the university, that the "only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one," that the radical intellectual comes to steal from - and to escape to - the university, which is always a deeply compromised space.  Professionalization within it is thus cooptation, labor discipline, etc.  I'm not sure it can't be denied that the university is a place of refuge - the assumed subject here has to be an academic or at its furthest plausible limits an undergrad.  Non-academic employees at universities, particularly folks who are subcontracted and outsourced service labor, often have very different relationships to the institution.  But I also think that the false premises on which one comes to the institution need not necessarily be those of criminality.  Some unions ask militants who want to organize to take jobs at particular workplaces and to help organize from within.  Folks in the labor movement call this practice "salting."  The national right to work committee condemns it as a form of sabotage, destruction from within.  I think, whether deliberately or not, that this is more or less how I approach(ed) graduate school.  Not particularly interested in entering the profession, I came in large partha to organize.  This was probably stupid, and I don't think I've been as effective, whether as an organizer or as an academic, over the last four years and two months, as I would like, but I still think it's worth recognizing this as another possible subject position for the subversive intellectual within the university - not just to form gypsy encampments, but to constitute instead the undercommons as a site of  ferment, constant organizing and insurgency, and refusal of the university's modes of control and accumulation in ways which affirm rather than disrupt the prophetic modes of the undercommons' nomadic, liminal subjection.  I guess one could argue that this is a more authoritarian and hierarchical mode of being in common than the more affinity based coterie of criminals and gypsies and, most provocatively, "maroons" Moten and Harney envision, but I don't know that I see that as necessarily the case.  Nor am I sure that one model is more politically effective than the other.  Anyway, it's a conversation to continue in the future, but this post is losing steam and I need to return this rented laptop to the work-study undergrads who run the laptop rental desk in the basement of the library.  I do want to think more about what it means, though, to approach the academy as a salt, and as assault.  But that sounds like the social war stuff, with which I have issues which I may address in a later post...

study?

Working my way through the latest ish of the journal Polygraph in preparation for the next iteration of the blogging group with the two Elis, I stumbled on Stefano Harney's suggestion that those who choose to turn to the "local union" for support in organizing struggles within the university/for the undercommons will have to contend with a "research department full of thugs."

Now I should first say that I greatly enjoy most of Harney's work on the university, with and without Fred Moten. And I have had, especially over the last four plus years, my share of frustrations with local and international union structures and politics. But I think this is at best silly and at worst essentialist and elitist in the way it poses the union researcher as too coarse, to blunt, for the non-work of study towards which all academics should strive to devote their time, should flee to as refuge from teaching and other forms of labor which aren't in excess of the limits of labor. I know a lot of union researchers and many of them have profoundly complex understandings of how the university works, who works in the yniversity, where endowment value comes from, etc. More importantly, I see echoes here, in study's otherness from work which contradicts some of the gestures Moten and Harney have made in previous essays to expand how we understand labor in academic contexts, and perhaps I'm being unfair, of the kinds of rhetoric that John Sexton used four years ago when the administration of New York University tried and failed to destroy the flawed and embattled, but not particularly thuggish union which has consumed the bulk of my organizing and activist energies since I moved back to the city in 2004.

Ought we to be blindly and uncritically pro-union? In this age of "Workers United" and the N/UHW fight, it's impossible to have such an orientation, and that's not what I'm arguing for. Nor am I trying to pick a fight with Stefano Harney, who i think is pretty brilliant. Instead i want to think about the implications of the presence here of a lot of the tensions I've been trying to parse lately with regard to how radical academics have accepted and adopted the autonomist refusal of work into how we theorize our own labors. It seems like what gets Harney into trouble here is the need to rescue study by understanding it as something other than or beyond labor. Maybe we need to expand or challenge our understandings of exodus and refusal in ways which allow us to recognize, as I would argue Harney's co-interviewee Marc Bousquet has, the power and subjectivity of the refuse(d). How does the discursive abjection of labor function here in relation to the class politics and labor hierarchies of university spaces? Why must that which we need to refuse be made abject? Or, conversely, can study really be rescued from labor? Can it really be redeemed as the kind of anti- or non-capitalist commons that Eli Meyerhoff and Isaac Kamola talk about persuasively in the same volume?

Check back later in the week for my response to this week's readings. Apologies for the sentence structure of this blog entry -I wrote it on my phone. I need to stop doing that.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

UCSC, Reoccupied

taken from http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/ucsc-students-occupy-deans-office-15-october-2009-call-to-revolt/

UCSC STUDENTS OCCUPY DEAN’S OFFICE, 15 OCTOBER 2009: CALL TO REVOLT!

The glass walls of passivity, separating us from one another, can only be shattered with revolt. We are occupying a second building on the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California because we have answered the call of the first to occupy everything. Tonight is a demonstration to students and workers everywhere that the division between taking what you want and planning for a movement to come only appears as a problem for abstract thought about taking action. We only catch sight of the fires of the insurrection to come on the morning after the unrest of the night before.

What is a crisis anyway? It is the exclusion from work and public services of those most precariously situated within this system. To a crisis which is generalized, it is pointless to respond with generic activism. Activists of more prosperous eras held demonstrations. Still, they were unable to secure any lasting position for those on whose behalf they took “action”. As the current crisis unfolds, it is necessary to elaborate innovative forms of escalation and revolt. Our crisis is as much the failure of these tired forms of mobilization as it is the collateral damage caused by a growing economic catastrophe.

We have lived through too many cycles of defeat and must try something else. We are compelled to negate the crisis itself with whatever capacity we have now. Tonight, we have taken the Humanities and Social Sciences building. As long as we occupy this space, Dean Sheldon Kamienecki will be deprived of his workplace. This empty figurehead, who last spring made decisions about what jobs get cut and which departments lose funding, will no longer have access to the means of his existence. While we hope this occupation quickens his pulse and that of administrators like him, we have not taken this building to send them a message. Although we hope that they fear for the integrity of their documents and office supplies, we do not occupy to demand the reinstatement of funding channels to what they were before the crisis exposed the fucked up priorities of this school. This occupation is a second call to everyone who has been targeted by this crisis. Which is to say: it is a call to everyone. We cannot wait for some movement to come that will stop the forces pushing ever more people out of this system. Our task is to disrupt the functioning of this system by appropriating what is ours for ourselves.

No amount of organizational meetings, phone calls or emails to legislators have the capacity to build a movement. Society cannot negotiate its way towards liberation. There is no need to raise consciousness. The crisis is already making people painfully aware of the situation. Peaceful marches, rallies and symbolic protests, attracting spectacular media attention, will never increase our ranks because this very process of mediation reduces us to passive observers of what is supposed to be our own activity. Organization for action has become an end in itself cut off from the reality of capitalism in decline. How many voices of outrage are required for a political rally to have a set demands met? We all know the answer to this question: no amount of voices will ever be enough. There is no power to which we can appeal except that which we find in one another. The organization of the movement occurs whenever a freshman or a service worker learns how to barricade doors, how to avoid arrest, how to pick locks. The movement has staying power when, for every one of us who grows tired, there are three who will take our place.

