Tag Archives: cooperative

notes on peace education and indignation


Posted by hallymk1

On Monday I contributed to a panel discussion on Prospects for Peace Education in the Neoliberal Era, as part of the Adam Curle Symposium hosted by the Peace Studies Division at University of Bradford. I made the following points..

ONE. The essay I produced ahead of the event situates the historical context for Curle’s Education and Liberation against the collapse of the post-war Keynesian compromise. In the West that compromise had ushered in a view of the State as guarantor of the production and distribution of certain forms of socialised wealth, grounded in access to healthcare, welfare benefits, social housing and free education. Yet by 1973 that political moment was under stress, as issues of profitability that had affected the major economies since the 1950s led to Nixon decoupling the dollar from gold. This was a critical way-marker in the development of neoliberal governance and the hegemony of monopoly finance capital, framed by the petro-dollar. Maybe, as Jehu questions, this was the moment when we reiterated our choice of barbarism over socialism.

TWO. The collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement would amplify Curle’s criticism of a dominant, global system rooted in competitive materialism and belonging-identity (rather than awareness-identity). Instead, Curle argued for an education counter-system rooted in a societal counter-system that was borne of a different formation of social wealth. This focus on wealth is central to the argument of his book, because it is situated asymmetrically against value as the dominant structuring form of society that is reproduced under capitalism. Here John Holloway’s focus on the first sentence of Marx’s Capital is important because it emphasises how capitalist social relations abstract and corrupt our concrete world, including how we relate to each other and the values that we embody (such as peace, justice, trust, faith, tolerance and so on). The first line of Capital reads as follows:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”[1] its unit being a single commodity.

Holloway argues:

It is easy to skip over the significance of the first sentence precisely because of what the sentence itself asserts. It is the very fact that wealth appears as a collection of commodities to us who live in capitalist society that makes us take this appearance for granted. We are used to seeing wealth in that way. When we think of wealth we usually think of material wealth, of the things that a person has, probably of money, the general equivalent of commodities. If we refer to someone as being wealthy, we generally mean that she or he has a lot of money, and can therefore dispose of an immense amount of commodities. In other words, the form in which wealth appears leads us to establish an identity between wealth and the immense collection of commodities, to treat them as being identical. And if this were so, then it would indeed be right to treat the first sentence as curtain-raiser, as a sentence that has significance only in leading us on to the central issue, the commodity.

However, wealth does not have to be thought of in this way. For English-speakers, this is perhaps easier to see if we go back to the original German term that Marx uses, Reichtum, which could just as easily have been translated as “richness”: in capitalist society, richness appears as an immense collection of commodities. There is certainly no sharp difference in English between the concepts of richness and wealth, but richness strikes us as having a broader meaning: a rich tapestry, an enriching conversation, a rich life or experience, a rich diversity of colours.

THREE. In the current moment this rich diversity of colours has been corrupted (like corrupt computer code) precisely because the history and materiality of our social and cultural lives has been distorted through the reality of economic crisis. I refer to this as a secular crisis of capitalism. Our enriching conversations are corroded through the toxicity of an on-going and immanent crisis of economic reproduction that catalyses debt, privatisation and financialisation, and the demonization of the powerless, whose lives are made precarious. The counter-measures that are required to maintain the system that Curle pushed against are not working, and they are delegitimising that system whilst they shore it up. This is the terrain upon which our ongoing cognitive dissonance, or even worse our dissociation, is borne.

NOTE: As a result we cannot face the ecological rift that has occurred in the metabolic relationship between humans and the planet: we are unable to do anything meaningful about carbon emissions as they breach 400ppm; we are unable to do anything meaningful about the assault on biodiversity and ocean acidification, or damage to the nitrogen cycle, the overuse of phosphates, and so on. How can we find peace when we are so embedded inside capitalism’s war on the planet?

FOUR. This war also threatens to become inter-generational. There is a looming disconnect between those who benefitted from the aftermath of Bretton Woods and millenials, although following Milton Friedman in The Role for Government in Education many of the arguments made in the global North now stress the importance of student debt being a family investment in human capital. Thus, the UK Government’s focus on future earnings and employability, and the Treasury’s explicit demand for tax data to be linked to student outcome/loan repayment data, de-territorialise and then re-territorialise the system through metrics, debt and risk. Here Curle’s fears around the development of competitive materialism and belonging-identity are realised as families become the very fabric of competition rather than of societal co-operation. And this is amplified because, as Oskar Negt states:

The labor power that capital can tie down by dint of Taylorism is markedly decreasing in both capitalist countries and Third World countries. More and more living labor power is slipping out of capital- ist production processes. This must have political consequences, which will also affect the formation of theories… Today, by comparison, we have a structurally growing industrial reserve army that is tending toward including the whole of society and, increasingly, threatening to cut labor power off from reality…

The fewer opportunities a subject has to appropriate these productive forces, the more often the latter turn into destructive forces. This is one of the core issues in our theory of labor power. It is not only that a growing number of work- ers—and also a growing number of labor characteristics—are unemployed in capitalist labor conditions; it is also that in the long term, these characteristics are being scrapped by being deobjectified.

