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.
Showing posts with label (post)coloniality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label (post)coloniality. Show all posts
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
"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.)
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.
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.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Taking its cues from the same group that held a "find the illegal immigrant" debacle here two years ago, the NYU University Senate has voted by a slim majority to lift the ban on Coca-Cola products which it imposed in 2005 in response to Coke's complicity in the murder of trade unionists at its bottling facilities in Colombia by paramilitaries.
There is no evidence that conditions are any better or that coke has taken any steps to ensure the right to organize free from fear, intimidation, murder, or torture. A recent report by the International Labor Organization failed to even call the question and one of the the organization's trustees is also on Coke's board. Meanwhile, the yearly death toll in Colombia has remained high since Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. This is what NYU is welcoming back onto its campus.
I can't say that I'm surprised, given this campus's abominable labor record of late. Sexton et al clearly do not care about the rights of working people, especially not those in far flung subcontracted corners of the globalized division of labor/coloniality of power.
But I am apalled. Apalled that a university that claimes to be in the public service would so blithely traffic with militarized terror against rank and file union members, apalled that with no justification 28 NYU senators decided to affirm their sudden support for a status quo they had voted to reject less than three and a half years ago, a status quo of torture, terror, and murder. Today the global university just became even more compromised by its imperial entanglements than it was yesterday. Today NYU has a body count.
There is no evidence that conditions are any better or that coke has taken any steps to ensure the right to organize free from fear, intimidation, murder, or torture. A recent report by the International Labor Organization failed to even call the question and one of the the organization's trustees is also on Coke's board. Meanwhile, the yearly death toll in Colombia has remained high since Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. This is what NYU is welcoming back onto its campus.
I can't say that I'm surprised, given this campus's abominable labor record of late. Sexton et al clearly do not care about the rights of working people, especially not those in far flung subcontracted corners of the globalized division of labor/coloniality of power.
But I am apalled. Apalled that a university that claimes to be in the public service would so blithely traffic with militarized terror against rank and file union members, apalled that with no justification 28 NYU senators decided to affirm their sudden support for a status quo they had voted to reject less than three and a half years ago, a status quo of torture, terror, and murder. Today the global university just became even more compromised by its imperial entanglements than it was yesterday. Today NYU has a body count.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.
This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?
This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
inaugurations
First day of lecture is tomorrow after a break of hermitude, gramsci, and autonomia. I'm suddenly extremely stressed out. It snowed a lot yesterday. I walked through Green-Wood cemetery - whence originate that picture of those geese, snow covering their backs. It was quiet and beautiful, and a nice escape from reading/writing/worrying, though no substitute for the way MLK day should be commemorated, which is in struggle, not shirking from critiquing the more problematic aspects of King's ideology while nevertheless adamantly refusing the neoliberal attempts at cooptation of a leader and organizer who demanded a "radical revolution of values" and was murdered fighting for striking service workers in Memphis, on the very spot where today a crowd watched Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration as the president of the U.S.
I watched the inauguration from my home, flipping back and forth between ABC (cheesy insert shots of the golden gate bridge and various sundry national icons during Aretha's performance, ugh) and PBS (David Brooks and the two historians not named Peniel Joseph, ugh) because ABC got the best picture on my bunnyt ears and PBS had a historian who wrote a book about the black power movement commenting on the inauguration speech instead of like, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person and who people tell me is a good historian, but is also a convicted plagiarist and writes books i find entirely uninteresting. Rick Warren apparently asking god's forgiveness for his homophobia was a bizarre spectacle, as was wheelchair-bound Emperor Palpatine. Were i less sympathetic to disability studies critiques, i might conjecture that we had seen medeival literature come to life, not so much physical defacements reflecting inner and innate corruption as the vice president having been literally crippled by his own secrets as he tried to spirit them away from the eyes of historians to god knows where. But of course i don't know what was in the box, and my logic here is complicit in the privileging of certain kinds of bodies.
Anyway, i found a couple of things problematic about the speech - the nationalism, although what else can you expect from a president's inauguration, even this president. The foreign policy stuff, however much more muted and qualified than with the last guy - smart, diplomatic imperialism is still imperialism and it's still in crisis - and that the extremely powerful nods to sweatshop workers, to thie history of the working class, had to be framed by invocations of the gospel of work a la Joe Leiberman on Beinecke Plaza in August 2003. (Joe the traitor kept asserting that "they" - the workers - weren't asking for a lot, kept excusing their struggle's righteousness with fictitious, thankfully, claims as to its narrowness.)
And likewise I'm glad President Obama recognizes the selflessness of workers who accept cutbacks, but i don't think that workers should be expected to, as they say in Italy, "pay for your crisis," that there is a difference between selflessness and exploitation, that who is called upon to sacrifice what for whom is never a neutral set of relationships, always fixed within the shifting ideological and historically produced matrices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.
Among the most powerful moments of the speech was
This was extraordinarily powerful, both because the emotion, the desire for the fulfilment of the dream King described 46 years ago remains a strong component of liberal nationalism, the idea that we can progress towards, are progressing, even have progressed towards an abstract equality that has now reached in the form of president obama, its apotheosis, retains every bit of its hegemony even as the multiculturalism of the 1990s has long since, it seems, given way to the libertarian "post-racialism" of 30rock and south park (which is often just "new racism" in disguise). But, historical objections aside (segregation in DC did not end in the 1940s) this is also powerful because it commemorates what it's stupid to claim as anything other than a victory in a deeper and more profound struggle against histories of race and racism not confined to juridical or representational arenas, that antiracists and pro-POC organizers and activists, workers and thinkers, produced, in a sense, this President in all his contradictory brilliance (here i'm thinking about something Nikhil Singh said at the Policing the Crisis panel back at ASA in october), that his victory (here i'm on my own but inspired by the hope from people bloc) is not simply the victory of neoliberal racial ideology, that he is no mere "centrist," that calling him a neocon in blackface (as i have seen some 'radica;s' allege in the wake of Ken Salazar and Robert Gates and Tim Geithner) is stupid and wrong, however much we need engaged, perceptive critique in the days ahead. To summarize, there were parts of the speech I found deeply moving, not simply as oratory, because they meant that we, at least the we i would like to identify myself with, had won a victory in a struggle that's nowhere near done.
Elizabeth Alexander said it best, more powerfully, my mother thought, bringing to the fore what was and is at stake in what has transpired and what is to come than even the momentous speech her poem followed.
And I would be remiss if I failed to mention Rev. Lowery, who brought my anarchist ass to tears as soon as he started speaking, and who offered not the platitudes of Warren's invocation but instead lessons in organizing.
