Weapon of Class Instruction OLD VERSION

2011-04-29T10:29:00.001-04:00

I'm importing this blog over to it's new address, which is weaponofclassinstruction.blogspot.com you can find it there, with new posts in the pipeline, I promise.

2011-02-01T17:33:00.001-05:00

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.)

2011-01-24T10:28:00.000-05:00

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.

2010-12-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

"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

2010-12-10T08:22:00.000-05:00

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

2010-12-09T14:52:00.001-05:00

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!

University for Strategic Optimism at Lloyds TBS [High Quality]

2010-12-08T20:11:00.000-05:00

this is what the university looks like.

2010-12-08T11:18:00.000-05:00

This is a really interesting article about the place of nonacademic university employees in the current, inspiring wave of student occupations and strikes that is erupting across the United Kingdom, from Leeds to Cardiff to Warwick to Oxford to the University of East London.

I've previously written (and feel like a careerist liberal asshole so noting) about the question of how the student occupationist movements ought to rethink the place of service work and workers as central to university capitalism, and I think the tensions this mute piece points out in the current moment speak similarly to the challenges and possibilities of future organizing.

Widening Participation: "

By Anathematician

Despite frequent declarations of solidarity, protesting students and academics are failing to join forces with non-academic staff. Except when police brutality momentarily unites them - writes Anathematician

department of shameless plugs

2010-11-20T15:03:00.002-05:00

Oh, hey, so my first published work as an academic, "The limits of work and the subject of labor history," appears in the brand new book Rethinking U.S. Labor History from Continuum Press. My essay looks at the racialized and gendered applicability of the term "labor" as a descriptor for selective human activities, and argues that two projects labor scholars should take up are the continual reexamination of both the shifting geography of the boundaries between work and not work and a corresponding shift in who or what ought to be the privileged subject(s) of labor history. I think my original draft was rather awful, and I think that the revisions process and intervening year and a half have convinced me that the finished project is significantly less awful, though you are of course welcome to disagree, and if folks who read it want to engage me on it, I'd welcome that, though I'm finding the temporality of publishing somewhat disorienting - i submitted the final draft of the essay 15 months ago and have been working on other projects since - a conference paper here, a diss chapter there, and hadn't really thought much about this essay in the interrim until i realized i needed to be able to say stuff about it for a panel Wednesday night. I should also note that the other essays in the book that I've read are really interesting, especially Dan Bender's article on the senses and the cultural turn. I'm also looking forward to reading the essay on home health care workers by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein.

Today's November 20th. That makes it the 1 year anniversary of this: At a moment in which the UCPD is pulling guns on protestors, academic neoliberalism continues expansionist coloniality at home and abroad and neoliberal assaults on campus workers, students, and spaces, we need to be inspired by and learn from the struggles of the last two years as we work to build new cycles of whatever. I meant that less in the agamben sense than in the "insert your radical noun here" sense, "insurrection, insurgency, transformation, strikes, resistance, organizing, etc." They're all problematic and insufficient in one way or another, but also all necessary in one way or another. Alright. Solidarity from the purple tendrils of the global network university

NO GOD, NO COUNTRIES, NO YALE!

2010-11-20T14:07:00.000-05:00

In honor of the Harvard-Yale game, which I have never been to, and the inevitable flood of nostalgic and slightly jingoistic, though i don't mean to be an asshole, facebook updates from people i haven't seen in at least five years. Obviously I'm riffing off Ni dieu ni maitre and "for god, for country...", and I don't actually really want to claim secularism as some kind of revolutionary position at this point, when in many ways it's profoundly not and is often complicit in projects like homonationalism and other ways in which folks deploy liberalism to justify postmodern imperial projects like the invasion of Afghanistan. Plus, I know many great organizers and committed radicals who approach what they do from a (critical engagement with their) religious standpoint, and I have a lot of respect for them. I also believe strongly in the power of ritual in anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian forms of religious practice, and here i'm thinking of stuff like freedom seders, even though i'm pretty estranged from Judaism - maybe even moreso than i'd like to be. I should also probably throw in "no bosses," or risk overdetermining the role of the state in relation to the capitalist class whose interests it mediates and regulates.

postscript: November 11th

2010-11-11T10:56:00.000-05:00

this is an addendum to last night's post on the nyu strike and it's transinstitutional valences.

today is November eleventh. before that meant veterans' day, it meant something else. 123 years ago today the anarchist and socialist organizers and leaders of the movement for the eight hour day in Chicago, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were hanged.

We ought to remember the haymarket "martyrs," ought to remember Peter Linebaugh's insights about the ways that the gallows, like the prisons, function as instruments of class struggle from above, of labor discipline and primitive accumulation.

also, let's remember Spies' last words: "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!"

All We Do Is Work

2010-11-11T07:30:00.000-05:00

union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis LLP notices the most recent ruling on grad employees, uses it to drum up new clients or reactivate old ones.

Jackson Lewis's motto is "all we do is work." This is profoundly ironic, given their involvement in NYU's long years of denial that what we do is work, an argument that was always ridiculous, always fraudulent. And it's ridiculous because as an antiworker labor law firm, their work is to bind us to ours, to impose work-discipline, produce fear, to help the boss maintain control, police the workers into submission. "Union avoidance" means violence, whatever you think about trade unionism, business unionism, unionism as a mode of organizing labor. However well or ill fought, there is always more at play in a labor struggle than everyone admits. This is why Joe Leiberman's claim during the summer before the second 2003 strike, that workers "were not asking for much" struck me as so flawed, because he could not possibly know what they were all asking for, because they were not asking but demanding, because by demanding, they were asking for everything, because this minimizing of the scope of what was at stake was always a reactionary project, was never strategic.

"All we do is work" is also a double-edged sword, of sorts - at once the colonization of everything in the Capital V.1 sense, i.e., originary accumulation as real subsumption - everything is work, all we do is produce surplus value, there is no escape - and an unwitting endorsement of expanding the terrain of struggle into new contexts and forms, because if all we do is work, then what does that yield us but yet more ways to strike?

we should all be so despicable

2010-11-11T03:48:00.000-05:00

Nina Power on the student occupation of the conservative party headquarters yesterday:

Numbers were massive too, with around 52,000 turning out – more than double the NUS's original estimate. Police helicopters circled above the crowds, as protesters carried giant vultures, carrots, coffins and effigies of Tory politicians. But media reports will inevitably focus on one thing, namely the spontaneous occupation of and protest in Tory HQ at 30 Millbank Tower. Aaron Porter, the NUS president, was quick to condemn the breakaway protesters, describing their actions as "despicable".
As I write, about 200 people have occupied the building, and bonfires burn outside. Some arrests have been made and eight people – protesters and police officers – have been injured. Protesters have broken windows and made their way on to the roof. Twitter reports indicate that some have taken a sofa from inside Millbank and put it outside, with the quite reasonable argument that "if we're going to be kettled we may as well be comfy".
Direct action this most certainly was, the kind writers such as John Pilger have recently been calling for. It is hard to see the violence as simply the wilfulness of a small minority – it is a genuine expression of frustration against the few who seem determined to make the future a miserable, small-minded and debt-filled place for the many.<\blockquote>

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

November Ninth, November tenth

2010-11-11T01:27:00.000-05:00

Five years ago yesterday, hundreds of NYU graduate students took to the streets, beginning a seven month strike which was the longest in the history of the US academic labor movement, though recent strikes in Canada have given it a run for its money. we picketed outside of Bobst Library for most of my first year of graduate school, we hauled giant green dumpsters full of gas-guzzling inflatable rat, we screamed at John
Sexton, refused to shake Stimpy's hand, got arrested twice, stormed the library, busted up lobbying day, got divorced and played spin the bottle and became organizers and researchers and jaded and we processed stuff and did shit we shouldn't have and we sat through long meetings, long, long meetings, and we struggled together and sometimes against each other and sometimes we betrayed each other and sometimes we learned how not to.

so many of the posts on this blog form an archive of that strike. some of them are far too boastful, read to me now as naive or dismissive of the many contradictions and conflicts and problems and just plain shit that got fucked up. some of them read now, for me, anyway, as indices of my own ambivalence and my ambivalent position as pseudosalt no one asked for, as transplanted UOCista, as anarchist, as first-year, as useless organizer. As if I felt compelled - as I not infrequently did, to mask the contradictions, to smooth them over, to downplay my fears and my concerns and do what needed to be done because of affective crises, diplomatic necessities, the guilt of the tactless fuckhead inept wannabe. I still feel this call to self-censorship, this reified and alienated regulator of affects, when I blog about stuff i am close to but feel conflicted about. I suppose that's somewhat natural, though I guess, being an American Studiesist, my instinct is to note that nothing is ever natural, or nothing human is only ever natural, more accurately, that my anxieties and ambivalences about how I write about the strike and everything else are conditioned, their limits produced in part, by the social relationships in which I am situated and which I help to constitute, how I lived the strike, how we continue to live in it's shadows even when we don't acknowledge them out of what we understand a's organizing necessities.

Anyway, my point is that the strike has ghosts, Avery Gordon ghosts, something I've written about before, though not posted here, ghosts of Monday night meetings and Frank Hoppensteadt PhD letters and endless department meeting shitstorms and oh so many mustache rides and "scab unions" GHODs and escalation/penis and TL calling the provost wilford brimley and "what makes you think you have the right to hug me" and "you want to take money out of my pocket so I will not tell you my name" and sundry other awesome things AC said in town hall meetings and detached crybaby white virus white supremacist extirpation poison pill missed paycheck captive audience third way proposals ("third way, historically means fascism"- HH) collapsed steward systems anonymous blog posts fights in bars letters cab rides picket lines picket lines ISO RMO cultural capitalist lapdog union busting marxists roll the sausage factory on.

the strike has ghosts, and one of the ghosts is us. we are still here, we endure, we have not let NYU destroy us, we shout at John Sexton in Bobst imperial photoshoots, we march with immigrant workers centers we march on bobst we organize we get kicked out of labs we ask Stimpy about attrition we get far 4ed we work and we practice Moten/Harney theft and try to constitute and undercommons and eat pizza and we meet and meet and meet until

we're still here because of the determination of hundreds of graduate employees not to let the bosses win. we're here because of SV and MWP and TL and JH and RJ and MC and hundreds and hundreds of others who would not let NYU beat us, who kept fighting, kept building. And we're still here because the UAW didn't sell us out, and we're here because we still want power over or power against our work, because the university is in crisis, because we are the crisis, because it's been five years and I have never worked under a union contract and this is the sixth class I have taught and the union I want to build is the union of university labor beyond the university "we carry a new world in our hearts.". because Rana put two and a half years of her life into keeping the union alive, into organizing in new places, into fighting the attempts to restructure us into oblivion.

yesterday was November ninth, the 5th anniversary of the GSOC strike date. today was November tenth, the 69th anniversary of Local 142 of the United Construction Workers-CIO's first strike at Yale University, in 1941. FUE, the UOC, and the greater new haven labor history association organized an event tracing the history of Yale labor from
that strike through '53, '68, '71, '74, '77, '84, '91, '92, '95, '95, '96, '03, '03,'05, and everything for which those numbers stand as insufficient metonym. i am writing a chapter on yale workers in the 70s, so I came up from NYC, and this blog post emerges in nonsmall part from my desire to keep putting the NYU struggle in conversation with the Yale fight.

November 10th 1941 inaugurates 425 college street, local 35 and the organization of the dining halls, Vincent Sirabella, John Wilhelm, Local 34 and everything that Yale clerical and technical workers and food service and maintenance workers built and won together, TA solidarity and two decades of GESO hundreds of thousands of struck hours, insurgent alliances, who knows how many organizing conversations, hard pushes, tough decisions. stake take do.

there are important links between these strikes. there were the five GESOistas who suspended their lives and their work and dissertations to help GSOC strike, the two GSOC rank and filers who went to new haven to organize with clerical workers and cafeteria workers, the busloads of Yale workers who came down Wednesday after Wednesday throughout November, December, January, who got arrested with us and hounded NYU trustees into the toney depths of Fairfield County country clubs, who translated Scott Marxist picketline chants into new idioms and taught many of us what it meant to be organizers. And last and least there's me, who still feels liminal sometimes but precisely because i owe so much to both these trajectories, these histories of struggle and sweat and freezing for a reason.

the university has been a site of labor struggle for a very long time - janitors organized elsewhere long before they organized at Yale. we need to remember that. there never was a university divorced from and free of the labor that makes it possible. what kind of university, what kind of city, what kind of world, can we, in union, create for each other and ourselves?

this is the 1800th post on this blog.

uprising!

2010-11-10T19:09:00.000-05:00

quick link to NYT article on today's events in the UK.

Student uprising in london

Today is the 5-year anniversary of the NYU strike.

2010-11-09T23:56:00.002-05:00

The struggle continues.

MOAR DISPATCHES! MOAR DISSERTATIONIZING! ZOMG!

2010-11-06T16:16:00.002-04:00

Well, I'm sort of stuck. I need to figure out why the 1942 and 1943-4 University of Minnesota nonacademic worker strikes weren't illegal - or if they were, why no one seemed to care. Minnesota labor law, unlike NY, permits strikes by "nonessential" government employees after a 10-day cooling off period and, in some cases, an arbitration process. But the Minnesota Public Employee Labor Relations Act only dates back to the 1970s, and a morning and a half's worth of searching has yielded little help as to what the status of public employee strikes was in the period i'm looking at. Labor historian and lawyer Joseph E. Slater's Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, The Law, and The State 1900-1962 suggests that strikes by public school janitors were very much illegal in the 1930s, yet strike votes recur into at least 1940, and the objections Slater recounts of BSEIU brass to the proposed job actions hinge more on public perception than perceived illegality. I'm debating submitting a query to H-labor or something. The point is that neither state labor law nor the WLB - one would think one or the other would have gotten involved - seem to have been pressuring the local against a strike, at least until the governor intervened to end the 1942 strike on the promise of some form of continuing mediation. Minnesota Governor Howard Stassen's intervention isn't surprising given the role the university was playing in housing and training armed services personnel in the middle of world war II. Nor is it entirely suprising that the international leadership of the BSEIU, an AFL craft union with historical links to organized crime, also opposed the strike, even if the Minneapolis Central Labor Union supported it. What's odd is the lack of evidence I've found that anyone was seriously pressuring the union against striking prior to picket lines going up around campus. Or maybe I am just not looking in the right places, relying too heavily on press clippings, not looking at a wider span of archival press coverage from before the strike. The Minneapolis Labor Review makes no reference to any such pressure before the strike, and none of the other press coverage of the actual October '42 strike lists any such concerns or any state response to the strike save Governor Stassen's attempt to convince the workers to go back by promising to mediate.

Anyway, If you, dear reader, have ideas about how I might figure out the answers to some of these questions, I would be in your debt.

AUC Strike ends

2010-10-31T20:08:00.002-04:00

Click on the link for the campus paper's report...

short update on the auc strike

2010-10-31T13:26:00.000-04:00

The strikers have a blog, on which they have posted a full list of demands, and some amazing photographs.

Update on the AUC strike

2010-10-30T07:57:00.000-04:00

Sounds vaguely familiar to those of us who remember the March 2003 Yale Strike.

American University in Cairo, on strike.

2010-10-29T17:06:00.004-04:00

Custodial workers at American University in Cairo are on strike. Wages and insurance and other deductions are a major issue - when the company subcontracted to the global food service giant compass, workers had to pay ridiculous percentages of their wages towards "commisions" and insurance. Now this "proletariat" is still being charges such fees - directly by the university, and workers are demanding to know why.

Here's a petition being circulated via twitter by supporters of the strikers. It lists the workers' strike committee demands as the following:

Receive a gross minimum monthly wage of 1,200 EGP (which means less than 1000EGP net) with equal pay for all workers who hold the same position.
Have Saturday as an official holiday for the AUC workers as it is for all those employed in the maintenance, service departments and the administration. If one is to work on Saturday they shall receive overtime pay for their work.
Receive 200 EGP as meal compensation (or an adequate meal) in addition to the salary.
Receive annual salary raise of no less than 10% on the original wage of each worker. This percentage is subject to be increased by the administration.
Receive Social Insurance coverage that includes all the years of service to the AUC.

AUC and NYU's new campus in Abu Dhabi are very different institutions in very different places, serving very different groups of people. AUC is not a branch campus of a U.S. higher ed brand - it is a separate independent institution founded by U.S. missionaries nearly a century ago, although it does host hundreds of U.S. study abroad students every semester, and models itself on north american higher education institutions. I'd be interested to know if the majority of workers at AUC are Egyptian or, as in NYU's new node in the global newtowrk university, originate elsewhere, especially in south and southeast asia. But nevertheless, what links this strike to the enduring questions that surround the proliferation of satellite and branch campuses and study abroad programs that lie at the heart of the ongoing NYU controversy is the question of how the workers whose labor makes possible the spread of U.S. higher education institutions and models abroad will be treated, how an increasingly global university system exists in relation to the labor of thousands of blue collar low-wage precarious service workers, and what it does to and with their labor in order to reproduce itself and expand its reach.

According to Amin, Brian MacDougall, AUC vice president for planning and administration, had offered to give workers an additional LE200 per month, but workers rejected the proposal.

“Last month I took home LE400," cleaner Ahmed Omar told Al-Masry Al-Youm. "This isn't enough to pay rent and living expenses."

"They kept promising to raise our salaries, but this never happened," he added.

Nasser Sayed, of the university's housekeeping department, said: “I usually get LE650 per month, but now I take only LE500. I’m married and have two kids and I’m in debt, and have to borrow money from people. When I tell people that I work for AUC, they think I get a good salary, but this isn't true.

The student newspaper, the Caravan, has previously reported on worker deaths during the construction of the university's new campus in one of Cairo's mega-exurbs as well as on the poverty conditions which are forced upon campus janitors. (In the first article, scroll down from the discussion of the deaths to read another interesting article about janitors' grievances and acts of rebellion against Compass.)

If you want to follow the strike, which is set to continue into next week, one way to do so is by checking the twitter hashtag #AUCworkers, where supporters and activists have been posting pictures, links, and updates about the latest moves by the administration and updating the interwebs on the workers' struggle.

Now back to previously scheduled dissertating...