We are forced to compete so that our alienation becomes more manageable.

FIVE. This secular crisis is political and economic and is rooted in an ideological position that has generated monstrosities in UK higher education like the White Paper’s proposed teaching excellence framework, and the obsession with teaching intensity and productivity in the Green Paper. As our educational lives are subsumed under the structuring realities of value, rather than alternative conceptions of social wealth, one outcome is the disconnection of our educational souls. As our curricula are restructured around performance management, progression, retention, student-as-purchaser, education commodified as a service, learning analytics, employability, and so on, our conversations with our students, our peers and ourselves are in tension with our desire to care. The rule of money places us in conflict with our desire to care, and so we dissociate, rage or employ cognitive dissonance as defences. For Curle, such a world was rooted in psychological alienation that itself emerges from social, political and economic violence. For Marx, in the German Ideology, such alienation was fourfold: from the process of production; from the things that we produce; from our society; and from ourselves. In the incorporation of all forms of education inside the production processes of capitalism, in the damaging realities of over-testing,  monitoring, permanent technological and organisational restructuring, precarious employment and so on, those very spaces that set out to be rooted in care, justice and peace are reproduced as anxiety machines.

SIX. Inside our anxiety machines, time is weaponised against us. We are forced to internalise the system’s demands around contact hours, workload planning, absence management, imposed deadlines for impact relating to teaching and research, and so on. As a result, both space and time are made unsafe for staff and students, who must also contend with the boundaries of relationships that at once appear to be rooted in care/contract and use/exchange. These are the contested qualities of being that are embodied in our formal educational institutions. We might then wonder what else we can set in-motion inside-and-outside the school or university that refuses this reality? Here, our learning is enriched through engagement with the struggles of campaigns against the ongoing re-colonisation of the university’s history and material realities, grounded in its organising principles, financing and curricula, like Rhodes Must Fall or Black Lives Matter. It is also enriched through the educational work rooted in co-operative values and organisation. These examples force us to consider how to frame a richness of life or experience, or how to stitch a rich tapestry, which prefigures the world we wish to see. Such prefiguration is educational, iterative and generative of new possibilities. However, crucially it is also inter-generational, open and public, radical in that it stresses the need to find alternative forms of value that works to create the society we would wish to live in, and democratic. Such prefigurative activity is borne of a realisation: that our current forms of social reproduction are in crisis; that new forms of solidarity across indebted generations and between those suffering in healthcare or education or social services or housing are needed; and, that these new forms of social solidarity might coalesce around directional demands, like the social strike that stops the system and forces conversations.

SEVEN. It is in co-operatively-negotiated, solidarity actions that peace might re-emerge as a possibility or as a guide to our direction of travel. For solidarity enables us to move across boundaries between contexts and disciplines to examine

the real object of knowledge, which is the social phenomenon as a whole.

Schmidt, A. (1968). On the Concept of Knowledge in the Critique of Political Economy, p. 93.

Yet peace is grounded in: individual and collective courage to act; faith in each other and ourselves; justice for the wronged, othered and alienated; and, hope for setting in motion a different world. Peace emerges through education as a form of social wealth that is against-and-beyond capitalist social relations. It emerges as indignation with the present state of things, where we recognise that it cannot emerge through private property and wage slavery, or through the State taking control of production. As Jehu argues:

We do need to think about how the immediate seizure of what we need to live (in places like the UK this would also mean mass non-payment campaigns) could open into new forms of social organisation; also about how import-export relations can be sustained in industries that are necessary to social reproduction once the power of capitalist owners has been annulled… Capital is vulnerable to radical approaches that emphasize real relations over material relations. Our approach should be guided by the desire to address issues in a way that does not make capitalist categories our starting point.

Only when we have recognised and held the tension of the values inside us, which are revealed as embodied or psychological illness, can we begin to be and to create anew, by prefiguring the world we wish to see. Prefiguring this world is situated against challenge and struggle.

We do need to think about this; but the question of how to re-organise the world market along ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ lines is meaningless without an acceptance that mass movements can only succeed by making severe inroads into bourgeois property relations.

it is in the middle-term of active struggle that a movement against capital must necessarily arrive at the stage of greatest tension and uncertainty. It is a moment in which the most fundamental contradictions of class and ownership cannot be ‘knitted together’ into a woolly hegemony and then handed over to a ‘future’ which can scarcely mask its ingratitude.

De-Arrest Editorial Services (2016). Demeaning the Future.

Thus, peace is contingent on the development of mass intellectuality as a force for the production of Curle’s counter-system, rooted in new relations of production, where our co-operative engagement might recuperate the social brain from its co-option solely for the production and accumulation of value. We need to be disinhibited from seeing peace education as an on-going, day struggle, which is enacted at the level of society.


on DMU’s Institute for Education Futures


Posted by hallymk1

I’ve been at De Montfort University since 2002 leading on our agenda for education and technology or e-learning or technology-enhanced learning or enhancing learning through technology. In that time I’ve also been pursuing pedagogic research through: first, a raft of national/international projects; second, through publications; and third, as a National Teaching Fellow. This has drawn me increasingly into supporting pedagogic research and innovation across the University, through project work, mentoring, supporting DMU Teacher Fellow and National Teaching Fellow applications, setting up the DMU Academic Commons, and so on.

