Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

None of you know this, but there are several unpublsihed draft posts for this blog i never finished.  I have been otherwise ignoring it though, I admit.  But I've been doing some other writing elsewhere, cranking out a dissertation chapter draft, co-writing an essay for an edited volume (more on that in a future post,) and writing an essay on occupation and student struggles for this e-book dossier on the Occupy movement edited by Rana Jaleel, A.J. Bauer, Cristina Beltran, and Andrew Ross and published in cooperation with the Social Text collective.  Many other friends and comrades contributed to the volume, and I urge anyone still aware of this blog's existence to check it out.

Today's destruction of the Occupied Wall Street library in Zuccotti Park echoes the $2m spent by Jean Quan to brutalize the Oakland commune on the same day that budgetary considerations forced the closure of four schools - to whit, attacks by the repressive state apparatus on Both the disciplinary institutions of the Ideological State Apparatuses [/Althusser] AND the attempts to create radically counterhegemonic spaces of knowledge production within social movements and liberated spaces. There may be some irony in this unwilling commonality, but maybe it's more useful to think about this as a particularly revealing moment in neoliberalism's attempt to violently reconstitute itself in the wake of the ongoing crisis, in which the state can only return to its monopolies of violence and property destruction, can only attack sites of social reproduction - hegemonic and counterhegemonic, can only foreclose possible futures through nightstick and pepper spray, in a doomed attempt to hold ground in the present. The system is about to die, hella hella occupy

In leiu of something more substantial, links to my three guest posts at Marc Bousquet's blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education in reverse chronological order.

This week's Campus Occupations Intensify on #occupycal, #occupyharvard, and the relationship between university occupations and racialized and gendered service labor.

From early October, Inside The Crackdown at Occupy Boston

and from September, Wall Street Occupation, Day 3

If you aren't following me on twitter, I've been livetweeting general assemblies etc.

"They say America First, but they mean America next."

In an effort to better understand the political context of U.S. higher education institutions in the early 1940s for the chapter I'm revising now, I turned yesterday to labor/social historian Stephen Norwood's recent The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower (Cambridge University Press, 2009).  Norwood's book is an accessible account of the entanglements between university administrators and the Nazi regime at Harvard, Columbia, the Seven Sisters, and in German departments across the U.S.  There is much in Norwood's account which readers unfamiliar with the story of the pro-fascist leanings of much of the U.S. academic and financial elite in the 1930s will find shocking.  Harvard President James Conant and Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, were both deeply antisemitic and endeavored to build institutional relationships with the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, even as both carried out increasingly brutal actions against unionists, communists, and, in the former case, German Jewry.

Norwood ably and convincingly documents the relationship between the U.S. elite university in the 1930s and the ideological projects and diplomatic missions of the nazi state.  But 80 pages in, I feel like there are some blanks i need filled - Norwood doesn't really historicize or explain the fascist sympathies that seem to have been almost universal at Harvard and slightly less so at Columbia due in part to the larger number of Jewish students at the latter.  He doesn't really explain the class structure or the relationship to the state and/or society of any of the institutions he examines.  Though his expose is valuable for historians of higher education, I want to suggest that some gestures towards broader conclusions would have greatly enhanced his text.  So would an introduction laying out the stakes, scale, and scope of these transoceanic fascisms and their importance for U.S. politics, knowledge production, and the history of universities.

Need to cut this entry short to run to campus.

Via Really Open University, London Metropolitan University is Occupied.

Statement

A certain area of the Tower Building in Holloway Road is being currently occupied by students in protest against Vice- Chancellor Malcolm Gillies’ decision to axe 70% of courses- including Performing Arts, Philosophy and History.

Gillies’ decision came as a shock a couple of weeks ago. None of the university teaching staff was consulted about the cuts. A majority of the excellent, dedicated tutors are under imminent threat of losing their jobs.

Students already enrolled on the courses face an uncertain future. There have been rumours about transfers to other universities with which WE DO NOT AGREE.

This statement is our call for help to save our university, our future and our dreams: to keep London Metropolitan University open to everyone, regardless of their social class, wealth and chosen subject of study. The purpose of this occupation is to present the Vice-Chancellor with our demands

Demands

1. Meeting with Vice- Chancellor
2. Transparent process and direct communication
3. University management goes back to HEFCE to renegotiate repayment terms
4. Vice- Chancellor to accept proposals put forward by staff in HALE
5. University retracts decision of cuts of ALL courses
6. Students on existing courses which are being deleted, WILL NOT BE TRANSFERRED.
7. Free access IN and OUT of the Occupation
8. No student is victimized following action taken to occupy the space.