2010-10-26T23:18:00.003-04:00

Apologies for the cryptic nature of the post immediately preceding this one. As you may have surmised from following the link, the NLRB has remanded our filing from last May back to the regional office, which means we are going to have hearings, and probably, at some point, an election. So that's interesting. I'm pretty skeptical of the NLRB election process, but it worked for NYU the last time around, so I'm not ruling anything out. Of course, back then, the president was a drunkard, now we have an evangellically neoliberal megalomaniac who has publicly vowed to destroy us. I suspect it will be a much more difficult process to gain recognition a second time around.

Quick thoughts on the decision: who are the "15 people" excluded from the post far-4 restructuring? We know that the picture the employer presents is wrong on a bunch of levels which I won't get into here because I don't think it's strategic to preview arguments the lawyers might take up later on a random blog that John Beckman might be reading (if you are reading this, please quit, and by quit i mean your job.) But I have no idea who they're talking about and I have read their initial filing, which, yes, claims that an election to recertify GSOC would interfere with the adjunct unit. Unbelievable. Anyway I am wondering if these are the same 15 people who Sexton claimed before the UN were the only people in the world who cared about grad employee labor, or if they're the same 15 people whom Josh Taylor claimed were the only people still on strike in spring '06. (Our numbers then were, I still believe, significantly higher than that by an order of magnitude at least.) It must be nice to be so rich you can pull numbers out of your tukhes at random.

Two - in Hayes' dissent, who are these people supposedly excluded under the NYU decision? Is he talking about the hard science RAs? As always GSOC UAW has nothing to do with and no control over or culpability in this blog. More later.

edited to clean up rushed grammar.

NLRBeezy

2010-10-26T19:53:00.000-04:00

Here we go.

2010-10-26T18:16:00.002-04:00

I was looking through the front material of Historical Materialism 15.1 (2007), at the voluminous list of brilliant scholars and radicals who constitute the journal's advisory board, when I was struck by something. All of the people listed have a parenthetical location next to their names, e.g., Aijaz Ahmad, (New Dehli), Robert Brenner, (Los Angeles), etc etc etc. For folks not affiliated with universities, it's the same as those who are - thus (labor notes founder) Kim Moody, (New York) - though last I heard Moody was in the U.K., but the journal is several years old. There's one exception, a senior scholar in marxist cultural studies and one of my intellectual heroes, who is listed with the designation "(Yale.)" There are two other instances of this. Fredric Jameson is listed with "(Duke)", Simon Bromley with "(Open University)". Bromley's situation is a bit different, since his university is understood to be not fixed to any particular geographical location. With the other two, though, it's two distinguished Marxist scholars at two very wealthy private universities in two deindustrialized small cities whose economies are now dominated by universities and hospitals. What does the erasure of New Haven and Durham from Historical Materialism mean? What does it tell us about the practice and praxis of marxist theory within and without the academy, about the place of the university in radical politics? As the frontispiece of an issue including Toscano and Vercellone on cognitive capitalism and the general intellect, I think these are actually important questions to take up. I'd add more, but i have an organizing meeting to run to.

I think, though, that there is a tension here that's a lot like the one I see in this video which is currently making the rounds on the internet among my fellow cognitarians:

specifically I'm interested in the presumed supremacy of mental over manual labor, the differential valuation of cognitive and affective labor explicit in the assumption that there's something horrible and undignified in getting paid less than secretaries and janitors. It seems to me like what academic workers need to be doing is organizing in solidarity with secretaries and janitors and other campus workers, whether we're fighting the bosses, radically reconstituting the spaces we inhabit, building counterinstitutions, going on strike, or engaging in a wide variety of other kinds of projects, and I think we should be doing all these things at once, combining them and ourselves into new and powerful forms.

Ok, meeting now.

linkdump

2010-10-20T07:02:00.000-04:00

The WSN on a possible strike by thousands of NYU adjuncts.

Andrew Ross demystifies "the corporate university" in the chronicle of higher education.

2010-10-16T15:46:00.000-04:00

So, what does the U.S. navy do when there's a general strike at the school it's using as a training ground for soldiers in the middle of a multi-continent war?

2010-10-16T09:21:00.001-04:00

Carl Paladino, Lee Abrams... What's up with these capitalist plutocrats' apparent compulsion to send pornographic emails to their entire fucking companies? What kind of arrogant shit do you have to be to casually sexually harass like three hundred people with the click of a button? What does this say about the role of digital communications technology and the construction of the gendered workspace?

dispatches from the dissertating, II

2010-10-15T15:43:00.000-04:00

I'm still trying to get a handle on the complicated dynamics between university administrators, military officers, and union leaders, let alone rank and file workers and armed services members during the University of Minnesota's multiple wartime strikes during the 1940s, the subject of the chapter I'm currently working on, but if you'd care for a glimpse of how awkward and complex these relationships were, here's one example, where military personnel berate university administrators for one aviation instructor's lack of access to the mimeograph machine due to picketing service workers.

The union seems to also have been in direct contact with the armed services leadership personnel, proposing to them how the military might conduct bargaining unit jobs with soldiers as scabs during the strike. This, I don't understand at all.

dispatches from the dissertating.

2010-10-07T18:59:00.002-04:00

Yes, this blog still exists.

ar/ has me on the "three pages a day plan", which is more hortatory than prescriptive, or so i fervently hope. I'm currently sitting in one of the grad employee cubicles in the department of sundry and copious acronyms trying to live up to these expectations with little success today - i've written about a page, but squeezed in some archival research into the origins of BSEU (now SEIU) Local 113's organizing at the U of Minnesota. In so doing, I came across this article in the January 16, 1931 edition of the Minneapolis Labor Review, which was and remains the organ of the AFL's Central Labor Union (we now call them central labor councils) in the Twin Cities. It's a craft unionist framing of what folks now call the edu-factory, seven and a half decades before that term came into vogue, having been described elaborated by the eponymous collective and more recently been transmogrified into a book and a most excellent webjournal. The edufactory - "what was the factory is now the university" - is the articulation of knowledge and labor within the global neoliberal university as the social factory was the articulation of production and consumption, of productive and reproductive labor within and beyond the factory walls during the moment of the crisis of the bretton woods regime, the crisis of state corporatism, the crisis of disciplinary governability. So what's this paleo-edufactory then, produced by its own moment of capitalist crisis, articulated by a Yale professor half a decade before the first stirrings of local 35 to a Minneapolis audience three years before the Trotskyist teamsters' frontal attack on the Citizens' Alliance's open shop repressive parastate apparatus? I don't think this is a vestige of the moment Clyde Barrow so ably dissects in Universities and the Capitalist State -- if anything, it speaks more to the kinds of formation Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front, the "laboring of American culture," the hegemony of a language and consciousness of labor and work among cultural producers and the protocognitarians Henderson describes here.

You'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing, and i apologize for its horizontality.

Minneapolis Labor Review, 1.16.1931

"The emperor has no clothes"

2010-04-27T14:43:00.002-04:00

The title of this post comes from something NZ yelled yesterday in front of Bobst, itself culled from that horrifically awesome picket sign of Sexton's junk designed by one of the folks from GET-UP. "Wiz" has an excellent account of yesterday's announcement that GSOC has reached majority yet again and of our demand for voluntary recognition from the administration. I'm too lazy to add anything other than that if we are really being paid 50,000 a year I am owed over $130,000 in back pay, and I'll take it in installments of tasti-d-lite, ipads, and comic books. Also, @JohnBeckmanisaLiar, this is only a "puzzle" if you're as stupid as you think we are.

I was going to write something about the "rotting husk of Keynesianism an anonymous commenter on this post once accused GSOC of attempting to resurrect, but all the comments seem to have disappeared. (I did not delete them.)

Instead, it's worth noting, I think, that today marks the four year anniversary of an earlier declaration of majority which culminated in a huge membership convention at Judson and 57 arrests, including this blogger. I've been a little less involved this year than in the past, though i am still organizing, but I remain committed to building a just and democratic member-driven union and "taking back NYU" in the streets and the libraries and the third floor cafeterias and the cubicles and carrels and laboratories every day. Kudos to everyone responsible for yesterday and let's all help Mr. Beckman work through his inability to understand that we, not he, determine who our union is.

2010-04-12T10:48:00.000-04:00

More later, but this past weekend's Beneath the University, The Commons conference was exciting, inspiring, and an utterly unique exprience. I'm still in Minneapolis, heading out to try to find some archives to deal with, but i wanted to post a link to all the video that folks from the nonstop liberal arts institute (antioch in exile) shot of almost every panel, so you can get a sense of just how amazing the conversations taking place were. I say "um" way too much, apparently.

2010-04-06T18:59:00.000-04:00

In case you were wondering what it looks like when anarchoinsurrectionists run for student government positions...

From the archives

2010-04-05T23:14:00.002-04:00

That image is from the December, 1991 issue of The GESO Voice, a publication whose later iterations I became intimately familiar with during the 2001-2003 contract fight and the continuing recognition struggles that bookended it. It depicts a march of Yale University graduate employees during a one-day strike on December 4, 1991. (I think this was the first strike by Yale grad students since the 1972 Teaching Assistants Organization grade strike, though I remember reading about some solidarity work by folks during the '84 strike that probably also counts.)

I spent spring break looking through the archives of District 65, an important and powerful NYC union which was, among other things, the precursor to the local that GSOC is now in (it also made several attempts to organize Yale's C&Ts between the late 1960s and 1981, organized New York department store workers in the 1930s, and - and this is why I was looking through the collection - successfully organized Barnard and Columbia clerical and technical employees.) While waiting for the relevant boxes to arrive, i decided to examine two boxes of material from Yale's TA Solidarity and the early days of its successor, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, both of which were donated to Tamiment by the labor historian Gunther Peck sometime in the last eighteen years. In both collections I found some pretty amazing stuff, and my research is still continuing. In the weeks ahead, I'll try to use this space more frequently to think about what I'm finding and hopefully have some good conversations with readers about what it all means. For now, I need to put the finishing touches on my conference paper for Beneath the University. I'm writing about the role of service work in the political economy and cultural imaginary of university capitalism. I'm having fun, but I'm not sure my intervention's going to be a particularly useful or competent one. I'll soon dfind out, I guess. In the meantime. I'll leave you with this.

edit: should note that the second image, from a later GESO Voice is from the 1992 strike, which was a three-day general strike by graduate students, food service workers, maintenance, custodial, and physical plant workers, and clerical workers and technical workers.

2009-11-20T23:46:00.059-05:00

It's been a pretty rough week. I sat through one of the most difficult meetings I've ever been party to. That NYT article I shouldn't talk about here. I have some difficult stuff going on in my family right now. Two nyu undergrad activists were attacked by the cops and arrested the other night at an impromptu solidarity action with the incredible mobilizations across the UC system. One of those arrested was a former student. I hear a certain law student anarchist friend got hit with a police baton in Berkeley. I got stuck in an elevator with about fifteen other people. Actually that was pretty fun. Etc.

I feel a bit better today, excited about organizing possibilities albeit mostly ones outside of my current comfort zone, and excited about my research and its political possibilities and talking a bit about them hopefully at the Minnesota conference in April. I'm excited about the movements folks are building, the actions folks are taking in CA even if the regents just voted to up tuition by 32% in the next two years, which is obscene even by NYU standards, which are themselves obscene.

What is taking place there, and in Bern, and in Austria, is incredible despite the police repression and the neoliberal state's unflinching acceleration of its privatization/privation engine. Another university isn't just possible, it's being made on the streets and in the occupied spaces of these movements every day.

But what about those whom the university's discursive practices and regimes of looking cast to its "margins?" Specifically I am thinking - a more urgent question for the elite private universities, perhaps, than those which can still claim to belong to the public in however extraordinarily attenuated a manner and however attenuated and circumscribed a "public" - and when we say public we are never talking about the commons - about the service labor that makes possible the acts more traditionally associated with the "work of the university," the clerical and technical, service, maintenance, culinary and caring labor that supports the teaching, research, study and policing, the administration and investment and gentrification and enclosure, all the many things that universities do. In california the UPTE and the UAW are on strike too, and some of the occupations are directly challenging worker firings, I know, but I worry about the extent to which student movement rhetorics marginalize and exclude such workers as subjects of the university. But maybe too much time in grad school has led me to privilege word over deed, when what we should be paying attention to is not rhetoric but tactics and strategy and action, at the very least what's said in organizing conversations and in strategy meetings rather than in communiques and newspaper articles? In New York, though, such concerns seem entirely absent from what some anarchists are doing. Which is ok, I support them anyway, even as I wanna engage them critically, as others have done and continue to do, on their racial politics and anarchohipster exclusions and ennui and hypermasculinism. Because I believe an organizing conversation can be as transformative and perhaps even moreso as/than a building occupation (and i am all about building occupations) and i believe a wider understanding of what the university is, who is the university, and what the university does, makes for a more radical set of questions and goals than those currently being put forward in some circles. That's the kernel of the paper i want to give in MN, I think.

Anyway, as I get deeper into my research, I'll try to blog here more regularly. I missed the GEO Strike entirely, and I'm not really providing the coverage of the UC struggles the title of this blog suggests I should be. But i was about to quit blogging altogether before Eli suggested the group blogging experiment, and I think i still have blogging fatigue from four years ago, and I'm going to try to make this a useful space for me and for folks who are still reading this thing anyway.

GEO at university of illinois votes to strike

2009-11-09T14:35:00.000-05:00

click for the press release

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE
GRADUATE EMPLOYEES’ ORGANIZATION REPRESENTS ONE OF LARGEST LOCAL
HIGHER EDUCATION BARGAINING UNITS IN THE UNITED STATES

URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS (November 7): On Monday, November 9th, the
Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will hold a press conference at 1:00 pm at
1001 S. Wright Street in Champaign, IL to announce the results of its
strike authorization vote.

Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of
participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. With the vote, GEO
members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to
call a strike at any time. The Graduate Employee’s Organization,
American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local
6300, AFL-CIO, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a labor
union representing all teaching and graduate assistants (TAs and GAs)
on the UIUC campus. With over 2600 GEO members, and over 2600
graduate employees represented in the bargaining unit, the GEO is one
of the largest higher education union locals in the United States.

The GEO has been negotiating with UIUC administrators for over six
months. The GEO seeks a contract that will set the minimum salary for
a 50% nine month appointment at the University’s estimate of a living
wage for a graduate student in Urbana-Champaign and protect tuition
waivers for TAs and GAs. While the GEO presented the administration
with a full contract proposal on the first day of negotiations, the
UIUC administration declined to offer a counterproposal until August
11th, just four days before the GEO’s previous contract expired. The
UIUC administration’s initial contract proposal sought to freeze GEO
wages for three years, reserve the right to furlough and layoff
graduate employees in good standing, and to count “in-kind”
compensation such as housing or meal vouchers toward the minimum
salary mandated in the contract.

The GEO understands that the state of Illinois is in dire economic
straits, but as University administrators pointed out in their FY 2010
budget request, this is the result of long standing deficiencies in
state level budget prioritization and not a sudden result of the
recent national recession. Instead of championing the university’s
historic land grant mission, UIUC administrators have embraced the
national tendency toward the corporatization of the public higher
education system. Their consequent failure to secure adequate state
funding leaves the social science, humanities, and fine arts
especially vulnerable. Worse, it jeopardizes access to higher
education for many who have the capacity and desire, but not the
financial resources to attend the University. If increased state
funding is also necessary to providing at least a living wage for all
campus employees, then the GEO expects the UIUC administration to
forcefully make that case to the Higher Education Appropriations
Committee, other state legislators, and the Governor.

Instead of advocating on the behalf of students and workers,
administrators were granting costly favors to state politicians. The
former Chancellor diverted $450,000 of discretionary funds to provide
jobs and scholarships for politically well-connected but undeserving
applicants. Another $400,000 went to the attorneys who represented
the University before the Governor’s investigative committee, and
another $550,000 to new faculty appointments for the former President
and Chancellor. In this context, the GEO finds it hard to trust the
UIUC administration when it argues that there is not enough money to
provide a living wage. From the GEO’s perspective, it appears that
budget priorities are simply out of place. When campus revenues rose
by 7% in FY 2009, only 0.8% ($2.7 million) went to undergraduate
instruction. Meanwhile, the Chief Information Officer’s budget rose
by 10.9 percent ($1.6 million), and the Division of Intercollegiate
Athletics budget increased 6.2 percent ($4.1 million).

GEO bargaining unit members teach 23.1% of all undergraduate course
hours at UIUC, and perform comparably to faculty in official student
evaluations of instructor performance as measured by the University of
Illinois’ Center for Teaching Excellence. Yet our salaries draw only
6.5% of state funding, including salaries for GAs and Research
Assistants, who don’t teach. By contrast, faculty salaries draw over
55% of the University budget. Graduate employee labor is vital to the
fiscally efficient provision of the University’s core service,
academic instruction. Should graduate employee salaries be set to a
living wage, the University would still have a large pool of
inexpensive and high quality instructional and administrative labor.

GEO members have been working hard to avoid a strike. Hundreds of GEO
members have participated in three major rallies, and GEO members have
also lobbied the Illinois House of Representatives Higher Education
Appropriations Committee, spoken with state legislators from
Champaign, actively informed campus community members about the
issues, and maintained a constant presence in Urbana-Champaign print,
radio and television media. The Illinois Student Senate has passed
two resolutions in support of the GEO and the decision to authorize a
strike, and GEO supporters in the faculty senate are working to pass a
similar resolution. GEO members and allies will hold a rally at the
University of Illinois Board of Trustees Meeting in Springfield, IL on
November 12.

As with any labor negotiation, however, the most effective pressure
has been the threat of a strike. Only after GEO members at a General
Membership Meeting voted unanimously to file an “intent to strike”
notice did the University administration offer their first compromise
proposals. Accordingly, the Coordinating Committee and Steward’s
Council of the GEO voted unanimously to hold a strike authorization
vote from November 4-6. By voting to authorize a strike, GEO members
have taken a vital step in holding the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign administration accountable to its stated commitment
to excellence in research and undergraduate education.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Peter Campbell, GEO Communications
Officer, odell.campbell@gmail.com, 253-222-5861, or the GEO office at
geo@uigeo.org, 217-344-8283, 1001 S. Wright Street, Champaign, IL,
61820. Information about the GEO can also be found on our website at
www.uigeo.org.
###

2009-11-01T13:12:00.003-05:00

TAs at McMaster University have called a strike for 8 am monday. Info and updates here.

addendum to the last post

2009-10-20T23:53:00.001-04:00

Couple quick clarifications, because that last post got a bit sprawling and sloppy. I want to try to clear up some points quickly before I fall asleep.