I watched the inauguration from my home, flipping back and forth between ABC (cheesy insert shots of the golden gate bridge and various sundry national icons during Aretha's performance, ugh) and PBS (David Brooks and the two historians not named Peniel Joseph, ugh) because ABC got the best picture on my bunnyt ears and PBS had a historian who wrote a book about the black power movement commenting on the inauguration speech instead of like, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person and who people tell me is a good historian, but is also a convicted plagiarist and writes books i find entirely uninteresting. Rick Warren apparently asking god's forgiveness for his homophobia was a bizarre spectacle, as was wheelchair-bound Emperor Palpatine. Were i less sympathetic to disability studies critiques, i might conjecture that we had seen medeival literature come to life, not so much physical defacements reflecting inner and innate corruption as the vice president having been literally crippled by his own secrets as he tried to spirit them away from the eyes of historians to god knows where. But of course i don't know what was in the box, and my logic here is complicit in the privileging of certain kinds of bodies.
Anyway, i found a couple of things problematic about the speech - the nationalism, although what else can you expect from a president's inauguration, even this president. The foreign policy stuff, however much more muted and qualified than with the last guy - smart, diplomatic imperialism is still imperialism and it's still in crisis - and that the extremely powerful nods to sweatshop workers, to thie history of the working class, had to be framed by invocations of the gospel of work a la Joe Leiberman on Beinecke Plaza in August 2003. (Joe the traitor kept asserting that "they" - the workers - weren't asking for a lot, kept excusing their struggle's righteousness with fictitious, thankfully, claims as to its narrowness.)
And likewise I'm glad President Obama recognizes the selflessness of workers who accept cutbacks, but i don't think that workers should be expected to, as they say in Italy, "pay for your crisis," that there is a difference between selflessness and exploitation, that who is called upon to sacrifice what for whom is never a neutral set of relationships, always fixed within the shifting ideological and historically produced matrices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.
Among the most powerful moments of the speech was
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
This was extraordinarily powerful, both because the emotion, the desire for the fulfilment of the dream King described 46 years ago remains a strong component of liberal nationalism, the idea that we can progress towards, are progressing, even have progressed towards an abstract equality that has now reached in the form of president obama, its apotheosis, retains every bit of its hegemony even as the multiculturalism of the 1990s has long since, it seems, given way to the libertarian "post-racialism" of 30rock and south park (which is often just "new racism" in disguise). But, historical objections aside (segregation in DC did not end in the 1940s) this is also powerful because it commemorates what it's stupid to claim as anything other than a victory in a deeper and more profound struggle against histories of race and racism not confined to juridical or representational arenas, that antiracists and pro-POC organizers and activists, workers and thinkers, produced, in a sense, this President in all his contradictory brilliance (here i'm thinking about something Nikhil Singh said at the Policing the Crisis panel back at ASA in october), that his victory (here i'm on my own but inspired by the hope from people bloc) is not simply the victory of neoliberal racial ideology, that he is no mere "centrist," that calling him a neocon in blackface (as i have seen some 'radica;s' allege in the wake of Ken Salazar and Robert Gates and Tim Geithner) is stupid and wrong, however much we need engaged, perceptive critique in the days ahead. To summarize, there were parts of the speech I found deeply moving, not simply as oratory, because they meant that we, at least the we i would like to identify myself with, had won a victory in a struggle that's nowhere near done.
Elizabeth Alexander said it best, more powerfully, my mother thought, bringing to the fore what was and is at stake in what has transpired and what is to come than even the momentous speech her poem followed.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
And I would be remiss if I failed to mention Rev. Lowery, who brought my anarchist ass to tears as soon as he started speaking, and who offered not the platitudes of Warren's invocation but instead lessons in organizing.
Amen.
And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.
We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.
Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.
Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.
I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.
Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.
Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)
At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.
Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.
EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer
Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.
Charlie Parker - Donna Lee
Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school
Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?
Darkness - Gamith
Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.
Specials - Blank Expression.
De la Soul - Supa Emcees
The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.
Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.
I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.
Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.
Still no cease fire in Gaza, no contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)
At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.
Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.
EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer
Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.
Charlie Parker - Donna Lee
Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school
Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?
Darkness - Gamith
Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.
Specials - Blank Expression.
De la Soul - Supa Emcees
The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
clarification
My problem with an academic boycott is entirely tactical. I think it's useless and i think student movements and yes even faculty associations can intervene in ways that are way more direct and way more powerful. I think that even when their are caveats (e.g., "unless they reject the invasion of Gaza") it looks fishy, it ascribes the actions of the state on to the bodies of the citizen in a way that winds up reproducing Zionist logics, and it doesn't really attack in any way the policies or forces against which folks are trying to organize against.
If you've got an argument for why a boycott against Israeli academics makes strategic/tactical sense, I'd love to hear it.
If you've got an argument for why a boycott against Israeli academics makes strategic/tactical sense, I'd love to hear it.
Zach divests from Israel
I divested from Israel this week. I didn't actually know i was invested in Israel until a couple of days ago. My great-grandmother, who died in 1987 (when I was six years old) apparently took out a bond in my name with the state of Israel which matured about thirteen years ago. My great grandmother never told anyone about this bond, in all likelihood because she had Alzheimer's when she bought the bond, and her symptoms only intensified in the last six years of her life. This meant that I never really knew her. It also meant that nobody knew that this bond existed until my dad found it, going through his grandmother's papers last week. (My dad's side of the family were suburban Philly republicans, the right wing branch of the family, at least compared to the anarchists and bundist/communists on my mother's side.)
I promptly sent the bond in to be cashed (apparently you can do this by mail.) I have doubts about the efficacy of, say, boycotting Israeli academics, but I'm staunchly anti-zionist and the thought that my name and my family have been wrapped up in the occupation of the West Bank and the brutal state terrorism in the Gaza strip sickens me. So, IDF, consider my personal divestment from your repressive and ideological state apparatuses long overdue, and a gesture of solidarity, however small, with Palestinians, Israelis, and other Jews fighting for social justice in the middle east and all over the world.
I promptly sent the bond in to be cashed (apparently you can do this by mail.) I have doubts about the efficacy of, say, boycotting Israeli academics, but I'm staunchly anti-zionist and the thought that my name and my family have been wrapped up in the occupation of the West Bank and the brutal state terrorism in the Gaza strip sickens me. So, IDF, consider my personal divestment from your repressive and ideological state apparatuses long overdue, and a gesture of solidarity, however small, with Palestinians, Israelis, and other Jews fighting for social justice in the middle east and all over the world.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Tomorrow at 5:30 I'll be outside the union square bank of america just a block up from the GSOC office, standing in solidarity with the employees of the Republic Window factory in Chicago who are occupying their factory to demand the back pay owed them/save their jobs. The workers have called for nationwide solidarity actions at noon - there's going to be a big one in Chicago. And an earlier march is being planned here in NY by the IWW leaving from St. Mark's Church at noon, which i might also stop by.
