Vox Import

I just imported all of my posts from my old Vox blog, so now my archives go all the way back to 2008.

Campo de Fiori: The Market Form in Italy

Some excerpts from a paper I wrote for my architecture trip to Rome. Posted here are the descriptive sections, to be followed another day with my analysis (otherwise this post would get really long).

Abbreviations: CdF (Campo de Fiori), PP (Pike’s Place Market, Seattle), NM (North Market, Columbus, OH)

Description of Campo de Fiori

Boundaries and Features

CdF is an open piazza in Rome, located near Palazzo/Piazza Farnese, Piazza Navona, the Area Sacra, and the Pantheon, in proximity to Via Giulia, Ponte Sisto, and the Tiber River. It is bounded on four sides by buildings ranging from four to six stories high. The buildings provide a clearly defined rectangular space, in effect a large outdoor room with no ceiling. The ground floor of each building is occupied by restaurants, cafes, bars, bakeries, a movie theatre, and a few clothing stores. At the Northwest end of the piazza sits a large fountain – low water pressure fills a large bowl which slowly trickles into a collecting basin. This fountain is filled with cigarette butts, empty bottles, and flower petals.

The center of the piazza is dominated by a statue of St. Bruno, a 16th century Christian martyred on the site. The statue collects bodies 24 hours a day: over night and early morning, homeless people sleep there; during the day, tourists collect around it for photos and locals smoke at its base; in the evening it collects young people socializing and hanging out. During the day the market stalls surround the statue, anchoring the physical space of the market.

The market stalls are mostly dedicated to goods necessary for day-to-day life in Rome – fruit, olives, cheese, pasta, spices, as well as hats, cookware, and some clothing items. A few stalls are geared toward tourists, especially the t-shirt vendor (my favorite item is the anatomically-correct underwear showing Michelangelo’s David). Overall, though, the stalls sell goods that people need to survive; not goods that serve to inflate/mark status or reflect conspicuous consumption (don’t get me wrong, the Italians do plenty of this, just not at CdF).

Patterns of Inhabitation

CdF is an incredibly dynamic space. Arrive early enough and witness the market set-up. Stalls are erected every morning, goods laid out, and the day’s business begins. Business seems fairly steady throughout the day until the vendors clear out. The earliest I observed a single stall break down was about 1pm, the earliest I saw the entire market disappear was about 4pm. The same vendors show up every day. A few of the cafes open early for breakfast, though most stay closed until lunch. A few, on the Southeast side, do not set up outdoor seating until 4 or 5pm as the market breaks down. Vehicle traffic runs almost exclusively in a Northeast/Southwest pattern on Via de Baullari, although the occasional small vehicle enters the market to service a stall or pick up an order.

Most interesting is the way people inhabit the space. In short, this is a pedestrian space. Cars do not move on Via de Baullari until pedestrians get out of the way. The stalls provide some physical constraints, but not many, as people squeeze themselves between stalls or block the major paths by trying on clothes or when they stop to talk to one another. Unlike the NM in Columbus, which constrains movement to a single bi-directional circuit, CdF has numerous flows with little predictability in movement. One second people are moving along the obvious path set up between border buildings/cafes and market stalls, the next second they are cutting a diagonal trajectory through gaps that would be off-limits in an American market (getting too close to where the money is kept…). The opposition between circuits and flows is apt. Circuits are bi-directional and are easy to start and stop, block and redirect; they work through a predetermined channel only when certain conditions are met. Flows, though, tend to push through blockages or find creative ways around them by creating new spaces. CdF is water flowing into a dry canyon, adapting to the terrain, creating new terrain. NM is an electric circuit, dependent upon the placement of conductive material. Of course, that doesn’t foreclose the chance of a malfunction (electric shock), but that’s the problem, it is viewed as abnormal, a mistake, rather than the natural flow and adaptation of people on a terrain.

In the evening the flows change. Less restricted by the physical presence of the market stalls, the flows normalize into more direct paths across the piazza, but retain their adaptive quality. (In contrast, NM and PP close, effectively shutting down the circuit entirely.) Young people claim the piazza at night, occupying it and laying claim to at least a small portion of the city. Based on my observations, the presence of youth do not prevent others from using, passing through, and occupying the space. (This is uncommon in the United States, as a concentration of young people in public is usually associated with delinquency and danger, effectively forcing people away from the space and thereby eliciting a police action/presence.) Always, though, the space retains a feeling of dynamism, a sense that anything can and will happen.

Architecture

The buildings bordering CdF are unremarkable (by Roman standards), lacking any major palazzi or defining architectural features. What they lack in distinction they make up in effect. The tall buildings create a well-defined rectangular space that define a “terrain vague,” an urban space with no explicitly defined purpose or use. Tradition holds that there is a market here every day, the architecture does not. The building walls and market stalls create bottlenecks/narrowings and openings and anchors which partially constrain the movements of people, but they remain permeable. The ground floor of every building can be penetrated, whether to purchase a coffee, watch a film, or pick up the day’s bread. The flat ground defined by the surrounding buildings allows for a spreading effect during market hours; the central statue provides a concentrating effect in the evenings. Little exists during the day to draw the eye upwards, St. Bruno and the surrounding buildings are generally blocked by umbrellas: the action is at waist to umbrella level, no higher.

