I was looking through the front material of Historical Materialism 15.1 (2007), at the voluminous list of brilliant scholars and radicals who constitute the journal's advisory board, when I was struck by something. All of the people listed have a parenthetical location next to their names, e.g., Aijaz Ahmad, (New Dehli), Robert Brenner, (Los Angeles), etc etc etc. For folks not affiliated with universities, it's the same as those who are - thus (labor notes founder) Kim Moody, (New York) - though last I heard Moody was in the U.K., but the journal is several years old. There's one exception, a senior scholar in marxist cultural studies and one of my intellectual heroes, who is listed with the designation "(Yale.)" There are two other instances of this. Fredric Jameson is listed with "(Duke)", Simon Bromley with "(Open University)". Bromley's situation is a bit different, since his university is understood to be not fixed to any particular geographical location. With the other two, though, it's two distinguished Marxist scholars at two very wealthy private universities in two deindustrialized small cities whose economies are now dominated by universities and hospitals. What does the erasure of New Haven and Durham from Historical Materialism mean? What does it tell us about the practice and praxis of marxist theory within and without the academy, about the place of the university in radical politics? As the frontispiece of an issue including Toscano and Vercellone on cognitive capitalism and the general intellect, I think these are actually important questions to take up. I'd add more, but i have an organizing meeting to run to.
I think, though, that there is a tension here that's a lot like the one I see in this video which is currently making the rounds on the internet among my fellow cognitarians:
specifically I'm interested in the presumed supremacy of mental over manual labor, the differential valuation of cognitive and affective labor explicit in the assumption that there's something horrible and undignified in getting paid less than secretaries and janitors. It seems to me like what academic workers need to be doing is organizing in solidarity with secretaries and janitors and other campus workers, whether we're fighting the bosses, radically reconstituting the spaces we inhabit, building counterinstitutions, going on strike, or engaging in a wide variety of other kinds of projects, and I think we should be doing all these things at once, combining them and ourselves into new and powerful forms.
Ok, meeting now.
I don't disagree with anything you say here, on either topic, but I do want to critique it a bit. First, I like the idea of listing cities instead of universities. It's a way of opening up spaces in intellectual institutions for those intellectuals who aren't employed in the academy. I'm all for that, obviously. Two years ago, when LAWCHA cosponsored its annual meeting with Archie Green's Laborlore group in Chicago, it was thought (I don't know how correctly) that a lot of the Laborlore folks would be unaffiliated, so rather than anyone have organizations listed we were all marked by location. I thought it was a rather nice idea. But it does open up some problems. Most notably, what location do you put down? Where they live? Where they work? The largest city in the metropolitan area? If you're a Yale professor (say) who lives in New York, being listed as (New Haven) or (New York) might be meaningful. Nevermind if you live in a suburb no one's heard of. But if the rule is that academics are listed by the location of their university, does that imply that non-academics should also be identified by the location of their employer? That would be odd in most instances, surely.
ReplyDeleteAnd then of course there's the purpose of these identifications to begin with. John Smith (Hillsborough, N.C.) doesn't actually mean anything to anyone--other than perhaps those who know the cultural geography of the Research Triangle. And if someone doesn't know who Kim Moody is, "Kim Moody (Labor Notes)" is a lot more useful as an identifier than "Kim Moody (New York)". Same is true for Jameson, where, if you don't know who he is, it's much more useful for him to be identified as being affiliated with Duke than with Durham (or Chapel Hill, or Hillsborough, or Morrisville, or Bahama or wherever he happens to live).
Perhaps what you're seeing is something the purpose people serve on the advisory board. Which is to say, maybe Jameson and your coyly unnamed Yale hero are there mostly to be there and recognizable on the masthead--thus it makes sense to identify them by their academic home, since in large part that's the purpose they're serving. Which is to say, perhaps what you're seeing is that the editors haven't had contact with Jameson and the Yale hero since they agreed to be on the advisory committee.