Meanwhile, I think the staples singers put it best:
(I love how the reproductive, feminized labor of the household and domestic service gets placed before waged or unwaged "masculine" "productive" labor and both precede and situate and articulate the nationalist narrative framework through reference to "the control over unpaid labor." Capital v1 p 672. Imperialism's the "materialization of unpaid labor time" spatially diffused and writ large across the globe, the movement of labor and capital, the commodification of workers and the labor of racialized and commoditized workers.)
Edited again to add that this performance precedes "The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community" by a whole year. Also see Silvia Federici's critique of post/autonomist, post/operaist theories of precarity, which i think is at moments extremely insightful, though I disagree with some of her claims.
Meanwhile, I think the staples singers put it best:
(I love how the reproductive, feminized labor of the household and domestic service gets placed before waged or unwaged "masculine" "productive" labor and both precede and situate and articulate the nationalist narrative framework through reference to "the control over unpaid labor." Capital v1 p 672. Imperialism's the "materialization of unpaid labor time" spatially diffused and writ large across the globe, the movement of labor and capital, the commodification of workers and the labor of racialized and commoditized workers.)
Edited again to add that this performance precedes "The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community" by a whole year. Also see Silvia Federici's critique of post/autonomist, post/operaist theories of precarity, which i think is at moments extremely insightful, though I disagree with some of her claims.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
ABC news has a lengthy report this morning on the conditions of migrant labor in Abu Dhabi, with particular focus on the NYU satellite campus.
"We don't believe that they are doing nearly enough to avoid the exploitation of workers in their own projects," said Human Rights Watch's Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the organization's Middle East and North Africa division. She said that the institutions have not made public commitments to ensuring that its construction workers are not exploited.
Whitson says that while the UAE government needs to investigate, prosecute and penalize contactors that break the nation's labor laws, these organizations need to take responsibility themselves. These measures, she said, should include reimbursing workers who are found to have paid an illegal recruiting fee (one of the most common abuses that can total as much as $3000), ceasing dealings with contractors who use recruiters who charge such fees, ensuring that housing and work sites are safe and that health and safety records are kept, and guaranteeing that workers' passports are not confiscated and that monthly wages are paid regularly.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Staffing the "Global Network University"
In their profile of Bloom, the designated head of the Abu Dhabi campus, raise some of the common questions about the endeavor:
And interestingly Sexton responds:
Criticisms of colleges starting campuses or programs in the Middle East often include issues of academic freedom, human rights (in particular in the Emirates, concerns about migrant workers’ rights), and equal access and opportunities for women and Jews.
Lumping these together seems irresponsible to me, since some of the folks who've been loudest on the migrant worker issues have also been concerned with the orientalist assumptions involved in some of the ways gender, homosexuality (not even mentioned here) and Judaism in the middle east are being talked about. Here, the latter prove a smoke screen to allow the administrator-select to avoid discussing the former:
Thankfully, IHE also talked to Andrew Ross:On the latter issue, “I am Jewish, as it is well-known,” Bloom said Monday. “I see the institution as committed to diversity, and that my appointment is emblematic of the diversity to which it is committed.”
“I know that the Abu Dhabi government will make it possible ... for us to include faculty and students from wherever they come.”
NYU’s Faculty Senators Council chair did not respond to e-mail and voice-mail messages inquiring about Bloom’s selection Monday. Andrew Ross, chair of NYU’s American Association of University Professors chapter and a professor and chair of the department of social and cultural analysis, said he was surprised that someone from outside NYU would be leading the Abu Dhabi branch.
“The way we’ve understood it is that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi wants some kind of facsimile of NYU on site in Abu Dhabi. I guess it would make sense for someone to know the culture of NYU to be in that figurehead position, executive position,” said Ross, who has questioned the motives and assumptions behind the campus and other similar initiatives.
At the same time, Ross continued, “Swarthmore isn’t just any liberal arts college … it’s one that’s known for its open and free speech culture. Surely that’s part of the message.”
“There’s still a widespread skepticism about the project, I would say,” Ross said, surmising that a main reason for the continuing skepticism was that the branch campus was a top-down rather than a faculty-driven endeavor. NYU’s AAUP has been working with Human Rights Watch to draft and push for the adoption of a code of conduct to govern labor practices in the construction and maintenance of the Abu Dhabi campus. The AAUP is also advocating for the establishment of a permanent tenured faculty in Abu Dhabi to safeguard academic freedom.
And interestingly Sexton responds:
This isn't much of an answer, though, because he's not telling us whether the faculty from the middle east and south asia who are not part of the Washington Square Campus's tenure(less) system will be able to earn tenure at NYU Abu Dhabi - the "significant portion" here could easily be a reference to the NYU faculty Sexton wants to serve "tours of duty" at the A.D. Institute. And there's no commitment here to ensure just working and living conditions for the migrant workers who'll build and staff the new campus. For more on the campaign to get NYu to commit to fair labor at branch campuses, check out the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU, sign the petition, and be on the lookout for upcoming events.“We view the faculty as being exactly the same as faculty we have in New York in all respects,” said Sexton. He said that tenure decisions will be up to individual schools and departments, but expects a significant portion of the Abu Dhabi campus’s faculty to be tenured or tenure-track.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
a question
So, if NYU is the new British Empire, does that mean that Njiall Ferguson will come back?
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The return of the virus?
I figured i'd make available here my comments from the panel Steve Fletcher chaired yesterday on "The NYU Grad Strike and the Neoliberal University" at the conference titled Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value, at the University of Minnesota.
Without Our Brain and Muscle: NYU and the Future of the Neoliberal University.
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein[i]
The afterlife of the strike
The picket lines of what was likely the longest strike in the history of the graduate employee labor movement in the U.S. came down on May 11th, 2006, following a “strike graduation” rally two blocks south of the university’s commencement ceremonies. By fall, the police barricades along the sidewalks of West 4th Street, outside the library over which the university president’s offices panoptically loom, were gone, soon replaced, oddly, by NYPD protest pen-style bike rack barriers painted NYU purple. The forlorn island of dirt where strikers had erected sign-in tables and munched on stale bagels for six months was rendered inaccessible by a wall of scaffolding and nets. The dirt had to be scrubbed from the library’s red-brown façade. It took nearly a year. Gone too was the rickety ugly green dumpster in which strikers had hauled picket signs, tables, and the gas tank, generator, and what I can only describe as the decaying corpse of our environmentally unsustainable giant inflatable rat, which, eyes red and fangs bared, stood with us in the freezing rain and silently, stoically, bore witness to so much of a strike that mixed the theatre of the absurd and the infuriating with high tragedy, surreal farce, tortuous monotony, and its fair share of deeply inspiring and emotionally exhausting moments.