Website: http://www.wearelondonmet.wordpress.com

Yesterday was the nineteenth anniversary of the Los Angeles riots set off by a Simi Valley jury's not guilty verdict against the police officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King a little over a year earlier. I recommend Judith Butler's article "endangered/endangering: schematic racism and white paranoia" on the "racially saturated field of visibility" with which the cops' defense was able to surround the video, and thus to use it as evidence of King's violent black criminality, crucial in exonerating the four police officers before the all-white jury. We on the left take the evidentiary power of the image and of videorecording for granted, but words and images can be made to mean any number of things based on what social forces are organized to determine their meanings and what discursive frames govern their interpretation. if any recent moment illustrates the need for a continuing engagement with the politics of interpretation it's that now famous quote in the Ron Suskind piece on "the reality based community" by a high ranking republican in the Bush administration. Liberals at the time largely took the quote as evidence of either the right's stupidity or its disingenuousness, some proudly claiming "reality-based community" as a badge of courage. I took the statement as a warning that even if leftists and liberals shun postmodernity and it's skepticism of truths and grand narratives, the right does not, finds its revelations about mediated meanings and discursive significatory aporias politically useful. Speaking truth to power is all well and good, but when notions of truth are so profoundly compromised that a president forced to show his papers to be authenticated by racist billionaires can then be commanded to surrender his educational records in order to explain how someone who evinces a supposed stupidity which is unreadable outside of Donald Trump's racist optics could have gotten into Columbia and Harvard Law, we need cultural studies to help us explain the historical circulation of racialized truths and the historical production of racialized authenticatory discourses of black lives by privileged white figures.

***

Similarly subject to a racially saturated field of visibility are the images that circulate of immigrant workers, to whom I now turn because tomorrow is May 1, international workers' day, born of the battle for the eight hour day by anarchist working class militants in the u.s. labor movements of the 1880s. Contemporary immigrants are routinely cast as contagion, as terrorist, as part of a nefarious plot to hispanicize white america. Pointing out that this is racist isn't enough. Neither, really, is a nuanced account of the shifting racial formations that obtain in a moment wherein capital and capitalists cross borders freely while labor alone is disciplined and radicalized by state production of difference. This post began with an argument for cultural studies' political importance, but cultural studies is only useful to the extent that and when it articulates with on-the-ground, militant, deep social movement organization. Writing a book or article, giving a talk, even to some extent organizing a conference - these can all be important contributions, but they are also all too easily reinscribed and recuperated into the university's economies of prestige, devaluation, debt, and enclosure. those of us who work in universities need to engage more deeply with movements both inside of and beyond the university. we particularly need to challenge the logics of value that pretend that the only work universities do is teaching and research, that we are more important than all of the other people with whom we share an employer.

it's entirely possible that this post is all over the place. against the teleology of topicality!

occupy texas

This week has seen a wave of building occupations at universities over a range of issues - the actions against cuts in the cal state system, and the sit-ins at Emory, William and Mary, and Tulane against the food service subcontractor Sodexo and for better working conditions for campus workers, as well as the occupation at Rutgers against sweatshop licensing, and at Madison against the Scott Walker and University Admin-backed privatization scheme that would separate the Madison campus of UW from the rest of the system. They are now joined by students at UT Austin. The photo of the occupiers in the president's office is fairly amazing, in that ludic reappropriation/recuperation of the space of the neoliberal university kind of way. I'm inspired by these movements and by the way they have disrupted the smooth functioning of the university, foregrounded questions of labor and privatization, and brought the fight to the centers of administrative control of the university. Those of us who are fighting to transform (or destroy and rebuild/reconstitute) spaces of knowledge production should be paying attention to these occupations. And those of us in the graduate employee labor movement in particular ought to be thinking about the lessons we can take from both these student struggles and those of our counterparts in Madison's TAA, who've played a central a role in the struggle against Scott Walker's shock doctrine austerity measures and attacks on public employees. I'm sorry this blog has been so nonexistent lately. The subjects it's concerned with certainly have not been. So i'm going to try to blog a bit more - though not simply for the sake of blogging. I'll write when there's reason to, and new posts will go up here, at the new home of Weapon of Class Instruction, now with a 39% more relevant URL. I'll probably delete the old blog within the next few weeks, but for now I'm leaving it up so folks can switch their RSS readers and/or browser bookmarks

Not unrelatedly, this is upsetting as hell.