Yale has organized a "boot camp" for graduate students writing their dissertations. This suggests to me a militarization of labor discipline, speed-up in which surveillance is not only ever more integrated and obviously integrated, but constructed as desired, as useful. But the manner in which the event is framed - granting to those poor abject PhD's the amenities afforded to Yale undergrads living in the residential colleges, suggests the national project of infantilizing adult graduate employees, which is central to the post-Brown Decision project of rendering us primarily students, perpetual "trainees" - unless cast into the role of the post-Yeshiva (powerless) "managerial" professoriate. Graduate students suffer because they have been exiled from the uterine comfort of the dormitory. (Possibly because they have been illegally evicted from their graduate dorm, but let's not go there at the moment.) The graduate student as ADD-afflicted procrastinator who cannot complete work and therefore must be subjected to administrative speed-ups and streamlines seems a particular potent formation in the ideological topography of neoliberal academe, producing an ideal terrain for interventions such as this boot camp, however benignly intended, the 2-4 project in the Yale GSAS, and similar initiatives elsewhere, to be certain...

I was writing a post speculating on why Vin Petrini has stayed at his job for the last three years, what makes someone want to do what he does, and then I got bored and realized I didn'tget nearly as much work done tonight as i had intended. So i reread some Cedric Robinson, and i understand better than i did last year why Black Marxism has become such a canonical text for so many in my field, despite my own issues with it, and i guess that's a good thing to be able to do. In class today my professor, acting as an interlocutor for one of her professors when she was a graduate student, which makes this possibly my most mediated blog entry ever (prove me wrong) emphasized the need to "say yes" to the text before saying no, to understandi a text's project and internal logic before tearing it to shreds, as graduate seminars are wont to do. I think that's good pedagogy, although I'm not convinced anymore that I know what good pedagogy is in a non-empirical sense. I know it when I see it. And i can point to Freire, etc. But Freire is not the be all end all of good teaching. I'm rambling again. It's bed time.

I downloaded four cds today. Haven't had the chance to listen to them all yet, but feel obsessively-compulsively drawn to blog about the ones i have listened to. Peter Bjorn and John's Writer's Block is at this juncture probably the one i like the most. At its best, it sometimes feels like the best album the Go-Betweens never made. The New Deerhoof album, Friend Opportunity pretty much picks up where The Runners Four ended, at least musically. Lyrically, I think it's a little less sanguine and explosive, a bit more rueful. But I may be pulling that out of my ass. I haven't listened to The Long Blondes' "someone to drive you home" enough to form an opinion yet, but I'm underwhelmed by Menomena's Friend and Foe.

Back to Black Marxism.

From the previews, it looks like Veronica Mars is going to jump the shark for good next week. Oh well.

I've been very unproductive today. I think it's propter nivem, as my 8th grade Latin teacher olim dixit. It has to end. In part I'm excited about buying a new computer, now that Vista is out, to replace the one that died over the summer (the one I'm typing on now is on loan from mis padres. It's tiny and "ultra portable" in the language of computer-purchasing, which is cool, but there's lots of stuff it can't really do.) And I'm a little burnt out from the last week of crazy meetings and visiting friends et cetera. By the way, the "c" is hard. Like a building occupation. Just kidding.

The work i have managed to get done so far has been some reading for class, and some research for an incomplete paper, though not as much as I would have liked. I also slowly finished season 2 of The Wire, which is the most nuanced and compelling depiction of union corruption I've ever seen, ludicrous NOI assassin caricatures notwithstanding. And today I took a walk, thought about New York and the racialized geographies of southern Brooklyn and discovered the Tasti-D-Lite on 86th street in Bay Ridge. And I paid my cable bill and my electricity and my credit cad bill, which was pretty swollen from coursebooks and the impulse buys on amazon I made too many of while writing my Postcolonial Marxism paper over break. I kind of like not having class on Mondays this semester, but I can see it too easily becoming too seductive as far as procrastination's concerned. Speaking of which, this is a useless entry, and I have better things i should be doing right now. So if you want to read today's attempt at a substantial entry go here if you haven't already. Otherwise, don't tell me anything about season's three or four of The Wire, because I'm going to hold off on watching them until the end of the semester.

But while I'm rambling, here are bizarre search hits which have led folks to this humble blog:
industrial age progressive companies pro-labor
The UFW movimiento clap
SODEXHO INTERNET NYUS
president giamatti on "phil donahue" yale
police sirens whoop new york
dov charney has issues

Reflections on Recent iTunes Celebrity Playlists

1. Someone needs to Tell Thom Yorke that Madlib and Quasimoto are the same person, hence referring to "Madvillain and Quasimoto" is redundant since the "mad" half of madvillain and Quasimoto are the same individual.