The NYU campus feels palpably different now, emptier. The drum beats and chants that echoed off the campus’s forbidding edifices and wafted through its securitized apertures marked the dramatically increased visibility and audibility of a precarious, transient, and contingent population of teachers and researchers. As things have quieted down in the strike’s wake, that presence now feels somewhat spectral. Yet if we have not shouted with the same volume as we did during the strike, we have not been inactive. Even as organizing efforts have continued, and graduate employees have continuously attempted to rethink strategic miscues and failures and move towards new ways of being and building a union for academic workers, we’ve seen the institution at which we labor undertake multiple new projects and outline broad plans for financial, territorial, and global expansion.
It’s important to remember and rethink and reevaluate the strike. I’m grateful for the interventions that Andy and Monika have made here, and I agree with them. But I think it’s equally important to think about what’s happened since and what may happen next, to think, briefly, about recent developments in the constitution of the deeply contradictory and evangelically neoliberal university that is NYU and to posit a role for graduate employee unionists in transforming it, moving beyond it.
Spatial Contours of the Enterprise University: ICE and the Global Network
John Sexton has underlined his vision of NYU’s future explicitly and grandiloquently. He is fond of making broad and overarching pronouncements and declarations, in a manner which, admittedly, often smacks of the absurd, the preposterous. There is method in his megalomania, though, and I believe his words must be taken at face value more often than not. Soon after his installation, President Sexton issued a series of missives (Mary Nolan calls them “Epistles”) on the “Enterprise University,” or “Common Enterprise University” (how’s that for a “capitalist commons?”) which he framed as a disciplinary mechanism to be exercised upon wayward faculty, necessitating the centralization of power and governance in the hands of his handpicked “University Leadership Team” in order to compel an unacknowledgedly and increasingly casualized workforce to perform its labors as desired. The Enterprise University was and is the Managed University, and it was this bureaucratic arrangement of administrative power that cut off negotiations with GSOC, blacklisted and fired some twenty strikers, and recruited two enterprising professional students to begin designing the company union structure which would ostensibly replace the UAW-allied union. In April of 2006 one of these individuals received a fifty-thousand dollar fellowship for his “social entrepreneurship” through a newly created university program. This program was endowed by then newly crowned NYU Trustee for Life Catherine B. Reynolds, who not long after came under pressure from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for selling student loans with inflated interest rates. Which is interesting, to say the least.[ii]
The Common Enterprise University represents the death knell of faculty governance, which we ought to caution ourselves against being too nostalgic for in its actually existing, or actually having existed forms, as complicit as it’s been in structures of exclusion, empire, and the political economy of the academic superstar system. Yet Faculty Democracy of the sort advocated by hundreds of pro-union NYU faculty as they joined GSOC picket lines and stormed John Sexton’s offices in November of 2005 becomes more than worth supporting, at least if one cares about the principle that people should have some form of control over and/or voice in the work that they do.
The current NYU administration has designs, at any rate, not merely on bending the academic workforce to its will, but also on radically restructuring city and state economic policies. President Sexton has, since 2004, advocated reconfiguring New York’s political infrastructure around what he calls ICE – a set of policies in which “global talent” is increasingly concentrated in centers of Information, Culture, and Economy. Sexton is fond of making a proprietary claim to this term. As a member of the Higher Education Committee created by former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer, President Sexton has actively pushed the idea of New York City as in “idea capital” of the future, and called for a reorganization of its economy which foregrounds the revenue-generating potential of the private research university.[iii] Writing in The University Against Itself, Sarah Nash, a GSOC veteran and former staff researcher for the union, and Steven Duncombe, a professor in NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, have noted the ironies of a term that hinges upon the exploitation and financialization of academic and intellectual innovation but is itself seemingly plagiarized from Indian economists, who apparently doubt the model’s efficacy.[iv] But ICE’s neoliberalism lies not only in its zeal for the commodification of immaterial labor, but also in its demand that state funding for public education should be, in the words of the Washington Square News, NYU’s student paper, “spread less thinly and given mostly to private universities,” This, President Sexton explains to the WSN reporter, is “merit based pay,” “making sure the investment is not wasted.”[v] The language of finance and pragmatism here masks the ways in which NYU’s regional growth involves the enclosure of public spaces and the expropriation of public institutions and funds. This regional expansion, it’s important to note, also involves developing Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, and colonizing a broad swathe of downtown Brooklyn’s working class commercial district south of the newly acquired campus of Polytechnic University, an area which currently serves a predominantly working class and African-American clientele.[vi] This considerable addition to the university’s already formidable real estate empire is a key piece of the university’s “2031” plan, which involves the acquisition or construction of 6 million square feet of space over the next 23 years, as the university continues ot admit increasing numbers of students at ever-rising tuition rates.[vii]
NYU’s expansion is hardly limited to the New York metropolitan area. Though plans for a partnership with American University in Paris on an island NYU recently purchased in the Seine fell through last month, the university holds or has recently opened satellite campuses and programs in London, Madrid, Accra, Paris (a smaller operation than the planned joint venture) Singapore, Argentina, Israel, Berlin, Prague, and Shanghai.[viii] And construction may begin very soon on NYU in Abu Dhabi, a project whose history was recently discussed by Tamar Lewin in a lengthy article in the New York Times,[ix] though Andrew Ross’s recent article on the matter which appeared both in Inside Higher Ed and in The University Against Itself is engages the project more rigorously and more valuably. Our colleague Lena Sze reminds us that the politics surrounding the Abu Dhabi venture are complex and multivalent, and Rana Jaleel will speak about how NYU graduate employees are thinking about potential interventions in the university’s transnational enterprise, so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about the issue, but I am interested in the ways in which Sexton’s framed this ‘partnership’, which began during the GSOC strike and which Sexton refused to “take seriously” unless UAE representatives made a 50 million dollar donation to NYU’s endowment.[x] Fond of ruminating in totalizing and indeed orientalist terms on the 21st century as “The Century of the Other,” Sexton recently described the university’s expansion to Abu Dhabi and elsewhere in terms of the globalization of ICE ‘idea capitals’ and the ‘embrace of otherness,’ – meaning, apparently ‘we don’t mind our campus interrupted with other buildings instead if an NYU building,’ as an ethic of expansion. The latter statement, by the way, is one that the historical preservationists who unsuccessfully fought NYU’s annexation and demolition of Edgar Allan Poe’s House, might disagree with.[xi]
The Truth Is A Virus
Thus, NYU becomes what Sexton has alternatingly termed “the global network university” and “the university of the other,”[xii] The other, of course, meaning potentially everything which is not NYU, with NYU imagined as homogeneous, Western, white, apparently, and unitarily, proprietarily progressive and dynamic. Meanwhile, back in Greenwich Village, expansion means, as a March 7 memo from Executive Vice President Michael Alfano announces, a hiring freeze for the coming year for clerical and administrative labor, with concomitant calls for increases in efficiency inevitably spelling speed-up, increased outsourcing, and the increasing consolidation of such function’s under the U.L.T.’s watchful eyes.[xiii] The sweeping nature of these changes evince a swagger on the part of administrators who believe they’ve moved past (Sexton’s often repeated words during the strike) the challenges from below posed by GSOC and its allies and supporters.