1. Unoriginal, but I think the role of the student new left in '68 and "the sixties" is somewhat overemphasized. What does the broader "revolt against work" look like inside and outside of the university? How might Russo's arguments be recast if we place them within the genealogy of the "long 1960s" which begin sometime in the late 1930s and end, depending on whom you ask, somewhere around 1973?

2. I edited the stuff on the salt metaphor to remove or at least mute somewhat the active/passive binary as a frame for the distinction i'm trying to draw, since that binary smacks of masculinism. I'm not sure I redeem the metaphor, but it felt kinda glaring to me as it was.

3. I feel lately like I'm always a) defending politics organized around the point of production to poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites and b) defending, in both the abstract and in reference to historical and current contexts particular forms of unionism as radical and deeply important struggles. I am sick of this, and I hate it when people look at me like I'm a trotskyist or something. I mean, really, let's have a more nuanced understanding of the political and its molecular and capillary operations. Or can we think in Gramscian/Stuart Hallian/ terms about the many sites and forms of struggle and contestation? Which isn't to say I'm not in solidarity with poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites or people who get organizing around work but want to see the union as an always already compromised form or something. I'm just not a fan of sectarian squabbling. Well, unless (and I'm going to get shit for this) the ISO is involved, in which case I tend to have a rather short fuse based on past offenses, like lying at membership meetings, threatening to punch me in the face, etc.

I may have more to say on these subjects later. For now I postpone Harvey & my diss in favor of Ruthie Gilmore's Golden Gulag.

Academic Neoliberalisms, comparative and otherwise

2009-10-20T17:00:00.002-04:00

I just finished, this morning, Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart, which is a really brilliant account of the history of feminized labor and evangelical reformations of gender in the making of christian capitalism. The first half adeptly sketches out the ways in which it's the immaterial, affective labor of entry-level Wal-Mart employees which makes possible the Ozarks' shift from the anticorporate populisms of the fin de siecle West to the christian corporate familial politics which obtain in the cultural politics of the world which Sam Walton stood as an imperfect metonym for. Moreton's an excellent labor historian, and her grasp of how these transformations occur and the implications of her rereading of the history of the late twentieth century U.S. are profoundly important.

The second half of Moreton's book deals largely with the role of the corporate-religious-university nexus in the nationalization and globalization of Wal-Mart's corporate presence and (and through) its increasingly evangelical mode and ideology of "free enterprise," its connections to the surging new right, missionary evangelism and free trade neoliberalism in Latin America, and accumulation by dispossession and enclosure on an increasingly global scale. The university - actually three universities - University of the Ozarks, Harding, and John Brown (not the militant abolitionist) - serve as sites of social reproduction, suturing the products of Wal-Mart workers' affective labor to the Republican Party, the New Right student movements (especially Students in Free Enterprise, or SIFE,) missionary christianity, and the origins of neoliberal globalization.

Moreton's description of the relationships between these universities and the growth of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. resonates for me with this week's readings in two important ways. First, it offers an account of the kinds of classed destinies of the university and their relationships to students and study which are very different either from the kind of subversive criminality of the latter gestured to by Moten and Harney in the interview i discuss in a previous post, or in the episteme-wrecking shifts Alessandro Russo makes the case for in his essay "Destinies of The University." Like Eli M, I have some difficulty with the rather broad rejection of "classism" as a social analytic for post'68 academic capitalism-or-whatever. My problem, I think, is that there's too much slippage, Russo's "classism" is too broad and unwieldy a term, conflates neoliberal rearticulations of class into racialized and biopolitical representational frames with a political dissappearance of class as political demand, something I don't really see evidence for. If the New Right found rather ingenious new ways to articulate race and class, the two were hardly strangers before 1968, and in both the U.S. and in Europe, new social movements have often transformed and expanded rather than discarded the class and labor politics of earlier movements. Moreton's book, in fact, suggests how even in the absence of a labor metaphysic, the politics of class and the surplus labor of proletarianized women service workers lie at the heart of the rise of the largest corporation and employer in the U.S. and Mexico and do so in part through an ideological state apparatus organized around evangelical conservative universities which offer an important new explanation for but do not in any way debunk the ways in which class and the social relationships of accumulation and exploitation which class constitutes, structure both the social and the university. Clearly the borderless subjects of Gokce Gunel's insightful ethnography of folks whose lives are affected by a U.S.-inspired, corporate, private university with a secluded, gated campus in northern Istanbul, are also relevant to the ways Moreton traces the movement of students, from Panama and Honduras and Mexico to the Ozarks and back, filtered through evangelical universities daily prayer meetings and Wal-Mart's corporate expansions into the global South.

I guess this has been more about Moreton than the polygraph journal. That's in part, I think, because the essays in the journal I was most struck by were Morgan Adamson's great essay on "The Financialization of Student Life," the tail end of which I saw her present at the Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis in April of last year, and Eli M and Isaac Kamola's piece on enclosure and struggles over the university's commons, which I also first encountered as a presentation at the same conference. And I've been thinking about that roundtable with Marc Bousquet and Fred Moten and Stafano Harney some more, thinking about study and how it might or might not be in excs of labor. I've been thinking about the claim Moten and Harney made in a fantastic essay on professionalization and exodus in the university, that the "only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one," that the radical intellectual comes to steal from - and to escape to - the university, which is always a deeply compromised space. Professionalization within it is thus cooptation, labor discipline, etc. I'm not sure it can't be denied that the university is a place of refuge - the assumed subject here has to be an academic or at its furthest plausible limits an undergrad. Non-academic employees at universities, particularly folks who are subcontracted and outsourced service labor, often have very different relationships to the institution. But I also think that the false premises on which one comes to the institution need not necessarily be those of criminality. Some unions ask militants who want to organize to take jobs at particular workplaces and to help organize from within. Folks in the labor movement call this practice "salting." The national right to work committee condemns it as a form of sabotage, destruction from within. I think, whether deliberately or not, that this is more or less how I approach(ed) graduate school. Not particularly interested in entering the profession, I came in large partha to organize. This was probably stupid, and I don't think I've been as effective, whether as an organizer or as an academic, over the last four years and two months, as I would like, but I still think it's worth recognizing this as another possible subject position for the subversive intellectual within the university - not just to form gypsy encampments, but to constitute instead the undercommons as a site of ferment, constant organizing and insurgency, and refusal of the university's modes of control and accumulation in ways which affirm rather than disrupt the prophetic modes of the undercommons' nomadic, liminal subjection. I guess one could argue that this is a more authoritarian and hierarchical mode of being in common than the more affinity based coterie of criminals and gypsies and, most provocatively, "maroons" Moten and Harney envision, but I don't know that I see that as necessarily the case. Nor am I sure that one model is more politically effective than the other. Anyway, it's a conversation to continue in the future, but this post is losing steam and I need to return this rented laptop to the work-study undergrads who run the laptop rental desk in the basement of the library. I do want to think more about what it means, though, to approach the academy as a salt, and as assault. But that sounds like the social war stuff, with which I have issues which I may address in a later post...

study?

2009-10-16T16:59:00.000-04:00

Working my way through the latest ish of the journal Polygraph in preparation for the next iteration of the blogging group with the two Elis, I stumbled on Stefano Harney's suggestion that those who choose to turn to the "local union" for support in organizing struggles within the university/for the undercommons will have to contend with a "research department full of thugs."

Now I should first say that I greatly enjoy most of Harney's work on the university, with and without Fred Moten. And I have had, especially over the last four plus years, my share of frustrations with local and international union structures and politics. But I think this is at best silly and at worst essentialist and elitist in the way it poses the union researcher as too coarse, to blunt, for the non-work of study towards which all academics should strive to devote their time, should flee to as refuge from teaching and other forms of labor which aren't in excess of the limits of labor. I know a lot of union researchers and many of them have profoundly complex understandings of how the university works, who works in the yniversity, where endowment value comes from, etc. More importantly, I see echoes here, in study's otherness from work which contradicts some of the gestures Moten and Harney have made in previous essays to expand how we understand labor in academic contexts, and perhaps I'm being unfair, of the kinds of rhetoric that John Sexton used four years ago when the administration of New York University tried and failed to destroy the flawed and embattled, but not particularly thuggish union which has consumed the bulk of my organizing and activist energies since I moved back to the city in 2004.

Ought we to be blindly and uncritically pro-union? In this age of "Workers United" and the N/UHW fight, it's impossible to have such an orientation, and that's not what I'm arguing for. Nor am I trying to pick a fight with Stefano Harney, who i think is pretty brilliant. Instead i want to think about the implications of the presence here of a lot of the tensions I've been trying to parse lately with regard to how radical academics have accepted and adopted the autonomist refusal of work into how we theorize our own labors. It seems like what gets Harney into trouble here is the need to rescue study by understanding it as something other than or beyond labor. Maybe we need to expand or challenge our understandings of exodus and refusal in ways which allow us to recognize, as I would argue Harney's co-interviewee Marc Bousquet has, the power and subjectivity of the refuse(d). How does the discursive abjection of labor function here in relation to the class politics and labor hierarchies of university spaces? Why must that which we need to refuse be made abject? Or, conversely, can study really be rescued from labor? Can it really be redeemed as the kind of anti- or non-capitalist commons that Eli Meyerhoff and Isaac Kamola talk about persuasively in the same volume?

Check back later in the week for my response to this week's readings. Apologies for the sentence structure of this blog entry -I wrote it on my phone. I need to stop doing that.

UCSC, Reoccupied

2009-10-16T09:06:00.001-04:00

taken from http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/ucsc-students-occupy-deans-office-15-october-2009-call-to-revolt/

UCSC STUDENTS OCCUPY DEAN’S OFFICE, 15 OCTOBER 2009: CALL TO REVOLT!

The glass walls of passivity, separating us from one another, can only be shattered with revolt. We are occupying a second building on the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California because we have answered the call of the first to occupy everything. Tonight is a demonstration to students and workers everywhere that the division between taking what you want and planning for a movement to come only appears as a problem for abstract thought about taking action. We only catch sight of the fires of the insurrection to come on the morning after the unrest of the night before.

What is a crisis anyway? It is the exclusion from work and public services of those most precariously situated within this system. To a crisis which is generalized, it is pointless to respond with generic activism. Activists of more prosperous eras held demonstrations. Still, they were unable to secure any lasting position for those on whose behalf they took “action”. As the current crisis unfolds, it is necessary to elaborate innovative forms of escalation and revolt. Our crisis is as much the failure of these tired forms of mobilization as it is the collateral damage caused by a growing economic catastrophe.

We have lived through too many cycles of defeat and must try something else. We are compelled to negate the crisis itself with whatever capacity we have now. Tonight, we have taken the Humanities and Social Sciences building. As long as we occupy this space, Dean Sheldon Kamienecki will be deprived of his workplace. This empty figurehead, who last spring made decisions about what jobs get cut and which departments lose funding, will no longer have access to the means of his existence. While we hope this occupation quickens his pulse and that of administrators like him, we have not taken this building to send them a message. Although we hope that they fear for the integrity of their documents and office supplies, we do not occupy to demand the reinstatement of funding channels to what they were before the crisis exposed the fucked up priorities of this school. This occupation is a second call to everyone who has been targeted by this crisis. Which is to say: it is a call to everyone. We cannot wait for some movement to come that will stop the forces pushing ever more people out of this system. Our task is to disrupt the functioning of this system by appropriating what is ours for ourselves.

No amount of organizational meetings, phone calls or emails to legislators have the capacity to build a movement. Society cannot negotiate its way towards liberation. There is no need to raise consciousness. The crisis is already making people painfully aware of the situation. Peaceful marches, rallies and symbolic protests, attracting spectacular media attention, will never increase our ranks because this very process of mediation reduces us to passive observers of what is supposed to be our own activity. Organization for action has become an end in itself cut off from the reality of capitalism in decline. How many voices of outrage are required for a political rally to have a set demands met? We all know the answer to this question: no amount of voices will ever be enough. There is no power to which we can appeal except that which we find in one another. The organization of the movement occurs whenever a freshman or a service worker learns how to barricade doors, how to avoid arrest, how to pick locks. The movement has staying power when, for every one of us who grows tired, there are three who will take our place.

We have recently learned that the University of California does not use tuition money or student fees to fund research and education. On the contrary, they place one hundred percent of this money into an account with the Bank of New York Mellon Trust in order to protect their borrowing power in credit markets. They hold our tuition as collateral in order to finance the largest and most speculative construction projects in the state of California. UC pledged collateral rose by 60% with the last issue of bonds to $6.72B from $4.2B. The number of students taking out debt has risen 20% since 2000: 80-100% for students of color. Average debt levels for graduating seniors rose to $23,200 in 2008 alone, a 24% percent increase over 2004. We know very well what is going on: the University’s ability to finance bonds for new construction increases in direct proportion to their ability to slash spending on education, raise student fees indefinitely and ensure that students cannot disrupt the function of the University itself. This spectacular credit swap finances new construction on the backs of parents who increasingly risk foreclosure on their homes and students who will work the rest of their lives to pay off their debt. The University of California has already been securitized, ensuring that none of us have a future within this system.

We in the US have been too timid for far too long. We are afraid of the police. We are afraid of losing our jobs or getting expelled from school. We are afraid of people shouting in the streets. Security is the watchword of our era: no one wants to take risks. But this illusion of comfort — our separation from one another into perfectly compartmentalized lives, disconnected and self-amused — increasingly unravels with each person thrown out of work, every family evicted from their home and each student unable to afford unending tuition increases without bartering away her future on credit markets. It remains for those terminated by this system to use these failures as flash-points for generalizing the struggle. Perhaps, at last, we can understand one another, for we are all going bankrupt.

Press contact: (eight-three-one) 332-8916

website: http://occupyca.wordpress.com

comparative academic neoliberalisms, part deux

2009-09-26T13:24:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm typing this on my iPhone keyboard since the laptop the nyu library just rented me doesn't seem to have functioning Internet access, I need to prepare for my diss proposal defense Tuesday, and I woke up at 4 this morning because of a car horn sypmhony outside my window, so this is probably going to be both bad and short. That said, I did want to get a post up about the articles we read this week from Inter-asia Cultural Studies on university rankings, corporatization, and locally useful knowledge production.

It was initially interesting to me that Myungkoo Kang's discussion of the neocolonial predicament of South Korean universities, in his "'State-guided' university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production" mentions not at all the significant movement against neoliberal globalization which Kuan-Hsing Chen and Sechin Y.S. Chien describe in that country. Chen and Chien ("Knowledge production in the era of neoliberal globalization: reflections on the changing academic conditions in Taiwan") claim that the alterglobalization movement in Korea "has attained such a level that the National Alliance of Progressive Professors is engaged in organizing a labor union of university teachers.". (224). This "relatively massive progressive force within the South Korean academic community," has been, they note, thus far unable to stave off the colonizing tyranny of the Social Science Ciation Index (SSCI). Presumably even some of these "progressive" faculty endorse the SSCI as marker of scholarly distinction and rigor. Yet Chen and Chien are sanguine about the possibilities for such an organization as that which the NAPP has undertaken to build.

Kang ignores such a project altogether. One could ascribe nefarious motives here - he is, after all, a dean, and deans tend to have a rather dim view of academic labor organizing, at least in the U.S. But I think there are other, equally salient questions to be raised here about Kang's findings and argument.

First, what might more locally oriented knowledge production mean? What's at stake in this call? Is this import-substitution academic knowledge production, academic nationalism, or qua Walter Mignolo, an attempt to trace the local histories which limn, demarcate, and traverse what Quijano calls "the coloniality of power"? Is it some combination thereof? Certainly the SSCI's reign marks 'colonial conditions' of knowdge production for South Korean universities, but is it a cause or a symptom? Can the research university ever not be a colonial apparatus? To whom would "locally suitable" knowledge be "suitable," and for what uses?

More when I get to an actual computer, maybe...

things university students do in "the community:"

2009-09-15T22:34:00.002-04:00

enact summary executions for property crimes.

NYU news roundup

2009-09-15T09:04:00.001-04:00

New acquisition NYU-poly, or, as i like to call it, nyupoly, is already being firmly integrated into the neoliberal frameworks of higher education's relationship to municipal funding and spatial practices.

According to Niswander, NYU-Poly selected 27 companies from around 300 applicants based on what would most benefit Manhattan's economy. NYU-Poly offers the companies mentor services, business seminars and networking opportunities.

"I think its fantastic that NYU-Poly stepped up to do this," said David Hochman, executive director of the Business Incubator Association of New York State, Inc.

"JSex," meanwhile, is trying to move in more rarefied company. After all, what better agent of universities' neoliberal gloablization than the guy who calls his school's destiny the becoming of "the university of the other," who told an audience at the U.N. that the mission of the 21st century is "to embrace the other?" Interested readers may find a copy of the study group's report here. I may discuss it in detail in a future post.

EDIT: Also, just because your endowment's in freefall doesn't mean you shouldn't get a two million dollar pay raise, i guess.

some thoughts on comparative academic neoliberalisms

2009-09-12T22:26:00.003-04:00

My sense of how neoliberal restructuring has obtained in countries other than the U.S., and, uh, Abu Dhabi, and to a much lesser extent Italy and (from Slaughter and Leslie's accounts) the U.K and Australia is very spotty, so I'm thankful to Eli for bringing me in to a conversation oriented thusly. In thinking about neoliberal reforms and student responses to them in New Zealand, Cameroon, Mexico, and Latin America more broadly, I noticed some interesting overlaps and lessons for the work I do, which focuses on service workers at U.S. universities and hospitals and universities' roles in urban development and renewal. This is sketchy and not particularly well-thought out, but i'm having a pretty hectic week, and it's all I've got right now.