In late 2014 I set up a Centre for Pedagogic Research (following very useful conversations with Debbie Cotton at Plymouth), but within a year the General Election made it plain that the Government’s direction of travel was to re-focus higher education policy through a new Green and then White Paper, and both new policy and primary legislation. As a result we had to take a position on how to respond to both the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and any forthcoming REF. This catalysed conversations about building institutional capacity and capability related to pedagogic innovation, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and research in our Education Division, in order to create a structured environment for engaging with TEF and REF (Education Studies) at DMU.

The result of these conversations is the creation of a new Institute for Education Futures at DMU, of which I am Co-Director with Dr Sarah Younie. This is an end to my leadership of our education and technology agenda, and a new start in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, although the IEF will have a cross-institutional role working with staff (and students). I have appended our working Vision and Objectives below. However, it is important to note four things in relation to the IEF at this point.

NOTE 1: The IEF’s work has a clear connection to DMU’s Strategic Framework, which is working towards a corporate step-change in pedagogic practice, innovation and scholarship, including the following.

  • An explicit commitment to teaching quality, in all its forms.
  • The creation of a stimulating teaching and learning environment re-framed through pedagogic innovation.
  • The sustainability of a pedagogic culture rooted in student achievement.

The IEF will generate additional benefits for DMU, in terms of other Framework priorities: a scholarly culture that delivers research with impact; the social and economic development of Leicester (linked to #DMULocal) through research linked to social justice; and diverse international agendas (linked to #DMUGlobal).

NOTE 2: I have already signalled that I would like to see the IEF build capacity for pedagogic innovation democratically and co-operatively (taking on-board some of the co-operative leadership principles outlined in my work with Joss Winn and others), so that we can respond to and attempt to influence strategic priorities. Therefore, the work will be predicated upon:

  • an (infra)structure that enables the sharing of academic practice, skills and knowledge by all staff (academic and professional services) and students;
  • co-operative internal and external funding bids rooted in the TEF criteria of teaching quality, learning environment and student outcomes, alongside the REF focus on impact and environment;
  • the facilitation of grassroots, concrete, thematic networks of educational and pedagogic practice, inside and outside the University; and
  • a mentoring and peer review strategy for outputs and impact.

Sharing, co-operative, grassroots and peer-enabled. Other values and approaches are available.

NOTE 3: I have been an outspoken critic of the Government’s HE proposals for some time. I have blogged extensively about performance management, the TEF, the Green Paper and the White Paper on this blog and through peer review. I have also refused to apply for any post related to the implementation of the TEF. I remain in support of the Second Convention for HE’s aims, and I continue to work with those engaged with co-operative education. However, I work inside a University that is being recalibrated through policy and legislation as a competing business. Thus, my intention through the IEF is to continue to critique our current dystopic HE system, and work for a re-imagining of what HE might be, whilst accepting the concrete reality of my everyday existence inside the University, alongside the limitations that league tables, TEF/REF, and so on, place on my academic labour and my agency. That said, I will continue to work co-operatively for alternative possibilities in my everyday work, and this means working prefiguratively inside the University (in terms of deliberation, values, governing principles and so on). It is crucial that we are able to demonstrate what else might be possible. The maxim here is Render unto Caesar… (cheers Klaus).

NOTE 4: I hope that the IEF will emerge as a self-critical scholarly community, with a level of internal, co-operative self-governance that enables people to find their voice. The focus on Futures in the Institute title is important, and it suggests possible utopias, such as those hinted at by the University of Utopia. Our work may sit against the nostalgic futures craved by Astrov in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (thanks @nosnilwar), but it is more likely to be a re-focusing of potential energy on re-imagining that which continues to be defined for us as a productive educational life, so that we can describe an alternative, social commonwealth.

Vision

The Institute for Education Futures (IEF) will place De Montfort University at the heart of a global pedagogic and educational network engaged in the dynamic interrelationships between educational processes and societies. The IEF will be a bridge between education sectors and types of provider. It will catalyse policy-into-practice, so DMU can address crucial questions about educational futures and become world-leading in this field.

Objectives

The objectives of the IEF are as follows.

  • To act as a bridge between REF and TEF activities.
  • To act as a bridge between different sectors of formal and informal educational practice.
  • To build a REF202X Education Studies submission.
  • To establish a distinctive scholarship culture, in order to inform DMU’s engagement with the TEF, and the delivery of the University Learning Teaching and Assessment Strategy, including support for individual pedagogic projects.
  • To widen and deepen DMU’s educational and pedagogic research culture, including support for early-career researchers and for career-progression, and through publication and public dissemination
  • To create one unified research unit, combining and amplifying research in the Learning Futures Institute, the Centre for Pedagogic Research, and the Education Research Group.

Postscript

The view from my new office is quite nice, if you ignore the car park (unless you like car parks).


Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

Working with 20 co-authors, Joss Winn and I have just submitted the manuscript for Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. The edited collection forms part of Bloomsbury Academic’s series on Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education. Assuming that the review process goes to plan, the book is slated for publication in early 2017.