In November 2005, a striking graduate teaching assistant in the NYU English department booked a meeting with President Sexton during his office hours. Sexton, dismayed to learn of his guest’s support for the union, informed her that GSOC was a “virus” that needed to be “eradicated from the earth.” [totally anecdotal.] I share this anecdote not to solicit your outrage, much less your sympathy, but rather because I think it offers both a clear window into how the NYU administration views its “waste” – to steal from Marc Bousquet’s brilliant theorization of the exploitative structure of academic knowledge production. We are completely abject, menacing, microscopic, indeed barely material but nonetheless necessitating either the university’s vaccination or our own destruction.
I also raise the virus metaphor because I think it offers, as does Bousquet’s model, a path for potential intervention, disruption and recuperation of the neoliberal university. Disgusting as it seems, I wonder if the virus, constantly shifting, constantly adapting, reconstituting itself, rhizomatic, hybrid, and nearly irresistible, might, taking a cue from the Aids activism of an earlier moment – and I’m indebted to Rana Jaleel for pointing out my reliance on these histories of activism and struggle - offer a useful way to think about how we organize against and within and increasingly spread out, de/territorialized, ruthless, employer. This is a position I’m wary of taking, particularly because the history of contagion in this country is very much a racialized one, and I wonder whether an uncritical appropriation or reclamation of the union as virus ignores the ways in which some of us are more immediately read as threats to afflict the social body than others. But still, I find the possibilities alluring. Moten and Harney[xiv] describe a subversive relationship to the university which is premised on criminality, and specifically on theft – To the university I’ll steal and there I’ll steal. What would it look like if instead we thought about our relationships to the university through the metaphor of infection?
Addendum: I want to respectfully disagree with Peter Rachleff that addressing the concerns of the university’s undercommons – Moten and Harney again – must be done outside of the labor movement, that our struggle exceeds the bounds of such forms, because I’m not convinced we can know the bounds of any union or any form of struggle until we can push them no further. Our strike was no "fiasco." Rather, it was extraordinarily instructive, and I hope the tactics we have developed, the lessons we have learned, will prove useful to university employees in the years to come who are imagining and pushing forward alternative futures for the sites in which we all labor.
[i] I owe thanks to the many members of GSOC, to the folks from GESO who lent our struggle new force and direction, and thus made this paper possible. Steve Fletcher, Andy Cornell, Rana Jaleel, Mike Palm, Andrew Ross, Johana Londono, and many others guided and helped to shape this paper, whether they knew it or not.
[ii] “First Class of Reynolds Scholars Named,” WSN 5/8/2006 and “Trustee’s nonprofit loan co. under fire,” WSN 9/20/2007
[iii] “Sexton: Private and public Schools should partner,” Washington Square News, 12/6/2007
[iv] Duncombe and Nash, “Ice From the Ashes of Fire: NYU and The Economy of Culture In New York City,” in Palm, Krause, Ross, and Nolan, eds. The University Against Itself Philadelphia; Temple University Press, 2008. 72
[v] “Sexton: Private and public Schools should partner,” Washington Square News, 12/6/2007
[vi] NYU 2031 Open House Presentation, Jan 30, 2008.
[vii] “Villagers still wary of NYU’s growth” WSN 11/15/2007
[viii] “Cramped In Village, NYU Eyes Globe as It Grows,” WSN 12/7/07 and Andrew Ross, “Global U” in The University Against Itself 212
[ix] Lewin, “Universities Rush to Set up Outposts Abroad,” NYT 2/10/2008
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Duncombe and Nash, 80
[xii] “Cramped In Village, NYU Eyes Globe as it grows,” op cit
[xiii] Michael Alfano, “Administrative re-engineering – A follow-up to John Sexton’s Memo”. 3/7/2008
[xiv] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and its Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text79, 2004
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Another quick link, this time to Thomas's insistently non-travelblogical account of his journeys across Asia, which currently find him in the Negev, beset by curious performances and imperialist relativisms.
If anyone can rescue the travelogue from its colonial origins, resonances, and effects, it's probably Thomas.
If anyone can rescue the travelogue from its colonial origins, resonances, and effects, it's probably Thomas.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
I've been thinking about deleting this blog and starting over, but I'm far too much the pack rat to do it right now.
During second semester of sophomore year of college i took the comp lit department's intro to lit theory class. I hated the professor, the course's methodology, and most of the readings until, late in the semester, we made it to the marxists, the feminists, deconstruction, and the postcolonialists. During the week on the New Critics when i tried to make a point about the social and historical context of the denial of referent beyond the text, (and I'll admit to not having done the reading, too busy wallowing in depression and waiting for the revolution) my TA ended the class by gesturing at me and declaring "and here we have our Marxist." This, combined with the anti-union (all four of them) professor's narcissistic posturing at the lectern about whether or not he was a Marxist led me to attend sections and lectures even less, but vituperative pedagogy isn't really my point here - what is is the being fingered as "the Marxist," however inaccurate such a designation may actually be for my particular political and theoretical commitments. Come to think of it, we could include my 1oth grade history teacher's somewhat condescending but fondly exasperated statement to me that it was good to have the voice of Marx in the classroom, to which I, with mild indignation, responded, "But I'm an Anarchist!" (Saw her last year while standing on the picket line.)
I felt that peculiar discomfort about being interpolated within a particular discursive construction of "the Marxist" which seems inadequate, innacurate, and insufficient given the actual scope of Marxian interventions in Cultural Studies in class yesterday evening during a discussion of Wallerstein on World-Systems and Michael Denning's 1986 essay on "The Special American Conditions" and American Studies's history as a substitute for Marxism. Maybe I myself was being a bit narcissistic, and the politics and circumstances of the two classes and groups of folks involved were very different, thank jeebus. But there were offhanded comments in the hallway during the break, and I had a more general discomfort with the collapsing of
New Left-influenced marxist cultural studies with big M Marxist political theory methodological
orthodoxy. I certainly wasn't the only person in the room for whom Marxist cultural theory is important or useful. Maybe what I'm frustrated with is the ease with which folks who drift towards poststructuralist interventions sometimes make their break with Marx in ways that strike me as counterproductive and dependent upon extremely limited and limiting readings of Marxists and Marxism. This was especially infuriating in the Postcolonial Marxism class I took last semester. This is coming out way more polemical and less sensical than I intended it.