First, I think the differential and multivalent, historically contingent nature of "neoliberalization" which Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron describe in their account of the respatialization and global integration (one might call it the Australization, as its into the Oceanic cycle of academic capitalization that New Zealand higher education gets initially and most directly affixed) of the New Zealand higher education system, is instructive. Talking about the "corporatization of the university" or certainly "the corporate university" masks a much more complex set odf institutional and regional convergences and ruptures. Andrew Ross, in his contribution to The University Against Itself, as well as in his contribution to the edu-factory listserve, talks about "corporate university" as "lazy shorthand" for the incomplete, tentative articulation of knowledge corporation and the university as a generator and incubator of intellectual and other forms of property, a formulation I've found valuable mostly because it opens the conversation up to recent autonomist work on the diffusion of informatized production, cognitive capital, and immaterial labor, in short, the general intellect, across multiple social strata and nodes throughout the coloniality of power. But if Ross is right, then I think we can take from Larner and Le Heron the caveat that such convergences are always historically and geographically specific, that "neoliberalization" can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations. More needs to be said about the relationship between neoliberalization and massification in both Larner and Le Heron and, say, Bernasconi's work on the decline of the "Latin American Model of the University," but while I'm intrigued by the subversive potential the former claim to see in the reorganizations which neoliberalism initiates, I'm not really sure they adequately explore the relationship of such openings and opportunites to neoliberalization policies nor convincingly map out what "possibilities" are being produced by the restructuring. I do appreciate, though, the corrective here against the kind of simplified, pat nostalgic lamentations for the moment of faculty governance and the hegemony of what we might cheekily call paleoliberal governmentality in higher education and its presumed utility for and place within the social.

Piet Konings' "University Students' Revolt, Ethnic Militia, and Political Violence during Political Liberalization in Cameroon" offers a stark timeline of the bloody suppression of anglophone migrants' student movements in 1990s Yaounde. The scale of violence and repression here is remarkable, but what I think I find most interesting is the relationship - and Rhoads and Mina remark upon this as well - between the university and the regime, the way in which the professoriate serves as a corps for directing and helping to foment the consolidation of the regime's power over economic liberalization, as well as the ways in which the campus becomes a site of violent jingoist political reaction allied to the regime and the exercise of state brutality to defeat threats to the ruling party's grip on the universities as sites of the reproduction and training of the nation's technocrats.

Rhoads and Mina (in comparative education review, vol 45 no. 3) attempt an analysis of the 1999-2000 UNAM occupation and strike via Gramsci and Mannheim. Unfortunately Gramsci is both underutilized here and utilized in a clumsy and unhelpful manner, quoted at legnth, but in ways which don't really address the central problematics of the strike particularly well, and mobilized, as he so often was by the eurocommunists of an earlier moment, to preclude more radical possibilities and the kinds of dangerous and potent connections that are the most powerful implications, for me, anyway, of Gramsci's work - (I'm thinking here of 'Americanism and Fordism,' of the beyond of Taylorism, the biopolitics before biopolitics of the fordist worker, etc.) UNAM's "ultras" here could do with more careful and complex parsing and critique even if the results are the same, and I wonder what gets lost in the clearly vanguardist orientation of the authors' engagement with both university and strike in a context which is perhaps too heavily electoral, but here I may be displaying my inner anarchosyndicalist a bit too obviously.

I think I'll hold off for now on comment on Andres Bernasconi's "Is There a Latin American Model of the University" until I've had time to digest it a bit more. It is in many ways the most complete and rigorous work of the four, evincing both a broad historical sweep and perhaps both a firmer and more transnational grasp of the history and transformations of higher education institutions than some of the other articles. Perhaps most valuably, its complex situating of the contradictory and problematic export of academic neoliberalism U.S. style to radically different political and economic contexts deserves wider comment and circulation. What does the export of the kinds of entrepreneurial and convergent modes described by SLaughter and Leslie, Slaughter and Rhoades, and Etzkowitz et al. mean in the context of states which are historically outside of the global North and have not really been party to either the rise of the service sector (except as a source of migrants to staff it) or the shift to value-added production in the postindustrial economies of places like the U.S. and southern Canada's urban belt?

2009-09-12T09:16:00.005-04:00

Last night I finished reading Model City Blues. Last year, you may recall, I came down against Paul Bass's criticism of the book without having actually read it. Now that I have, I want to talk a little bit about the text itself.

Model City Blues is an important and fascinating book, one which speaks volumes about the history of New Haven, its people, and its social movements, about the struggles over the right to the city that defined the last half of the twentieth century and continue to define this moment, about gentrification and dislocation, recuperation and organizing.

My undergraduate senior essay was about the relationship between the forms of resistance Jackson writes about and the emergence of Local 35 as a militant force in the city by the early 1970s, so I knew some of the story Jackson tells here. I knew about HPA and John Wilhelm's involvement with them. I knew about AIM and Rick Wolff and the ring road, about Oak Street and Trade Union Village.

But I didn't know about the origins of the Freddie Fixer Parade in the urban renewal machine's attempts to produce consent for Dixwell slum clearance. I didn't know that Malcom X spoke in New Haven's first mosque on Dixwell ave, didn't know that the half empty shopping areas on lower Dixwell were themselves products of renewal policies, or about the rent strikes led by the Hill Neighborhood Union or that so many people were arrested during the riots that the NHPD renditioned people to Farmington and other fairly distant cities. I didn't know about State Street's Bread and Roses Cafe, or Dixwell's "sit-outs" against renewal. New Haven has a long history of people sitting in the street as a form of protest and a way to reclaim contested, policed, and "planned" space, a history Jackson evokes quite powerfully. This is a theoretically rich but deeply grounded work of scholarship. The breadth of Jackson's archives and interviews are astounding, and the careful way Jackson situates the events of thee Lee era in relation to New Haven's present and more recent past (NHSB redlining, YNHH unionbusting, University Properties expansion and Yale's technocratic (and biopolitical) optic of urban development) is skillfull and politically resonant. I would have liked some account of why Edward Logue, the first staff organizer of what's now Local 35, becomes a Robert Moses disciple and one of the betes noires of New Haven social history as the grand poobah of renewal and dislocation - his younger brother later became mayor - or the role of union leaders like Vincent Sirabella, a hero to the Yale Unions and the former organizing director of HERE - in supporting renewal policies and the Lee machine. But this isn't their book. It's a book, instead, about the Fred Harrisses and James Gibbses, the residents of the Hotel Strand and the folks who fought against Yale's expansion into the Hill many years later, about the people who collectively imagined and fought for a different mode of urban existence than that held by the planners and highway builders on church street, and it's a valuable and insightful account of those movements and their place in urban history. Go read it. Now.

Ok, next up on this blog will be the first in a series, hopefully, of posts in a conversation with Eli on international crises in and contours of academic neoliberalism. Yeah, that's right. This blog is back. (Maybe.)

2009-09-08T10:53:00.009-04:00

Books I have read so far this semester
Martha Biondi: To Stand And Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

Hardt and Negri: Commonwealth

Bethany Moreton: To Serve God and Wal-Mart
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Endnotes No. 1 Gilles Dauve, Theorie Communiste, etc.
Polygraph 21

Books I Want to read by the end of this semester:

David Graeber - Direct Action: An Ethnography

Odd Arne Westad: The Global Cold War

Stephan M. Brafdley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University

Anti-Oedipus and a thousand plateaus, finally.

Juno Diaz's Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union

The Canal Builders

Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement

Security, Territory, Population: Foucault
Charles Payne's I got the light of freedom

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia
Giovanni Arrighi 0 Adam Smith in Beijing
Achille Mbembe - On The Postcolony
to be amended and appended as things develop.

2009-08-06T22:11:00.002-04:00

Just finished an edit (there should be more but may not) of my last incomplete of graduate school. I'm an article revision away from being able to actuallyt work on my dissertation, though I've spent much of the summer having nothing to do with my academic work, instead walking an average of between 14 and 17 miles every day around brooklyn. I've walked to mill basin, to bergen beach, to Canarsie and east flatbush and brownsville, to flushing meadows for the colombian independence day celebration with Johana, through the hasidic triangle of Boro Park/Crown Heights/South WIlliamsburg, down Ocean Parkway and up Utica and across Linden Boulevard (cue a tribe called quest reference, though I haven't yet walked as far as jamaica) down gerritsen and through marine park and into mud puddles, bensonhurst benches and Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay and Flatlands and Middle Village (Queens) and Parkville and Homecrest. It's been amazing and i don't really want to stop, but I need to devote more time to work, to performing my academic labors...

2009-07-12T19:19:00.003-04:00

I walked up 45th street from my apartment across sunset park and the whole of Borough Park to where it ends at the junction of 18th avenue and Dahill, then up 18th to Ditmas Park, up Marlborough Road to Caton Ave and the Parade Grounds, to Parkside and Ocean and into the park, along its eastern edges to grand army plaza, up to 5th and flatbush and then back home, about 10 miles. I'd forgotten, until recently how much i prefer walking places i don't know that well to retracing the same route everyday. I hope this isn't my farewell to Brooklyn or this apartment, that I can stay here after august and stay in my apartment for at least the next year. But I'm also thinking about next steps, about what I do and where I go when funding runs out, about what to make of the second half of the summer.

Congrats to the PTAIs at Western Michigan University, "part of a growing trend." And the long stella doro strike in Riverdale has ended, though the greenwich hedge fund that owns the factory is now threatening to close in october. More on this later, perhaps.

FAR 4 : the new frontier of academic class war.

2009-07-01T08:06:00.007-04:00

We won't pay for NYU's crisis, but that won't stop them from trying to force us to.

Last week NYU finally confirmed to the graduate student body that it planned to implement its "FAR 4" restructuring this fall. FAR 4 purports to abolish, formally, the category of teaching assistant in favor of mass adjunctification of TA labor on a putatively voluntary basis. Theoretically NYU grad employees would now be able to join the adjuncts union, or so the deans claim - in fact they still have yet to discussFAR-4 with local 7902 (the adjuncts' union) and have offered only flimsy explanations for how grad employees would be able to meet the contact hour cutoffs for adjunct union membership.

That's the least of folks' worries, though. FAR-4 would, in the short term, free up some time and give folks in their first five years a small amount of extra cash. Maybe 8,000 bucks for two semesters of teaching, depending on what it is you're teaching and how much time you spend in the classroom. But there's a rigid five year funding cutoff replacing a somewhat more fluid, if nonetheless exploitative in itself current arrangement where full TA appointments are often still available to 6th and 7th year students in many departments. So few PhD students ever finish in five years - something that a modest decline in teaching "responsibilities" - and the email sent by the deans to department chairs and DGSes two weeks ago suggests that all current PhD students will be expected to fulfill all remaining "obligations," despite the fact that FAR 4 supposedly completely disambiguates teaching labor from the conditions of graduate employee "financial aid" (i.e. pay) - that FAR 4 will likely create a permanent corps of liminal, superexploited, "superannuated" grad employees teaching 3/2 loads for less money than i get paid to teach a 1/1. In the labor movement, we call that a speed-up. A pretty gross one at that. And it's a speed up which may only be available to non-intl students: despite vague administrative promises to "work around" f-1 Visa working hours/week and demonstrated level of support restrictions, the math just doesn't compute. If one teaching assistant gig is supposed to be twenty work hours per week, as we're all told during our teacher trainings, and twenty hours per week now pays about $4000 per semester, how do I demonstrate I have $20,000 dollars of support if I can't work more than 20 hours per week as a condition of my VISA and am not independently wealthy? Dude, it's like herrenvolk exploitation!

FAR 4 has been framed explicitly as an anti-union measure by the deans, a way to "finesse" an expected reversal of the National Labor Relations Board's 2004 Brown Decision, to preempt expected actions by the federal government to restore federal labor protections to graduate employees at private universities. Even if they aren't lying about the possibility of joining the adjunct union, NYU administrators know full well that FAR 4 would, by rendering much of our labor and compensation invisible under the sign of "financial aid," dramatically reduce and circumscribe what aspects of our work and compensation we would be able to negotiate. Health care, for instance, would be off-limits, still subject, as it has been for the four years since GSOC's last contract expired, to administrative whim and fiat. That's not an acceptable alternative to a GSOC contract, clearly. And one doubts that local 7902 is particularly jazzed about the creation of a subclass of pseudoadjuncts who can take bargaining unit work (though adjunct positions fromerly known as ta jobs will supposedly be reserved for graduate students) but won't be on equal footing with the rest of its membership in several important respects.

"be careful what you do, because the lie becomes the truth."

Oh, and then there's the fact that the whole thing appears to be a sham. Not only will we be doing the same work, but at least if administrative communiques to department chairs and dgses are to be believed, the very disambiguation between teaching labor and graduate employee "funding" is nonexistent. Everyone admitted to the graduate school prior to the spring of 2009 is still "obligated" to teach as a condition of our funding. So what FAR 4 means for us is a continued attack on our union rights, a speed up both of our labor and of our time to degree with no relaxing of either requirements.

Merry crisis, indeed.

(This is but a sample of FAR 4's implications. Others of note include the reliance on the "moral authority" of the faculty to compel grad employees to teach after/if ever the disambiguation actually takes place i.e., the hypermanagerialization of the faculty/grad employee relationship, and much more!)

Folks I've talked to over the last three months (since this plan was initially made public - sorry for not blogging, by the way) have been both highly skeptical of the administration's claims that FAR 4 will allow us to teach less but also initially pessimistic and defeated. Thankfully, the more we learn about what this plan is and what it does, the more people seem amped up to fight it. It's going to be an interesting year. But hey, if you wanna be starting something, you got to be starting something.

(give me points for not slipping in "they don't care about us" or "scream," both of which are relevant, or babbling about Manu Dibango, except in praeteritio. As always, only I am culpable for the above blog entry and its many failings, hypertext links to michael jackson videos, and the opinions expressed and claims made within.)

2009-06-07T17:58:00.004-04:00

Deleted the post about last weekend, since it didn't seem all that useful or well-written, but i will soon write a longer piece about GSOC's recent travails, so keep reading. kthxbai.

.

2009-05-16T15:38:00.000-04:00

Walking again past the new high rise condos off Flatbush that weren't here four years ago, the increasingly militarized parameter around Tillary and Flatbush, the hypersecuritized catholic church at Jay and Cathedral, the clinic in the bridge's shadow, playgrounds that reek of marijuana, and onto the bridge, past Jehovah's witness windows onto hardhats and endless storage closets and billboards. I'm walking and I'm thinking about the union and the last 4 years of my life and parasitic pseudotrotskyist raids and my diss proposal and the Dumbo yuppies below and everything I'm doing wrong. Walking past anarchist graffiti onto the river towards Manhattan's collapsing future and army of casual labor. A wedding in Brooklyn bridge park below, a water-taxi, a foggy haze. Jogging combines flanerie with Foucauldian discipline. My walks are not flanerie, because I'm going somewhere even if I don't know where that is yet. Lame defense. Fuck it, occupy everything. Occupy buildings and build committee. Past the FDR over the baseball fields of the LES and the swath of projects and into the Bowery and neoliberalism's shiny new facades. My walk is almost over.

this blog still exists

2009-05-15T21:17:00.000-04:00

But I put it on the back burner this semester because of organizing responsibilities, academics, and other work. I'm sitting in the panopticon now, reading Moon-Kie Jung's "Reworking Race and Labor: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement," thinking about my diss while trying to pull together this final incomplete, and staring out the window at the Empire State Building. Hopefully, I'll figure out how to use this space more productively over the next few weeks. I don't feel like it's had much of a purpose since that little essay about the movement in New Haven two years ago...

2009-04-21T09:35:00.003-04:00

Eight years since Vinny and the reggae truck and Quebec city. And now it's Stimpy and FAR 4 and "moral authority," about which i may blog later but must now away...

dollhouse goes to college

2009-03-27T22:17:00.003-04:00

Tonight's episode of Dollhouse read like page freaking 33 of Slaughter and Leslie's Academic Capitalism, "congealed intellectual labor" and all. As in Buffy Season 4 academic technoscience is sinister, but here the demons are us dude, (which was ultimately the point of Buffy as well, i suppose.) Unlike in Buffy we're not (yet) talking about the state - although the Dollhouse has infiltrated state agencies up the wazoo. Instead we get the relationship between the university, the shady biotech/pharma corporation, and the global conglomerate that erases animal rights' activists' brains and turns them into sex robot amnesiac rewriteable palimpsests. Instead of the military demonic academic complex it's an only slightly paranoid look at the nefarious entanglements of university patent offices and the politics of tech transfer and industrial espionage. Three Joss Whedon shows and three abused grad students - Buffy had Riley, so damaged by drug withdrawal and emasculation he pays vampires to bite him. Angel had Fred, thrown into a hell dimension by an advisor jealous of his student's superior command of theoretical physics, and dollhouse has the kid who beats his own skull to a pulp against the lab window tripping out on outsourced Dollhouse brain juice.

I'm writing this directly after the episode aired. I was not going to post about television again for a while, much less about a show i wrote quite a bit about last week, but the subject of this week's episode demanded otherwise. I may have more to say later or tomorrow or whenever I get the chance to rewatch the episode. In the meantime, it's back to the writing.

"Go live in your real world, if you ever did"/"I live to serve lunch."

2009-03-21T13:31:00.006-04:00

spoiler warning for the BSG finale blah blah blah.

Here's last night's episode of Dollhouse, which embraces the kinds of interpretive disputes I tried to stage between myself and Alyssa yesterday, albeit problematically, invoking race and sexual violence in some deeply inadequate ways. That said, I think it continues to raise intriguing questions along the lines I traced yesterday, and beyond. Judge for yourself.
We are all (maybe) dolls, and the dollhouse is a global phenomenon. Unoriginal? Perhaps, but intersting in light of some of the other frames through which the show asks us to understand the world it conjures.

In any event, it's more interesting than the finale of Tahmoh Penikett's other show, Battlestar Galactica, which slid easily back into the show's racist, imperialist Mormon iconography and made me want to smash my laptop in half. It's good that I didn't, because now i need ot get back to work on my paper(s). Sigh.

"Nothing is what it appears to be."

2009-03-20T18:27:00.001-04:00

These are the first lines of the pilot of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, the sixth episode of which will largely be ignored tonight, what with Battlestar Galactica ending and stuff, but Alyssa's written an interesting and thoughtful critique of the show for the Atlantic Monthly's website. (Awesomely, she interviews Whedon, who sounds exactly like Joss Whedon, which, as I already noted in this sentence, is awesome.)