We have recently learned that the University of California does not use tuition money or student fees to fund research and education. On the contrary, they place one hundred percent of this money into an account with the Bank of New York Mellon Trust in order to protect their borrowing power in credit markets. They hold our tuition as collateral in order to finance the largest and most speculative construction projects in the state of California. UC pledged collateral rose by 60% with the last issue of bonds to $6.72B from $4.2B. The number of students taking out debt has risen 20% since 2000: 80-100% for students of color. Average debt levels for graduating seniors rose to $23,200 in 2008 alone, a 24% percent increase over 2004. We know very well what is going on: the University’s ability to finance bonds for new construction increases in direct proportion to their ability to slash spending on education, raise student fees indefinitely and ensure that students cannot disrupt the function of the University itself. This spectacular credit swap finances new construction on the backs of parents who increasingly risk foreclosure on their homes and students who will work the rest of their lives to pay off their debt. The University of California has already been securitized, ensuring that none of us have a future within this system.

We in the US have been too timid for far too long. We are afraid of the police. We are afraid of losing our jobs or getting expelled from school. We are afraid of people shouting in the streets. Security is the watchword of our era: no one wants to take risks. But this illusion of comfort — our separation from one another into perfectly compartmentalized lives, disconnected and self-amused — increasingly unravels with each person thrown out of work, every family evicted from their home and each student unable to afford unending tuition increases without bartering away her future on credit markets. It remains for those terminated by this system to use these failures as flash-points for generalizing the struggle. Perhaps, at last, we can understand one another, for we are all going bankrupt.

Press contact: (eight-three-one) 332-8916

website: http://occupyca.wordpress.com

comparative academic neoliberalisms, part deux

Okay, I'm typing this on my iPhone keyboard since the laptop the nyu library just rented me doesn't seem to have functioning Internet access, I need to prepare for my diss proposal defense Tuesday, and I woke up at 4 this morning because of a car horn sypmhony outside my window, so this is probably going to be both bad and short. That said, I did want to get a post up about the articles we read this week from Inter-asia Cultural Studies on university rankings, corporatization, and locally useful knowledge production.

It was initially interesting to me that Myungkoo Kang's discussion of the neocolonial predicament of South Korean universities, in his "'State-guided' university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production" mentions not at all the significant movement against neoliberal globalization which Kuan-Hsing Chen and Sechin Y.S. Chien describe in that country. Chen and Chien ("Knowledge production in the era of neoliberal globalization: reflections on the changing academic conditions in Taiwan") claim that the alterglobalization movement in Korea "has attained such a level that the National Alliance of Progressive Professors is engaged in organizing a labor union of university teachers.". (224). This "relatively massive progressive force within the South Korean academic community," has been, they note, thus far unable to stave off the colonizing tyranny of the Social Science Ciation Index (SSCI). Presumably even some of these "progressive" faculty endorse the SSCI as marker of scholarly distinction and rigor. Yet Chen and Chien are sanguine about the possibilities for such an organization as that which the NAPP has undertaken to build.

Kang ignores such a project altogether. One could ascribe nefarious motives here - he is, after all, a dean, and deans tend to have a rather dim view of academic labor organizing, at least in the U.S. But I think there are other, equally salient questions to be raised here about Kang's findings and argument.

First, what might more locally oriented knowledge production mean? What's at stake in this call? Is this import-substitution academic knowledge production, academic nationalism, or qua Walter Mignolo, an attempt to trace the local histories which limn, demarcate, and traverse what Quijano calls "the coloniality of power"? Is it some combination thereof? Certainly the SSCI's reign marks 'colonial conditions' of knowdge production for South Korean universities, but is it a cause or a symptom? Can the research university ever not be a colonial apparatus? To whom would "locally suitable" knowledge be "suitable," and for what uses?

More when I get to an actual computer, maybe...

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

things university students do in "the community:"

enact summary executions for property crimes.

NYU news roundup

New acquisition NYU-poly, or, as i like to call it, nyupoly, is already being firmly integrated into the neoliberal frameworks of higher education's relationship to municipal funding and spatial practices.

According to Niswander, NYU-Poly selected 27 companies from around 300 applicants based on what would most benefit Manhattan's economy. NYU-Poly offers the companies mentor services, business seminars and networking opportunities.

"I think its fantastic that NYU-Poly stepped up to do this," said David Hochman, executive director of the Business Incubator Association of New York State, Inc.

"JSex,"  meanwhile, is trying to move in more rarefied company.  After all, what better agent of universities' neoliberal gloablization than the guy who calls his school's destiny the becoming of "the university of the other," who told an audience at the U.N. that the mission of the 21st century is "to embrace the other?"  Interested readers may find a copy of the study group's report here.  I may discuss it in detail in a future post.


EDIT: Also, just because your endowment's in freefall doesn't mean you shouldn't get a two million dollar pay raise, i guess. 

some thoughts on comparative academic neoliberalisms

My sense of how neoliberal restructuring has obtained in countries other than the U.S., and, uh, Abu Dhabi, and to a much lesser extent Italy and (from Slaughter and Leslie's accounts) the U.K and Australia is very spotty, so I'm thankful to Eli for bringing me in to a conversation oriented thusly. In thinking about neoliberal reforms and student responses to them in New Zealand, Cameroon, Mexico, and Latin America more broadly, I noticed some interesting overlaps and lessons for the work I do, which focuses on service workers at U.S. universities and hospitals and universities' roles in urban development and renewal. This is sketchy and not particularly well-thought out, but i'm having a pretty hectic week, and it's all I've got right now.

First, I think the differential and multivalent, historically contingent nature of "neoliberalization" which Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron describe in their account of the respatialization and global integration (one might call it the Australization, as its into the Oceanic cycle of academic capitalization that New Zealand higher education gets initially and most directly affixed) of the New Zealand higher education system, is instructive. Talking about the "corporatization of the university" or certainly "the corporate university" masks a much more complex set odf institutional and regional convergences and ruptures. Andrew Ross, in his contribution to The University Against Itself, as well as in his contribution to the edu-factory listserve, talks about "corporate university" as "lazy shorthand" for the incomplete, tentative articulation of knowledge corporation and the university as a generator and incubator of intellectual and other forms of property, a formulation I've found valuable mostly because it opens the conversation up to recent autonomist work on the diffusion of informatized production, cognitive capital, and immaterial labor, in short, the general intellect, across multiple social strata and nodes throughout the coloniality of power. But if Ross is right, then I think we can take from Larner and Le Heron the caveat that such convergences are always historically and geographically specific, that "neoliberalization" can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations. More needs to be said about the relationship between neoliberalization and massification in both Larner and Le Heron and, say, Bernasconi's work on the decline of the "Latin American Model of the University," but while I'm intrigued by the subversive potential the former claim to see in the reorganizations which neoliberalism initiates, I'm not really sure they adequately explore the relationship of such openings and opportunites to neoliberalization policies nor convincingly map out what "possibilities" are being produced by the restructuring. I do appreciate, though, the corrective here against the kind of simplified, pat nostalgic lamentations for the moment of faculty governance and the hegemony of what we might cheekily call paleoliberal governmentality in higher education and its presumed utility for and place within the social.