[At some point in the future I will address this topic through an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari, but this paper was written before I read any of A Thousand Plateaus.]

Rome

So, this December, I spent about 10 days in Rome with a professor and classmates from the fall seminar I took on public space. It was a great trip; I couldn’t have asked for a better group of students to be there with, and our professor/guide made the city come alive. I had been to Rome before, but left somewhat ambivalent due to its size and busyness and perhaps not quite spending enough time there. By the end of this trip, though, I had completely fallen in love with the city. It felt so much smaller, more intimate, and every day on every street offered a new surprise – even when I was retracing my steps.

I’ll post excerpts from my paper and maybe even a scan or two from my sketchbook later, but for now… pictures.

Update: Apparently some of the photos are too large to fit well on this page. Just click on the photo for an unobstructed view in a new window.

Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome

This guy stood in the doorway for a while after he got out of mass at Sant’Ivo.

Me in front of the Ara Pacis.

Me at the Imperial Forum

Lunch near the Colosseum.

Sunset on my birthday, heading roughly west from the Spanish Steps.

I spent quite a bit of time sitting around or near Campo dei’ Fiori as part of the assignment for the academic component of the trip. This picture shows what my table usually looked like: notebook, pen, water, cafelatte.

Graduate Employee Unions

I am testifying at the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday, January 12, in favor of House Bill 365. This bill will make it easier for graduate employees and adjunct faculty to unionize. As the law currently is written, both groups are considered special populations of workers and therefore exempt from current labor laws that mandate an employer recognize a union. Instead, even if we had 100% graduate employee approval of a union at Ohio State, for example, we would have to be voluntarily recognized by our employer in order to gain collective bargaining rights. Of course, President Gee is one of the most vocal anti-graduate union voices in higher education today, so voluntary recognition is not going to happen.

Below is a draft of the remarks I will give to the House Commerce and Labor Committee.

Proponent Testimony for HB 365

Before the House Commerce and Labor Committee

joshua j.  kurz

Graduate Teaching Associate and member of Graduate Employees’ Student Organization, The Ohio State University

I would like to begin by thanking Chairman Yuko, ranking minority member Uecker, and the remaining members of the committee for providing an opportunity to hear testimony on House Bill 365. My name is joshua kurz, and I am a Ph.D. student and Graduate Teaching Associate in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership at the Ohio State University. I have also been a graduate student and employee at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Currently, I am a member of the Graduate Employees’ Student Organization, or GESO, a volunteer-based group that is working to improve the quality of graduate employee working conditions at Ohio State.

An economist at Ohio University, Richard Vedder, recently wrote in the New York Times, “Since most of the financial benefits of college go to the student, he or she should pay a large portion of college costs.”[i] This has been the conventional wisdom in higher education since at least the Reagan administration, and in strictly economic terms, may in fact be true. However, there are myriad reasons we educate citizens in this country, and especially at the level of graduate education, the purposes of education are undermined by a narrow focus on economic calculations. As we are becoming painfully aware as a society, the challenges of a contemporary world have quickly outpaced our ability to meet those challenges in a humane, equitable, and mutually beneficial way. Graduate education is particularly well suited to play a role in meeting these challenges. Historically, this has been the case, but the economization of higher education has far reaching ill effects, not least of which is the paradoxical situation of both compressing and expanding the length of time to degree, which of course effects the quality of research. The economization of graduate programs compresses graduate education by forcing students to find employment to support themselves, in many cases such employment equates to a full-time job or more, as students are forced to supplement assistantship placements with multiple positions or even non-academic employment. This, in turn, extends the length of time to degree because less time can be spent reading, writing, presenting, debating, and thinking about complex issues. This compression and extension of graduate education leads to the production of work that is not suited to meeting the challenges we must face.

To return to Vedder’s comment, I think it is grossly misguided to judge higher education in general, and graduate education in particular, through an individualistic, short-term economic lens. Many of the problems of today have their genesis in issues that have been debated for millennia. While it is true that science, technology, and mathematics offer solutions to many of these problems, focusing only on these disciplines is akin to a bodybuilder who only exercises the upper body. Philosophy, the social sciences, music, literature, and so on offer as much or more than narrow scientism; indeed, the persistence of the role of religion in global conflict should provide all the necessary justification we need to recognize the importance of fully funding graduate programs in all disciplines as well as providing real opportunities for interdisciplinary work.

It is within this context that I sit before you today, encouraging you to pass House Bill 365. What follows is a more specific set of arguments directly related to the working conditions at universities in general and the experiences of graduate employees at Ohio State in particular.

Graduate employees, such as teaching assistants, graders, and research assistants at public universities are among those persons denied full collective bargaining rights in the state of Ohio. In a nutshell, HB 365 would allow Ohio graduate employees the opportunity to exercise their collective bargaining rights to the fullest extent.