Thus far, five episodes into the series, escapism has dominated the plotlines. In the premiere, Echo spent a hot weekend racing motorcycles, dancing, and having sex with a good-looking young man who treats her like a treasured girlfriend. In the second episode, she went rock-climbing and hunting with another hunk, who turned out to have a Most Dangerous Game fantasy. That’s a step closer to the risks of violence and coercion in human trafficking and sex work, but it’s not exactly realistic. And in the fourth episode, Echo pretended to be an abused prostitute to gain access to a vault full of valuable art she intends to steal. There’s something disturbing about using sympathy for victims of sexual violence to commit crimes, but the episode doesn’t explore whether we ought to be disgusted with someone—Echo’s client? Her handlers? Echo herself?—for designing and carrying out the con. There is no hint of the grubby realities of human trafficking, or of the intriguing alliance between feminism and evangelical Christianity that drives a great deal of anti-trafficking work in both the government and non-profit sectors.

Dollhouse could be a fascinating exploration of prostitution if Echo was able to consent, if she had a decision-making process we could assess and evaluate. And sex has been so large a part of Dollhouse that it threatens to drown out other facets of what once made Echo a person.

I share some of Alyssa's concerns regarding the sexual politics of how Dollhouse represents bodies which are, essentially, trafficked. Particularly in the non-Whedon-penned episodes, there's a very thin line between the revulsion and discomfort we're supposed to feel at the utter commodification not just of the "actives'" labor, or their bodies, but of their very identities, what someone more schooled in late twentieth century philosophical traditions than I would probably caution me against calling their "being." Alyssa's conversation with Whedon highlights these tensions to great effect. That said, I also want to map out some quick points of disagreement.

First, Alyssa says that Whedon and Tim Minear's Firefly " lacks a central conceit that ties it to contemporary American problems." I disagree with this. Firefly, produced in 2001 and 2002 and aired intermittently if at all over the course of 2002 before an abrupt and unjustified cancellation, was a space western, yes, but one which focused heavily (the 2005 follow up film Serenity even more so) on (inter)global corporate capitalism, on empire, on war, on piracy and margins and core-periphery post-wallersteinian world(s)-systems. Through subtle allegory, I want to argue that Firefly spoke and speaks directly to conversations about trade and development, rogue states and corporate power, the rule of experts and the tasking of bodies, which dominated political discourse in the decade before it aired, which recur in Dollhouse, and which remain deeply relevant seven years on.

This may seem like a nitpick, but I hope it also points us at a different way of reading Whedon, taking into account the warning that Olivia Williams' Adelle DeWitt, the Dollhouse's CEO, offers Caroline/Echo/Dushku in the series' opening moments. Alyssa is right to point toward the ways in which Dollhouse fails as an allegory for human trafficking, an important and deeply problematic form of labor arbitrage and migration in 21st century securitized global regimes of trade and work. But I want to argue that we also need to think about what it would mean to take Whedon at his word that he does not intend Dollhouse to be a show about trafficking, that trafficking operates in the show as a red herring for Agent Ballard to pursue in his attempt to discover the "real truth," something which is perhaps more sinister than and certainly altogether different than trafficking (a displacement Alyssa rightly identifies as uncomfortable) or which at least can not be easily represented and allegorized only under the sign of the human trafficking industry. That is not to say that I think it is wrong to consider the trafficking parallels, as Alyssa does very well, and to which Whedon himself admits, but, in light of the more tenuous, subtle ways in which Whedon and company have mobilized allegory in the past - i.e, not in the ripped from the headlines style of Battlestar Galactica (suicide bombers and cylon torture, etc) but instead through setting and how broader questions are framed, a more subtle and sometimes more effective symbolic politics than the law and order spin-off Whedon references in Alyssa's article.

I want, then, to suggest that we try, and hope that the show's writers will invite us (as they did in the pilot but not much since then), to read Dollhouse for the questions it raises about the gendering of digital virtualities, the commodification of life, the sexual politics of subject formation. What work does Whedon want mindwiping to do? What about it interests him as a story to tell, as, presumably, a metaphor for some contemporary cultural or social phenomena? What does this show, with its mindwiped pleasure dolls and action heroes, have to say about labor and knowledge, about how the corporation and the body and the computer are articulated together? And there are the broader questions of what Whedon et al want to achieve by destabilizing selfhood, placing us in a world where identities are in flux, cannot be trusted, are constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed in the most literal of ways. (And then of course, there's the theme, common to so much of Whedon's work, and which I am fascinated by, of the perverse politics of geek masculinities, feminized bodies as action figures, etc.) What if what's radical and important about Dollhouse is how compromised, how impossible "the real girl" is to recover? Wouldn't this radically decenter the kinds of privileged first world femininities Whedon's been criticized for reproducing and valorizing at the expense of, say, Kendra the short-lived mimetic Jamaican Vampire Slayer? I'm sure someone more versed in gender theory than I could rip me to shreds right now, and I have a lot of work I need to do (not sure when I'll even be able to watch either the dollhouse episode or the BSG finale,) but I'll end by saying that I think Alyssa has done us an enormous service by critically engaging Whedon's latest work, and I look forward to seeing what happens both with the series and with the critical dialogue which surrounds it.

EDIT: Further troubling any attempt to define "the real girl," for me, is the extent to which the show, at least in the pilot, frames itself as a direct critique of reality tv - the dollhouse itself as something like a combination of the real world house, with jobs assigned depending on the producers' whims, and the big brother house with constant surveillance and intrigue, etc. The reason the real echo is so elusive is that representations of reality are precisely what the show is trying to tackle.

Further thoughts on Watchmen

2009-03-16T00:48:00.005-04:00

I read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen for the first time when I was 15, in the summer of 1996, a decade after the 12 issues of the series were originally published. I found its admixture of superhero deconstruction, social critique of U.S. power in the late cold war, and interrogation of the meaning and history of the comic book fascinating, moreso than any other comic i'd read, and from the first comic i'd ever bought, an noirish John Byrne/Jim Aparo issue of Batman involving the murder of costumed impersonators, I'd read superhero and "nonsuperhero" comics voraciously throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. I have read Watchmen again several times in the last 13 years, so much so that my old trade paperback visibly demonstrates its wear. These subsequent readings have impressed upon me the work's concern with the parameters and implications of its genre and the narrative possibilities and politics therein, the interspersed panels from the black freighter story, the tijuana bibles, the flashbacks to the golden and silver ages (employed even more dramatically, perhaps, in Moore's noteworthy deconstruction of Rob Liefeld's odious Supreme years later) and the textual prefaces to each chapter (Hollis Mason, the physicist who writes about Dr. Manhattan, the interview with Adrian Veidt, etc.) Watchmen is a book about reading, about what it means to read, about what it means to read (superhero) comics. It is a comic book about comic books, a comic book about being a comic book about comic book about comic books.

And it is masterfully told - Moore and Gibbons both employ and exceed genre conventions, introducing, along with their now-compromised contemporary Frank Miller new "cinematic" narrative forms, but also playing, subversively, with the temporality and spatiality of the comic panel, the spatial and temporal organization of the page. One issue is entirely symmetrical to itself. Another plays with time in sophisticated and unprecedented ways for comic storytelling. Watchmen is Moore's magnum opus, still one of the most thoughtful accounts of what comics are, what it is they do, and how the superhero functions ideologically in 20th century U.S. culture. We get nerd masculinities and sexual (and commodity) fetishization, fascist revanchism and/as Randian objectivism (never unproblematized, never romantically embraced), cold war nuclear post-humanism planner states and Richard Nixon.

Zack Snyder's film abandons most of these things. Its social critique is far less complex, the intertextual metacritique gone altogether. Each panel becomes three minutes of bloody, aestheticized gore. Rohrshach's fascism becomes the director's and the viewers'. The adulteration of the film's politics is dramatic and has real consequences for how we must understand its project. The characters in the film are not archetypes to be critiqued and deconstructed and poked and prodded but rather static, commodified objects of the Warner Brothers gaze, not multivalent and ambiguous echoes of obvious tropes to be picked apart and read politically but instead crude exemplars of exactly the sort of mawkish, reactionary frames which the comic tears apart. This is Watchmen as Rob Liefeld himself would have staged it, watchmen as celebration of the grim and gritty, Watchmen as blooddarkstabstrikeforce ascendant, Watchmen as something which can be read as and only as clumsy noir. The extended and aestheticized violence is important here. We celebrate blood seeping under doorways and oil burning the skin of prison inmates rather than recoil at them, or recoil at our excitement, as occurs at least in my reading of the original material. Snyder's Watchmen operates as a justification for fascist superheroics rather than a critique of them.

Except for the Tijuana bible scene which makes no sense absent its place in the original text, the comic book is largely absent here as it has been for so many of the recent wave of superhero films, which i have discussed elsewhere on this blog. But Snyder's film does not engage this wave of films critically, as some critics suggested - rather it functions parasitically, proceeding from the assumption that dark sells more tickets to transform perhaps the most nuanced and intentionally ambiguous superhero comic ever into an empty, vacuous, univocal testament to the politics of a Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter. The directing deals poorly with Moore's dialogue and the "new stuff" is too horrendous to merit the designation 'risible.' But if anything the film's failure proves Moore's contention that his work is "unfilmable" to be an insightful claim, cognizant of the very different narrative structures employed in comics and on film, that adaptation is a political process, and that while 300 was fascist garbage in the original Frank Miller graphic novel, Zack Snyder's notion of how to do Watchmen "right" says more about the director than about the work.

More on this later, maybe, though i'll be spending the entirety of my "break" writing, with hopefully some grading thrown in as well. Ugh.

EDIT More on Moore, and the great Grant Morrison on what comics (can) mean.

Police On My Back

2009-03-11T07:50:00.001-04:00

Whose school? Theirs, apparently.

On Tuesday night at approximately 11 p.m. more than 50 New York Police Department officers and about 30 police cars flooded the south side of Washington Square Park, setting up barricades that stretched from the entrance of Bobst Library to the Kimmel Center.

Though some early reports from police officers at the scene identified the action as an anti-terrorism drill, NYU spokesman John Beckman confirmed otherwise. Because of some discussion among students at the New School that there would be a protest outside of Bobst and "given the turn the protest took outside Kimmel last time," he said, the administration took “due precaution” to protect the university.

Officers at the scene confirmed that the university had asked the NYPD to come out and protect the campus, though they were under the impression that it would be a CUNY or SUNY demonstration and that it would occur at 12 a.m.

Resist, Occupy, Grade Papers

2009-03-09T22:56:00.005-04:00

Today somewhere between 70 and 100 NYU graduate employees occupied the cavernous lobby of Elmer Holmes Bobst Panopticon for an hour and, wearing our "GSOC Is Here To Stay" t-shirts and a panoply of awesome signs created in a frenzy of creativity and unintentionally-inhaled marker fumes, graded, read, and otherwise made visible some of the many forms of the labor the university administration's been trying to occlude and obfuscate for so many years.

After a vicious anti-union campaign, after everything the bush administration could throw at us, we're not only still here, we're growing every day. Today's action sent a clear message to President Sexton and his "University Leadership Team," (Beckman, fresh from his 'mountainous region,' was wearing a puce fleece vest and looking about nervously) that we aren't going away, that we're in this for the long haul, that they might as well negotiate because none of the many ways they've tried to destroy our union have been successful and none will be.

I like actions - like one which took place six years ago last week - that combine the performative, the disruptive, and the practical (that is, the committee-building,) this action worked because it did this well. I'm excited for the next steps.

Oh, by the way, Watchmen (the movie) was atrocious, poorly directed, politically lobotomized, an utter failure at capturing or gesturing towards the comic's complex intertextualities and deconstructionist position. Indeed this was an over the top, milleresque, grim and gritty orgy of hypermasculinity and fascist aesthetics, exactly the sort of thing that Watchmen parodized and critiqued and which only Rob Leifeld ever thought it actually stood for. Alan Moore should be very glad his name was nowhere on this thing. I want my twelve fifty back.

make NYU not abhorable

2009-02-20T16:15:00.007-05:00

I was never entirely comfortable with the slogan "take back nyu," if only because NYU was never ours, always anathema to the university i have spent much of the last decade trying to create, always the enterprise university, the engine of gentrification and commoditization fueled by precarious labor and massive debt burdens. That is, until wednesday, when dozens of students took over the 3rd floor of Kimmel, took the space not "back" (this was not reaction) but for the purposes of a wide-ranging but interconnected set of demands - disclosure, divestment, recognition, collective bargaining, justice, openness, transparency.

Just before noon today, the NYU administration, in a strategy built entirely upon lies and fear, summoned the negotiators under the pretense that it had come in good faith, but instead secluded them from the other occupiers and told everyone they were suspended, a group which included friends and former students of mine. Then the security guards rushed the Kimmel Marketplace, and it was over. (What better site for an occupation at a university so explicitly ruled by neoliberal logics of profit maximalization, privatization of public space and resources, and ruthless disciplinary repression of workers and other movements?)

A couple scattered thoughts as I try now to focus on my dissertation proposal. First, this outcome has the potential to be extremely demobilizing, which is certainly what NYU intends. Let's not let this happen. Too many people put too much on the line to let this be anything other than a beginning, a point from which to stage new struggles to transform the university into a space of justice and democracy rather than the finanicalization of immaterial and service labor, the accumulation of cognitive and other capital. NYU is trying to suspend and unspecified number of protesters and evict and ban them from its residence halls. The university is trying to forclose upon its future, to eat, as the old New Left would have put it, its young. So I think a task for those of us who share with those who went in a vision for a transformed university is to develop strategies for countering these attacks and moving forward, building stronger movements and expanding our reach and our demands.

"2,4,6,8: John Sexton is an asshole"
"3,5,7,9: Where's my fucking contract?"
- psychology graduate student, GSOC strike, 2005-2006

convenient abjection?

2009-02-19T07:16:00.003-05:00

In a rather craven and transparent move, the NYU administration is attempting to 'disown' and thus disqualify the protesters by branding them as outside agitators.

Take Back N.Y.U. has been a vocal presence on campus for the last few years, said Lynne Brown, the senior vice president for university relations. Ms. Brown said that she believed only about half of the protesters were from N.Y.U. and that the rest probably included students from the New School, which had its own student occupation in December during protests over the school’s embattled president, Bob Kerrey.
Ms. Brown said the university will allow the students to remain in the cafeteria through the night and will give them access to restrooms.

The notion that NYU, a "private university in the public service" is only accountable to those who pay tuition to it, its "customers," if we are willing to traffic in the neoliberal frame which has governed the institution for well over a decade now is not only specious but indeed evinces the logics of administration and governance of which Sexton fancies himself the greatest ideologue and his administration the zenith. (Disclaimer: i couldn't sleep last night for the second night in a roaw, so i am not sure if anything i'm writing makes any sense.) This is the logic of the university against which the folks in the cafeteria are actively in revolt.

That said, there were folks from CUNY and the New School and Columbia there last night, mostly, i suspect, on the outside, but the occupation is not the work of "outside agitators," arising instead from very real antagonisms and structural conditions produced by seven years of rapid tuition hikes, administrative fiats, questionable investments, and imperial hugs. That the occupiers have declared solidarity with comrades in the UK, Greece, Italy, Rochester, and on fifth avenue in no way exculpates the NYU University Leadership Team for its venal neoliberalism, its arrogant attacks against the academic and urban commons, and its evangelical fervor for the bottom line above all else, that is, the superexploitation of precarious and transient labor in the form of undergraduate work study, graduate employees, adjuncts, and postdocs, not ot mention migrant construction labor in Abu Dhabi, etc. This occupation, as VP brown would realize if she knew any of the students who are behind the barricades, is very much in and of NYU even as it participates in a larger transnational conversation about the spatial politics of the global university and the future of the city.

one more thing

2009-02-19T01:12:00.003-05:00

An update from the folks inside, at least four of whom are former students, (I have had some awesome students) and many of whom are friends and colleagues. I feel conflicted about not being there with them, but i have to perform my labor. I think this is important enough to merit conversation in section tomorrow. Regardless, I'll be back on the west 4th street sidewalk tomorrow afternoon (after i teach) shouting loud so the folks inside, and the city, and John Sexton and Marty Lipton and Ken Langone and Catherine Reynolds and Barry Diller and Anthony Welters can hear.

well, we finally did it.

ACTUALLY, THAT'S MINE.
or why we finally, really took back nyu.

WHAT’S MINE? THE UNIVERSITY, OF COURSE. IT’S YOURS, TOO!

A group of student-empowering, social-justice-minded rabblerousers have occupied the Marketplace at Kimmel and we refuse to move until our demands are met. All are encouraged to join us on the third floor and help us sustain this occupation until NYU complies with our demands. Our demands are as follows:

-Full, annual disclosure of NYU’s operating budget and endowment.

-The election of a student body whose purpose is the socially

responsible investment of NYU’s funds and all of whom are full, voting members of the Board of Trustees. That this body investigate NYU’s investments in war and genocide profiteers, specifically the Israeli occupation of Gaza.

-That tuition be stabilized; that no student pays more tuition than they did their first year. That the University meet 100% of students’ government-calculated financial need.

-That all NYU employees, including graduate students, are granted union rights, and that work study employees are allowed collective bargaining rights.

-That NYU provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, and that it offers scholarships for 13 Palestinian students annually.

-That NYU grant public access to Bobst Library and that student groups get priority when reserving space in all NYU-owned or –leased buildings.

We apologize for inconveniencing the loyal lunchgoers of the Kimmel Marketplace, but we are not sorry for causing a disruption! Established channels have been insufficient to make our voices heard by the administration, and we have waited too long to be taken seriously. By disrupting the University’s functioning now, we are forcing the administration to deal with those people it depends upon the most—we, the students!

Our demands, though many and varied, are united by the desire to empower students to take part in the governance of their University.

By making public the endowment and budget, and establishing a student voice in the investment of funds and on the Board of Trustees, we are creating a means for active student participation in the administration of the University. By providing union rights for graduate students and collective bargaining rights for work study employees, we are guaranteeing that the students upon whom the University depends for labor are treated and compensated fairly.

By drastically reducing the amount that tuition can increase, we are forcing the University to reassess its spending and cut back appropriately (instead of making a low-income student take out more loans, perhaps the University can build one less abroad site). By forcing the University to meet 100% of students’ financial need, we are ensuring that students spend less time working multiple jobs to make ends meet and more time making the University a place where active minds flourish.

By demanding investigation into war and genocide profiteers, providing aid to Gaza, and offering scholarshipts to Palestinian students, we are demanding that the University heed our own voices immediately. Through these demands we are also stating our solidarity with the students who have occupied their universities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere demanding aid for war-torn Gaza.

