dispatches from the dissertating.

Yes, this blog still exists.

ar/ has me on the "three pages a day plan", which is more hortatory than prescriptive, or so i fervently hope.  I'm currently sitting in one of the grad employee cubicles in the department of sundry and copious acronyms trying to live up to these expectations with little success today - i've written about a page, but squeezed in some archival research into the origins of BSEU (now SEIU) Local 113's organizing at the U of Minnesota.  In so doing, I came across this article in the January 16, 1931 edition of the Minneapolis Labor Review, which was and remains the organ of the AFL's Central Labor Union (we now call them central labor councils) in the Twin Cities.  It's a craft unionist framing of what folks now call the edu-factory, seven and a half decades before that term came into vogue, having been described elaborated by the eponymous collective and more recently been transmogrified into a book and a most excellent webjournal.  The edufactory - "what was the factory is now the university" - is the articulation of knowledge and labor within the global neoliberal university as the social factory was the articulation of production and consumption, of productive and reproductive labor within and beyond the factory walls during the moment of the crisis of the bretton woods regime, the crisis of state corporatism, the crisis of disciplinary governability.  So what's this paleo-edufactory then, produced by its own moment of capitalist crisis, articulated by a Yale professor half a decade before the first stirrings of local 35 to a Minneapolis audience three years before the Trotskyist teamsters' frontal attack on the Citizens' Alliance's open shop repressive parastate apparatus?  I don't think this is a vestige of the moment Clyde Barrow so ably dissects in Universities and the Capitalist State -- if anything, it speaks more to the kinds of formation Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front, the "laboring of American culture," the hegemony of a language and consciousness of labor and work among cultural producers and the protocognitarians Henderson describes here.

You'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing, and i apologize for its horizontality.

Minneapolis Labor Review, 1.16.1931

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.

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.

untitled 11:20 PM 11/30/06

I just got internet in my apartment for certainly the first time since May - when the wireless connection i was "borrowing" cut out, but really the first time ever, since this is a dependable connection I pay for and control. It's exciting. In a totally banal kind of way.

I've been thinking about academics a lot, in part because there's no picket line around the library so i have more time to do so this year, (although there's a lot of organizing that needs to be done,) in part because I'm incredibly stressed out and need to be thinking about academics if I want to stay in grad school, and in part because, dude, I like thinking about the work i do or i wouldn't be in grad school in the first place.

I've felt detatched - and lost. I've been unexcited about my work and I'm still angry about last year, and, perhaps most keenly, unsure of what i want to focus on and what focusing on certain aspects of american studies will mean within the context of my university and/or department. The guest lecture i did last week, and the research i did for it make me increasingly certain that I want "labor" in there somehow, but perhaps coupled with "cultural theory" or making the move to specifically deal with cultural histories of labor and workers' movements, something that isn't in itself a new gesture, but could point my attentions towards places I would find it useful and rewardling to go. The spatial metaphors I'm using here are somewhat out of control.

And then the second exam could be something like "histories of capitalism," maybe. I don't know. Any suggestions?

Interdisciplinarity kind of sucks. It seems at least in part an illusory intervention. The limits of free play and open exchange become readily apparent not only when you get told you aren't focused enough or you're looking too narrow and need to be more broad - these are helpful interventions, more often than not- but, more pointedly, when it becomes all too clear that interdisciplinarity's an open signifier and as much a symptom of the neoliberal discursive hegemony of the "University of Excellence" as a zone of resistance to it - at least that's part of Bill Readings' argument in The University in Ruins, which I m enjoying but the pagination in my copy is totally fucked up and makes the second half unreadable so i have to find another copy. I haven't given up on cultural studies as a site from which to lodge powerful critiques and mobilize political and anti-political interventions, but I think I've done a poor job of figuring out how to situate what I want to do within such projects. Does this make any sense?

the financialization of the hospital-university city

Taken as advertised, as a story about the upper-middle class transitioning into the ranks of the super rich, today's installment in the Times's "Gilded Paycheck" series is, to quote RMJ's cousin, "boring." But taken as a story about new fronteirs of accumulation in an already deeply commodified set of professions and workplaces - the university, (and the business school,) the hospital, the nexus where the twain meet, etc., - the tale seems - at least to my admittedly obvious prejudices - more gripping. What exactly, we wonder, is "health care investment management,"and why is it so lucrative - so much more lucrative than actually practicing medecine?

As for the section on philanthropy, the valorization of the reagano-machiavellian spirit here - make shitloads of money for yourself so you can give lots of it away later and thus replace the welfare state with voluntarist and extragovernmental structures, of course ignores the baleful effects of the privatization of the commons and commodification of life-worlds by which these folks are amassing their fortunes in the first place. It seems unlikely that "health care investment management" is a victimeless crime. That money has to come from somewhere, and that means someone else's work is involved and rendered invisible by this tale of ingenuity (or canny mediocrity, as Robert Glassman himself suggests) and excess. A study might be made (that's me pretending to be Gramsci) of the forms of labor central to this story but excluded in the times piece, included but not limited to the lives of the health care workers and "consumers" upon whose backs Glassman's fortune seems to have been built.

I'm in new haven on account of Julie being on the east coast for the first time in a year and a half. I bumped into AP and LK - my first organizer, six years ago - today randomly on Dwight street when i walked by their house. They complimented my GSOC IS HERE TO STAY t shirt and i wished them good luck with their organizing and then I remembered what it's like to live somewhere where it sometimes feels like the entire community is standing in solidarity with you in a broad, multifaceted struggle for social justice.

They finally turned the Farmington Canal into a footpath (they had to evict the homeless in order to do it back in 2003.) The new Labyrinth store makes me envious - bought Selections from the Cultural Writings and slobbered over the Marxism, Cultural Studies, and Labor History sections for a while, then freaked out about what a shitty grad student I am - a daily occurence but that doesn't make it any less true. I walked up orange down livingston and thought about how difficult grad school and gsoc have been and The burrito cart is still way way better than chipotle.