(As a side note, by the way, I do think you want to be careful about equating New Haven and Durham too much. On the surface they do seem similar for the reasons you articulate, but Duke really is less dominant in Durham, largely because of the presence of Research Triangle Park. It has a lot of the low wage jobs, but not nearly the same monopoly on high wage jobs as Yale does in New Haven. Also different is that Durham is one of the cities in a larger metropolitan area in a way that New Haven isn't. Or rather, if you think of New Haven as part of the New York area, in a different way than New Haven is. Finally, Durham has a black middle class with a frequently articulated history, with longstanding cultural, religious, political, and financial institutions, which grew up totally independently of Duke. All of these things may just be nuances, but I think here the nuances matter when thinking about the relationships between the universities (and their hospitals) and their cities.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, onto the video. This is not the critique I expected you to make. Nor is it the one I would have made. (I would have said that the video loses its power by being so clearly derivative of the law school version. Because it hues so closely to the structure of its predecessor, it muddies the distinctions between someone complaining about the crappy job market and someone complaining about a crappy job. I could go on, but I won't; the point is that I thought this video was bad for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that it wasn't actually funny.) And I think that your critique is a bit unfair. I don't think that as an intellectual/academic I'm owed or deserve more money than a secretary or a janitor because of the work I do. But I don't think it's illegitimate to point out that no one goes through four years of undergrad and god knows how many years of grad school in order to make as much as you could have made had you not done that. And it's not just about money: now that I have a PhD, I don't want a job that I could have gotten with a BA (or without a BA). This isn't because I think I'm better or more important. It's because I want my 20s to have benefited me in some recognizable way. And to the extent that the choices I made in my 20s mean that I didn't benefit in some recognizable way, I think it was a mistake to make those choices--and that is, after all, what the professor in the video was trying to prevent the student from doing.
Did you know that there is a length limit for blogger comments? Clearly, I don't have enough to do or enough people to talk to.
Jacob,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure the aformentioned Yale prof, already probably far too googleable on this blog, which I know he's read in the past, and I would like to ask him to be the fifth person on my dissertation committee at some point, hence the coyness, is any more recognizable to HM's readership than say, Moody, or Ahmad, or Michael Hardt. Jameson obviously is a whole different matter. I also much prefer listing cities for a whole set of reasons, but I want to insist on New Haven's cityness in its own bitterly contested way, for folks who imagine themselves to be radical materialist theorists to understand New Haven as a terrain of all kinds of important projects - radical and revanchist that people need to pay attention to and involve ourselves in.
As for the video, I haven't seen the law school version. I think this is both rather elitist geographically (nowhere nebraska) animated by guild labor concerns - not just the mental/manual split but also the job market, the overproduction thesis, the faculty member attempting to preserve professional exclusivity... I do think the labor critique is pretty good, I think the line about Harold Bloom is hilarious, and I think the portrayal of the undergraduate is kind of insulting and problematic, but then, my reasons for going to grad school and expectations about outcome were always very different.
Wait, so Jameson is listed as Duke and Hardt is listed as Durham? Weird. I think that's just further evidence that it's something internal to the workings of the advisory board.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, like I said, I don't actually disagree with anything you said in the original post.[1] Or in your response. You might be interested in the political science phd version--it's also derivative of the law school version, but at least it's about "this is a crappy job" and not "this is a crappy job market."
Political science: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7469383/?ref=nf
Law school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMvARy0lBLE
[1] Actually, I think you know that I disagree with you about telling people not to go to grad school. You're probably right that the problem with the job market isn't overproduction. But I do think that on any individual level--that is, on the level of giving someone advice about what to do with their 20s--telling them not to go to grad school is the ethically correct answer. One of the reasons I'm more excited about teaching at a liberal arts college than an R1 university is that I don't much want to train students who aren't going to get jobs. That doesn't mean that I want to decrease the number of grad students because I think that's the way to solve the job crisis; it means that I don't want to lead more 24-year-olds into the slaughter.