ar/ has me on the "three pages a day plan", which is more hortatory than prescriptive, or so i fervently hope. I'm currently sitting in one of the grad employee cubicles in the department of sundry and copious acronyms trying to live up to these expectations with little success today - i've written about a page, but squeezed in some archival research into the origins of BSEU (now SEIU) Local 113's organizing at the U of Minnesota. In so doing, I came across this article in the January 16, 1931 edition of the Minneapolis Labor Review, which was and remains the organ of the AFL's Central Labor Union (we now call them central labor councils) in the Twin Cities. It's a craft unionist framing of what folks now call the edu-factory, seven and a half decades before that term came into vogue, having been described elaborated by the eponymous collective and more recently been transmogrified into a book and a most excellent webjournal. The edufactory - "what was the factory is now the university" - is the articulation of knowledge and labor within the global neoliberal university as the social factory was the articulation of production and consumption, of productive and reproductive labor within and beyond the factory walls during the moment of the crisis of the bretton woods regime, the crisis of state corporatism, the crisis of disciplinary governability. So what's this paleo-edufactory then, produced by its own moment of capitalist crisis, articulated by a Yale professor half a decade before the first stirrings of local 35 to a Minneapolis audience three years before the Trotskyist teamsters' frontal attack on the Citizens' Alliance's open shop repressive parastate apparatus? I don't think this is a vestige of the moment Clyde Barrow so ably dissects in Universities and the Capitalist State -- if anything, it speaks more to the kinds of formation Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front, the "laboring of American culture," the hegemony of a language and consciousness of labor and work among cultural producers and the protocognitarians Henderson describes here.
You'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing, and i apologize for its horizontality.
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| Minneapolis Labor Review, 1.16.1931 |
So what, if anything do you know about this Henderson fellow?
ReplyDeleteNot much - he's in Deborah Elkin's dissertation, but not the chapters I'm familiar with. When I get back to the New Haven component of my research, I can do some more investigating on him. What I know now is that he was an early AAUPer. I wonder what his relationship was to Jerome Davis and the Div school commie contingent...
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid the advert for the mortuary fits rather well...
ReplyDeleteMeaning?
ReplyDeleteWell, I was thinking the factory model spelt death to the university, but actually, it's more in a frozen slumber, no?
ReplyDeleteI think this article helps to illustrate that the factory model's been with us for a very long time, and while the university's place within global and regional labor markets is much changed from what it once was, I don't know if I would agree that it is dead, because I think "university" is a deeply unstable term. To the extent that I choose to identify with it, I do so to the extent that it can be invoked as a collectivity from below, of people who engage in study,whatever their institutional affiliations - that's Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's Undercommons, but also of all of us whose labor is being or has been extracted to produce the other university, the thing John Sexton and Richard Levin and Drew Faust etc command, not just knowledge workers, but janitors and line cooks and patient care associates...
ReplyDelete