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]