I'm still not willing to call myself a Marxist, whatever my investments in certain moments of Marxist cultural theory. I have huge problems with Marx and many other figures in the tradition. I have similar reservations about anarchist interventions from Proudhon and Bakunin forward. But even as Marxist descriptions of "faddish" poststructuralisms and postmodernisms and postcolonialism have always made me cringe, so do the totalizing oversimplifications with which some dismiss more recent reconfigurations of Marxian frameworks. Maybe I'm just not cracked up for this academic thing.
It's six in the morning and I woke up to reread George Fredrickson's Racism: A Short History, which I had tons of issues with four years ago, most of which are not dispelled by another go-round.
During second semester of sophomore year of college i took the comp lit department's intro to lit theory class. I hated the professor, the course's methodology, and most of the readings until, late in the semester, we made it to the marxists, the feminists, deconstruction, and the postcolonialists. During the week on the New Critics when i tried to make a point about the social and historical context of the denial of referent beyond the text, (and I'll admit to not having done the reading, too busy wallowing in depression and waiting for the revolution) my TA ended the class by gesturing at me and declaring "and here we have our Marxist." This, combined with the anti-union (all four of them) professor's narcissistic posturing at the lectern about whether or not he was a Marxist led me to attend sections and lectures even less, but vituperative pedagogy isn't really my point here - what is is the being fingered as "the Marxist," however inaccurate such a designation may actually be for my particular political and theoretical commitments. Come to think of it, we could include my 1oth grade history teacher's somewhat condescending but fondly exasperated statement to me that it was good to have the voice of Marx in the classroom, to which I, with mild indignation, responded, "But I'm an Anarchist!" (Saw her last year while standing on the picket line.)
I felt that peculiar discomfort about being interpolated within a particular discursive construction of "the Marxist" which seems inadequate, innacurate, and insufficient given the actual scope of Marxian interventions in Cultural Studies in class yesterday evening during a discussion of Wallerstein on World-Systems and Michael Denning's 1986 essay on "The Special American Conditions" and American Studies's history as a substitute for Marxism. Maybe I myself was being a bit narcissistic, and the politics and circumstances of the two classes and groups of folks involved were very different, thank jeebus. But there were offhanded comments in the hallway during the break, and I had a more general discomfort with the collapsing of
New Left-influenced marxist cultural studies with big M Marxist political theory methodological
orthodoxy. I certainly wasn't the only person in the room for whom Marxist cultural theory is important or useful. Maybe what I'm frustrated with is the ease with which folks who drift towards poststructuralist interventions sometimes make their break with Marx in ways that strike me as counterproductive and dependent upon extremely limited and limiting readings of Marxists and Marxism. This was especially infuriating in the Postcolonial Marxism class I took last semester. This is coming out way more polemical and less sensical than I intended it.
I'm still not willing to call myself a Marxist, whatever my investments in certain moments of Marxist cultural theory. I have huge problems with Marx and many other figures in the tradition. I have similar reservations about anarchist interventions from Proudhon and Bakunin forward. But even as Marxist descriptions of "faddish" poststructuralisms and postmodernisms and postcolonialism have always made me cringe, so do the totalizing oversimplifications with which some dismiss more recent reconfigurations of Marxian frameworks. Maybe I'm just not cracked up for this academic thing.
It's six in the morning and I woke up to reread George Fredrickson's Racism: A Short History, which I had tons of issues with four years ago, most of which are not dispelled by another go-round.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
"If we are not careful, there is the constant risk that the people will ask why continue the war, every time the enemy makes the slightest concession. We have become so used to the occupier's contempt and his determination to maintain his stranglehold, whatever the cost, that any semblance of generosity or any sign of goodwill is greeted with surprise and jubilation. The colonized then tend to break into song. The militant must be supplied with further, more searching explanations so that the enemy's concessions do not pull the wool over his eyes. These concessions, which are nothing but concessions, do not adress the essence of the problem, and from the colonized's perspective, it is clear that a concession does not adress the problem until it strikes the heart of the colonial regime."
- Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Philcox translation), 91
- Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Philcox translation), 91
Thursday, December 14, 2006
I'm skipping my department holiday party and neglecting emails i should be writing and i missed The O.C. too, in order to research a paper on Postcolonial Marxisms, The United States, and the long 1960s, for which I am in the midst of reading Cynthia Young's Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, which I like immensely. Young's articulation of race, gender, class, New Left aesthetics and their vanguardist omissions, and labor in the formation of what she terms a "Third Worldist" structure of feeling, her historicization of the Internal Colony in lefts old and new, and her account of the prison and third worldist theorizations and activism concerning it are valuable interventions into the historiography of the 1960s, deindustrial urban spaces, and post-Cuba social movements. What i find particularly valuable reading this today, though, is the chapter on 1199 and its cultural programs as a central component of Third World subjectivity, looking at the lifeworlds of the working class black and puerto rican women and men who constituted the rank and file of the insurgent union's social movement organizing during the late 1950s and on, and giving us yet another vantage point from which to historicize and understand the struggle currently taking place at a hospital in New Haven where 1199 has left its imprint more than once. (Of course, Young knows this, given her own involvements in New Haven labor history, as, among other things, one of the three women made to appear before the university's kangaroo court tribunal in the aftermath of the grade strike which she helped lead.)
Alright, back to work.
Alright, back to work.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The Politics of the Memorial and The Neoliberal University: Yale, David Lee, Maya Lin
(Another paper for the same class at the Firefly piece. Started writing this last night because I dodn't knwo what else to write my last paper on, and got a bit caught up. This is still a work in progress, but it's eight pages too long and due in four hours, so I've sent it in anyway. I welcome criticism and comments from other folks who were involved in all of this first hand. There's stuff I don't think i do very well, and I probably should have engaged memorial theory more and gone into the specifics of the anti-Lee campaign a bit less. That said, here.)