The original summary, description and key features of the book are noted below. The proposed table of contents is appended thereafter.

Summary

Drawing on the activism of academics and students working in, against and beyond the neo-liberal university, this book critiques academic leadership through the concept of mass intellectuality, with an analysis of the crisis of higher education and the alternative forms that are emerging from its ruins.

Description

Higher education is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What and who have led us to this crisis? What are the alternatives? To whom do we look for leadership in revealing those alternatives?

This book brings together critical analyses of ‘intellectual leadership’ in the University, and documents on-going efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organising higher education and the production of knowledge. Its authors offer their experience and views from inside and beyond the structures of mainstream higher education, in order to reflect critically on efforts to create really existing alternatives. In the process the volume asks is it possible to re-imagine the University democratically and co-operatively? If so, what are the implications for leadership not just within the University but also in terms of higher education’s relationship to society?

The authors argue that mass higher education is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and long-term interests of global society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon ‘mass intellectuality’ or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

Key features

  1. The book critiques the role of higher education and the University as an institution for developing solutions to global crises that are economic and socio-environmental. In this way it offers an analysis of the idea that there is no alternative for higher education but to contribute to neoliberal agendas for economic growth and the marketisation of everyday life. The restrictions on the socio-cultural leadership that emerge inside the University are revealed.
  2. The book describes and analyses concrete, alternative forms of higher education that have emerged from worker-student occupations, from academic engagements in civil society, and from the co-operatives movement. These projects highlight a set of co-operative possibilities for demonstrating and negotiating new forms of political leadership related to higher learning that are against the neo-liberal university.
  3. The book argues that the emergence of alternative forms of higher education, based on co-operative organising principles, points both to the failure of intellectual leadership inside the University and to the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge. The concept of ‘Mass Intellectuality’ as a form of social knowledge that is beyond the limitations of intellectual leadership inside the University is critically developed in order to frame socially-useful responses to the crisis.

Contents

Introduction

  1. Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education ~ Richard Hall and Joss Winn

Section One: Power, History and Authority

  1. Pedagogical Labour in an Age of Devalued Reproduction ~ Stevphen Shukaitis
  2. Co-operation, leadership and learning: Fred Hall and the Co-operative College before 1939 ~ Tom Woodin
  3. Academic Voices: from Public Intellectuals to the General Intellect ~ Mike Neary
  4. Openness, Politics and Power ~ Martin Paul Eve

Section Two: Potentialities

  1. The (im)possibility of Mass Intellectuality: Viewing Mass Intellectuality through the lens of the Brazilian Landless Movement ~ Joyce E Canaan
  2. Still spaces in the academy? The dialectic of university social movement pedagogy ~ Eurig Scandrett
  3. Bradford’s Community University: From ‘Constellations of Knowledge’ to Liberating the ‘General Intellect’? ~ Jenny Pearce
  4. Aesthetic Education, Critical Pedagogy and Specialist Institutions ~ Jonathan Owen Clark and Louise H. Jackson

Section Three: Praxis

  1. Six Theses In, Against and Beyond the University ~ Birmingham Autonomous University
  2. Reconciling mass intellectuality and higher education: lessons from the PPE experience ~ Joel Lazarus
  3. Somewhere Between Reform and Revolution: Alternative Higher Education and ‘The Unfinished’ ~ Gary Saunders
  4. Permaculture education as ecology of mind: the head, hands and heart of transformation ~ Tom Henfrey
  5. Mass Intellectuality from the Margins ~ Sara C. Motta

Conclusion: Politics, Aesthetics and Democracy

  1. Practicing What We Preach? Writing and Publishing In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University ~ Gordon Asher

notes on desire, anxiety and academic luddism


Posted by hallymk1

Stay in the shadows/Cheer at the gallows/This is a round up/This is a low flying panic attack

Radiohead. 2016. Burn the Witch.

ONE: showing-up as the limit of our educational hopes

Years ago I wrote the following about our relationship to the University.

I wonder if the University’s functions now are being redesigned so that they reproduce a sense of anxiety as a permanent state of exception inside teams and individuals. I wonder whether the focus on productive labour, on the socially necessary labour time of abstract academic work, and the entrepreneurial turn across higher education, each create an atmosphere of anxiety. I wonder whether the reproduction of an ambiance of anxiety is a co-operative endeavour that emerges from inside the University as a means of production that is governed by metrics, data and debt, and out of which value is scraped through the alienation of time. This reminds me of persistent inferiority and internalised responsibility, and of the shock doctrine that recalibrates what is possible.

Are defence or refusal possibilities inside the University as an anxiety machine? What is the psychic impact of: alienated labour; the disciplining of academic labour; the cognitive dissonance inherent in the contradictions of abstract/concrete labour; the rule of money? How do we learn to self-care as opposed to self-harm inside the University? One of the ways in which self-care might emerge is in looking at who is pushing back against financialisation and alienation, be that in casualised labour, or trades union anti-casualisation strategies, or through a precariat charter, or in actions like 3cosas, or in post-graduates for fair pay. These are not organisations of those with tenure, but they force us to consider both the university as anxiety/performativity machine and the idea of making opposition public, as an association of the dispossessed or impacted. They reignite the concrete/abstract relationship between higher education and the public.

