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...
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