In the fall of 2001, the Reverend W. David Lee, a former Syracuse University football player and the pastor of the Varick AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, the oldest black church in New Haven, located in a working class African American neighborhood bordering Yale University’s sprawling, fortress-like gothic architecture, announced his candidacy for a seat on the Yale Corporation. The Yale Corporation is “the senior policy-making body for
In order to appear on the alumni fellow election ballot, one must either be nominated by the Association of Yale Alumni, a not-particularly independent body responsible for channeling communication between the university administration and potential donors[3] which also administers the elections, or one must campaign for enough petition signatures to qualify independently. This process “involves the collection of a number of petitions equal to 3% of the prior year's number of qualified electors,” with “qualified electors” numbering over a hundred thousand.[4] While “campaigning” for an alumni fellow seat is unusual, it has been the means by which historically marginalized groups have attained a seat at the table. William Horowitz, who became the first Jewish member of the Yale Corporation in 1965, secured his place on the ballot through such a campaign.[5]
Lee’s roots in
The response to Lee’s candidacy was mixed. The bid garnered support from progressive students and alumni, as well as community groups and local and national politicians and political organizations and figures, including Senator Joseph Lieberman and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (both Yale Alumni.) Lee secured far more than the necessary signatures in advance of the deadline, and won a spot on the ballot, promising to become the only member of the corporation besides the university’s president to actually live in
In almost every election for alumni fellows of the Yale Corporation, the AYA nominating committee selects multiple candidates to place on the ballot, from which alumni select one new trustee. In late February, 2002, the Association of Yale Alumni announced that this year it would put forward only one nominee – the artist and architect Maya Lin, class of ’81.[14] Lin was a popular figure on the Yale campus. Her Women’s Table sculpture, with its smooth black surfaces visually and thematically evocative of the Vietnam War Memorial, which, Yale students are often reminded, she designed while among their ranks, numerically commemorates and memorializes the presences and absences of women at the university from its founding through coeducation in 1969, only stopping in the early 1990s, when women for the first time outnumbered male classmates. Lin’s liberalism, financial and artistic success, and celebrated creative genius are often represented to undergraduates as elements of a career worthy of emulation, and the university had recently awarded Lin with an honorary degree. Lin enjoys privileged status not only within Yale’s artificially-aged walls, but more pointedly in Asian-American studies generally – Jeannie Barroga’s play Walls, about Lin and the Memorial, is excerpted at length on the very first page of what has arguably been the discipline’s most important and influential intervention over the last decade.[15] Lin’s memorial has been important for Asian American and other cultural studies for its incommensurability, its refusal to be entirely subsumed and enclosed by a nationalist historiography of arma virumque cano, and its openness to appropriations and transformations, including the discourses which circulated widely concerning the ability of artist and memorial alike to embody, understand, and incorporate hermeneutics of experience and belonging from which both are presumed excluded by virtue of their alleged radical otherness.[16]
In
Quoth Bass:
#3: Rules for Attacking Your Opponent
· If possible, have stand-ins do it.
· If he's black, find black fronts to do it.
· If he's black and liberal, put up another liberal minority against him.
· Comb through his public statements, remove snippets, then broadcast them out of context to make him look like a raving, dangerous nut.[19]
I now think such a framework is far too simple for thinking about the Yale/AYA anti-Lee offensive. I do not wish to reify the forms of knowledge and research presumed by the masculinist and jingoist logics in Hart’s condemnation of Lin’s refusal to engage and understand a referent (the veterans) in her design for the memorial, but in the context of the Lee-Lin election, Lin’s physical and verbal absence from debates and conversations concerning the university’s relationship to New Haven, its demonizing of Lee, and continued global priorities, was and continues to be deeply troubling. At times allies of the Federation, including me, have critiqued Lin for her silence on matters of concern in ways which bear a problematic relationship to tropes of feminine (and Asian) passivity, difference, and childishness. In part this paper represents an attempt to formulate a more complex and less fraught critique, to think through how me might reach a different understanding of the political implications of the way Lin represented herself, and allowed herself to be represented, throughout the months leading up to the election, and the ways in which she has continued to represent herself in the years since. (Her six-year term on the corporation ends in 2008.)
Even a particularly anti-union, anti-Lee editorial board of the Yale Daily News opined that the AYA nominating committee had “made its nomination process look suspiciously subject to external influence and contradictory to the purpose of alumni fellow elections.”[20] Such skepticism was widespread, but did not prevent the YDN from later endorsing Lin anyway. Lin refused to campaign or speak to New Haven community organizations or media, while in her name the AYA, the Yale administration, and a group of alumni who were mostly current or former trustees and officers of the university (such as former University Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey and then-corporation member Frances Beinecke) calling themselves “Yale Graduates for Responsible Trusteeship” waged a “slick, $145,000-plus campaign” to discredit and impugn Lee.[21] The supposedly neutral Association of Yale Alumni website lauded Lin while prominently displaying Lee quotes such as "There is a blind spot at Yale -- no one is responsible for the community interests ... [President] Levin is probably laughing now but he won't laugh after we get there." Paul Bass interviewed Lee and spoke with him at length about the quote:
I ask Lee about the quotes as we sit in his office, below a Yale wall hanging and his
"It hurt," a somber Lee recalls of hearing of Levin's laughter. "My gut reaction was, 'Wow. That stings. Fine. He won't laugh when I come in the room.' It was like calling me a joke. I had to deal with that all my life, growing up in the projects, not having money, people laughing at you.
"I went to
Regardless of Lee’s lack of press-handling skills to rival those of Yale spokesperson Helaine Klasky, who attempts to equate Lee’s union support with Enron, it is now and was then clear that the AYA would not neutrally conduct the election it was charged with facilitating. Bass’s response to Klasky’s claim that the media did not see her link between Enron and FHUE as poisonous outside agents with political and economic agendas separate from university leadership is worth quoting at length, for it underscores rather well what is at stake for
Klasky has a point. That's because Enron is a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise that bribed the federal government and destroyed thousands of workers' livelihoods and pensions. The media doesn't see Yale's unions, or their influence, the same way.
The fact that Yale can see its unions that way helps to explain why more is clearly at stake here than the bid by a pro-labor minister from New Haven's oldest black church to sit in the board meetings of a $10.7 billion university. In fact, one trustee out of 17 clubby members probably won't change the outcomes of any votes.
But Yale's overreaction has endangered two of university President Rick Levin's major initiatives: promoting "partnerships" with
But faced with the possibility of allowing a labor- or New Haven-backed alum to enter the sanctum of monthly corporation meetings (a "partnership" tool in some American corporate boardrooms), Yale revealed the limits of its definition of "partner."
Bass continues,
In this campaign, Lin has released a public [campaigning] letter in which she trumpeted her credentials and denounced the notion of campaigning. She failed, and continues to fail, to distance herself from the more expensive and nastier campaigning being done on her behalf.
