burn unit

This morning, as I began to take attendance for my 8:00 AM section, a security guard knocked on the door of my classroom on the basement of 25 West 4th Street and told us to evacuate the building, which was, we learned, on fire. This was news to me, there having been no alarm or any other indication that there was a rather large electrical fire in our immediate vicinity, which, as we exited the building quickly, started releasing massive clouds of smoke onto west 4th street. After a few minutes of indecision, and as it became clear that there would be no immediate resolution to the fire, i elected, rather than to immediately cancel class, to try to conduct my section outside on the granite plaza in front of the business school. It was too loud, though, and there was a building on fire behind us, which was really distracting, for some reason. Still, in the forty or so minutes before i let them go, we had a halfway decent conversation about Vijay Prashad's "Crafting Solidarities." This is a testament, I think, to how cool and engaged my students are this semester. I think I freaked out all the Sternies by talking about Prashad's Marxist praxis though.

I went to a job talk today in 19 University Place - home to the language and literature departments at NYU. The talk was by a former TA of mine who works on visuality, trauma, and black diasporic women's bodies, for a joint appointment in compl lit and the megadepartment which includes American Studies. It was a good job talk. Afterwards in the subway i saw a flotilla of cops investigating violently racist graffiti someone had markered onto pylons and a door on the Downtown N/R/W/Q track at Union Square. Swastikas, "N______ must die," etc. The social geography of New York after gentrification is deeply racialized. Racialization being the "extension of racial meaning to a previously uracially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group." That's Omi and Winant. I taught it this morning.

On the way back home tonight I thought about the politics of academics "making trouble" in the university, frustrated by David Graeber's explanation that he really thought it was best for so much time to avoid "making trouble" in New Haven, to avoid "getting sucked in" to Yale's union "troubles." Of course, to Graeber's credit, when he needed to, he came down on the right side, at the cost of his job. I greatly admire him for that. But the notion that one can be an activist in New York and a professor in New Haven (and never the twain shall meet) greatly irks me. It irks me because the university is everywhere - New York, Baca Ranch, Abu Dhabi. It irks me because while not anarchistically correct, those many-headed struggles in new haven are so important, so innovative, so hybrid, that I think it's foolish to even try to ignore them or dismiss them. Granted, Graeber was junior faculty, and as for Westheimer at NYU, vocally supporting any of the Yale unions and GESO in particular - and especially when senior faculty in your department are trying to boot a graduate student for being a union organizer - is an easy way to derail your academic career. That's professionalization for you, which is one of the reasons why I find that Moten/Harney piece so useful.

A professional education has become a critical education. But one should not applaud this fact. It should be taken for what it is, not progress in the professional schools, not cohabitation with the Universitas, but counterinsurgency, the refounding terrorism of law, coming for the discredited, coming for those who refuse to write off or write up the Undercommons.

David Graeber's a brilliant scholar. He's, from the accounts of all my friends who studied with him while he was at Yale (i never had the opportunity to do so) a fantastic teacher. I loved his "The New Anarchists" and I started reading through "Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology" today and liked it very much too, though i think he's sometimes prone to oversimplifications and reifications about what "Marxism" is. My point is not to attack Graeber, whom, again, I admire, but rather to point out that even he is, or was, anyway -- one could argue he's rejected it now, a subject of this "counterinsurgency," a counterinsurgency against which we ought to be envisioning some alternatives.

Another University possible. Another New York is possible.

I wonder what the WGA settlement would look like if Hollywood was organized Industrially rather than by craft. For those of you not familiar with Terrence Powderly, Eugene V. Debs, or John L. Lewis, what i am talking about is if, instead of being split between and among above the line guilds and the below the line mix of craft and industrial unions - IATSE, IBT, etc etc - Actually i guess those are all (nominally, at least,) craft unions - Movie and TV industry workers were all part of the same union or federation of unions coordinating their actions with each other. I'm no expert on the film and TV industries and i'm not particularly knowledgeable about the labor history of said industry. But so many commentators have remarked that so much of this strike's outcome was determined by and against the settlement that the DGA reached with the AMPTP a few weeks prior to the end of the strike.

Revisionist labor history of the 70s and 80s greatly complicated the conventional read on craft unionism as exclusionary and limiting. It allowed and allows for particular kinds of labor arrangements, particular cultures of work, particular kinds of subjectivity. Dorothy Sue Cobble's Dishing It Out (1990) on waitresses in what we now call Unite-HERE is particularly instructive, but think about Bruce Nelson's argument that segregated locals in the fin de siecle South sometimes made it possible for black workers ot have more power over their labor than in 'progressive,' multiravcial, integrated locals elsewhere and later.

Fine. Point taken. But, and I'm not sure Cobble's book sufficiently deals with this, craft unionism IS limiting, and it IS exclusionary. Exclusionary in the sense i pointed to last november - why don't those BTL service workers get to negotiate for residuals too? - and limiting, certainly, in the sense that more radical and strategic forms of solidarity and direct action become untenable, even if, as in this case, the threat of what the IWW used to call "union scabbing" - when one union remains at work while another strikes - was avoided. Indeed, one of the most intriguing demands of the strikers, to extend jurisdiction to reality TV 'story editors' and animation writers, was dropped in exchange for what many feel was not enough of an inroad into "New Media" ownership rights. What if the DGA, SAG, and WGA/W/E weren't just de facto striking together -- what if they were negotiating together? And what if the other union were at the table with them?

In Bobst, grading my first batch of undergrad papers for the APA course and working on the list for my second exam - on the university, labor, neoliberalism, and disciplinarity. I spent lot of time and search terms over the last two days trying to remember the title or author of an article Laura Wexler gave my AMST junior seminar spring semester 2003. (Between the organizing, the strike, the daily two hour spanish class at 8 AM, and my personal life, i had a lot going on that semester.) Finally found it - Michael Holzman's "The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale," an article in the Summer 1999 issue of the journal American Studies. This journal, i found after a couple dozen attempts, isn't online, so I tracked down the archives in the library, copied the relevant article by Xerox, and scanned it into pdf just to be safe. I'm feeling rather proud of myself for no good reason.

Harlan Ellison did not like the WGA settlement.

My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It gave
away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some bullshit
short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words; it
sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before anyone
even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we were
meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The WGAw
folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.

Social geography 101

WSN:

Concerns over acceptance rates and quality standards also extend to our potential takeover of Polytechnic University, which seems imminent. An engineering school holds great promise. Realizing its potential will require patience and wise stewardship. Imagining what Poly can be also emphasizes what NYU might yet become: a school giving out too many diplomas to too many students, diluting the university's name. We're not arguing that NYU should aim to be an urban Yale or that the university should be selective for the sake of selectivity. But we hope that being more selective in admissions will translate to a more gifted student body and that a smaller pool of more qualified students will make our degrees that much more valuable.

Profound elitism aside, where do they think Yale is, Kennebunkport?

Who let this kid on Youtube?