Piet Konings' "University Students' Revolt, Ethnic Militia, and Political Violence during Political Liberalization in Cameroon" offers a stark timeline of the bloody suppression of anglophone migrants' student movements in 1990s Yaounde. The scale of violence and repression here is remarkable, but what I think I find most interesting is the relationship - and Rhoads and Mina remark upon this as well - between the university and the regime, the way in which the professoriate serves as a corps for directing and helping to foment the consolidation of the regime's power over economic liberalization, as well as the ways in which the campus becomes a site of violent jingoist political reaction allied to the regime and the exercise of state brutality to defeat threats to the ruling party's grip on the universities as sites of the reproduction and training of the nation's technocrats.

Rhoads and Mina (in comparative education review, vol 45 no. 3) attempt an analysis of the 1999-2000 UNAM occupation and strike via Gramsci and Mannheim. Unfortunately Gramsci is both underutilized here and utilized in a clumsy and unhelpful manner, quoted at legnth, but in ways which don't really address the central problematics of the strike particularly well, and mobilized, as he so often was by the eurocommunists of an earlier moment, to preclude more radical possibilities and the kinds of dangerous and potent connections that are the most powerful implications, for me, anyway, of Gramsci's work - (I'm thinking here of 'Americanism and Fordism,' of the beyond of Taylorism, the biopolitics before biopolitics of the fordist worker, etc.) UNAM's "ultras" here could do with more careful and complex parsing and critique even if the results are the same, and I wonder what gets lost in the clearly vanguardist orientation of the authors' engagement with both university and strike in a context which is perhaps too heavily electoral, but here I may be displaying my inner anarchosyndicalist a bit too obviously.

I think I'll hold off for now on comment on Andres Bernasconi's "Is There a Latin American Model of the University" until I've had time to digest it a bit more. It is in many ways the most complete and rigorous work of the four, evincing both a broad historical sweep and perhaps both a firmer and more transnational grasp of the history and transformations of higher education institutions than some of the other articles. Perhaps most valuably, its complex situating of the contradictory and problematic export of academic neoliberalism U.S. style to radically different political and economic contexts deserves wider comment and circulation. What does the export of the kinds of entrepreneurial and convergent modes described by SLaughter and Leslie, Slaughter and Rhoades, and Etzkowitz et al. mean in the context of states which are historically outside of the global North and have not really been party to either the rise of the service sector (except as a source of migrants to staff it) or the shift to value-added production in the postindustrial economies of places like the U.S. and southern Canada's urban belt?

Last night I finished reading Model City Blues. Last year, you may recall, I came down against Paul Bass's criticism of the book without having actually read it. Now that I have, I want to talk a little bit about the text itself.

Model City Blues is an important and fascinating book, one which speaks volumes about the history of New Haven, its people, and its social movements, about the struggles over the right to the city that defined the last half of the twentieth century and continue to define this moment, about gentrification and dislocation, recuperation and organizing.

My undergraduate senior essay was about the relationship between the forms of resistance Jackson writes about and the emergence of Local 35 as a militant force in the city by the early 1970s, so I knew some of the story Jackson tells here. I knew about HPA and John Wilhelm's involvement with them. I knew about AIM and Rick Wolff and the ring road, about Oak Street and Trade Union Village.

But I didn't know about the origins of the Freddie Fixer Parade in the urban renewal machine's attempts to produce consent for Dixwell slum clearance. I didn't know that Malcom X spoke in New Haven's first mosque on Dixwell ave, didn't know that the half empty shopping areas on lower Dixwell were themselves products of renewal policies, or about the rent strikes led by the Hill Neighborhood Union or that so many people were arrested during the riots that the NHPD renditioned people to Farmington and other fairly distant cities. I didn't know about State Street's Bread and Roses Cafe, or Dixwell's "sit-outs" against renewal. New Haven has a long history of people sitting in the street as a form of protest and a way to reclaim contested, policed, and "planned" space, a history Jackson evokes quite powerfully. This is a theoretically rich but deeply grounded work of scholarship. The breadth of Jackson's archives and interviews are astounding, and the careful way Jackson situates the events of thee Lee era in relation to New Haven's present and more recent past (NHSB redlining, YNHH unionbusting, University Properties expansion and Yale's technocratic (and biopolitical) optic of urban development) is skillfull and politically resonant. I would have liked some account of why Edward Logue, the first staff organizer of what's now Local 35, becomes a Robert Moses disciple and one of the betes noires of New Haven social history as the grand poobah of renewal and dislocation - his younger brother later became mayor - or the role of union leaders like Vincent Sirabella, a hero to the Yale Unions and the former organizing director of HERE - in supporting renewal policies and the Lee machine. But this isn't their book. It's a book, instead, about the Fred Harrisses and James Gibbses, the residents of the Hotel Strand and the folks who fought against Yale's expansion into the Hill many years later, about the people who collectively imagined and fought for a different mode of urban existence than that held by the planners and highway builders on church street, and it's a valuable and insightful account of those movements and their place in urban history. Go read it. Now.

Ok, next up on this blog will be the first in a series, hopefully, of posts in a conversation with Eli on international crises in and contours of academic neoliberalism. Yeah, that's right. This blog is back. (Maybe.)

Books I have read so far this semester
Martha Biondi: To Stand And Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

Hardt and Negri: Commonwealth

Bethany Moreton:  To Serve God and Wal-Mart
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Endnotes No. 1  Gilles Dauve, Theorie Communiste, etc.
Polygraph 21

Books I Want to read by the end of this semester:

David Graeber - Direct Action: An Ethnography

Odd Arne Westad: The Global Cold War

Stephan M. Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University

Anti-Oedipus and a thousand plateaus, finally.

Juno Diaz's Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union

The Canal Builders

Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement

Security, Territory, Population: Foucault
Charles Payne's I got the light of freedom

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia
Giovanni Arrighi 0 Adam Smith in Beijing
Achille Mbembe - On The Postcolony
to be amended and appended as things develop.

Just finished an edit (there should be more but may not) of my last incomplete of graduate school. I'm an article revision away from being able to actuallyt work on my dissertation, though I've spent much of the summer having nothing to do with my academic work, instead walking an average of between 14 and 17 miles every day around brooklyn. I've walked to mill basin, to bergen beach, to Canarsie and east flatbush and brownsville, to flushing meadows for the colombian independence day celebration with Johana, through the hasidic triangle of Boro Park/Crown Heights/South WIlliamsburg, down Ocean Parkway and up Utica and across Linden Boulevard (cue a tribe called quest reference, though I haven't yet walked as far as jamaica) down gerritsen and through marine park and into mud puddles, bensonhurst benches and Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay and Flatlands and Middle Village (Queens) and Parkville and Homecrest. It's been amazing and i don't really want to stop, but I need to devote more time to work, to performing my academic labors...