Did we hope that these things would pass, and that we would not end-up being recast over-and-over inside the university as an ever-expanding site for the consumption of our educational souls and the re-production of their domination over our pedagogical possibilities? I wonder if we simply hoped that the global crises of social reproduction that we face on a daily basis would somehow not infect the university. That somehow the distilled class hatred of the HE White Paper, with its relentless focus on the rule of money, on elites, on a degree as a token of bourgeois, elitist consumption and position, on the deconstruction of higher learning as services to be commodified and purchased, would not come to pass. That somehow we would find the collective will to stitch the university back into the context and form and content of those crises, so that we could find meaningful responses to the brutality of austerity, to the brutal circulation of refugees, to the ideological brutality of Prevent and Islamophobia, and our on-going inability to care enough about environmental degradation.

And we have failed to find the collective will. We somehow felt that it was enough to be spared the rod. Or that even if we were not to be spared taking our place in the brutal execution of austerity, then we could at least find spaces for self-care as opposed to self-harm. That we could still show-up for our students or for each other, or maybe even, at a push, for ourselves.

TWO: the university as machinic whole

And all the time are revealed global narratives that bear witness to the machine-like qualities of the university as it morphs and re-morphs into something that is beyond our control. Something that is beyond our imagination. Our working lives reimagined as exchangeable or tradable services. Our working lives broken down through workload plans and performance management, so that our everyday activities can be monitored and measured, and then flung back into the machine, in order that the machine can be repurposed. Our turnaround times for assessments; our loading for preparation; our scholarly outputs; our annual teaching loads; our key performance targets; our national student survey data; our teaching excellence; our casualised contracts; our adjunct status; our educational everything; and more.

So that the university becomes a site for the ever more efficient consumption, or purchase and distribution, of societal hopes and desires. The rule of money ensures that that the university can only expand based upon the control of flows of energy that underpin these hopes and desires. So that the productive futures of our students and their families depend upon the efficient and maximised production of value, recomposed as future earnings or employability. Where the production of value is a fusion of, first, humanity made productive and efficient, and second, renewed capital infrastructure, so that the space and time of the university can be made to operate as a self-regulating and machine-like, capital-sink.

And we are reminded that in The Grundrisse, Marx wrote:

Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.)

The creation of a system of higher education intensifies the context and reality of teaching and learning, in order to drive efficiency and productivity. More technology; more efficient processes; more metrics; more performance management; less trust in the unprogrammable human; more trust in the programmable and knowable data; more. And the generation of a market through competition will ensure the domination of constant capital and infrastructure, and the power of organisational development and technology. These will ensure that the constant innovation in the motive parts of the machine determine the on-going extraction and circulation of surpluses. The machine will demand the on-going alienation of the general intellect from us, and we willingly offer this up, in the hope that we can be spared the worst.

We innovate. We manage our own performance. We offer up new efficiencies. We over-produce research and knowledge exchange or transfer. We are impactful. We do not protest the loans, or the new providers, or the reduction of educational faith and hope to commodities, or the reduction of our assessment to the machine or the learning analytics. We do not go into occupation of the terms of the struggle or the site of the struggle. We sit and hope that they do it to Julia.

And again we are reminded that in The Grundrisse, Marx wrote:

No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.

This is the systematic conversion of our work into the definite functions of the machine. So that our work as students, or professors, or professional services staff, or adjuncts, and our work as researchers or teachers or students, and our work as managers or admissions staff or on open days, and on and on, are sites for the generation of new pieces of apparatus; new parts of the machinic whole. A machinic whole designed to be productive and to generate surplus, and inside which the generation of educational hope and faith and possibility are desires that can be reduced to means of production.

THREE: higher education and the machining of desires through anxiety

And the persistent re-production of the machine enables those desires to be machined. And the machining of those desires, the re-working of those desires, is made possible through anxiety. The anxiety that is both ours and of our students. And the terrain for this is widened because the machine is infrastructure and constant capital but it is also our culture and our language and our pedagogy and our curriculum and our very, educational breath. As Virno states:

the so-called ‘second-generation autonomous labour’ and the procedural operations of radically innovated factories such as Fiat in Melfi show how the relation between knowledge and production is articulated in the linguistic cooperation of men and women and their concrete acting in concert, rather than being exhausted in the system of machinery.

It is our concrete acting in concert that is needed, wanted, desired by the machine. So we remember that in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari wrote how

There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.

That the desires we internalise from the machine are the machine’s own desires for efficiency and mindfulness and resilience. The machine’s projected desires for production and productivity and intensity, internalised by us, so that our desires are alienated and disfigured. So that we have impact or excellence. That the social desires projected into our students, for elite consumption and competition and educational positionality or comparability, for future earnings and employability, recalibrate our own desires as well as our students’ own.