In the past, graduate assistants were commonly viewed as academic “apprentices” rather than “employees.”  However, academic roles have changed significantly over the past few decades.  Currently, full-time, tenured faculty constitute only 27% of higher education teaching staff nationwide.[ii] At the Ohio State University, over HALF of all classes are taught by non-tenured and part-time faculty and graduate students.[iii] Graduate assistants are increasingly the instructors of record for their own courses, rather than grading or leading recitations for large lectures.  Many graduate assistants perform the same kind of teaching as full-time faculty, often spending more face-to-face time with undergraduate students, and yet are denied “employee” status for the purposes of collective bargaining.  This is grossly unfair and degrades the integrity of higher education in the state of Ohio at both graduate and undergraduate levels.

Graduate employees at OSU face a number of challenging working conditions.  For example:

According to a 2008 report commissioned by the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies, in order to be economically self-sufficient – that is, the ability to live without public or private assistance – in Franklin County, a single adult must earn $1,471 per month, or $17,652 annually.[iv] According to OSU Human Resources, 56% of all Ohio State graduate assistants make less than $1500 monthly.[v] Because many, if not most, graduate employees are on 9-month, rather than 12-month, appointments, their yearly earnings would fall under $13,500.[vi] OSU mandates that all graduate assistants be paid at least $1,000 per month.  This leaves roughly 25% of all graduate teaching associates at Ohio State with pay so low that they qualify for food stamps, heat assistance and other social services.[vii] In the Big Ten, OSU lags significantly behind Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin-Madison, Illinois, and Iowa in terms of wages and benefits offered to its graduate assistants.  If it is our goal to attract the best and brightest minds to Ohio State’s many graduate programs, OSU must achieve parity with these institutions.

Most graduate assistants are appointed at the 50% level (also known as full-time equivalence or FTE).  This means that these GAs are expected to spend roughly 20 hours per week on their teaching or work duties (half of a 40 hour week) and the rest of their time on their studies.  While some graduate employees are appointed at higher levels – sometimes 60% or 75%, the university has a policy that graduate employees are not allowed to be appointed at the 100% level.  However, there is nothing stopping departments from asking GAs to take on additional work during a term.  Many departments, such as Philosophy, regularly ask students to teach double course loads and in exchange, offer them an increase to 75% pay, even though it is near impossible to fit all of the prep time, class time, grading, time spent answering emails and in office hours for two separate classes (usually totaling around 60 students) into the 30 hour week that is meant to correspond with the 75% pay level.  Essentially, departments frequently ask GAs to take on twice their normal workload for much less than twice their normal pay.  While this situation is considered “voluntary,” it is rare for GAs to refuse, either in fear of losing funding entirely or appearing ungrateful,[viii] or because they so badly need the extra money, no matter how little it is.  As it stands, there is little in place to protect graduate assistants from being sorely over-worked.

OSU does not require departments to provide teaching supplies for their graduate assistants, although some do anyway.  In the Music Department, graduate teaching assistants must pay for their own teaching supplies.  Unlike in many other departments, Music GAs are not permitted access to department equipment to print documents or make copies related to their teaching.  They pay for their own photocopies, purchase their own dry erase markers, pens, chalk, and other office supplies that the department provides free to full-time faculty.  Graduate employees in the Music Department receive among the lowest monthly stipends on campus.  Without the protection of a union, many of them fear they will lose their funding if they speak up too loudly about this problem.

Funded graduate students at OSU are required to sign an appointment document that includes some standard content but differs widely by department. None of these documents is legally binding. As such, graduate employees may have their positions changed on short notice or taken away with no advance warning and therefore no ability to locate another funding source.  There is no set deadline by which graduate assistant appointments must be made each year or each quarter, meaning that sometimes a graduate employee does not know if she or he has a job until mere days before a quarter begins.  Normal course preparation can take dozens of hours to prepare syllabi and lectures, and frequently require the reading of hundreds or thousands of pages in order to design a course. Even those graduate associates who are given syllabi already written must still spend hours preparing lectures, in-class materials, and other work. Because of this, in addition to inflicting anxiety on graduate students, this system has a negative impact on undergraduates as well.  In at least one department last year, graduate teaching appointments were still being adjusted a week into Spring Quarter, causing frustration and confusion to both graduate students and undergraduates alike.

OSU graduate assistants also have no access to a formal grievance procedure, no system to assure that they receive professional, written evaluations of their work, no guarantee of wage stability, and they face as much as $1,000 to $2,000 (a month’s pay or more for most) in fees and health insurance costs over the course of a calendar year, further compressing wages.

The only sure way in which we can negotiate meaningful and stable improvement in Ohio graduate employees’ wages and working conditions is through a legally binding contract.  These improvements would put OSU on par with counterpart institutions in the Big Ten and across the nation.