I walked up 45th street from my apartment across sunset park and the whole of Borough Park to where it ends at the junction of 18th avenue and Dahill, then up 18th to Ditmas Park, up Marlborough Road to Caton Ave and the Parade Grounds, to Parkside and Ocean and into the park, along its eastern edges to grand army plaza, up to 5th and flatbush and then back home, about 10 miles. I'd forgotten, until recently how much i prefer walking places i don't know that well to retracing the same route everyday. I hope this isn't my farewell to Brooklyn or this apartment, that I can stay here after august and stay in my apartment for at least the next year. But I'm also thinking about next steps, about what I do and where I go when funding runs out, about what to make of the second half of the summer.

Congrats to the PTAIs at Western Michigan University, "part of a growing trend." And the long stella doro strike in Riverdale has ended, though the greenwich hedge fund that owns the factory is now threatening to close in october. More on this later, perhaps.

FAR 4 : the new frontier of academic class war.

We won't pay for NYU's crisis, but that won't stop them from trying to force us to.

Last week NYU finally confirmed to the graduate student body that it planned to implement its "FAR 4" restructuring this fall. FAR 4 purports to abolish, formally, the category of teaching assistant in favor of mass adjunctification of TA labor on a putatively voluntary basis. Theoretically NYU grad employees would now be able to join the adjuncts union, or so the deans claim - in fact they still have yet to discussFAR-4 with local 7902 (the adjuncts' union) and have offered only flimsy explanations for how grad employees would be able to meet the contact hour cutoffs for adjunct union membership.

That's the least of folks' worries, though. FAR-4 would, in the short term, free up some time and give folks in their first five years a small amount of extra cash. Maybe 8,000 bucks for two semesters of teaching, depending on what it is you're teaching and how much time you spend in the classroom. But there's a rigid five year funding cutoff replacing a somewhat more fluid, if nonetheless exploitative in itself current arrangement where full TA appointments are often still available to 6th and 7th year students in many departments. So few PhD students ever finish in five years - something that a modest decline in teaching "responsibilities" - and the email sent by the deans to department chairs and DGSes two weeks ago suggests that all current PhD students will be expected to fulfill all remaining "obligations," despite the fact that FAR 4 supposedly completely disambiguates teaching labor from the conditions of graduate employee "financial aid" (i.e. pay) - that FAR 4 will likely create a permanent corps of liminal, superexploited, "superannuated" grad employees teaching 3/2 loads for less money than i get paid to teach a 1/1. In the labor movement, we call that a speed-up. A pretty gross one at that. And it's a speed up which may only be available to non-intl students: despite vague administrative promises to "work around" f-1 Visa working hours/week and demonstrated level of support restrictions, the math just doesn't compute. If one teaching assistant gig is supposed to be twenty work hours per week, as we're all told during our teacher trainings, and twenty hours per week now pays about $4000 per semester, how do I demonstrate I have $20,000 dollars of support if I can't work more than 20 hours per week as a condition of my VISA and am not independently wealthy? Dude, it's like herrenvolk exploitation!

FAR 4 has been framed explicitly as an anti-union measure by the deans, a way to "finesse" an expected reversal of the National Labor Relations Board's 2004 Brown Decision, to preempt expected actions by the federal government to restore federal labor protections to graduate employees at private universities. Even if they aren't lying about the possibility of joining the adjunct union, NYU administrators know full well that FAR 4 would, by rendering much of our labor and compensation invisible under the sign of "financial aid," dramatically reduce and circumscribe what aspects of our work and compensation we would be able to negotiate. Health care, for instance, would be off-limits, still subject, as it has been for the four years since GSOC's last contract expired, to administrative whim and fiat. That's not an acceptable alternative to a GSOC contract, clearly. And one doubts that local 7902 is particularly jazzed about the creation of a subclass of pseudoadjuncts who can take bargaining unit work (though adjunct positions formerly known as ta jobs will supposedly be reserved for graduate students) but won't be on equal footing with the rest of its membership in several important respects.

"be careful what you do, because the lie becomes the truth."

Oh, and then there's the fact that the whole thing appears to be a sham. Not only will we be doing the same work, but at least if administrative communiques to department chairs and dgses are to be believed, the very disambiguation between teaching labor and graduate employee "funding" is nonexistent. Everyone admitted to the graduate school prior to the spring of 2009 is still "obligated" to teach as a condition of our funding. So what FAR 4 means for us is a continued attack on our union rights, a speed up both of our labor and of our time to degree with no relaxing of either requirements.

Merry crisis, indeed.

(This is but a sample of FAR 4's implications. Others of note include the reliance on the "moral authority" of the faculty to compel grad employees to teach after/if ever the disambiguation actually takes place i.e., the hypermanagerialization of the faculty/grad employee relationship, and much more!)

Folks I've talked to over the last three months (since this plan was initially made public - sorry for not blogging, by the way) have been both highly skeptical of the administration's claims that FAR 4 will allow us to teach less but also initially pessimistic and defeated. Thankfully, the more we learn about what this plan is and what it does, the more people seem amped up to fight it. It's going to be an interesting year. But hey, if you wanna be starting something, you got to be starting something.

(give me points for not slipping in "they don't care about us" or "scream," both of which are relevant, or babbling about Manu Dibango, except in praeteritio. As always, only I am culpable for the above blog entry and its many failings, hypertext links to michael jackson videos, and the opinions expressed and claims made within.)

Deleted the post about last weekend, since it didn't seem all that useful or well-written, but i will soon write a longer piece about GSOC's recent travails, so keep reading. kthxbai.

.

Walking again past the new high rise condos off Flatbush that weren't here four years ago, the increasingly militarized parameter around Tillary and Flatbush, the hypersecuritized catholic church at Jay and Cathedral, the clinic in the bridge's shadow, playgrounds that reek of marijuana, and onto the bridge, past Jehovah's witness windows onto hardhats and endless storage closets and billboards. I'm walking and I'm thinking about the union and the last 4 years of my life and parasitic pseudotrotskyist raids and my diss proposal and the Dumbo yuppies below and everything I'm doing wrong. Walking past anarchist graffiti onto the river towards Manhattan's collapsing future and army of casual labor. A wedding in Brooklyn bridge park below, a water-taxi, a foggy haze. Jogging combines flanerie with Foucauldian discipline. My walks are not flanerie, because I'm going somewhere even if I don't know where that is yet. Lame defense. Fuck it, occupy everything. Occupy buildings and build committee. Past the FDR over the baseball fields of the LES and the swath of projects and into the Bowery and neoliberalism's shiny new facades. My walk is almost over.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

this blog still exists

But I put it on the back burner this semester because of organizing responsibilities, academics, and other work. I'm sitting in the panopticon now, reading Moon-Kie Jung's "Reworking Race and Labor: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement," thinking about my diss while trying to pull together this final incomplete, and staring out the window at the Empire State Building. Hopefully, I'll figure out how to use this space more productively over the next few weeks. I don't feel like it's had much of a purpose since that little essay about the movement in New Haven two years ago...