By agreeing to be used by Yale to stop Lee's campaign, Lin has already proved her major qualification for the seat -- reliability. She won't press Yale to take more than baby steps to help rebuild
The AYA, the Yale Graduates for Responsible Trusteeship, and the Yale administration together outspent the Lee campaign by nearly a hundred thousand dollars and dwarfed the union’s financial involvement in the race by a factor of five. The AYA letter strongly emphasized to over 115,000 voters that neither Yale nor the AYA supported Lee’s candidacy and openly attacking the Lee campaign
"The AYA's Board of Governors is concerned about the strong and unexplained disparity between Rev. Lee's past public statements about Yale and those now being made in campaign mailings to alumni," the letter said. "We are also concerned about Rev. Lee's expressions of deep commitment to the Yale-New Haven relationship despite his lack of past involvement at any level with Yale's many initiatives and engagements with the city."[23]
The anti-Lee campaign sought to portray the Reverend as a disingenuous and dissimulating intruder, a willing tool of the labor unions not truly dedicated to Yale or
There are those at
The attempt to rigidly separate town from gown in this language is extraordinarily simplistic and willfully ignores or obfuscates the constitutive role neoliberalized universities play in shaping ndreshaping deindustrialized urban spaces like New Haven, but often, the logic of the AYA, the YGRT, and the university’s “official” spokespeople was very much complicit in such sweeping generalizations and in the pernicious construction they would redeploy over and over again of Lee’s supposed lack of any capacity for independent thought, “anti-Yale” bravado (here relying on a quote from a 2001 union meeting in which Lee called FHUE Yale’s “waterloo,”) and duplicitous relationship to organizations with whom Yale was still proclaiming a desire to build lasting partnership and cooperation. Granted, the Lee campaign was, in part, an attempt by an activist affiliated with Yale’s workers’ unions and community organizations to push open the limits of what kind of partnership the university was really willing to enter into. Still, with Lee’s campaign recast as a deliberate move to challenge Yale’s power and agenda in the city, Lin’s role is no less problematic.
Yale’s campus is stuffed with memorials. Sterling Memorial Library. Hewitt Memorial Quadrangle and its tomb-like salute to the World War I dead. Woolsey Memorial Rotunda with its armed Athena marbles and names carved in the walls of Yale students and alumni who died in colonial warfare. These spaces are radically unlike Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. They are unapologetically nationalist, realist, and imperialist, not necessarily in that order. Whereas Lin’s memorial is intensely public, these spaces and the histories (and memories) they institutionalize are private, elite, constantly policed to keep the homeless riffraff from sleeping on heated floors during the cold New Haven winters and available only to a select few, or open to the public only occasionally and as part of a grand but transparent gesture of accessibility and pedantic generosity, such as when Benjamin Carson, an African American neurosurgeon t Johns Hopkins and a Yale trustee, gave a free and open lecture to students from New Haven public on self improvement and individual excellence. A painting in the room where the Yale corporation customarily meets depicts Elihu Yale, the university’s first donor standing proudly with a slave wearing an iron collar kneeling at his feet. President Levin has replied to student demands that the painting be removed with assurances that Kurt Schmoke told him to leave it up, so that the university might be reminded of its problematic legacies. Yet, as in the summer of 2001, when a group of graduate students published a report detailing the foundational role the slave trade and racism played in Yale’s early years in the midst of tercentennial self-congratulations,[26] Yale has been often been dismissive of or lukewarm to critical discussion of this legacy, and has been loathe to engage in open dialogue with community organization it does not bankroll or control unless forced to do so by public and political pressure. This represents a key theme of Yale’s long shift from elite finishing school to global university, which obliterates the local in favor of universal discourses of historical and current excellence.[27] While Yale has openly embraced multiculturalism, not only are the possibilities for such a hermeneutic themselves limited, but so has been Yale’s commitment to said possibilities. Thus, these sites of exclusion represent not merely “the memory of the past but the experience of the present moment as explicitly controlled and shaped by the museum.”[28] If the “filth” of the anti-aestheticism and graffiti on Gerz’s disappearing Holocaust monument in Harburg reflects a deep and ugly truth – “the memorial projections and preoccupations”[29] of post-Cold War Germany, in this case, Yale’s memorial culture, antisceptic, neoclassical, and imperial points toward an altogether different project. Lin’s Women’s Table fountain is easily read as an attempt to subvert and disrupt this masculinist built environment glorifying death and war, yet recent events outlined above must lead us to question the limits of this intervention. (Indeed, there is no space on the Women’s Table to commemorate or memorialize the struggles of the uncounted numbers of working-class women employed by the university as maids, and as clerical, food service and custodial workers, the women who were historically the most vulnerable members of the university’s workforce, who built Local 34 and comprise a dedicated activist core within Local 35.) That Lin seemed so quick to embrace this politics of liberal exclusion in the face of a movement which literally promised to “tear down the walls” between Yale and New Haven[30] suggests that the space the memorial inhabits may no longer be simply precarious, but in fact perhaps already collapsed into the very forms of exclusion, violence, and loss which it attempted to disrupt – or ignore.
[1] http://2110uaw.org/gsoc/nyu_trustees.htm
[2] http://yale.edu/about/leadership.html
[3] Aya.yale.edu/about
[4] http://www.aya.yale.edu/corpelection/process.htm
[5] “Light and Verity,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November, 2001
[6] As CCNE’s organizing grew, Immigrant Rights and responsible development became increasingly foregrounded. See http://www.ctneweconomy.org/socialcontract.html
[7] HERE merged with the textile and garment workers union UNITE! In July 2004 to create UNITE-HERE
[8] “Unions Rally With Call For Partnership,” Yale Daily News, April 25, 2002 http://yaledailynews.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=19186
[9] Yale workers have struck perhaps 14 times since the first union (what is now Local 35) won recognition in 1941. This history has been extensively documented. See Deborah Sue Elkin, Labor and The Left: The Limits of Acceptable Dissent at Yale University, 1920s to 1950s, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1995, Toni Gilpin, Gary Isaac, Dan Letwin, and Jack McKivigan, On Strike For Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers’ Strike at Yale University, 1984-1985, updated edition, University of Illinois Press, 1995. Also Herbert Janick, “Yale Blue: Unionization at
[10] “T-shirts DominateLabor Talks,” Yale Daily News, 3/1/02
[11]Paul Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,”
[12] “Yale Unions Poised to Call Strike,”
[13] The University at the time claimed that Charles Ellis of Greenwich Associates, Greenwich, Connecticut also lived in New Haven (he is married to Linda Lorimer, the secretary of the University,) but to my knowledge Ellis in fact lived in a mansion in Greenwich and not, in fact, in New Haven. If this is incorrect I will gladly edit this sentence.
[14] “Maya Lin Nominated for Corporation Seat,” YDN 3/1/02
[15] Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts,
[16] Sturken, Tangled Memories, 51-58
[17] “Maya Lin vying with minister for seat on Yale board,”
[18] “BSAY Position Paper,” Yale Daily News, 5/3/71 “Hunger Strike,” Yale Daily News, 5/4/1971. “Students Continue Support Activities,” Yale Daily News 5/7/1971
[19] Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” op cit
[20] “A conspicuously singular nomination”, Yale Daily News, 3/6/2002
[21] Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” op cit
[22] Ibid.
[23] “AYA criticizes Lee in letter to alumni,” Yale Daily News, 4/16/2002
[24] “Elect Maya Lin to Yale Board,”
[25] “At
[26] See http://www.yaleslavery.org/
[27] Bill Readings offers an interesting deconstruction of this sort of discursive formation in The University in Ruins.
[28] James Young, At Memory’s Edge:After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture.
[29] Young, 139
[30] “Hispanics to Wield Clout at Union Rally,”
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