Over the past few months, we have heard some lawmakers express concern regarding the fiscal impact of this bill.  First, I would like to point out that this bill does not guarantee that adjunct faculty and graduate employees will form a union; rather, it simply provides the conditions for democratically deciding the issue.  Second, in terms of tuition, over the past few decades both undergraduate tuition and university administrator salaries have skyrocketed, while graduate assistant pay has remained relatively steady.  It is important to keep in mind that graduate assistants are not directly funded by undergraduate tuition dollars.  Furthermore, OSU has already raised tuition to the legal maximum for a number of years and will likely continue to raise tuition whether or not graduate employees are unionized.  OSU is a financially healthy institution with a large and complex budget.  We believe that were graduate employees to unionize at OSU, it would not necessarily cost the state more.  The university has the capacity to re-organize its budget to reflect the changing needs of its students and employees.  A fellow grad employee remarked recently, “Our situation frustrates me, because I see the opulence displayed in other areas of university life: senior administrators whose salaries exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars, free concerts and comedy shows for students, and t-shirt give-aways on the oval.  I know that there is enough money at our university to pay for the supplies that I need to teach my students effectively, but I have no meaningful and safe way to voice my complaint, and this serious problem is thus ignored by the administration.” Many other state universities, including Michigan, Michigan State, Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, Illinois-Chicago, Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Iowa, Oregon, Rutgers, Florida, Washington-Seattle and the New York and California state systems, have witnessed graduate employee unionization without significant financial incident.  There is no reason to think that this bill will adversely affect Ohio.  In fact, it could serve to improve the quality of higher education at OSU and across the state.  Don’t undergraduates and their families deserve a fairly-paid, well-treated teaching staff at all levels in exchange for their tuition dollars?

Finally, denial of collective bargaining rights to low-wage employees such as graduate assistants has already had a financial impact on Ohio’s communities.  Again, we estimate that nearly a quarter of all OSU graduate employees qualify for food stamps and other state and federal assistance programs.  Ohio State graduate assistants are using local food banks in increasing numbers.  The Ohio State University is artificially compressing wages and then asking our local and regional communities to subsidize the accumulation of capital at the university that is then redirected toward non-essential projects (a 109 MILLION dollar renovation of the library!?!), weak gestures aimed at student satisfaction (bringing in yet another comedian), and administrative salaries amongst the highest in the nation. In a state that claims to place great value on education, and that boasts one of the largest public universities in the world, this is unjustifiable.  This bill does not mandate graduate employee unions, but rather allows for greater opportunities for us, as graduate employees to work meaningfully with OSU to improve graduate assistants’ standard of living and the quality of higher education in Ohio.

We are faced with a choice. Either we continue to enable a management-centric approach to higher education where we continue to produce great metrics (ever-increasing ACT scores of incoming first-years and retention rates and graduation rates) in the face of a constantly degrading quality of life for faculty, adjuncts, graduate and undergraduate students; or, we push back and allow the very people being exploited in this system to redress grievances, collectively engage in their employment, and negotiate legally binding contracts. Indeed, the long-term health of Ohio depends on a robust system of public education, which needs a steady production of graduate students who can dedicate their time to research and teaching. A graduate union may not be the most ideal solution, but it is a significant step in the right direction.

I thank you for allowing me to speak today on behalf of this important legislation.  I welcome any questions you may have.

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[i] Haves vs. have-nots at public universities, found at: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/haves-vs-have-nots-at-public-universities/?th&emc=th (accessed 1/9/2010).

[ii] American Federation of Teachers (AFT) report on Academic Staffing Crisis, citing data pulled from the U.S. Department of Education, 2007 Fall Staffing Survey.  See  <http://www.aft.org/topics/academic-staffing/index.htm>

[iii] Ohio Board of Regents report, “Instruction by Faculty Type  at University System of Ohio Institutions: Fall 2003 to Fall 2007.”  See <http://regents.ohio.gov/perfrpt/statProfiles/statProfiles09.php>

[iv] “The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Ohio 2008” (July 2008), report prepared by Diana Pearce, PhD on behalf of the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies.

[v] The Ohio State University, Office of Human Resources.

[vi] In order to be more precise in some of our assertions we would need more data from Ohio State. However, the administration consistently denies GESO information that it could use to make the bargaining process easier. If any legislation is passed, it should include provisions to compel Ohio’s universities to provide transparent data on issues such as percentages of graduate employees at different pay levels, releasing lists of current graduate employees and basic contact information.

[vii] According to statistics from the Ohio State University Office of Human Resources, nearly 25% of OSU graduate assistants make less than $1200/month.   The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) requires that qualifying individuals earn an income at 130% of the federal poverty guideline, or $1174 or less per month.

[viii] The peculiar relationship between advisers and advisees exacerbates this problem. When one person (an adviser) has such drastic control over an advisee’s academic future, it is hard for any student to stand up for themselves when they are being exploited for fear of unjust punishment. Not only do advisers direct thesis and dissertation projects, they also write recommendation letters, which are perhaps one of the strongest factors in academic job placement. In short, the lack of protections at an institutional level for graduate employees leave them open to what can turn into a highly volatile, unpredictable, and sometimes petty clash that has dramatic consequences for a student.

Future Directions…

I don’t post “personal” stuff very often, but I think that writing this out might help me think it through.