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Eight years since Vinny and the reggae truck and Quebec city. And now it's Stimpy and FAR 4 and "moral authority," about which i may blog later but must now away...

dollhouse goes to college

Tonight's episode of Dollhouse read like page freaking 33 of Slaughter and Leslie's Academic Capitalism, "congealed intellectual labor" and all. As in Buffy Season 4 academic technoscience is sinister, but here the demons are us dude, (which was ultimately the point of Buffy as well, i suppose.) Unlike in Buffy we're not (yet) talking about the state - although the Dollhouse has infiltrated state agencies up the wazoo. Instead we get the relationship between the university, the shady biotech/pharma corporation, and the global conglomerate that erases animal rights' activists' brains and turns them into sex robot amnesiac rewriteable palimpsests. Instead of the military demonic academic complex it's an only slightly paranoid look at the nefarious entanglements of university patent offices and the politics of tech transfer and industrial espionage. Three Joss Whedon shows and three abused grad students - Buffy had Riley, so damaged by drug withdrawal and emasculation he pays vampires to bite him. Angel had Fred, thrown into a hell dimension by an advisor jealous of his student's superior command of theoretical physics, and dollhouse has the kid who beats his own skull to a pulp against the lab window tripping out on outsourced Dollhouse brain juice.

I'm writing this directly after the episode aired. I was not going to post about television again for a while, much less about a show i wrote quite a bit about last week, but the subject of this week's episode demanded otherwise. I may have more to say later or tomorrow or whenever I get the chance to rewatch the episode. In the meantime, it's back to the writing.

"Go live in your real world, if you ever did"/"I live to serve lunch."

spoiler warning for the BSG finale blah blah blah.

Here's last night's episode of Dollhouse, which embraces the kinds of interpretive disputes I tried to stage between myself and Alyssa yesterday, albeit problematically, invoking race and sexual violence in some deeply inadequate ways. That said, I think it continues to raise intriguing questions along the lines I traced yesterday, and beyond. Judge for yourself.
We are all (maybe) dolls, and the dollhouse is a global phenomenon. Unoriginal? Perhaps, but intersting in light of some of the other frames through which the show asks us to understand the world it conjures.

In any event, it's more interesting than the finale of Tahmoh Penikett's other show, Battlestar Galactica, which slid easily back into the show's racist, imperialist Mormon iconography and made me want to smash my laptop in half. It's good that I didn't, because now i need ot get back to work on my paper(s). Sigh.

"Nothing is what it appears to be."

These are the first lines of the pilot of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, the sixth episode of which will largely be ignored tonight, what with Battlestar Galactica ending and stuff, but Alyssa's written an interesting and thoughtful critique of the show for the Atlantic Monthly's website. (Awesomely, she interviews Whedon, who sounds exactly like Joss Whedon, which, as I already noted in this sentence, is awesome.)

Thus far, five episodes into the series, escapism has dominated the plotlines. In the premiere, Echo spent a hot weekend racing motorcycles, dancing, and having sex with a good-looking young man who treats her like a treasured girlfriend. In the second episode, she went rock-climbing and hunting with another hunk, who turned out to have a Most Dangerous Game fantasy. That’s a step closer to the risks of violence and coercion in human trafficking and sex work, but it’s not exactly realistic. And in the fourth episode, Echo pretended to be an abused prostitute to gain access to a vault full of valuable art she intends to steal. There’s something disturbing about using sympathy for victims of sexual violence to commit crimes, but the episode doesn’t explore whether we ought to be disgusted with someone—Echo’s client? Her handlers? Echo herself?—for designing and carrying out the con. There is no hint of the grubby realities of human trafficking, or of the intriguing alliance between feminism and evangelical Christianity that drives a great deal of anti-trafficking work in both the government and non-profit sectors.

Dollhouse could be a fascinating exploration of prostitution if Echo was able to consent, if she had a decision-making process we could assess and evaluate. And sex has been so large a part of Dollhouse that it threatens to drown out other facets of what once made Echo a person.

I share some of Alyssa's concerns regarding the sexual politics of how Dollhouse represents bodies which are, essentially, trafficked. Particularly in the non-Whedon-penned episodes, there's a very thin line between the revulsion and discomfort we're supposed to feel at the utter commodification not just of the "actives'" labor, or their bodies, but of their very identities, what someone more schooled in late twentieth century philosophical traditions than I would probably caution me against calling their "being." Alyssa's conversation with Whedon highlights these tensions to great effect. That said, I also want to map out some quick points of disagreement.

First, Alyssa says that Whedon and Tim Minear's Firefly " lacks a central conceit that ties it to contemporary American problems." I disagree with this. Firefly, produced in 2001 and 2002 and aired intermittently if at all over the course of 2002 before an abrupt and unjustified cancellation, was a space western, yes, but one which focused heavily (the 2005 follow up film Serenity even more so) on (inter)global corporate capitalism, on empire, on war, on piracy and margins and core-periphery post-wallersteinian world(s)-systems. Through subtle allegory, I want to argue that Firefly spoke and speaks directly to conversations about trade and development, rogue states and corporate power, the rule of experts and the tasking of bodies, which dominated political discourse in the decade before it aired, which recur in Dollhouse, and which remain deeply relevant seven years on.

This may seem like a nitpick, but I hope it also points us at a different way of reading Whedon, taking into account the warning that Olivia Williams' Adelle DeWitt, the Dollhouse's CEO, offers Caroline/Echo/Dushku in the series' opening moments. Alyssa is right to point toward the ways in which Dollhouse fails as an allegory for human trafficking, an important and deeply problematic form of labor arbitrage and migration in 21st century securitized global regimes of trade and work. But I want to argue that we also need to think about what it would mean to take Whedon at his word that he does not intend Dollhouse to be a show about trafficking, that trafficking operates in the show as a red herring for Agent Ballard to pursue in his attempt to discover the "real truth," something which is perhaps more sinister than and certainly altogether different than trafficking (a displacement Alyssa rightly identifies as uncomfortable) or which at least can not be easily represented and allegorized only under the sign of the human trafficking industry. That is not to say that I think it is wrong to consider the trafficking parallels, as Alyssa does very well, and to which Whedon himself admits, but, in light of the more tenuous, subtle ways in which Whedon and company have mobilized allegory in the past - i.e, not in the ripped from the headlines style of Battlestar Galactica (suicide bombers and cylon torture, etc) but instead through setting and how broader questions are framed, a more subtle and sometimes more effective symbolic politics than the law and order spin-off Whedon references in Alyssa's article.