By demanding students have priority in reserving space in NYU buildings, we are literally making space for ourselves in the University, and putting students above groups who rent out space in our buildings. By allowing the public access to Bobst Library and the wealth of knowledge it contains we are building a bridge between NYU and the community it so often displaces, while empowering students of all universities (as well as alums of our own) to take part in information that is too often consolidated in the Ivory Tower.

We have waited too long for the University to respond of its own volition. We have let administrators push us around through endless red tape, through never-ending tuition hikes, through unfair labor practices, through secrecy and lies, through power being consolidated in a tiny group of (mostly) rich white dudes who know nothing about our lives as students. We wrote John Sexton a nice letter and struggled to contain our rage in Town Hall after Town Hall; we’ve agitated and tabled and built our coalition. Our demands serve and concern all students. We refuse to dignify the University’s lack of response with our own inaction.
So we take action! We’ve got food and sleeping bags and good friends and we are not going anywhere. Join us! This is a sleepover for student empowerment, a party for participation in the University, a disruption for democracy, an occupation for all!

occupiamo tutto

2009-02-19T00:52:00.004-05:00

Just saw like fifty NYU folks and allies barricade themselves into the Kimmel "Marketplace" in a full on occupation of the space. A bunch of us GSOC folks (I'm on staff this semester - have I mentioned that here?) were there, though i have to teach in ten hours so i wasn't able to stay inside, and instead moved to the sidewalk solidarity demo when the cops shut down the building. I'm excited about what the folks inside have done and I'm awed and inspired. Seeing the barricades come down was one of my top five NYU moments.

FREE UNION PETER!

Anyway, here is the list of demands for folks who are interested:

At approximately 10pm tonight (Feb. 18), students of Take Back NYU! took over the Kimmel Marketplace. They have blockaded the doors and declared an occupation!
NYU is the latest university to join a wave of global student occupations in the name of student empowerment. The Kimmel Center for University life is official a reclaimed space.

What you can do:
Come support the occupation!
Send a letter to the administration in solidarity
Send an e-mail to your professors, peers, listservs, facebook groups you name it! Tell the world.
Have your parent write a letter or e-mail to the university
Print the following demands and distribute them far and wide:

DEMANDS

We, the students of NYU, declare an occupation of this space. This occupation is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the Take Back NYU! coalition, and of campaigns from years past, in whose footsteps we follow.

In order to create a more accountable, democratic and socially responsible university, we demand the following:

1. Full legal and disciplinary amnesty for all parties involved in the occupation.

2. Full compensation for all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation.

3. Public release of NYU’s annual operating budget, including a full list of university expenditures, salaries for all employees compensated on a semester or annual basis, funds allocated for staff wages, contracts to non-university organizations for university construction and services, financial aid data for each college, and money allocated to each college, department, and administrative unit of the university. Furthermore, this should include a full disclosure of the amount and sources of the university’s funding.

4. Disclosure of NYU’s endowment holdings, investment strategy, projected endowment growth, and persons, corporations and firms involved in the investment of the university’s endowment funds. Additionally, we demand an endowment oversight body of students, faculty and staff who exercise shareholder proxy voting power for the university’s investments.

5. That the NYU Administration agrees to resume negotiations with GSOC/UAW Local 2110 – the union for NYU graduate assistants, teaching assistants, and research assistants. That NYU publically affirm its commitment to respect all its workers, including student employees, by recognizing their right to form unions and to bargain collectively. That NYU publically affirm that it will recognize workers’ unions through majority card verification.

6. That NYU signs a contract guaranteeing fair labor practices for all NYU employees at home and abroad. This contract will extend to subcontracted workers, including bus drivers, food service employees and anyone involved in the construction, operation and maintenance at any of NYU’s non-U.S. sites.

7. The establishment of a student elected Socially Responsible Finance Committee. This Committee will have full power to vote on proxies, draft shareholder resolutions, screen all university investments, establish new programs that encourage social and environmental responsibility and override all financial decisions the committee deems socially irresponsible, including investment decisions. The committee will be composed of two subcommittees: one to assess the operating budget and one to assess the endowment holdings. Each committee will be composed of ten students democratically elected from the graduate and under-graduate student bodies. All committee decisions will be made a strict majority vote, and will be upheld by the university. All members of the Socially Responsible Finance Committee will sit on the board of trustees, and will have equal voting rights. All Socially Responsible Finance Committee and Trustee meetings shall be open to the public, and their minutes made accessible electronically through NYU’s website. Elections will be held the second Tuesday of every March beginning March 10th 2009, and meetings will be held biweekly beginning the week of March 30th 2009.

8. That the first two orders of business of the Socially Responsible Finance committee will be:
a) An in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories.
b) A reassessment of the recently lifted of the ban on Coca Cola products.

9. That annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students, starting with the 2009/2010 academic year. These scholarships will include funding for books, housing, meals and travel expenses.

10. That the university donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.

11. Tuition stabilization for all students, beginning with the class of 2012. All students will pay their initial tuition rate throughout the course of their education at New York University. Tuition rates for each successive year will not exceed the rate of inflation, nor shall they exceed one percent. The university shall meet 100% of government-calculated student financial need.

12. That student groups have priority when reserving space in the buildings owned or leased by New York University, including, and especially, the Kimmel Center.

13. That the general public have access to Bobst Library.

Along with this, students have issued a

SOLIDARITY STATEMENT

We, the students of Take Back NYU! declare our solidarity with the student occupations in Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as those of the University of
Rochester, the New School for Social Research, and with future
occupations to come in the name of democracy and student power. We stand
in solidarity with the University of Gaza, and with the people of
Palestine.

OMG LACANIAN POLAR BEAR!!!

2009-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

2009-02-05T16:17:00.003-05:00

Taking its cues from the same group that held a "find the illegal immigrant" debacle here two years ago, the NYU University Senate has voted by a slim majority to lift the ban on Coca-Cola products which it imposed in 2005 in response to Coke's complicity in the murder of trade unionists at its bottling facilities in Colombia by paramilitaries.

There is no evidence that conditions are any better or that coke has taken any steps to ensure the right to organize free from fear, intimidation, murder, or torture. A recent report by the International Labor Organization failed to even call the question and one of the the organization's trustees is also on Coke's board. Meanwhile, the yearly death toll in Colombia has remained high since Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. This is what NYU is welcoming back onto its campus.

I can't say that I'm surprised, given this campus's abominable labor record of late. Sexton et al clearly do not care about the rights of working people, especially not those in far flung subcontracted corners of the globalized division of labor/coloniality of power.

But I am apalled. Apalled that a university that claimes to be in the public service would so blithely traffic with militarized terror against rank and file union members, apalled that with no justification 28 NYU senators decided to affirm their sudden support for a status quo they had voted to reject less than three and a half years ago, a status quo of torture, terror, and murder. Today the global university just became even more compromised by its imperial entanglements than it was yesterday. Today NYU has a body count.

2009-02-01T22:53:00.004-05:00

I spent most of the day in the panopticon, reading Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty instead of grading. Watched the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on the long subway ride home, and holy fuck (I had to sit down on my couch and not do anything for like five minutes after i finished it to let my heart slow down), and then read the kakistotle (that's a greek joke. aristotle from aristos, best, kakistos=worst, also a demon in buffy season three.) I like the Sugrue book a lot, narrative but also theoretically grounded and both deeply enmeshed in the archive and demonstrating widespread knowledge of recent historiography of the long civil rights movement. I would like to see him engage more directly with some of Nikhil Singh's critiques of a few of the figures and movements he discusses, but maybe that's another book?

The ontario provincial government has ordered striking York U graduate employees in CUPE 3903 to return to work, and the workers are returning without a contract. This is no resolution.

Some folks from the Republic Window Workers' Strike stopped by Judson yesterday and it was inspiring to hear firsthand abotu what went down and what the struggle and the victory meant to the folks who fought and won it. Kudos to jobs with justice for making folks submit questions on index cards to minimize the sectarian rostrum hoggers. I sat behind the folks from DWU and next to the dissident TWU contingent, which was interesting. Ed Ott is pretty awesome as CLC presidents go. Oh, btw, Boycott Stella D'Oro. The factory, oddly enough, is a couple blocks away from where i went to high school. They tried to force the workers to accept some severe cutbacks and workers have been on strike for nearly six months.

2009-01-30T06:57:00.004-05:00

Much to blog about - Obama's appointment of Brown Decision dissenter Wilma Liebman to the chair position of the NLRB, power struggles in the two most dynamic labor unions in the U.S., and much less important, the conclusion of Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, but i don't really have time to write about any of these things right now and instead i will leave you with a list of songs randomly compiled by my ipod.

The temptations - "since i lost my baby"

woody guthrie - "talking fishing blues"

NaS - "Project Roach (ft Last Poets)"

Sleater-Kinney - "I wanna be your Joey Ramone"

The pioneers - "long shot" (not to be confused with their "long shot kick de bucket," which is a different song with the same chord progression.)

Madness - "My Girl"

Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop/That Thing"

Helium - "All the X's Have Wings"

Destroyer - "Certain Things You Ought To Know"

Refused "New Noise"

good smattering of mid 90s post riot grrrl, 70's "skinhead reggae" and white british appropriations thereof, and, uh, swedish anarchist post-hardcore?

2009-01-25T18:21:00.002-05:00

It's been too unproductive a weekend, though mostly enjoyably so. I spent Friday in the great pangatsbycon banging out the latest draft of my proposal, this time with 100% fewer parenthetical phrases and a half assed, if complete, literature review. Hung out with Johana, then saturday read some Autonomia and watched the latest episodes of Battlestar Galactica (OMG Felix) and Damages (not on hulu, and not really very good) and procrastinated more than i should.

More procrastination today. Watched Donnie Brasco, which takes Goodfellas' (failed) attempt to demystify and deflate the mobster several steps further - Pacino's Lefty is a tracksuit-wearing, washed up schlub of a gangster, though Johnny Depp in the starting role sort of impedes this particular project simply by virtue of the fact that Al Pacino! and Johnny Depp! are starring together in a mob movie!. The scene in which the FBI high ups tip off Michael Madsen's character about Brasco/Pistone also makes no sense. Anyway, then I read more autonomia and watched Stepbrothers. concurring with my brother's initial diagnosis after having viewed an advance screening before it hit theaters, that the film is rather bizarre.

Tonight I'll prep for class tomorrow, which means Plato and Aristotle. Neither of whom I've read since high school greek class. This was the most boring blog post ever, so let me refer you to the latest manifesto to have emerged from the New School Occupation. I object to some of the assertions they make about the supposed inherently reactionary or bourgeois nature of meetings and organizing strategy, and the disciplinary chest-beating is similarly a little tiresome, but there's nevertheless much here that's valuable. I particularly appreciate the critique of critique and the elaboration of the university as battleground for a range of social struggles, the refusal to fall prey to exceptionalist, bourgeois accounts of the university's removal from the social, from the "real world." The university is of the real world, is in the real world, and so are the struggles to transform/destroy/replace/your verb here it. The problematization of the university here is eloquently articulated and ably expresses the urgency and necessity of such organizing and such struggles.

II. The university shall never again be merely the lukewarm appendage to civil society that our (hypo)critical theorists so highly acclaim; rather, as our friends in Greece have shown, the university can also be an appendage to civil war, a space in which impenetrable bodies and inflammable knowledges can conspire towards the dissolution of their very condition, that is, separation. Yet it is exactly that sharing between life and thought that is preemptively banned from the territories marked under the sign “university.” Such territories betray their innocence not only in their concrete unfolding, but in their very name. There is nothing “universal” about the university anymore except the universality of emptiness. Students and professors spend their waking lives covering up this void with paltry declarations and predictable nonactions. The void should no longer be avoided; it should be unleashed.

Seceding from the university is no longer enough. One must bring it down as well.

Now back to your regularly scheduled commodity fetishism, which should indicate exactly how divorced I, and this blog, have been from anything resembling the political of late.

Nate Evans - "Pardon my innocent heart"
Tony Donne's Hollywood Quintet - "Micaela"
Andrea Williams - "Love Makes Me Do Foolish Things"
King Django - "What's The Use"
Rufus Thomas - "The Dog"
Sonic Youth - "In the mind of the bourgeois reader" lol
kaleidoscope - "holidaymaker"
Smashing Pumpkins - "Luna"
Outkast - "Decatur Psalm"
Manu Dibango - "Aphrodite Shake"

two more things about the inaugural speech

2009-01-21T19:48:00.003-05:00

1. I liked the remaking america stuff, because of the constituent politics it creates a space for, hopefully not neoliberal reaganite voluntarism but instead an invitation, not that we needed one, to bring "change" from below, not a cooptation but instead a gesture of solidarity, though that's ultimately up to us.

2. I liked the hope not fear line. Obviously.

2009-01-21T14:39:00.003-05:00

Other schools are canceling searches and imposing hiring freezes, but not my mala mater. Yale, instead, has decided to hire war criminal and death squad pal John Negroponte to join union-buster Paul Kennedy's grand strategy program along with John Gaddis and fellow neocon iran contra figure Charles Hill.

This despite a 25% drop in the university's endowment which has led administrators to impose a freeze on salary increases and swear to continuously trim budget costs from employee benefits. So is Negroponte, who holds no PhD, whose hands-on experience should land him not in front of undergraduates but rather in front of the international criminal court, worth it? Or, put differently, what does this say about the "scarcity" dynamics of university job markets (academic and otherwise) and what does it tell us (as if we didn't already know) about the priorities of the "global" university?

2009-01-21T07:39:00.003-05:00

From IHE

A sign of the times: A group of labor unions in Boston is questioning whether teaching hospitals there are contributing enough to the city’s coffers, The Boston Globe reports. The group, Community Labor United, released a report, “The Nonprofit City,” suggesting that the city’s major nonprofit hospitals are paying their fair share at a time when the city’s finances are a mess. The report found that the hospitals had made voluntary payments of $4 million when the taxes they would have owed on their property would have resulted in a contribution of $64 million toward the city services from which they benefit. Officials of the hospitals said the report greatly underestimated their contributions to the city, especially in the provision of medical services to the needy. As urban and state economies struggle, calls like the one in Boston are likely to escalate inversely.

From the Globe aritcle

Community Labor United, a coalition of union and activist groups, found that the city's eight biggest teaching hospitals would have owed $64.2 million in city taxes in 2007 if their land and buildings had been taxed like commercial property. Instead, the hospitals made voluntary payments to the city of just $4 million in 2007, a year when they collectively had profits of more than $750 million.
"They're not paying their fair share," said Mary Jo Connelly, director of research for Community Labor United, whose members include a union seeking to organize city hospital workers. "In a time that everyone is sacrificing, it's time for them to step up and start addressing these shortfalls. We know there are going to be significant layoffs of teachers, police, Fire Department personnel, and that sort of thing. If they paid only 25 percent [of the property tax rate], we could save 115 firefighters" from layoff.

and here's the report

Finally, Boston’s AMCs do not even provide an adequate level of charity care to the poor, one of the core purposes underpinning their nonprofit tax-exemption. They fall very far below the proposed federal standard of directing 5% of their revenues to provide uncompensated charity care for low-income patients. These failures cannot be attributed to a lack of resources: in Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, Boston’s AMCs had profits—which they call surpluses—ranging from $9 million to $355 million, and owned assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The property tax exemption AMCs enjoy as nonprofit institutions represents additional millions of dollars in public subsidies they receive every year in the form of tax exemptions. Ironically, this adds to the AMCs’ capacity to buy more land and buildings, which takes even more land off the tax rolls and increases traffic and other burdens on adjoining neighborhoods.

inaugurations

2009-01-20T23:54:00.005-05:00

First day of lecture is tomorrow after a break of hermitude, gramsci, and autonomia. I'm suddenly extremely stressed out. It snowed a lot yesterday. I walked through Green-Wood cemetery - whence originate that picture of those geese, snow covering their backs. It was quiet and beautiful, and a nice escape from reading/writing/worrying, though no substitute for the way MLK day should be commemorated, which is in struggle, not shirking from critiquing the more problematic aspects of King's ideology while nevertheless adamantly refusing the neoliberal attempts at cooptation of a leader and organizer who demanded a "radical revolution of values" and was murdered fighting for striking service workers in Memphis, on the very spot where today a crowd watched Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration as the president of the U.S.

I watched the inauguration from my home, flipping back and forth between ABC (cheesy insert shots of the golden gate bridge and various sundry national icons during Aretha's performance, ugh) and PBS (David Brooks and the two historians not named Peniel Joseph, ugh) because ABC got the best picture on my bunnyt ears and PBS had a historian who wrote a book about the black power movement commenting on the inauguration speech instead of like, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person and who people tell me is a good historian, but is also a convicted plagiarist and writes books i find entirely uninteresting. Rick Warren apparently asking god's forgiveness for his homophobia was a bizarre spectacle, as was wheelchair-bound Emperor Palpatine. Were i less sympathetic to disability studies critiques, i might conjecture that we had seen medeival literature come to life, not so much physical defacements reflecting inner and innate corruption as the vice president having been literally crippled by his own secrets as he tried to spirit them away from the eyes of historians to god knows where. But of course i don't know what was in the box, and my logic here is complicit in the privileging of certain kinds of bodies.

Anyway, i found a couple of things problematic about the speech - the nationalism, although what else can you expect from a president's inauguration, even this president. The foreign policy stuff, however much more muted and qualified than with the last guy - smart, diplomatic imperialism is still imperialism and it's still in crisis - and that the extremely powerful nods to sweatshop workers, to thie history of the working class, had to be framed by invocations of the gospel of work a la Joe Leiberman on Beinecke Plaza in August 2003. (Joe the traitor kept asserting that "they" - the workers - weren't asking for a lot, kept excusing their struggle's righteousness with fictitious, thankfully, claims as to its narrowness.)

And likewise I'm glad President Obama recognizes the selflessness of workers who accept cutbacks, but i don't think that workers should be expected to, as they say in Italy, "pay for your crisis," that there is a difference between selflessness and exploitation, that who is called upon to sacrifice what for whom is never a neutral set of relationships, always fixed within the shifting ideological and historically produced matrices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.

