Stevphen Shukaitis on Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:10:58 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> No Future |
Hellos... Thought I would congeal a number of thoughts and responses to comments made into one message... sorry for the slowness in responding, have been busy with all sorts of family and holiday type things... Oh, and before doing that, obviously I'm not Paolo so anything I'm saying is my take on it, not his... And that's important to point because while I quite appreciate recent post-workerist writing on academic labor and the changing role of the university (for instance as embodied in things like the edu-factory project: http://www.edu-factory.org/), I don't entirely agree with a number of suppositions that tend to get made by such projects. A critical appreciation you might say. And that applies to this piece as well. For instance, in particular, I worry about falling into a sort of substitutionalist trap by wanting to see university as THE paradigm and space of cognitive capitalist & post-fordist production. This really only seems to be a necessary move to make when you're engaging in some kind of strange Leninism (network Leninism?) where it becomes necessary to identify the highest point of capitalist production in order to identify the revolutionary subject that is consonant and emergent within such conditions, and so forth and so on... Post- workerism has really never rid itself of its Leninist roots and at time that shows forth in a kind of nostalgia for a hegemonic revolutionary subject or a strange return to a kind of stagist conception of history (which someone like Virno admits to). But, but it doesn't need to be that way, as it's possible to employ a class compositional approach to university of workplace and space to shape politics and and through without needing it to be paradigmatic. And this is exactly the sort of thing that people like the Midnight Notes Collective have been doing for years, and is quite useful to go about through things like always keeping reproductive and affective labor in the framework (thanks for bringing that out as an important area of focus, it often gets lost it seems). Incidentally, here's my take on questions of affective labor and social reproduction and building a politics that takes such questions as a starting point: http://www.onyxfoundation.org/static/uploads/2008/essaycontest/shukait is.pdf Having said that, piece does seem to reflect a particular Italian experience, but not necessarily a bad thing. Written several months ago, and perhaps given university occupation and current struggles is not wildly optimistic but rather just reflects different conditions. This is exactly the sort of thing that came up for me when we had a release event for the epehemera issue this is from, that the experience of UK universities are far different. And likely quite different in many other places, although the recent occupation of the New School and the gains there are quite interesting in how they are somewhat anomalous from how things seems to go the in US. As for the question about centers... well, I think one can say that something is more central without saying that is is the center. So one can say that global capitalism is polycentric and the university has came to play a more central role in networks and circuits of value production without saying that is the center itself. This is similar to saying that something is important to consider and work with/ through but without saying that its the paradigmatic space. The question is what this increased centrality would mean for composing a radical politics around it. Or for that matter even if such centrality is not the case you still have the same question, which is what the potentiality of a space, composition of forces and social relations, enables or does not enable for movement building. And that's why I value things like this essay and related projects, for given some tools for thinking through such things, even if the answers provided have not always been totally convincing in and of themselves. Cheers Stevphen On 20 Dec 2008, at 16:17, > ! wrote: > Hmm, > > If one proposes to 'simply act', I'm not sure how a highly theoretical > discourse of the Other will get anyone very far in acting upon > pedagogy. But > simple action isn't ever that simple, is it? # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org