I’ve always thought that I can learn *something* in any context; you know, have that one take away point or thought that made the previous hour or two hours (or whatever) worth the time. I’ve gotten through entire conferences this way, thinking that in at least some small way my thinking would be changed based on a new experience.

But lately, I’ve been feeling hemmed in, constrained, even hamstrung in education. The field as a whole is contracting to the point of absurdity. Overall, it isn’t interested in producing educational theorists or curriculum theorists who might be able to work, admittedly on the margins, on those ideas that push the boundaries of education as a concept (and not simply a practice). It seems that the only work that is intelligible is work that does one of only a few things: 1) critical policy analysis, 2) teacher education within particular areas/disciplines (i.e. Social Studies education), 3) equality studies (i.e. the constant “discovery” that education is not equal and the repetitive “solutions” to the problem based in policy critique), 4) psychology of education/children/learning, 5) popular culture studies (i.e. the education of/in films, music, etc.). There is certainly room for other work in education, but I think these are the dominant streams based on my journal reading, the courses being offered in grad schools I’m familiar with, what is being presented at conferences, and national funding trends. But what if your work is none of these things?

I am finding identity politics increasingly uninteresting, even while I recognize the absolutely necessary work it has done over the past century or so. Giorgio Agamben posited a utopic “coming community” where subjects without identity exist in common, making no demands on identity. I take “the coming community” to be not only utopic, but ultimately anarchistic. I find this project, and the project of articulating my own vision of a coming community far more interesting than the “traditionally” educational project of justifying the demands of particular identities upon government.

In short, I have grown so uncomfortable with the field of education that I’m almost positive I want to leave it. In fact, thinking back, the study of education is the anomaly.

Gonzaga: Here I studied History and Political Science, with a strong helping of Philosophy. My favorite courses were – Ancient Rome I and II, Philosophy of Marx, Age of FDR, and PoliSci 101 where we read a history of political theory from Aristotle forward. My senior paper was an attempt at a genealogy of American identity between 1865 and 1924, using Supreme and Appellate Court decisions and select pieces of legislation. The paper dealt with issues of race and nationalism, law and politics to answer the basic question – what has it meant be a political subject in America?

AmeriCorps: After graduating GU, I joined AmeriCorps, where I coordinated K-12 tutoring programs. My primary intellectual interest throughout these two years was Service-Learning as a tool for creating citizens. This is where I began to be interested in something like an educational question, mostly because my context was working in K-16 education. Looking back, though, my primary interest wasn’t education (meaning schools, theories of learning/teaching, etc.). My primary interests were political philosophy and social theory, and the continuing question of what it meant to be politically engaged in the United States.

Miami University (Ohio): Not sure what else to do, I started at Miami with the intention of graduating with my MS in College Student Personnel and then working full-time on university campuses coordinating volunteer programs. But it was here that I realized that my role should be as an academic rather than as an administrator, and it also signaled my re-engagement with left political theory that has eventually culminated in my interest in anarchism. While I had not fully broken with issues of identity politics or the nation-state as an organizing paradigm, I was beginning to be increasingly uncomfortable with education in the US, becoming more and more critical but not really knowing what to do with my critique. The best paper I wrote in this time period was for my History of Higher Education course, where I looked at the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and how it touched off a number of years of political tumult on campuses around the country which culminated in the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970. The big questions were, 1) what effect did this kind of activism have on the notion of the ideal student and 2) how do we judge the effectiveness of social movements. Regarding the former, I held that the notion of a “good student” changed dramatically in this time period and has continued resonance today. As to the latter, I argued that social movements should not only be judged based on whether they achieved their stated goals. One must also look at unanticipated and unintended effects as well, and in this case, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was wildly successful, rather than largely a failure. At its core, this paper was about political subjectivity and the effectiveness of social movements in changing the conditions in which we live.

Ohio State: By the end of the 2008 election I was so thoroughly disenchanted with the political process in the United States that I started embracing anarchism. My early work at OSU was on graffiti and public space, which quickly morphed into an interest in public space in general, which shifted more broadly to an interest in how space can shape political subjectivity. Since the beginning of summer quarter 2009, this has shifted to a primary interest in political ontology (a sort of return to Aristotle’s Metaphysics via Giorgio Agamben and what I generally call post-phenomenology or left-Heideggerianism). A short-term observation study at Columbus’ North Market was a crucial moment in this development. This study pushed me to engage with an empirical space but through the lens of philosophy, effectively cementing the idea of an empirical philosophy that I later figured out to be similar to the work of Hardt and Negri. Most importantly, though, I started taking courses in the Comparative Studies department, where I’ve found that my work is accepted without reservation or qualification. I no longer have to justify my interest in theory, or introduce every theoretical argument as if I were teaching undergraduates. I decided that Comparative Studies would most likely be a better fit.

I have plenty of support within the department, which is great. My adviser is supportive and is also willing to write me a letter of recommendation. The only problem is that they may not have funding for any new students next year. And so, after being urged by a few different people, I’m looking outside of OSU at a number of different departments and disciplines.

