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.

I promised/threatened Josh that I would post a response to his positivist graphic modeling/theorization of tv quality as soon as grades were in.  They're in, as is the first chapter of my dissertation, tentatively titled "Revolting Against Their Government?: Labor Insurgencies and Compromise in the Academic Defense Factory" and two fellowship applications.  I'm sitting in the library on a Tuesday afternoon procrastinating from prepping for my first recitation (the stupid NYU term for what the rest of the world calls discussion sections), so i suppose I might as well impugn my friends' television habits.

I kid, of course.

But I was thinking about Josh's graph the other day, (in the shower, oddly enough,) and about why it doesn't work for me, or better to say doesn't really describe how i would evaluate my own affective investments in the tv I watch.  This has nothing to do with the fact that Josh seems to think Six Feet Under's increasingly cliched SUPER PROFOUND ALAN BALL CANNED LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF BOURGEOIS SUBURBAN FAMILIES CUM GAY BUT NOT QUEER HOMONORMATIVE OVERDETERMINED NARRATIVE OF THE CLOSET (tm) makes for better TV than, say The Wire.  (It most certainly does not, though 6FU had its moments - the kidnapping episode especially is perhaps the most disturbing hour of television which does not feature a cast member of Jersey Shore, and the wire could sometimes mythologize the tropes of policing it sought to problematize and/or fall into the trap of celebrating its Omars and Brothers Mouzone - as in that stupid high noon showdown sequence in season three - as cheap mythic icons, a mythologization which contributed little to the show's polemical interventions and narrative power.)  I will say that Six Feet Under is certainly better than say, American Beautyˆ, and that I actually have grown somewhat fond of True Blood even though it too strikes me as really problematic on several levels, maybe most notably how the Tara character has been written over the last two seasons.

Nor does my rejection of Josh's schema have anything in particular to do with my general aversion to Law and Order and more or less every police procedural on the planet on the grounds that their optics are the racialized optics of, if not the state, than a reactionary law and order (the discourse, not the tv show which was headquartered in Roland Betts' chelsea piers complex) sentiment which invests in the state and/or in fascist vigilantism the sole hope of reclaiming the city from a diffuse, shadowy criminal menace.  Also, while The West Wing under Sorkin is addictive television, I tend to find it addictive in the same way people find war and racism addictive, and the west wing has plenty of glorification of both, along with the blase sexism Aaron Sorkin is famous for and which he put to such blatant use in The Social Network's ridiculous bathroom stall blowjobs and histrionic bed-burnings by irrational SOCIAL CLIMBING ASIAN IVY LEAGUE STUDENTS(tm) who, like every female character Sorkin has ever written except for the ones who bomb stuff or order stuff bombed (Demi Moore's character in A Few Good Men notwithstanding) are even more neurotic and weak than his stock nebbishy drugged pretentious ass male protagonists.  (I don't want to suggest that i see a bed-burning episode as necessarily a negative thing.  I'm sure someone could make the argument that that kind of performative excess marks the irruption into the film's narrative of subjectivities which Sorkin is almost always deaf to unless using for his own shallow liberal ventriloquisms, but the problem for me is that Sorkin and Fincher are clearly including this scene as evidence of pathology, of how beyond rationality Andrew Garfield's character's life has become, and his girlfriend is treated as nothing so much as a prop of craziness.  This may be an uncanny depiction of the orientalism of the hollywood lens and/or the facebook imaginary, but it's also itself implicated in such a gaze.)

Ok, ok, The West Wing was a good show, at least until season 5, which is awful, and if you can get past its self-righteously liberal triangulatory potshots at the kind of politics I subscribe to - the episode where Toby visits the IMF protesters is Sorkinian megadouchery at its finest.  But I'm not being fair to Josh, who deserves better than me saying my bone to pick with his graph isn't his tastes and then going on to bash the TV he likes for like 500 words in the longest praeteritio since I don't even know.  Josh, by the way, is a pretty amazing person who does really amazing work, so when I tease him for not having sufficiently refudiated the finale of Battlestar Galactica, I kid.  Though seriously, that was some awful writing.

No, the problem for me is really the criteria, the effort vs reward schema.  I like TV that makes me think really, really hard, that makes me work, makes me rewatch episodes.  That's why I liked Lost, especially the 4th and 5th seasons, despite their cliches and stupidity, more than 6fu, which i felt trafficked in a lot of the same, but more pretentiously and without time travel or smoke monsters or polar bears.  But the shows I love that aren't Lost or The Wire or Deadwood are things like Freaks and Geeks and Buffy Season 3, and the reason I like them isn't because they require little effort, it's because they evoke things that I care about or that resonate with me, whether that's the cultural politics of air travel in the age of the patriot act, the denouement of the urban crisis, the coloniality of the west, or the condition of geekitude, the collective fantastic escapist world-making of dungeons and dragons, high school as hell, or hand-eating loose seals.  So really I think what I am arguing for is for other ways of evaluating cultural production which escape the rubrics of labor invested or guilt indulged and instead point us towards the alternative and sometimes dangerous knowledges we locate in the culture we produce and enjoy.  Or, in other words "we have to take the boxer-brief approach."  (JRE, quote page, 2003.)

I have several things i have been meaning to write here, but i have lacked time and will.  As a placeholder, here's something from the chapter I'm currently scrambling to finish:  Hopefully it's legible in this format.

"Not only has the education industry been the site of rapid employment growth, it has also been the site of growing labor unrest worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the VVLG data, the education industry is one of the few industries that has experienced a rising trend of labor unrest in the final decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, the geographical spread of teacher labor unrest has been far greater than was the case historically for the textile and automobile industries."

-Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor, 115

Unbelievable footage from London yesterday of students fighting back against the cops. Behold the potentialities of the liberation of living knowledge that is the book bloc.

Another occupation linkdump

Solidarity twitters from UC to Goldsmiths

Statement from the turbulence collective

The call from Paris, via edu-factory

European calling from Uniriot, with concomitant photo of the new British section of the book bloc

If you've got anything good on what's going on in PR at the moment, send it my way.

Edit: British book bloc in action!