I want, then, to suggest that we try, and hope that the show's writers will invite us (as they did in the pilot but not much since then), to read Dollhouse for the questions it raises about the gendering of digital virtualities, the commodification of life, the sexual politics of subject formation. What work does Whedon want mindwiping to do? What about it interests him as a story to tell, as, presumably, a metaphor for some contemporary cultural or social phenomena? What does this show, with its mindwiped pleasure dolls and action heroes, have to say about labor and knowledge, about how the corporation and the body and the computer are articulated together? And there are the broader questions of what Whedon et al want to achieve by destabilizing selfhood, placing us in a world where identities are in flux, cannot be trusted, are constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed in the most literal of ways. (And then of course, there's the theme, common to so much of Whedon's work, and which I am fascinated by, of the perverse politics of geek masculinities, feminized bodies as action figures, etc.) What if what's radical and important about Dollhouse is how compromised, how impossible "the real girl" is to recover? Wouldn't this radically decenter the kinds of privileged first world femininities Whedon's been criticized for reproducing and valorizing at the expense of, say, Kendra the short-lived mimetic Jamaican Vampire Slayer? I'm sure someone more versed in gender theory than I could rip me to shreds right now, and I have a lot of work I need to do (not sure when I'll even be able to watch either the dollhouse episode or the BSG finale,) but I'll end by saying that I think Alyssa has done us an enormous service by critically engaging Whedon's latest work, and I look forward to seeing what happens both with the series and with the critical dialogue which surrounds it.

EDIT: Further troubling any attempt to define "the real girl," for me, is the extent to which the show, at least in the pilot, frames itself as a direct critique of reality tv - the dollhouse itself as something like a combination of the real world house, with jobs assigned depending on the producers' whims, and the big brother house with constant surveillance and intrigue, etc. The reason the real echo is so elusive is that representations of reality are precisely what the show is trying to tackle.

Further thoughts on Watchmen

I read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen for the first time when I was 15, in the summer of 1996, a decade after the 12 issues of the series were originally published. I found its admixture of superhero deconstruction, social critique of U.S. power in the late cold war, and interrogation of the meaning and history of the comic book fascinating, moreso than any other comic i'd read, and from the first comic i'd ever bought, an noirish John Byrne/Jim Aparo issue of Batman involving the murder of costumed impersonators, I'd read superhero and "nonsuperhero" comics voraciously throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. I have read Watchmen again several times in the last 13 years, so much so that my old trade paperback visibly demonstrates its wear. These subsequent readings have impressed upon me the work's concern with the parameters and implications of its genre and the narrative possibilities and politics therein, the interspersed panels from the black freighter story, the tijuana bibles, the flashbacks to the golden and silver ages (employed even more dramatically, perhaps, in Moore's noteworthy deconstruction of Rob Liefeld's odious Supreme years later) and the textual prefaces to each chapter (Hollis Mason, the physicist who writes about Dr. Manhattan, the interview with Adrian Veidt, etc.) Watchmen is a book about reading, about what it means to read, about what it means to read (superhero) comics. It is a comic book about comic books, a comic book about being a comic book about comic book about comic books.

And it is masterfully told - Moore and Gibbons both employ and exceed genre conventions, introducing, along with their now-compromised contemporary Frank Miller new "cinematic" narrative forms, but also playing, subversively, with the temporality and spatiality of the comic panel, the spatial and temporal organization of the page. One issue is entirely symmetrical to itself. Another plays with time in sophisticated and unprecedented ways for comic storytelling. Watchmen is Moore's magnum opus, still one of the most thoughtful accounts of what comics are, what it is they do, and how the superhero functions ideologically in 20th century U.S. culture. We get nerd masculinities and sexual (and commodity) fetishization, fascist revanchism and/as Randian objectivism (never unproblematized, never romantically embraced), cold war nuclear post-humanism planner states and Richard Nixon.

Zack Snyder's film abandons most of these things. Its social critique is far less complex, the intertextual metacritique gone altogether. Each panel becomes three minutes of bloody, aestheticized gore. Rohrshach's fascism becomes the director's and the viewers'. The adulteration of the film's politics is dramatic and has real consequences for how we must understand its project. The characters in the film are not archetypes to be critiqued and deconstructed and poked and prodded but rather static, commodified objects of the Warner Brothers gaze, not multivalent and ambiguous echoes of obvious tropes to be picked apart and read politically but instead crude exemplars of exactly the sort of mawkish, reactionary frames which the comic tears apart. This is Watchmen as Rob Liefeld himself would have staged it, watchmen as celebration of the grim and gritty, Watchmen as blooddarkstabstrikeforce ascendant, Watchmen as something which can be read as and only as clumsy noir. The extended and aestheticized violence is important here. We celebrate blood seeping under doorways and oil burning the skin of prison inmates rather than recoil at them, or recoil at our excitement, as occurs at least in my reading of the original material. Snyder's Watchmen operates as a justification for fascist superheroics rather than a critique of them.

Except for the Tijuana bible scene which makes no sense absent its place in the original text, the comic book is largely absent here as it has been for so many of the recent wave of superhero films, which i have discussed elsewhere on this blog. But Snyder's film does not engage this wave of films critically, as some critics suggested - rather it functions parasitically, proceeding from the assumption that dark sells more tickets to transform perhaps the most nuanced and intentionally ambiguous superhero comic ever into an empty, vacuous, univocal testament to the politics of a Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter. The directing deals poorly with Moore's dialogue and the "new stuff" is too horrendous to merit the designation 'risible.' But if anything the film's failure proves Moore's contention that his work is "unfilmable" to be an insightful claim, cognizant of the very different narrative structures employed in comics and on film, that adaptation is a political process, and that while 300 was fascist garbage in the original Frank Miller graphic novel, Zack Snyder's notion of how to do Watchmen "right" says more about the director than about the work.

More on this later, maybe, though i'll be spending the entirety of my "break" writing, with hopefully some grading thrown in as well. Ugh.

EDIT More on Moore, and the great Grant Morrison on what comics (can) mean.

Police On My Back

Whose school? Theirs, apparently.

On Tuesday night at approximately 11 p.m. more than 50 New York Police Department officers and about 30 police cars flooded the south side of Washington Square Park, setting up barricades that stretched from the entrance of Bobst Library to the Kimmel Center.

Though some early reports from police officers at the scene identified the action as an anti-terrorism drill, NYU spokesman John Beckman confirmed otherwise. Because of some discussion among students at the New School that there would be a protest outside of Bobst and "given the turn the protest took outside Kimmel last time," he said, the administration took “due precaution” to protect the university.

Officers at the scene confirmed that the university had asked the NYPD to come out and protect the campus, though they were under the impression that it would be a CUNY or SUNY demonstration and that it would occur at 12 a.m.