2. Diana Ross picks only Diana Ross tunes, which is lame in itself, but she only picks one Supremes song and includes her rather weak version of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" when everyone knows Tami Terelle and Marvin Gaye owned that song, even the people responsible for Stepmom.

3.TV on the Radio include my favorite Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings song, which is cool.

4. Sylvester Stallone claims that "Born on the Bayou" "transports" him to "the swamps of Louisiana," but the song was written by someone from Northern California who had never even been to Louisiana. Discuss.

5. Liz Phair. What the fuck. Jefferson Starship. Sister Hazel? THE DAVE FUCKING MATTHEWS BAND? Huh?

The House Of Delegates, Gonad Metaphors, and Academic Capitalism

During a very long action-planning meeting during the second Yale strike of 2003, a fierce debate erupted over whether, as some termed it, to plan a "hard" building occupation (barricades, a la Columbia 1968) or a "soft" one (more of a sit-in, not resisting police, etc.) My response to this then was to note that a building occupation is not a penis, and that it becomes problematic to speak of direct action as "hard or soft" both in gendered terms, and from the standpoint of sometimes fetishizing the tactic at the expense of strategy.

Carrying on the dubious phallus metaphor, however, to one WSN columnist who has long opposed GSOC, the Graduate House of Delegates, NYU's new company union on which I and some 34 or so other GSOC supporters sit and hold a supermajority, apparently, is a testicle. Which makes GSOC an evil veterinarian or something, i suppose.

Moskowitz accuses GSOC of having verbally sabotaged the HOD and suggests that our only goal is a union contract and we will thus not take seriously the opportunity the HOD provides. My response to this is threefold: first, it is the NYU administration , not GSOC, which is currently responsible for the skepticism most graduate students , whether or not we support GSOC, (which most of us have time and again demonstrated that we do) hold for the HOD. As its constitution is currently written, the HOD's ability to improve working conditions and protect graduate employees is risible. There was never an up or down vote on whether or not we wanted a house of delegates or an "assembly of graduate assistants", instead these was crammed down our throats by the administration and its well-compensated agents. Indeed, when given the opportunity to speak, GA's in GSOC's bargaining unit have repeatedly voiced majority support for the university to negotiate a new contract with the union. If there has been any sabotaging of the HOD, it's come from the sordid and cynical history of its establishment and the bankruptcy of its constitution as currently written.

As both a GSOC member and an HOD delegate, I am committed to seeing the HOD through, pushing the mechanism as far as possible to meet the demands of graduate employees on this campus. The HOD won't be "useless," for me, at least, until such a time as it has been proven completely incapable of doing so. I see the HOD not as a threat, but as a tool.

The second half of Moskowitz's piece concerns itself with whether or not the university is a democracy, with a putative difference but interdependence between "wealth production" and "knowledge production." We pay money to the university so we can enjoy pure knwoeldge, pure culture. The difference between "wealth production" and "knowledge production," then, makes the university an idealized space of Arnoldian cultural production, into which movements for participatory democracy and radical reconfiguration represent an unwanted, intrusive outside. The interdependence between the two rationalizes and seeks to render normative academic neoliberalism and the Enterprise University's logics of real estate speculation, capital accumulation, and the bottom line. But this supposed difference is specious and arbitrary. Knowledge production is wealth production these days, as Moskowitz would understand if he ever stepped into an immunobiology laboratory. And thus this supposed interdependence relies on reified and useless categories and is woefully incomplete, failing to yield any accurate picture of the ways in which knowledge production has long since been a capitalist enterprise.

It is this neoliberal morphology of capital "penetration" (there go those genital metaphors again!) which the academic labor movement is uniquely poised to transform. Put succinctly, this is why we need a union.

Marna Borgstrom ditches the New Haven Board of aldermen, and the UOC demands card check, which, granted, isn't exactly radical at this juncture since DeStefano did so two months ago, but neither does it necessarily have to be to apply pressure where needed and is still, a good development to offset Marna "I wrote my M.P.H. Thesis on Union Busting" Borgstrom's refusal to be held accountable.

Amid the battle, an old master's thesis has surfaced that has union leaders wondering if Borgstrom ever intended to give them a fair shake. As a graduate student at Yale, Borgstrom spent one summer at a hospital in San Jose, Calif., helping to break the union there. She wrote up her findings in a 1979 thesis that was discovered this week in a Yale library.

In Borgstrom's study, an employee sick of paying union dues schemed with management to decertify the union. Managers ousted one of their own to placate workers. They also implemented "Operation Speak-Easy" to listen to employee complaints while monitoring union support. In the end, the union fell. "The Hospital should strive for union-free status," her thesis concludes.

It snowed a lot in Sunset Park last night, so much so i could hardly sleep because snow makes me all giddy. So now I'm going to go out and walk around a but before it all melts, and try to forget two of the three long, long meetings of the past week.