Next?: So this brings me to the “what’s next” question. I’ve had a number of programs and departments suggested to me – UMinnesota Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society or Geography or Political Science, City University of New York Geography (especially their program in Geography and Social Theory), Berkeley’s Rhetoric program (insanely competitive), UC Irvine Comparative Literature, The New School Philosophy. I’m also considering OSU’s program in Geography. This is where things get tricky. I never imagined myself in a geography department, and I’m not sure I have the disciplinary background to get in. Actually, that’s sort of the same with any of the comparative literature programs or philosophy. On paper, I graduated with a degree in history and have been in education ever since.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I thought this might help. Perhaps I needed to convince myself that submitting more than one application somewhere was a good idea. Maybe I secretly want affirmation. Maybe I just needed to see things laid out in front of me.

Enough of the narcissism. I think Gonzaga is playing Wake Forest today and the game is starting soon.

CFP – Waiting for the Political Moment

CALL FOR PAPERS

WAITING FOR THE POLITICAL MOMENT

Utrecht & Rotterdam, June 17-19, 2010

‘Hamm: What’s happening?

Clov: Something is taking its course.’

Beckett, Endgame

Over the last decades, several political and cultural theorists have argued that the domain of politics, and even the very idea of the political, has been hollowed out. Politics today appears to have lost its proper status or has been submerged in the more powerful and encompassing infrastructures of late capitalism. Instead of frantically affirming or denying the emptying-out of the political, this conference traces the appropriation of the political by apparatuses of state, church, capitalism and media in modernity to look for ways to reinvigorate it. To do so, the conference focuses on a key concept: the political moment – the moment in which political agency becomes possible, as well as the formative role of the moment in politics.

To get to grips with the political moment we not only need to understand our current moment; we need to have an idea of how it developed over time. Not considering the political moment from an exclusively contemporary point of view, this conference also calls for proposals that focus on the formation of the political in relation to its emptying-out from the late Middle Ages to the present.

Contributions in the form of a 4000 words positioning paper distributed in advance and to be discussed in a seminar setting could address (but are not limited to) the following issues: what is a political moment? What does the emptying-out of the political imply? How has the appropriation of the political by state, religion or media shaped the conditions of possibility of the political? What is the role of the moment in politics?

Confirmed speakers include: Mieke Bal, Bruno Bosteels, Rosi Braidotti, Simon Critchley, Martin van Gelderen, Olivier Marchart, Patchen Markell, Benjamin Noys, and Alberto Toscano.

If you are interested in participating, please send in a 300-words paper proposal and a short résumé of your current research by January 15 2010 to Frans-Willem Korsten, Professor of Literature and Society, Erasmus University Rotterdam, email: korsten@fhk.eur.nl; and/or to Bram Ieven, lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University, email: b.k.ieven@uu.nl.

For more information see: www.waitingforthepoliticalmoment.org

Intro to Paper

I’m working on a paper for a Comparative Studies course on Foucault. This is a (rough, rough) version of the introduction to the paper. Thoughts are welcome.

*****

“In short, I’d argue that the logic of intensification is Foucault’s primary mechanism for explaining historical change: the emergence of new modes of power happens through the lightening, saturation, becoming-more-efficient, and transversal linkage of existing practices.”[1]

Contemporary discussions of power almost always have to engage with the work of Michel Foucault in order to be taken seriously. No other philosopher (or theorist, or historian, or whatever Foucault chose to call himself that week) has had as much impact on the analysis of power in recent history. Arguably, he has had the greatest effect on the concept of power since the great theorists of sovereignty, such as Machiavelli. However, Foucault never intended to present a unified theory of power; instead he focused on the disjunctures, the changes that have developed in history by looking for power’s effects. He worked deductively, combing through archives until a pattern of effects emerged that he then turned into a paradigm. The example of the panopticon is probably the most famous paradigm to emerge from Foucault’s work, but there are others: his analyses of sovereign, disciplinary, and bio- powers, his engagement with sovereign power, and his articulation of governmentality being the others.

Foucault died in 1984, in the midst of a new direction in his work, a direction in which the subject was emerging as the central concern of his project. In fact, he goes so far as to say that his project had been deeply concerned with the subject throughout his entire career. (INSERT QUOTE). Many of Foucault’s interlocutors have begun to interpret this “ethical turn,” meaning the ethics or practices of the self upon the self, as a recognition that his previous modes of analysis, namely archaeology and disciplinary power, were insufficient and needed to be moved beyond.[2] But I am uncomfortable with this interpretation, and I do not believe that Foucault believed so based on his collected writings when all of the “periods” in his work are held side-by-side. In fact, Nealon makes this argument quite convincingly in Foucault Beyond Foucault and it needs little elaboration here. What is abundantly clear from Nealon’s book is that the historical changes that occur, which require new analytics of power based on the intensification of previous modes of power relations, are central to understanding power in Foucault. Therefore, I assert that he must be read through the lens of historical materialism: the analytics of power elaborated in Foucault are primarily historical phenomena that play a minor role in the present, mostly as nodes in the network of new intensifications of power relationships in the present.