Resist, Occupy, Grade Papers

Today somewhere between 70 and 100 NYU graduate employees occupied the cavernous lobby of Elmer Holmes Bobst Panopticon for an hour and, wearing our "GSOC Is Here To Stay" t-shirts and a panoply of awesome signs created in a frenzy of creativity and unintentionally-inhaled marker fumes, graded, read, and otherwise made visible some of the many forms of the labor the university administration's been trying to occlude and obfuscate for so many years.

After a vicious anti-union campaign, after everything the bush administration could throw at us, we're not only still here, we're growing every day. Today's action sent a clear message to President Sexton and his "University Leadership Team," (Beckman, fresh from his 'mountainous region,' was wearing a puce fleece vest and looking about nervously) that we aren't going away, that we're in this for the long haul, that they might as well negotiate because none of the many ways they've tried to destroy our union have been successful and none will be.

I like actions - like one which took place six years ago last week - that combine the performative, the disruptive, and the practical (that is, the committee-building,) this action worked because it did this well. I'm excited for the next steps.

Oh, by the way, Watchmen (the movie) was atrocious, poorly directed, politically lobotomized, an utter failure at capturing or gesturing towards the comic's complex intertextualities and deconstructionist position. Indeed this was an over the top, milleresque, grim and gritty orgy of hypermasculinity and fascist aesthetics, exactly the sort of thing that Watchmen parodized and critiqued and which only Rob Leifeld ever thought it actually stood for. Alan Moore should be very glad his name was nowhere on this thing. I want my twelve fifty back.

make NYU not abhorable

I was never entirely comfortable with the slogan "take back nyu," if only because NYU was never ours, always anathema to the university i have spent much of the last decade trying to create, always the enterprise university, the engine of gentrification and commoditization fueled by precarious labor and massive debt burdens. That is, until wednesday, when dozens of students took over the 3rd floor of Kimmel, took the space not "back" (this was not reaction) but for the purposes of a wide-ranging but interconnected set of demands - disclosure, divestment, recognition, collective bargaining, justice, openness, transparency.

Just before noon today, the NYU administration, in a strategy built entirely upon lies and fear, summoned the negotiators under the pretense that it had come in good faith, but instead secluded them from the other occupiers and told everyone they were suspended, a group which included friends and former students of mine. Then the security guards rushed the Kimmel Marketplace, and it was over. (What better site for an occupation at a university so explicitly ruled by neoliberal logics of profit maximalization, privatization of public space and resources, and ruthless disciplinary repression of workers and other movements?)

A couple scattered thoughts as I try now to focus on my dissertation proposal. First, this outcome has the potential to be extremely demobilizing, which is certainly what NYU intends. Let's not let this happen. Too many people put too much on the line to let this be anything other than a beginning, a point from which to stage new struggles to transform the university into a space of justice and democracy rather than the finanicalization of immaterial and service labor, the accumulation of cognitive and other capital. NYU is trying to suspend and unspecified number of protesters and evict and ban them from its residence halls. The university is trying to forclose upon its future, to eat, as the old New Left would have put it, its young. So I think a task for those of us who share with those who went in a vision for a transformed university is to develop strategies for countering these attacks and moving forward, building stronger movements and expanding our reach and our demands.

"2,4,6,8: John Sexton is an asshole"
"3,5,7,9: Where's my fucking contract?"
- psychology graduate student, GSOC strike, 2005-2006

convenient abjection?

In a rather craven and transparent move, the NYU administration is attempting to 'disown' and thus disqualify the protesters by branding them as outside agitators.

Take Back N.Y.U. has been a vocal presence on campus for the last few years, said Lynne Brown, the senior vice president for university relations. Ms. Brown said that she believed only about half of the protesters were from N.Y.U. and that the rest probably included students from the New School, which had its own student occupation in December during protests over the school’s embattled president, Bob Kerrey.

Ms. Brown said the university will allow the students to remain in the cafeteria through the night and will give them access to restrooms.

The notion that NYU, a "private university in the public service" is only accountable to those who pay tuition to it, its "customers," if we are willing to traffic in the neoliberal frame which has governed the institution for well over a decade now is not only specious but indeed evinces the logics of administration and governance of which Sexton fancies himself the greatest ideologue and his administration the zenith. (Disclaimer: i couldn't sleep last night for the second night in a roaw, so i am not sure if anything i'm writing makes any sense.) This is the logic of the university against which the folks in the cafeteria are actively in revolt.

That said, there were folks from CUNY and the New School and Columbia there last night, mostly, i suspect, on the outside, but the occupation is not the work of "outside agitators," arising instead from very real antagonisms and structural conditions produced by seven years of rapid tuition hikes, administrative fiats, questionable investments, and imperial hugs. That the occupiers have declared solidarity with comrades in the UK, Greece, Italy, Rochester, and on fifth avenue in no way exculpates the NYU University Leadership Team for its venal neoliberalism, its arrogant attacks against the academic and urban commons, and its evangelical fervor for the bottom line above all else, that is, the superexploitation of precarious and transient labor in the form of undergraduate work study, graduate employees, adjuncts, and postdocs, not ot mention migrant construction labor in Abu Dhabi, etc. This occupation, as VP brown would realize if she knew any of the students who are behind the barricades, is very much in and of NYU even as it participates in a larger transnational conversation about the spatial politics of the global university and the future of the city.

one more thing

An update from the folks inside, at least four of whom are former students, (I have had some awesome students) and many of whom are friends and colleagues. I feel conflicted about not being there with them, but i have to perform my labor. I think this is important enough to merit conversation in section tomorrow. Regardless, I'll be back on the west 4th street sidewalk tomorrow afternoon (after i teach) shouting loud so the folks inside, and the city, and John Sexton and Marty Lipton and Ken Langone and Catherine Reynolds and Barry Diller and Anthony Welters can hear.

well, we finally did it.


ACTUALLY, THAT'S MINE.
or why we finally, really took back nyu.

WHAT’S MINE? THE UNIVERSITY, OF COURSE. IT’S YOURS, TOO!

A group of student-empowering, social-justice-minded rabblerousers have occupied the Marketplace at Kimmel and we refuse to move until our demands are met. All are encouraged to join us on the third floor and help us sustain this occupation until NYU complies with our demands. Our demands are as follows:

-Full, annual disclosure of NYU’s operating budget and endowment.

-The election of a student body whose purpose is the socially

responsible investment of NYU’s funds and all of whom are full, voting members of the Board of Trustees. That this body investigate NYU’s investments in war and genocide profiteers, specifically the Israeli occupation of Gaza.

-That tuition be stabilized; that no student pays more tuition than they did their first year. That the University meet 100% of students’ government-calculated financial need.

-That all NYU employees, including graduate students, are granted union rights, and that work study employees are allowed collective bargaining rights.

-That NYU provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, and that it offers scholarships for 13 Palestinian students annually.

-That NYU grant public access to Bobst Library and that student groups get priority when reserving space in all NYU-owned or –leased buildings.