Our desires situated within a field of desire recalibrated by the market. So that our higher education is disfigured through competition. So that our place in it becomes unknowable beyond the measurement of the market. And our recognition of this disfiguring is the site of our anxiety, just as we hoped that by becoming complicit with it we might save ourselves from the worst of it. Yet all along we are subordinated to the machine’s desire for our anxiety. For The Institute for Precarious Consciousness:

Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination.

The lynchpin of our subordination: my availability for my students; my teaching preparation; my relationship to my precariously-employed peers; my turnaround times; my willingness to sit on committees; my NSS scores; my TEF scores; my REF scores; my on-line presence; my impact; my scholarly outputs; my innovation; my everything. My desperate everything, including the subordination of life to work, as a means for the internalised production of anxiety that will help me to re-produce the desires of the machine for productivity and intensity.

Anxiety, alienation, desire, competition, subordination. A machinic whole.

FOUR: on academic luddism

And we recognise the damage that this does to us, as we are stripped of our educational connection to our students or our precariously-employed peers, or to our partners in other, soon-to-be-competitor institutions. The Institute for Precarious Consciousness recognise “the breakdown of all the coordinates of connectedness in a setting of constant danger, in order to produce a collapse of personality.” To struggle against this stripping-away is anxiety-inducing as we resist where we think we have limited agency. Or else it leads us towards dissociation, as we deny we have any power so we may as well exist elsewhere (behind our metrics). Or else it leads towards micro-management of our everyday experiences, so that we feel we can exert some control: at least I can negotiate the limits of my own [impact/excellence/data-driven] exploitation.

And in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari wrote of the conflicted nature of desire. That our own, concrete educational desires, for emancipation, are subsumed and disfigured by the abstracted desires of the machine. That recognising that the true liberation of our concrete desires, against their bastardisation as data about future earnings, employability and enterprise, requires that we rethink our re-production of the machine, and its anxious control.

If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence — desire, not left-wing holidays! — and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.

Through Virno, we stretch this focus on desire by relating it to what has been taken from our public education and sequestered as private-property. This is re-imagination as a form of desiring activity that is against the State and against the market, that is against the enslaving of lives through competition, that is against the idea of what the university has become, and that is against intensity, impact, resilience, mindfulness, excellence, whatever.

the question is whether the peculiar public character of the intellect, which is today the technical requirement of the production process, can be the actual basis for a radically new form of democracy and public sphere that is the antithesis of the one pivoting on the state and on its ‘monopoly on political decision’. There are two distinct but interdependent sides to this question: on the one hand, the general intellect can affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere only if its bond to the production of commodities and wage labour is dissolved. On the other hand, the subversion of capitalist relations of production can only manifest itself through the institution of a public sphere outside the state and of a political community that hinges on the general intellect.

For The Institute for Precarious Consciousness this subversion is situated against anxiety:

what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have. If we see from within anxiety, we haven’t yet performed the “reversal of perspective” as the Situationists called it – seeing from the standpoint of desire instead of power. Today’s main forms of resistance still arise from the struggle against boredom, and, since boredom’s replacement by anxiety, have ceased to be effective.

Instead they argue that we need to:

  • Produce new grounded theory relating to experience, to make our own perceptions of our situation explicit, recounted, pooled and public;
  • Recognise the reality, and the systemic nature, of our experiences;
  • Transform emotions through a sense of injustice as a type of anger which is less resentful and more focused, and as a move towards self-expression and resistance;
  • Create or express voice, so that existing assumptions can be denaturalised and challenged, and thereby move the reference of truth and reality from the system to the speaker, to reclaim voice;
  • Construct a disalienated space as a space for reconstructing a radical perspective; and
  • Analyse and theorise structural sources based on similarities in experience, to transform and restructure those sources through their theorisation, leading to a new perspective, a vocabulary of motives.

The goal is to produce the click — the moment at which the structural source of problems suddenly makes sense in relation to experiences. This click is which focuses and transforms anger. Greater understanding may in turn relieve psychological pressures, and make it easier to respond with anger instead of depression or anxiety. It might even be possible to encourage people into such groups by promoting them as a form of self-help — even though they reject the adjustment orientation of therapeutic and self-esteem building processes.

Above all, the process should establish new propositions about the sources of anxiety. These propositions can form a basis for new forms of struggle, new tactics, and the revival of active force from its current repression: a machine for fighting anxiety.

New propositions as a basis for new forms of struggle. And we remember that we might need to become academic luddites as a basis for a new form of struggle. That in order to overcome the loss of time and agency, and the stripping away of our curriculum-power and our educational intellect and our pedagogical capacities into the machine, we need to insert ourselves differently into the anxiety-machine. That we need to consider how we resist the subsumption of the university and of higher education further into the re-production of a system of alienation, precisely because it is a system of alienation, and not because our is privileged, skilled, crafted, abstracted work. This is a resistance of social rather than occupational displacement, precisely because the terrain of higher education has become a means for the re-production of specific, alienating desires across society.

We owe our publics and our society that much at least.