Essentially, the abundance of writing which apply Foucault’s concepts, such as disciplinary power or biopower, to the present in order to affirm the disciplinarity of certain institutions (i.e. schools) or the effects of biopower operating on bodies (i.e. HIV/AIDS policies), while perhaps useful in some ways are in actuality missing the point. This is not to say that someone cannot do a historical analysis of a previously unexplored institution or phenomenon and use discipline as an analytical matrix. It is to say that if we take Foucault’s genealogy seriously in terms of it being able to intervene in the present, we must move beyond the constant reaffirmation of Foucault’s analytics of power to ones better suited to intervene 25 years after his death. What Foucault could only imagine, and what The Birth of Biopolitics only hinted at, are the extreme changes in the realm of the political since the mid-1980s. Without overblowing the significance of these things individually, the combination of these forces is significant and requires new interventions with new analytics of power: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War; the end (or at least significant respite) of a serious, global challenge to capitalism, liberal democracy, and now neoliberalism; the rise of technology, especially the internet; the sharp increase in the fighting of civil wars leading to mass numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons not seen since World War II; the roaring comeback of sovereign power post-9/11; and more. These historical events cannot simply have Foucault’s analytics of power applied to them, as the historical conditions for, as an example, the re-emergence of sovereign power do not mirror the conditions of sovereign power in 15^th century Europe. This particular paper will focus on finding and beginning to articulate an analytics of power which can be applied to the contemporary workings of the nation-state that intensifies Foucault’s own categories but moves beyond them.

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[1] Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 38.

[2] For a more complete critical summary of the “conventional wisdom” on Foucault’s shifts in project, see Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 24-38.

Communique from an Absent Future

I’m reposting this from the “we want everything” blog, one of the main outlets for the occupations at UC Santa Cruz. It’s long, but it’s also one of the most vicious critiques of higher education I’ve ever seen and well worth the read.

I

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university.  Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties.  We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments.  Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt.  The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do).  Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities.  Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords.  We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved.  We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project.  University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers.  Even leisure is a form of job training.  The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office.  Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work.  We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym.  We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle.  “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what? —drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk.  A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow.  And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have.  Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation.  Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.  We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around.  Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color.  Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003.  What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.  What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest.  Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school.  Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.  No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition.  On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum.  And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement.  Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit.  But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them.  And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers.  Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for.  It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things.  One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience.  First we pay, then we “work hard.”  And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed.  It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience.  Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system.  Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here:  was the course easy?  Was the teacher hot?  Could any stupid asshole get an A?  What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes?  Who needs memory when we have the internet?  A training in thought?  You can’t be serious.  A moral preparation?  There are anti-depressants for that.

Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient.  The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market.  Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market.  But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market.  There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night.  That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable.  Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.

Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith.  A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism.  The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one.  Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.

We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”  At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root.  We admire the first part of this performance: it lights our way.  But we want the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism.  But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical.  The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between the is and the ought of current left thought.  One feels that there is no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is possible.

We will not be so petulant.  The synthesis of these positions is right in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary.  The ought and the is are one.  The collapse of the global economy is here and now.

II

The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital.  Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows.  What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already subordinated to capital.  At the apex of public funding for higher education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism” and sustain US hegemony.  Its role during the Cold War was to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one was equal.

But if this ideological function of the public university was at least well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom.   Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the rest of the industrializing world.  Capitalism, it turned out, could not sustain the good life it made possible.  For capital, abundance appears as overproduction, freedom from work as unemployment.  Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.

For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations.  The raiding of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the 1970s.  It has continued to strike with each downward declension of the business cycle.  Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization of work.  Retiring professors make way not for tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less pay.  Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay to be trained for evaporate.

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education.  They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past.  But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone.  We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society.   The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system.  We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded.  The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward.  The old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world.  In the 1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the confines of the university understood that another world was possible.  Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical sections of the working class.  But their mode of radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold.  Because their resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class facing different problems.  In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.

That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles.  There will be no return to normal.

III

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.

Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.  We demand not a free university but a free society.  A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning.  We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt.  We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.  Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood.  This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society.  Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums.  All of our futures are linked, and so our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets.  In recent weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed have threatened demonstrations and strikes.  Each of these movements responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on the working class in a moment of crisis.  Viewed separately, each appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success.  Taken together, however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and resistance.  Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like a hidden water table, feed each struggle.

We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France, combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets.  High school and university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members, and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on the same side of the barricades.  (This solidarity was often fragile, however.  The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared between the two groups.)  French students saw through the illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work.  They took to the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures.  Their position tore down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.

As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between revolution and reform.  Its form was more radical than its content.  While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities – announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage.  Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when the CPE law was eventually dropped.  While the most radical segment of the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died.  Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of reformism.

The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle.  Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations.  Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece.  As in France it was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a total negation of the future.  Students, precarious workers, and immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE movement.

Just as significantly, they made almost no demands.  While of course some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police.   Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer.   Here content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and economic system.

Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its limit.  It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens.  The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the uprising emerged.  However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged wageworkers, who did not see the struggle as their own.  Though many expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in full-time jobs.  The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.

Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions for the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a truly communist content.  As the unions and student and faculty groups push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is clear that we want something else entirely.  We must constantly expose the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency.  What good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to elect those who will screw us over?  We must leave behind the culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and its fixation on single-issue causes.  The only success with which we can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st century.  All of our actions must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange. Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way.  The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when students occupied a building at the New School in New York.  A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public.  Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president.  These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded.  While the student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely.  They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society.  We side with this anti-reformist position.  While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.

We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized.  In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle there should take: road blockades, which brought to a halt the circulation of goods from place to place.  Within months this tactic spread across the country without any formal coordination between groups.  In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and outside the university.  We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over.  Now it is our turn.

To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position themselves as our representatives.  We are willing to work with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize their authority.  We must act on our own behalf directly, without mediation.  We must break with any groups that seek to limit the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate, to reconcile.  This was also the case in France.  The original calls for protest were made by the national high school and university student associations and by some of the trade unions.  Eventually, as the representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead.  And in Greece the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by canceling strikes and calling for restraint.

As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation.  The more we begin talking to one another and finding our common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned from them it is that we must build dense networks of solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy.  These networks not only make us resistant to recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective bonds.  These bonds are the real basis of our struggle.

Politics and Ontology CFP

For the Society for Social and Political Philosopy’s meetings to be held in conjunction with:

SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2010.

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

Politics and Ontology

We seek to explore and challenge the hypothesis that all political theory presupposes an ontology. From the presumption of universal rationality, to the potency of class consciousness, to the privileges shaped by the social existence of race, gender and sexuality, political order always is or implies an ontological order. In many respects, the ontological question is the political question. Struggles for political change are as much about the expansion (or contraction) of shared ontological categories as they are about the rewriting of legislation or the redistribution of power and resources . The traditional allocation of rights, for instance, has been determined almost entirely on the basis of who, or what, one is presumed to be. While ontology and politics share a long, interconnected history, for much of modern history the connection between them has been downplayed or denied, since liberalism is premised on bracketing such supposedly insoluble and inherently conflictual metaphysical questions. In recent decades, however, this has changed. The explicit investigation of political ontology has taken center stage and, as a consequence, what we understand to be political or ontological has changed as well. Politics is no longer limited to the state, but permeates all of social existence to include the terrain of imagination, emotions, and representation. Ontology is no longer an ultimate foundation, but is constituted through relations of power and affects. In the works of such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Giorgio Agamben, William Connolly, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, and many others, the subject of political ontology has surfaced in an array of new formulations. For this panel, we invite papers that extend this investigation or that challenge this resurgence, both within the context of work that has already been done and in anticipation of work yet to be conceived.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2010 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2010). The SPEP Conference is scheduled for October 2010, in Montreal, Canada.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY.

Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to: papers@sspp.us

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital CFP

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 24-27, 2011

Our second Roundtable will explore Volume One of Marx’s Capital (1867). We chose this text because the resurgence in references to and mentions of Marx – provoked especially by the financial crisis, but presaged by the best-seller status of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Marx’s surprising victory in the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” poll – has only served to highlight the fact that there have not been any new interpretive or theoretical approaches to this book since Althusser’s in the 1960s.

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, such that long “obsolete” approaches have a newfound currency, or does in mean, on the contrary, that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for?

The guiding hypothesis of this Roundtable is that if new readings of Capital are called for, then it is new readers who will produce them.

Therefore, we are calling for applications from scholars interested in approaching Marx’s magnum opus with fresh eyes, willing to open it to the first page and read it through to the end without knowing what they might find. Applicants need not be experts in Marx or in Marxism. Applicants must, however, specialize in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching and learning from their fellows, and in nurturing wide-ranging and diverse inquiries into the history of political thought.

If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Your approach to the text might be driven by historical or contemporary concerns, and it might issue from an interest in a theme or a figure (be it Aristotle or Foucault). Whatever your approach, however, your presentation must centrally investigate some aspect of the text of Capital. Spaces are very limited.

Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments (.doc/.rtf/.pdf) to papers@sspp.us by September 15, 2010:

1. Curriculum Vitae
2. One page statement of interest in the Roundtable. (Please include a discussion of the topics you would be willing to explore in a roundtable presentation. Please also discuss the projected significance of participation for your research and/or teaching.)

Ben Fowkes’ translation of Capital (Viking/Penguin, 1976) is the official translation for the Roundtable, and should be used for page citations. However, applicants are strongly encouraged to review either the German text of Capital (the 2nd edition of 1873 is the basis for most widely available texts) or the French translation (J. Roy, 1872-5), which was the last edition Marx himself oversaw to publication; both of these are widely available on-line.

All applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process via email on or before October 15, 2010. Participants will be asked to send a draft or outline of their presentation to papers@sspp.us by January 15, 2011 so that we can finalize the program.

In order to participate in the Roundtable (but not to apply or to be selected), you must be a member of the Society in good standing. You can become a member of the Society by following the membership link at: http://www.sspp.us/