We apologize for inconveniencing the loyal lunchgoers of the Kimmel Marketplace, but we are not sorry for causing a disruption! Established channels have been insufficient to make our voices heard by the administration, and we have waited too long to be taken seriously. By disrupting the University’s functioning now, we are forcing the administration to deal with those people it depends upon the most—we, the students!

Our demands, though many and varied, are united by the desire to empower students to take part in the governance of their University.

By making public the endowment and budget, and establishing a student voice in the investment of funds and on the Board of Trustees, we are creating a means for active student participation in the administration of the University. By providing union rights for graduate students and collective bargaining rights for work study employees, we are guaranteeing that the students upon whom the University depends for labor are treated and compensated fairly.

By drastically reducing the amount that tuition can increase, we are forcing the University to reassess its spending and cut back appropriately (instead of making a low-income student take out more loans, perhaps the University can build one less abroad site). By forcing the University to meet 100% of students’ financial need, we are ensuring that students spend less time working multiple jobs to make ends meet and more time making the University a place where active minds flourish.

By demanding investigation into war and genocide profiteers, providing aid to Gaza, and offering scholarshipts to Palestinian students, we are demanding that the University heed our own voices immediately. Through these demands we are also stating our solidarity with the students who have occupied their universities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere demanding aid for war-torn Gaza.

By demanding students have priority in reserving space in NYU buildings, we are literally making space for ourselves in the University, and putting students above groups who rent out space in our buildings. By allowing the public access to Bobst Library and the wealth of knowledge it contains we are building a bridge between NYU and the community it so often displaces, while empowering students of all universities (as well as alums of our own) to take part in information that is too often consolidated in the Ivory Tower.

We have waited too long for the University to respond of its own volition. We have let administrators push us around through endless red tape, through never-ending tuition hikes, through unfair labor practices, through secrecy and lies, through power being consolidated in a tiny group of (mostly) rich white dudes who know nothing about our lives as students. We wrote John Sexton a nice letter and struggled to contain our rage in Town Hall after Town Hall; we’ve agitated and tabled and built our coalition. Our demands serve and concern all students. We refuse to dignify the University’s lack of response with our own inaction.

So we take action! We’ve got food and sleeping bags and good friends and we are not going anywhere. Join us! This is a sleepover for student empowerment, a party for participation in the University, a disruption for democracy, an occupation for all!

occupiamo tutto

Just saw like fifty NYU folks and allies barricade themselves into the Kimmel "Marketplace" in a full on occupation of the space. A bunch of us GSOC folks (I'm on staff this semester - have I mentioned that here?) were there, though i have to teach in ten hours so i wasn't able to stay inside, and instead moved to the sidewalk solidarity demo when the cops shut down the building. I'm excited about what the folks inside have done and I'm awed and inspired. Seeing the barricades come down was one of my top five NYU moments.

FREE UNION PETER!

Anyway, here is the list of demands for folks who are interested:

At approximately 10pm tonight (Feb. 18), students of Take Back NYU! took over the Kimmel Marketplace. They have blockaded the doors and declared an occupation!
NYU is the latest university to join a wave of global student occupations in the name of student empowerment. The Kimmel Center for University life is official a reclaimed space.

What you can do:
Come support the occupation!
Send a letter to the administration in solidarity
Send an e-mail to your professors, peers, listservs, facebook groups you name it! Tell the world.
Have your parent write a letter or e-mail to the university
Print the following demands and distribute them far and wide:

DEMANDS

We, the students of NYU, declare an occupation of this space. This occupation is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the Take Back NYU! coalition, and of campaigns from years past, in whose footsteps we follow.

In order to create a more accountable, democratic and socially responsible university, we demand the following:

1. Full legal and disciplinary amnesty for all parties involved in the occupation.

2. Full compensation for all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation.

3. Public release of NYU’s annual operating budget, including a full list of university expenditures, salaries for all employees compensated on a semester or annual basis, funds allocated for staff wages, contracts to non-university organizations for university construction and services, financial aid data for each college, and money allocated to each college, department, and administrative unit of the university. Furthermore, this should include a full disclosure of the amount and sources of the university’s funding.

4. Disclosure of NYU’s endowment holdings, investment strategy, projected endowment growth, and persons, corporations and firms involved in the investment of the university’s endowment funds. Additionally, we demand an endowment oversight body of students, faculty and staff who exercise shareholder proxy voting power for the university’s investments.

5. That the NYU Administration agrees to resume negotiations with GSOC/UAW Local 2110 – the union for NYU graduate assistants, teaching assistants, and research assistants. That NYU publically affirm its commitment to respect all its workers, including student employees, by recognizing their right to form unions and to bargain collectively. That NYU publically affirm that it will recognize workers’ unions through majority card verification.

6. That NYU signs a contract guaranteeing fair labor practices for all NYU employees at home and abroad. This contract will extend to subcontracted workers, including bus drivers, food service employees and anyone involved in the construction, operation and maintenance at any of NYU’s non-U.S. sites.

7. The establishment of a student elected Socially Responsible Finance Committee. This Committee will have full power to vote on proxies, draft shareholder resolutions, screen all university investments, establish new programs that encourage social and environmental responsibility and override all financial decisions the committee deems socially irresponsible, including investment decisions. The committee will be composed of two subcommittees: one to assess the operating budget and one to assess the endowment holdings. Each committee will be composed of ten students democratically elected from the graduate and under-graduate student bodies. All committee decisions will be made a strict majority vote, and will be upheld by the university. All members of the Socially Responsible Finance Committee will sit on the board of trustees, and will have equal voting rights. All Socially Responsible Finance Committee and Trustee meetings shall be open to the public, and their minutes made accessible electronically through NYU’s website. Elections will be held the second Tuesday of every March beginning March 10th 2009, and meetings will be held biweekly beginning the week of March 30th 2009.

8. That the first two orders of business of the Socially Responsible Finance committee will be:
a) An in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories.
b) A reassessment of the recently lifted of the ban on Coca Cola products.

9. That annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students, starting with the 2009/2010 academic year. These scholarships will include funding for books, housing, meals and travel expenses.

10. That the university donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.

11. Tuition stabilization for all students, beginning with the class of 2012. All students will pay their initial tuition rate throughout the course of their education at New York University. Tuition rates for each successive year will not exceed the rate of inflation, nor shall they exceed one percent. The university shall meet 100% of government-calculated student financial need.

12. That student groups have priority when reserving space in the buildings owned or leased by New York University, including, and especially, the Kimmel Center.

13. That the general public have access to Bobst Library.

Along with this, students have issued a

SOLIDARITY STATEMENT

We, the students of Take Back NYU! declare our solidarity with the student occupations in Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as those of the University of
Rochester, the New School for Social Research, and with future
occupations to come in the name of democracy and student power. We stand
in solidarity with the University of Gaza, and with the people of
Palestine.