Last night I was watching TV and I saw a Honda commercial which used "Huddle Formation." My heart broke - one of my favorite bands of the last three years being used to sell not only cars, but non union-made cars. But then "the bridge," an old school hip hop show on channel 25 came on, did a show entirely about the bronx, and played Afrikaa Bambaata's "Renegades of Funk" and BDP's "Love is going to get you" and I felt somewhat better, although I suppose i should be uncomfortable with the nostalgification of hip hop culture - particularly the complete evacuation of politics...

Pat Buchanan, Meet Antonio Gramsci

BUCHANAN: Well, look, in the battle against Marxism (search) and Leninism, in economics
and politics the Western civilization won, the United States won. The Soviet
empire collapsed. But what I called cultural Marxism and militant
secularism are clearly winning in the United States of America.

You just did that ad by Paris Hilton (search). That would never have
been shown in the '50s or '60s in the United States. If you take a look at the
pornography and the filth that pours into American homes and you see the
consequences in divorces and broken families and delinquency and all of the rest
of them.

There was a communist known as Antonio Gramsci in Italy who
argued that this is the only way that Marxism is going to win. And I have to say
they are sure making progress and I think they're on the
offensive.

O'REILLY: Yes, but in the totalitarianism regimes of China and the Third
Reich and Stalin, they didn't want any of this stuff. I mean, they knocked this
stuff out.

Franco in Spain. I was in Spain when Franco was in power. Man, they
didn't want any of that. Even in Singapore. The totalitarianism regimes did not
want them. So what's the difference here?

BUCHANAN: What's the difference here is that this is sort of, if you will,
soft Marxism. And what it's done is replaced Christianity. You know, a culture
is a product of a cult. Western civilization is a product of Christianity.

And Gramsci and the others realized they had to de-Christianize
the culture. They had to change values. They had to make people think
differently, and then the citadel of western civilization would
collapse.

If you look at western nations, there's not a single one today, Bill,
that's got a population that is not dying out. And I think if you take a look at
the culture we have now, compared to what we had in the 1950's, you cannot say
that is progress.

Especially when you see folks that are cutting off their TVs or
throwing them out. They're not going to movies; the language is filthy. I think
you take a look at the popular culture and you can't say we're winning.

After this it gets extremely racist, and i don't feel like putting that shit on my blog.

Firm and Atoned pt. II

There's a broken water main at west fourth and bowery and the whole intersection was flooded. Lots of firefighters standing around in rubber boots and a car stuck in the middle of a huge-ass puddle, reminds me of katrina photos a little bit. The weather here's been pretty crazy all week, and it isn't going to stop raining until staurday, which is like 8 straight days. 32 more and shit would be all biblical.

Speaking of which, i wound up observing the fast, which i think was the right thing to do, though i broke it an hour or so early, because it's hard to read Gramsci when your brain is all spaced out from lack of food, and i felt like i'd done all the atonign i was capable of doing in one day.

I am feeling a little down because no one is laughing at what i think is the funniest post title ever. Come on, people. Indulge my narcissism! (But only if you get the joke.)

What about Messirs Clarke and Sorum?

welcome to graduate school, now shut the fuck up and do as we tell you.

I had to skip tonight's extremely important meeting on account of my three-hour long class, so i won't find out what was decided until tomorrow morning at the earliest, unless someone actuallly decides to call me and tell me, which isn't likely. In the meantime, my inbox has been flooded today, first with the provost's almost ashamed announcement of the appointees to the "student voice" mechanism that's supposed to serve as a replacement for the union and includes more than enough professional students and M.A. students to ensure that the university can ignore us for as long as we let it, which hopefully won't be very long. (Nothing against professional students or MA students, of course, but since they don't usually work in our bargaining unit in large numbers, I feel like it's safe to assume that they're being used. The MA students in particular seem like they are being totally screwed over, and there are quite a lot of them.

The second email is some newspeak from the GSAS dean trying to excuse the cuts in health care they said they wouldn't make and then did by claiming that we should be happy with what we get cause "90% of the NYU student body pays its own premiums." Uh-uh. Doesn't work like that. 90% of the NYU student body doesn't provide cheap labor for teaching your undergraduates, grading papers, and doing research which makes you filthy rich. And regardless, we aren't gonna let you pit us against other people you're screwing over. If NYU really wants to become the top-notch research instutition they're trying to sell themselves as, part of that is going to have to involve not fucking over sick students. They own half of Lower Manhattan. Money really shouldn't be a problem. Plus, you invest in Farallon, so I have no sympathy for the fact that your endowment's a "measly" $1.3 billion.

I'm totally swamped through next wednesday, with an 8-12 page paper (it was 8 as of 6:00 tonight but the extra four pages just got added on to make my life more miserable) due tuesday and then a presentation on Gramsci (Tony G!, how i have missed you)'s "Americanism and Fordism", a chapter from Norwood's Strikebreaking and Intimidation, and C.L.R. James's "The Struggle For Happiness" in American Civilization for a class on Wednesday afternoon. I'm stressed out and rather frustrated, and i don't know if i can afford to fast on Yom Kippur because i kind of need my brain all functional, and this strikes me as grossly unfair. Complaining about all this as i read about the 42,000 some odd deaths from the quake in South Asia seems grossly narcissistic. Anyone got any suggestions about what discipline/field of Latin American/Carribean Studies i should write an 8-12 page mapping paper about for Tuesday? Keeping in mind that i know absolutely fuck-all about Latin America? (okay, exaggeration, but still, I mostly do US stuff, however schizophrenically and transnationally.)