Thus, it is against what education is becoming, solely as a means to re-imagine what society might be, that we might strike. That we might strike to reclaim the parts of the machine that are socially-useful: the knowledge, the curriculum, the relationships, the technology, the language, the culture, and more. This is the reclamation of educational exchange-value as social use-value. Reclaiming and repurposing the parts of the machine that enable us to share our solidarity with other public workers who are being brutalised. That we might reclaim and repurpose the parts of the machine that enable us to provide solutions to global crises, rather than waiting for the market to act. That as a by-product or as a lever, we might refuse our abstracted labour where we can, as external examiners, or as reviewers for for-profit journals, or in working to rule, or wherever.

However, whilst these spaces inside the machine are a terrain for struggle, this also emerges from attempts to reclaim and to repurpose time. Slowing production and circulation and consumption time across a sector or across a society is a reminder of our humanity. It reminds us that our labour-power (and labour-time) is the source of all value. That exploited and dehumanised labour is the source of all value. As Marx argued, Capital’s desire to reduce labour-time is twinned with its desire to endless extract surplus value from that very labour as its source of power. It wishes to annihilate labour-time at exactly the moment that it desires to expand its potential for exploiting that labour-time. How then is this tension to be amplified inside the university and in solidarity actions across higher education and within society, without generating further levels of anxiety and performance and precarity? How do our struggles reclaim time from inside-and-across the terrain of higher education as a form of machine-breaking that repurposes the machine? For Marx, such struggles are rooted in the free development of individualities through associations that demonstrate the limited and limiting rule of value over our lives. They are rooted in pedagogies and curricula for association; in solidarity actions and solidarity economies; in co-operation and co-operative education.

The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.

There is something here about our collective liberating of the forces of production; our revealing and recomposing our social relations; our recognition and reclamation of time as a pedagogical project. With our students and our peers, and beyond them into society. Of finding collective spaces and times, in order to generate forms of academic luddism. As a form of academic machine-breaking that reconnects and recombines the machinic whole with its social whole for a different purpose that is calibrated by a different time.

The question is then how? And maybe when?


on resistance to the HE White Paper


Posted by hallymk1

Since I posted on the HE White Paper and academic practice, I have been thinking about obstacles or resistances that could be placed in the way. In the post, I contended the following.

Revealing the ways in which the White Paper is part of a process of on-going expropriation and pauperisation, of everyday life, of academic autonomy, of care and love inside the classroom, of academic development, is a starting point.

What follows must describe and play-out the conditional development of the social productivity of academic labour, for an alternative set of values beyond the market and instrumental financialisation.

Here we might ask, what can we do in association to resist and refuse the disciplinary instrumentalism of the White Paper and the TEF?

What can we do in association with those struggling for labour rights like trades unions, or with cross-sector groups like the HE Convention/Campaign for the Public University?

What can we do in association to refuse the competitive urges of some university “leaders”?

What can we do in association to frame a counter-position that frames an alternative vision for higher education?

What can we do in association with other public-facing workers, in education, in health, in social care, and so on, to define an alternative vision for our collective work? Can we use this as a moment to define alternatives to the law of value as the organising principle for social life?

Part of this work needs to be situated against the fact that the UK context is one of low resistance to the logics of neoliberalism. Here there has been an acceptance that austerity is necessary or ethically-sound. In fact, the primary discussion has been whether policy can or should support economic expansion or whether (in its anti-Keynesianism) it catalyses contraction and therefore threatens job security. One of the issues in revisiting this discussion, as a precursor to opposition, is then the balance between: imperceptible opposition (mutterings); non-disruptive resistance (marches and demos); disruptive resistance (as a function of trade union actions); and militancy (occupations, withdrawal of labour, worker-co-option of workplaces).

The work of David Bailey and Saori Shibata on moving from defeat to obstruction, highlights that in low resistance States, for substantial impact on any proposed neoliberal policy, the sufficient conditions for a substantial impact (a roll-back) are that they need disruption and militancy. The recent Junior Doctors’ action is a case in-point, grounded in labour rights and the idea of the public, although it has not catalysed broader, NHS reinstatement action. However, in HE there has been high-levels of policy disengagement by much of the workforce (staff and students), in spite of the principled opposition by individuals and associations. For instance, UCU and Unison have focused energies on immediate issues of labour rights, rather than on developing alternatives.

Bailey and Shibata’s analysis focuses upon resistance: by engaging with a critique of the likely, negative outcomes of any policy (including sharing concrete examples of those outcomes in order to build solidarity); through developing the ‘weapons of the weak’; by highlighting and making central the entrenched interests of those affected by reform; through outright refusal; and by influencing the role of decision-makers and decision-takers. As such, refusals can take the form of non-compliance, enacting governance problems, or the direct prevention of the reform and its implementation.

As Danny Yee argues in his review of Peter Scott’s The Weapons of the Weak:

conformity is calculated, not unthinking, and beneath the surface of symbolic and ritual compliance there is an undercurrent of ideological resistance, just as beneath the surface peace there is continuous material resistance. Scott considers the consequences of all this for definitions of resistance. Four criteria have commonly been required for ‘genuine’ resistance: it must be collective and organised rather than private and unorganised; it must be principled and selfless rather than opportunistic and selfish; it must have revolutionary consequences; and it must negate rather than accept the basis of domination.