Among the most powerful moments of the speech was

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

This was extraordinarily powerful, both because the emotion, the desire for the fulfilment of the dream King described 46 years ago remains a strong component of liberal nationalism, the idea that we can progress towards, are progressing, even have progressed towards an abstract equality that has now reached in the form of president obama, its apotheosis, retains every bit of its hegemony even as the multiculturalism of the 1990s has long since, it seems, given way to the libertarian "post-racialism" of 30rock and south park (which is often just "new racism" in disguise). But, historical objections aside (segregation in DC did not end in the 1940s) this is also powerful because it commemorates what it's stupid to claim as anything other than a victory in a deeper and more profound struggle against histories of race and racism not confined to juridical or representational arenas, that antiracists and pro-POC organizers and activists, workers and thinkers, produced, in a sense, this President in all his contradictory brilliance (here i'm thinking about something Nikhil Singh said at the Policing the Crisis panel back at ASA in october), that his victory (here i'm on my own but inspired by the hope from people bloc) is not simply the victory of neoliberal racial ideology, that he is no mere "centrist," that calling him a neocon in blackface (as i have seen some 'radica;s' allege in the wake of Ken Salazar and Robert Gates and Tim Geithner) is stupid and wrong, however much we need engaged, perceptive critique in the days ahead. To summarize, there were parts of the speech I found deeply moving, not simply as oratory, because they meant that we, at least the we i would like to identify myself with, had won a victory in a struggle that's nowhere near done.

Elizabeth Alexander said it best, more powerfully, my mother thought, bringing to the fore what was and is at stake in what has transpired and what is to come than even the momentous speech her poem followed.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

And I would be remiss if I failed to mention Rev. Lowery, who brought my anarchist ass to tears as soon as he started speaking, and who offered not the platitudes of Warren's invocation but instead lessons in organizing.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Amen.

Aviation terrorists

2009-01-19T21:18:00.002-05:00

Green-Wood cemetery, 1/19/2009

on the logic of budget cuts and hiring freezes

2009-01-18T13:16:00.004-05:00

And so the scapegoat mythology of "Hunt the Parasite" - the lynchpin of the crisis ideology - comes to the fore... A sort of vague egalitarianism emerges, which scrutinizes the income of the clerical worker, the student, and the tertiary worker, and says nothing, for example, about the transformation of capital-which-is-productive-of-interest: in its most shameful form, this egalitarianism assumes tones of workerist chauvinism. It appears that it is no longer capital that exploits the worker but the postman, the milkman, and the student. These are the first shots in that "class analysis" which will become the official ideology and the preferred argument of the super-paid editorial writers of the Regime's press. It is a crude and effective ideology...

-Sergio Bologna, "A Tribe of Moles," 1977

pithy quotation of the day

2009-01-17T22:55:00.003-05:00

There is nothing "Italian" about the class warfare in Italy; there is nothing "original" in the Italian theoretical contributions. If any, their specificity resides in the fact that in Italy these theories have been able to bloom and develop thanks to the class struggles and their formidable continuity. We must avoid ghettoizing Italy, thus neutralizing its importance. To understand italy, one must understand the United States; one must rediscover in the history of American class warfare that political richness which today is attributed to the Italian "intellectuals". To erect a monument to Italy is to play the game of the Italian state: to misrepresent as specific ("the product of certain intellectuals") what is in fact rooted in the workers' history, rooted, above all, in its international crisis.

-Christian Marazzi, 1980

2009-01-16T14:20:00.004-05:00

Students at the London School of Economics join colleagues at SOAS (and are now joined by folks at Essex University) in building occupations protesting university investments in arms manufacturers involved in Israel's attacks against the Palestinians in Gaza, demanding that their university issue a statement in support of the people of Gaza and undertake humanitarian efforts. More here.

That's four posts in five days. What is this, 2005?

A goose in every engine

2009-01-16T07:55:00.002-05:00

As promised, this week's shuffle

Makonde - Manzara
Charlie Parker - Chasing The Bird
Nas - America
James Brown - Down and Out in New York City
Kool Blues - I'm Gonna Keep On Loving You
Charles Mingus - Los Mariachis
Eric (Showboy) Akaeze and His Royal Ericos - Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham
Black Flag - Police Story.
Spoon - All The Pretty Girls Go To The City
A Tribe Called Quest - Verses From The Abstract

So we get the chocolate city, the deindustrialized city, New York in the early 70s, on the one hand, and we get postcolonial Lagos, we get Q-tip's Queens of 1991 and Nas's "America" 17 years later, and we get Spoon channeling Edwyn Collins and singing about the city as destination, the neoliberal hipster amusement park city. My ipod is trying to tell me things.

2009-01-15T22:37:00.004-05:00

This is going to be one of those semi-narcissistic blog entries about me in which i try to work in stuff about the rest of the world too. I'm mostly kidding with the disclaimer. I don't think i'm much of a narcissist. You may disagree, of course.

Incomplete number two is about three pages or so from being done. I will finish it tomorrow, i think, then work on my diss proposal for a day or two, then start the final incomplete, which is, i think, going to be a review essay on race and financialization. It was originally going to be about the Birmingham School's race analysis, and maybe i'll decide to go back to that instead. I feel like the financialization stuff is important for understanding the past year and would be an excuse to read Christian Marazzi's Capital and Language, Ian Baucom's SPecters of the Atlantic, and Randy Martin's recent stuff, all of which could be useful for my project(s) broadly concieved.

I spent the majority of "break" in the library, researching, writing or trying to. Bobst is slightly more tolerable when it's less populated, but its fascist (literally, i learned last night) architecture has always unnerved me, far more so than SML's imperialist cathedral to orientalist and colonialist knowledges, say, or the fact that the NYPL was in Ghostbusters and Slimer could phase through that wall at any second, and then, i mean, who ya gonna call? Someone said recently that I reminded them of Jeanine. Not Louis, Jeanine.

Still, there's a feeling of satisfaction on the one hand in vold in making headway on this crap that's been hanging over my head for so long - like i'm actually getting stuff done, mixed with fear, because the papers are going to suck, because now i actually have to be evaluated on this stuff, because what now, because i don't want to be a professor if that means this. (Not to say that i don't respect the hard decisions folks had to make, but if hotel workers ask you to boycott the hotel you boycott the hotel. End of story. Whatever the problematic politics of the same sex marriage movement when they're making alliances with immigrant service worker unions and the American Historical Association fails to stand with them, that is a sad day. Anyway.) I'm also feeling stressed out, because this is taking so long, because I have so much to do this senmester, and because my Plato is rusty - i just remember there's that dude named Kephalos, which means "head" in Greek. I found this funny in high school, not for prurient reasons - get your head out of the gutter, nonexistent reader! More because of the absurdity, maybe the irony of a philosopher or philosopher's consilgliere named "Mr. Head." Also it sounded like the sock puppet from south park which i had not yet fully repudiated then. It's hard to recognize something as libertarian when they're mocking Atlas Shrugged and you're fifteen. Or sixteen. I guess i was sixteen. I'd contextualize the Plato remark, but this is the interwebs and google can come back to hurt your favorite alderpeople.

Still no cease fire in Gaza, n o contract in chicago, (and we don't want no peace, we want equal rights and justice.)

At some point in the soonish future i want to write something about Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen before they turn it into a really shitty movie in which the writer has no stake (having forsaken it in protest of DC Comics' refusal to let the copyright revert to him.) And at some point i should really resume critical analyses of the university. Let's start with this.

Back to work for a bit, then sleep, then more work.

EDIT: forgot this last week, and i'll do another tomorrowish
Marnie Stern: Healer

Wally Cox + The Natives: House Party. rare funk track from california. Lot of hammond.

Charlie Parker - Donna Lee

Joe Lovano and Greg Osby - Truth Be Told sadly hadn't listened to this since high school

Mirah -- Exactly Where We're From. Isn't she from like Wynnewood or Bala Cynwyd?

Darkness - Gamith

Run DMC - Hollis Crew. they are going in the rock and roll hall of fame with metallica. They should team up for the black tracksuit album.

Specials - Blank Expression.

De la Soul - Supa Emcees

The Monks - Complication. This song is ridiculous.

conrecerca

2009-01-11T10:22:00.004-05:00

I'm sitting in the panopticon - which I'm lately starting to think about as the Great Gatsby of academic libraries, its massive empty space (and dearth of books) in the middle of space-starved downtown manhattan as equivalent to Gatsby's shelves of unread volumes, as conspicuous consumption transitions to conspicuous waste.

Anyway I'm trying to finish one of two remaining incompletes, on Gramsci's "Americanism and Fordism," and i'm about three pages in.

On the subway in from Brooklyn, i read Nick Dyer-Witheford's peice on class composition and multitude theory in Werner Bonefeld's new Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, (Autonomedia 2008) which Andy hipped me to (did i just say "hipped me to?" This is what happens when you go to grad school. You forget how to speak/write/think because you're so anxious about the academy's pathological, reactionary politics of value and unspoken - at least in public - ethics of competition.) It's a really smart and useful attempt to evaluate the critiques of Hardt and Negri from other autonomists, to think about the utility of the multitude concept in a modified form, and to suggest and highlight forms of inquiry and analysis which proceed from such a utility, like Precarias a la Deriva and Collectivo Situaciones. It's a really useful, synthesis, as so much of Dyer-Witheford's tend to be. I'm already thinking about how to integrate some of the insights into my diss proposal.

clarification

2009-01-08T17:11:00.003-05:00

My problem with an academic boycott is entirely tactical. I think it's useless and i think student movements and yes even faculty associations can intervene in ways that are way more direct and way more powerful. I think that even when their are caveats (e.g., "unless they reject the invasion of Gaza") it looks fishy, it ascribes the actions of the state on to the bodies of the citizen in a way that winds up reproducing Zionist logics, and it doesn't really attack in any way the policies or forces against which folks are trying to organize against.

If you've got an argument for why a boycott against Israeli academics makes strategic/tactical sense, I'd love to hear it.

Zach divests from Israel

2009-01-08T16:04:00.003-05:00

I divested from Israel this week. I didn't actually know i was invested in Israel until a couple of days ago. My great-grandmother, who died in 1987 (when I was six years old) apparently took out a bond in my name with the state of Israel which matured about thirteen years ago. My great grandmother never told anyone about this bond, in all likelihood because she had Alzheimer's when she bought the bond, and her symptoms only intensified in the last six years of her life. This meant that I never really knew her. It also meant that nobody knew that this bond existed until my dad found it, going through his grandmother's papers last week. (My dad's side of the family were suburban Philly republicans, the right wing branch of the family, at least compared to the anarchists and bundist/communists on my mother's side.)

I promptly sent the bond in to be cashed (apparently you can do this by mail.) I have doubts about the efficacy of, say, boycotting Israeli academics, but I'm staunchly anti-zionist and the thought that my name and my family have been wrapped up in the occupation of the West Bank and the brutal state terrorism in the Gaza strip sickens me. So, IDF, consider my personal divestment from your repressive and ideological state apparatuses long overdue, and a gesture of solidarity, however small, with Palestinians, Israelis, and other Jews fighting for social justice in the middle east and all over the world.

2009-01-02T10:23:00.002-05:00

I tried writing a year end post on the subway on wednesday night shuttling back and forth btw manhattan and brooklyn so i could go into the city then back to my apt then back to the city because i forgot my ID to get into a bar/club i had no desire to go to, because I don't drink and i don't like crowded clubs on new years where drunk people I don't know elbow me. Anyway it wasn't a productive excercise, and I'm too busy at the moment to give such an endeavor the attention it would command of me.

Anyway, I (re-sort of)read "The Power of Women and The Subversion of The Community" yesterday, and today, I'm going to walk into the city and read a lot of Gramsci.

Two quick links on universities and debt. David Swensen is buying it up and a university near you is making deals with credit cards to profit from students', alumni, and workers' financial insecurity.

random ten
I put my ipod on shuffle and this is what it played.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Moanin'
Super Rail Band - Maliyo (From Rail Band vol 1. This is really great.)
Fela Kuti - ODOO
Toots and The Maytals - Careless Ethiopians
Edd Henry - Your Replacement Is Here
Desmond Dekker - Big Headed
Vic's Pick - Damaged (From the Version City compilation. Late '90s NYC dub.)
MIA - Pull Up The People
Woody Guthrie - I Ain't Got No Home
Beck - Dead Melodies. I thought this album was really great in 1998. Now I am not so sure, which probably has a lot to do with the whole scientology thing and everything isnce Midnight Vultures being exceedingly boring.

2008-12-30T00:40:00.003-05:00

I missed a stop on the subway today for the first time in like ten years. I don't miss stops on the subway. With the exception of the years i spent in new haven or the odd day when i don't go into manhattan or i walk both ways or something, i've been taking the subway more or less every day of my life since august of 1995 (when we moved from the burbs to the city right before 8th grade) and i know it very, very well. And yet I missed a stop, and looked like an idiot, i am sure, as i tried, and failed, to make it through the doors into the west 4th street station before they closed.

Instead i decided it was fate telling me to try Columbia's Butler library instead of the panopticon, but wound up at my parents' appartment eating tasti-d-lite out of a bucket, pretending to get work done, watching Hellboy II which, without Ron Perelman's lame dialogue (not, I think, the fault of the actor) could have been a halfway decent Guillermo Del Toro film. As it was, the combination of eerie dark faerie tale (good) and stilted cliched superhero film dialogue (bad) didn't work so well. Hellboy's a comic I never read. Indeed, other than Sin City, I don't think i read any of the stuff generated through the Dark Horse Comics Legend imprint - which included Sin City in all its beautifully rendered but narratively unimaginative glory (maybe i'm just taking potshots at frank miller for his recent history of making terrible films and supporting the invasion of iraq as the european front in a world war II analogy if september 11 was pearl harbor, which it wasn't), some John Byrne stuff, Madman (I think), and something bu Art Adams, Paul Chadwick, and Geaoff Darrow if memory and internets serve me correctly. Anyway my point is that i have no idea if the character actually speaks in such a cliched, shallow manner as depicted in the film, but i felt like Del Toro and Mike Mignolo could have benefitted from someone else who wasn't directing the film or responsible for creating the character to help with the script.

Also caught part of the Gilmore Girls episode where they tour Yale and the show's protagonists keep saying insulting and subtly racist things about New Haven. Not only that it's worse than the dump but that it's the left over crap at the bottom of the coffee pot. Yeah. I mean it may be accurate in representing the kinds of claims that suburban Connecticutians make about the deindustrialized belt along the state's southern shore (and throw Hartford and maybe Waterbury and/or Danbury in for good measure, though Waterbury's problems seemd to stem in part from the fact that its former Republican mayor - and the republican opponent to Joe Lieberman in the 2000 senate election - paid a crack addicted prostitute to let him rape her daughters and Danbury's mayor is an anti-immigrant fascist if the same guy's still in office) but also speaks to the kinds of racial and class politics that lay beneath the surface of the palladinos' small town utopia.

Tomorrow back to paper writing and gramsci reading. Coming soon is the requisite year-end post. Also, whatever good reasons some people may have had for bombing universities in the past, what Israel has done in Gaza this weekend is terrorism, pure and simple, attacking captive civilian populations in a brazen attempt to convince them by attrition to reject their democratically elected government. Fuck all government and fuck Hamas, but the fact that american politicans can vociferously support this murderous shit and then claim to be against terrorism is blatant hypocrisy - a fact which seems entirely unimportant at the close of a three day period which has left over 350 people dead, many of them civilians. (The U.N's conservative estimate is that 60 were civilians, other sources have indicated much higher numbers.)

2008-12-26T13:39:00.002-05:00

I made Latkes yesterday, and it was awesome, and i felt like a productive human being. They tasted good. I made something that tasted good. I totally understand why people love to bake.

Also i walked a lot, only from my apartment to canal and varick, not nearly the 12-mile oddyssey of thanksgiving day, but fun nonetheless. Today i went out for lunch but my big accomplishment was being able to fall asleep without taking an advil first for the first time since i had my wisdom teeth out a week and a half ago. Now it's back to rereading Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination.

Random ten:
The Menahan Street Band - The Traitor
Robert Johnson - 32-20 Blues
Joe Bataan - "Johnny" I must skipped this one every time i listened to the Joe Bataan Anthology, since i don't recognize it at all. It's kinda great.
Dennis Alcapone - Shades of Hudson
Manu Chao - The Bleedin Clown
Black Merda - Long Burn The Fire
Crass - The Immortal Death
dead prez - sellin' d.o.p.e.
the pipettes - pull shapes
the breeders - drivin' on 9.

2008-12-21T15:43:00.002-05:00

The anomalous wave-turin make like Godard's supermarket situationists and expropriate a bookstore

Students went in front of the bookstore and opened a banner saying “Against the crisis: self-reduction - Anomalous Wave Turin”. They had few hundreds of second hand books which they gave to passers-by. Finally the students went inside the bookshop, symbolically occupying it, demanding and taking few hundreds of books, which were later distributed to people for free.

“In this way, the Way wanted to protest against the high costs of books, but also to show in practice that another form of circulation of knowledge is possible, free of charge, based on valuation of the use value, against commercial distribution and capitalistic speculation which subordinates knowledge to the logic of money, profit, value of exchange”.

How amazing would it be if folks would do something like this at NYC's chain bookstores? At the NYU bookstore? At Amazon.com's union busting warehouses?

random ten for snow and revolution

2008-12-21T08:56:00.002-05:00

The Clientele - Dance of the Hours
Robert Forster - Danger in the Past
We The People - You Burn Me Up and Down
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - Anger In The Nation
Incredible Bongo Band - Bongolia
Genius/GZA - Labels
Refused - Hook, Line & Sinker
Chalice - Good to be there
Utah Phillips (covering Joe Hill) - There is Power in a Union
Camper Van Beethoven - Yanqui Go Home

Happy Hannukah

2008-12-20T13:13:00.003-05:00

It's nice and snowy out, but i'm stuck inside for the most part this weekend, rushing against time and inertia to get my grades in. Having spent most of thursday standing on the sidewalk outside the New School's Graduate Faculty building didn't help much (with the grading.) I was going to post some lessons i took from what I saw during the occupation - the opportunities created by the conjuncture and the strategies such a conjuncture encouraged, some of the problems, etc, but i'm not sure that a public blog is the best place for such ruminations. I will say, though, that the rush by some anarhcists to condemn the settlement as collaborationist strikes me as short sighted. I consider myself an anarchist, but I'm not sure why that has to involve the utter collapse of politics and tactics, the total fetishization of direct action beyond prefigurative politics to the point of pathology, the inability to think in terms of longues durees and the assumption that any action that does not produce widespread revolutionary uprisings (which i'm all for) must be categorized as a failure and must therefore have been hijacked by collaborationsists and crypto-liberals. There's nothing inherently bourgeois, counter-revolutionary, statist, or anti-democratic about strategy, about committing to build movements that keep growing, about not dismissing everyone who isn't waving around The Conquest of Bread or rocking an anti-flag patch on their knapsack as a outre statist yuppie.

"Outside" solidarity could have been more focused at times - the cuny contingent that showed up around 10 PM on Thursday was really brilliant in terms of channeling the power and focus of the crowd. Letting anyone who wants to speak is cool, but there has to be some way to deal with the sectarian crazies and didactic anarcho-individualists who think they're teaching you something by shouting the same tired slogans over everyone else.

There are many things the New School In Exile folks did that were very, very effective. I won't rehearse them here because I think its best for us to practice some semblance of security culture, at least online, about how we discuss the weaknesses of administrative and police repression tactics and the stregnth of how folks challenged them, but i don't want it to seem like I'm being a whiny mr. complainsalot. On the contrary, i find yesterday's victory inspiring and encouraging and the collection of folks inside and outside of 65 5th avenue was exciting to be a part of. I was particularly struck by how explicit folks were about tying their work to what's been going on in Greece and Italy ("We're in Greece, We're in Rome, Tell Bob Kerrey To Go Home," "Occupiamo Tutto,") etc. I think the question on all of our minds should be where does this go next? How do we expand the struggle? How do we "generalize the wave," as it were?

a las barricadas

2008-12-18T16:33:00.005-05:00

Spent some time today over at the occupied new school, watched the NYPD, particularly Officer Singer of the 6th precinct harrass and assault people for no reason whatsoever, until the administration got smart and diffuesed the very hairy situation by letting the new school students trapped outside the graduate faculty building back inside to join those still occupying the cafeteria. At least two people were arrested. I saw one of the arrests - a guy just handing out flyers whom police forced onto the ground. Officer Singer pulled a Baton on a friend of mine and a New School security goon pushed an NYU undergrad onto the ground, again, without any justification. But as of this writing, the occupation is still going strong, and there's a rally planned for 10:00 tonight that folks in the city should try to be at. Check out updates here and at their blog here.

ETA: That would be at 65 5th Avenue, btw 13th and 14th. The occupiers have reported that police have returned to the area but as yet no violence has occurred...

The Anomalous Wave Hits 5th Ave

2008-12-17T20:19:00.004-05:00

Just got this via email.

From New York City:

We have just occupied New School University.

We liberate this space for ourselves, and all those who want to join us, for our general autonomous use. We take the university in explicit solidarity with those occupying the universities and streets in Greece, Italy, France and Spain.

This occupation begins as a response to specific conditions at the New School, the corporatization of the university and the impoverishment of education in general. However, it is not just this university but also New York City that is in crisis: in the next several months, thousands of us will be losing our jobs, while housing remains unaffordable and unavailable to many and the cost of living skyrockets.

So we stress that the general nature of these intolerable conditions exists across the spectrum of capitalist existence, in our universities and our cities, in all of our social relations. For this reason, what begins tonight at the New School cannot, and should not, be contained here.

Thus: with this occupation, we inaugurate a wave of occupations in New York City and the United States, a coming wave of occupations, blockades, and strikes in this time of crisis.

Be assured, this is only the beginning,

With solidarity and love from New York to Greece,

To Italy, France and Spain,

To the coming insurrection.

-The occupied New School

Holy crap!!!

YNHH, the state, and the post-fordist city

2008-12-17T18:16:00.003-05:00

I'm in the process of working out my dissertation proposal, which is about the history of service workers at urban universities, about what the expansion and restructuring of universities looks like when read through the experiences of racialized and gendered food service, maintenance, custodial, clerical, and technical workers. I'm also going to talk about, but have been thus far giving short shrift to, workers at university hospitals, which have been a major part of the aforementioned expansion as universities prioritize the maintenance and care of bodies in what's been an era dominated by economies of biopolitical (re)production. Universities and their teaching hospitals have come to dominate the social and physical geography of urban spaces - just look at this peice today in the New Haven Independent reporting that Yale has now completed it's formal takeover of the building that was once an important Hill neighborhood high school (and site of student protest) and has in the process subtracted even more New Haven real estate, as one anonymous commenter notes, from the city's dwindling tax base.

And if that isn't a good enough reason why i need to more centrally address the effects of hospital service work on the terrain of post-fordist labor relations, Undergraduate Organizing Committee member Hugh Baran offers readers of The Nation an even more instructive tale about a violated community benefits agreement, an intimidated and betrayed group of 1800 Yale New Haven hospital employees, and one of the clearest examples we have of the necessity of card check neutrality agreements in protecting the rights of working people, and a strong message about the role of the state in protecting or assailing workers' voices. Whether you're like me, and you've been following what's happened at the hospital, on whose governing board many Yale executives and trustees sit, along with local New Haven plutocrats and a scant few medical professionals, since you watched Rick Levin shrug off questions from concerned SLAC members eight years ago, or you're learning of this just now (in which case, welcome to the blog) Hugh writes powerfully about what YNHH tells us about U.S. labor politics, and you should go read his article.

things to do today

2008-12-14T10:08:00.003-05:00

1. turn two thirty-five page exams into a five page lit review section. I think i can do this.
2. revise my chapter breakdown to add a chapter on the postwar emergence of the "federal grant university," the impact of the massification of the university on service workers' lives.
3.Take a stab at a methodology section.
4. eat.

2008-12-14T00:09:00.002-05:00

(don't read this if you haven't finished season 5 of the wire.)

Apparently the guardian has published a list of the "biggest douchebags" of 2008. I have several comments. I'm interested, first, in when "douchebag" became permissible speech in UK and US alternative newsmedia outlets. Has it become, like "fuck" or "asshole" urmoored from its association with pathologized female sexual hygeine, with commoditized pudenda? I ask not because i am offended by the list's prurience or because I believe that if one were to refer to, say, Jacob Lew of NYU/Citigroup fame as a "douchebag" one would be conjuring up the specter of "dirty" vaginas in need of corporate commercial cleaning products (hello biopower,) but because i think the question of what, precisely, douchebag means at present in this particular context and how it comes to mean what it means is probably worth asking to someone.

As for the content of the list, well, i don't know what "Eggheads" is, and I don't know who Timothy Mallet is, nor am i that well versed in the specifics of the Andrew Sachs-Russell Brand affair, so let's leave aside those three. I don't think that Soulja Boy line makes him a douchebag. I don't know the song that well, I don't know how seriously one can take a claim such as that. I'm not necessarily arguing that Soulja Boy's drowning in false consciousness as suggesting that maybe we're supposed to take something else away from the sentence than the compiler of this list assumes.

The "little hopper" is named Kenard, and I fail to see how he is a "douchebag." I certainly don't think that is what David Simon and Ed Burns were attempting to convey here. Leaving aside problems with the phrase douchebag which i'll return to below, that Kenard's the douchebag here and not Valcheck, Rawls, Carcetti, or the newspaper Powers That Be exemplifies the kind of sanctification of Omar Little which the character's death is supposed to deflate and which made season three my least favorite (Omar and Brother Mouszone at the ok corral? Can't we go back to this character's intriguing humanity?)

The sexism's certainly apparent in the rationale for naming Sarkozy, whose political loathsomeness has much to do with his chauvinism and nativism and little to do with his wife. Bankers may well be douchebags, but more importantly, as Boots Riley reminds us, "every banker is a fucking thief." Douchebag unites fascist, neoliberal profiteer, and minor annoyance under the sign of failed masculinity. Masculinity's always failed, i guess, but you know what I mean. Maybe arguing with the premise of a stupid year end list is futile and by spending the last hour doing so instead of working on my diss proposal i've already been won over. Ah, fuck it.

Nirvana - "Stain"

The Rulers - "Copacetic"

MIA& Diplo - Bingo (Diplo Mix) Some "mix," Diplo. (it's just the "Big Pimpin" Riddim.)

Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestros - Akayan Ekassa

Go Betweens "Bow Down"

Woody Guthrie - "Dust Can't Kill Me"

The Vaselines - "Molly's Lips." I used Nirvana's Vaselines covers to prove a poiunt last night.

Budos Band - Ghost Walk

Culture - See Them A Come

Michael Washington - Little Girl

Hard Times?

2008-12-11T12:38:00.002-05:00

Colleges and universities are claiming hardships as endowments plummet. Harvard's 36 billion dollar fund is now in the mid twenties, and they've already implemented a salary freeze and suspended all searches, opting to rely instead on newly minted PhDs in unstable "teaching postdoc" positions. How convenient!

NYU's endowment is at best 1/10th the size of harvard's, despite an undergraduate population that's four times larger, but that hasn't stopped John Sexton and co. from dropping massive amounts of money on prime downtown real estate. The New York observer reports that NYU recently purchased 726 Broadway (which already housed the student health center and the religious studies dept) for $210 million. Sexton, meanwhile, all brilliantly faked financial aid flyers notwithstanding, really is telling students who can't afford the ballooning tuition at NYU to try elsewhere.

Yesterday, student activists at the New School, where faculty just overwhelmingly voted no confidence in University President and former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, sat in the administration building for six hours to protest the university's relationship with the military contractor L-3 Communications:

Students were protesting the treasurer of the Board of Trustees,
Robert B. Millard, because of his position as chairman of the
executive committee of the military contractor L-3 Communications.
L-3 Communications provides a large percentage of the "intelligence
personnel" employed in illegal detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Guantanamo Bay, and is currently facing four lawsuits from Iraqis
tortured at Abu Ghraib...

The students participating in the sit-in remained patient, relatively
quiet and un-confrontational while they waited to see if the Board
would grant their requests. Other students brought pizza and coffee
to those participating in the sit-in. After about an hour, students
realized the Board was not going to meet with them and they pushed
into the blocked off area, passed the security guards and attempted to
climb the stairs that led to where the Board was meeting. The
security guards prevented the students from entering the meeting and
the students began to lead chants around investment disclosure and the
removal of Millard. The meeting, which was happening directly above
where the students were chanting, was forced to move because of the
demonstrators. The trustees' coats and personal items at the coat
check next to the students were passed up one by one to a staff member
on the stairs. The students moved outside around 6:30pm when they
realized a car was waiting at the basement exit of the building—the
only alternative exit to the front door. The group disbanded around
7pm after most of the Trustees had left the vicinity. A security
guard informed one RSU member that the Board of Trustees meeting,
which was scheduled to end at 8pm, ended an hour and a half early, at
6:30pm.

Speaking of sit-ins, the republic window workers won theirs today, their factory occupation translating into the money owed them as well as a new organization dedicated to repopening their plant. Maybe we really are seeing Buenos Aires style recuperation on the horizon...

Also, there may be social revolutions taking place in Greece and Italy...

2008-12-09T23:17:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow at 5:30 I'll be outside the union square bank of america just a block up from the GSOC office, standing in solidarity with the employees of the Republic Window factory in Chicago who are occupying their factory to demand the back pay owed them/save their jobs. The workers have called for nationwide solidarity actions at noon - there's going to be a big one in Chicago. And an earlier march is being planned here in NY by the IWW leaving from St. Mark's Church at noon, which i might also stop by.

Meanwhile, I think the staples singers put it best:

(I love how the reproductive, feminized labor of the household and domestic service gets placed before waged or unwaged "masculine" "productive" labor and both precede and situate and articulate the nationalist narrative framework through reference to "the control over unpaid labor." Capital v1 p 672. Imperialism's the "materialization of unpaid labor time" spatially diffused and writ large across the globe, the movement of labor and capital, the commodification of workers and the labor of racialized and commoditized workers.)

Edited again to add that this performance precedes "The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community" by a whole year. Also see Silvia Federici's critique of post/autonomist, post/operaist theories of precarity, which i think is at moments extremely insightful, though I disagree with some of her claims.

2008-12-05T06:58:00.002-05:00

Raekwon - spot rushers
Fugees - Fu-Gee-La
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - Yester Love
The Harbinger Complex - I Think I'm Down
Kool G Rap & DJ Polo - It's a Demo
Blowfly - Butterfly Theme.
A.C. Newman - On The Table
Smashing Pumpkins - Plume. 7th grade locker room flashbacks.
J.D.s - Funky Party Time.
Jesus Acosta and The Professionals - Guadija

random ten

2008-11-26T09:12:00.003-05:00

Television, "Friction."
Wu Tang Clan ft Gerald Alston - "Stick Me for My Riches."
Beaufort Express - "You Got To Do Your Best."
Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - "Be Easy"
The Advantage - "Guardian Legend - Corridor I." I love this band.
Linton Kwesi Johnson - "Two Sounds of Silence"
The Advantage - "Ghosts 'n' Goblins"
Jospehine Taylor - "I've made up my mind"
Sonic Youth "swimsuit issue"
The (International) Noise Conspiracy - "The Reproduction of Death." I used to love this band before Rick Rubin got ahold of them. Discuss.

2008-11-21T22:52:00.003-05:00

This week has been a rather brutal one for several reasons. I'm going to have to get my wisdom teeth pulled, and my mouth hurts. So does my skull. My 92 year old grandparents and my sexagenarian parents were in a harrowing car crash that they are very lucky to have survived and survived with only bruises and aches (and I am very lucky that they did so.) Work is piling up, and I'm wondering again what the hell I'm doing here, and feeling generally useless, and not at all surprised by that study that suggests the more tv you watch the unhappier you are - in college, when i was much smarter than i am now, i would have said this was reductionist and indicative of the obsession of a particularly fraction of the bourgeoisie with policing the consumption practices of the less cultured (in the Arnoldian/Bordieuian sense.) Now I'm cursing ridiculous Grey's Anatomy plotlines and wondering why my head feels so heavy (is it the teeth? My brain atrophying? Stress?) And I'm staring at this and wondering who drew it. (Book doesn't specifically say, but credits one Andy Dark with the jacket design. Dark, according to Ashley Dawson, was an antiracist SWP youth organizer, so this makes some sense, though the image reminds me of the style of the "deconstructionist" british comic books of the time (1988. Brian Bolland, David Lloyd, maybe. Some of the people doing Moore's Miracleman.) This may be because I'm an idiot. Perhaps this image is really famous, and i'm just two ignorant of the cultural iconography of Thatcherite Britain to realize it.

Anyway.

Random ten songs from the ipod:

Beatles - Polythene Pam
Voices of East Harlem - Music in the Air
Sleater-Kinney - Steep Air
Desmond Dekker & The Aces - Rudy Got Soul
Amy Winehouse - Rehab. forgot i owned this album.
Le Tigre - LT Tour Theme
Miles Davis - Darn That Dream
Rufus Thomas - Do That Push and Pull (Part 1)
Nathan Wilkes - Strenge Feeling
Jackie Mittoo - Black Organ

2008-11-19T10:22:00.003-05:00

For those of you who are New Yorkers or in the tri-state area, tomorrow evening (Thursday, November 20th,) the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU is holding a panel discussion entitled "Who's Building The Global U," examining the conditions of the migrant labor that will build and operate NYU's satellite campus. The event is co-sponsored by Human Rights Watch and Law Students for Human Rights, and will take place in Furman Hall, room 214. Speakers include Human Rights Watch's SarahLeah Whitson and NYU Historian Molly Nolan. For more information, go here

2008-11-19T09:07:00.002-05:00

Yesterday twenty members of the Yale Undergraduate Organizing Committee led a four-hour sit in in the university's investments office to protest - and to try to get a meeting with David Swensen about - Yale's endowment investments in the abusive hotel corporation HEI. The YDN article is priceless, complete with a snippy dismissal from Tom Conroy and the supposition that Swensen came up to the floor at one point, saw the students, closed the elevator without leaving it, and fled.

But, in the end, the students did not meet with anyone in the office. At 1:45 p.m., Landino had to leave to catch a flight back to California so he could report to work at 5 a.m. on Wednesday. As Landino left, the student protesters applauded him and then packed up their belongings. All 16 students crammed into one elevator for the trip downstairs chanting, “We’ll be back.”
Though no meeting materialized, the students and Landino said they still considered the event a success.
“We did not speak with him but we left a very clear message,” Landino said through a translator. “Like farmers we’ve planted something that is going to grow and we will reap the rewards.”
Before they left, the students wrote a note for Swensen on a yellow legal pad, which concluded, “We are firmly resolved to see this matter through to the end.”

Targeting university endowment investments is one of the most powerful and important ways activists and workers can fight to make universities more just places. It challenges the university's circuits of capital accumulation, exposes the ways in which universities participate in, and affect a broad swathe of economic activities and command the labor of diverse and deterritorialized groups of workers, and it hits the university's neoliberal foundations on multiple fronts and from many sites, making possible a truly global struggle against the "global (network) university."

For more on Unite-HERE's campaign against HEI, go here, here, here, and here

In case you had any doubts about the NYU board of trustees' priorities

2008-11-17T09:11:00.002-05:00

In a year when John Sexton forced a destructive strike, harassed, fired, and blacklisted graduate student employees, spat in the faculty's face (metaphorically,) and raised undergrad tuition by more than 5%, he was given a 56% pay increase by Marty Lipton and the other powers that be on the university's bloated corps of high finance miscreants that is its ruling body. $1.3 million. That's like Swensen money. More, actually. And NYU's endowment is about 1/10th the size of the one Swensen's presided over, though both have invested in predatory hedge funds like Farallon Capital Management and both like to gobble up urban real estate for private gain.

The Washington Square News is understandably miffed.

In addition to many unjustifiably elusive statements, NYU has yet to reveal whether the opinions of faculty and students are considered in the evaluation. It was in 2006 that the committee decided to increase Sexton’s base salary, a year of controversial graduate student strikes. Despite vocal disapproval of Sexton’s response to the strikes by student groups and members of the faculty, the committee still decided to raise his salary.

President Sexton’s salary might be raising at an entirely justifiable rate. But until the university becomes more candid about its methods, suspicions will justifiably abound.

Sounds like they might have something in common with those "angry radicals" after all.

And more reasons why Jacob Lew shouldn't be managing the federal budget.