In terms of the HE White Paper, there is a need to think through the potential for waves of struggle, which demonstrate the solidarity between various groups of affected workers and others across society whom the reforms will impact. The points of solidarity include: the embodied toll that neoliberal restructuring and austerity takes on mental and physical health, including in families; the control of performance and activity; the reduction of life to work; and, the inability of the curriculum to manage issues of crisis concerning poverty, climate change, on-going colonialism and so on. The points of solidarity connect:

  • Academic staff who are subject to increased workload and performance management;
  • Academic staff whose workload requirements are marginalising the rest of their lives, as parents, carers, partners, friends, so that never-ending, entrepreneurial work dominates;
  • Students whose work is defined by debt as a commodity or purchased as a service, rather than being regarded as work that should be reimbursed through a wage;
  • Students whose education is solely predicated on productivity and employability, with contributions to social or care work being marginalised;
  • Student of colour, who are protesting and refusing the on-going colonisation of the curriculum;
  • Precariously-employed graduate teaching assistants, or those for whom tenure is becoming an impossibility;
  • Professional services staff for whom the restructuring of back-office functions entails outsourcing or an attrition on labour rights, and amplifies forms of social dumping;
  • Graduates saddled with increasing amounts of debt and weak job prospects, in the face of automation, on-going recession, and so on;
  • Teachers in Primary and Secondary Education, whose work is covered by the Educational Excellence Everywhere White paper, which promises the privatisation and data-driven commodification of pre-HE education;
  • Teachers in Primary and Secondary Education, whose work is also affected by the Small Businesses, Enterprise and Employment Act (2015), which enables metrics and longitudinal data to be collated about individuals to drive the production of economic value;
  • Community groups fighting for social justice, for instance in refugee, housing or gender rights; and
  • Workers in notionally public-facing industries, where ideas of public service or the public good (contested as those terms are) are being lost, and for whom the realities of austerity are disciplinary (such as the campaign for an NHS Reinstatement Bill).

Here there is a need to redefine the terms of resistance as cross-sectoral, acting communally or socially, precisely because those communal or social aspects of our identities are being marginalised or reduced, as work and productivity becomes our everything. I have written about this, in terms of HE and the oppositional possibility of social strikes, as a moment of refusal of increased teaching intensity. This is situated through the definition of directional demands. As I argue against teaching intensity:

common struggle is critical in refusing the precepts of the [White] Paper. Such common struggled would join with those who are calling for refusal of TTIP, beyond education and in terms of other social goods like healthcare. It would connect intergenerational refusals of debt and indenture, which are shackling families with debt so that they become competitive rather than co-operative. It would connect with others who are precariously employed, in order to work-up moments of refusal and negation, and to demonstrate alternatives.

In this approach there is a need to disrupt the circuits of educational production that are wreaking further violence on higher education, and thereby wreaking violence on our home and social lives. Without such disruption, the ways in which we reproduce ourselves will become increasingly precarious.

Forms of resistance then take the form of moments of solidarity that contest and disrupt the bases of material power. Part of this might be managed through local and national solidarity campaigns between student, academic and professional services trades unions, as long as those unions do not subjugate collective bargaining to economic recovery that is predicated on austerity. Mechanisms must be found to block the circuits of capital accumulation, and the imposition of the rule of money inside education. Part of this is to find moments of radical solidarity, for instance in a focus on debt-free education, and in support of debt jubilees, or the strike debt movement. Part of this is to discuss the importance of time, and in particular of working time and the intensity of the working day. Finding ways to resist overwork are critical, especially between academics, students and precariously-employed staff. Part of this is to find ways to refuse the generation of mental and physical ill-health inside the University and across communities, by refusing to accept the impact and implementation of policy.

Finding spaces for dissent, and for remembering that we each have identities beyond work that are being ruptured, which need recording and sharing as forms of solidarity, are crucial moments in generating energy for alternatives. Finding the time and space to slow or to stop the University are also important. In part this is to support the activities that are being marginalised, like caring and loving and living. In part it is to support capacity-building for alternatives. In part it is to support forms of communal or educational governmentality that are rooted in an alternative imagining of HE, like that to be proposed by the Second Convention for HE. Here the autonomous imagination of staff, students, parents, community groups and graduates might enable us to shape what Dinerstein envisages as a concrete utopia.

The role of time is central in this. Time shapes productivity, intensity, and the creation of value. Disrupting and reclaiming time is a revolutionary act because it is about claiming that time for ourselves and our humanity. Reclaiming time in the face of the HE White Paper is a deeply pedagogic act. Perhaps the most radical pedagogic act we can imagine, because it is an intervention in the ways that we have been taught to experience or reproduce the world. Reclaiming time with others is potentially a way of enacting a slow-motion exodus from austerity and subsequently the domination of capitalist social relations. At issue is whether some form of horizontal organising through general assemblies, radical and collective research, and work done in public, can converge with vertical organising through trade unions and political parties, in order to reframe our collective and individual desires away from being willing slaves of capital. Or is it all we can do to drag our feet?

Here the logics of action must be more than our identities solely defined as teachers or students. They are rooted in class, identity, community, and social rights. They situate specific issues like indentured study or performance management or workload monitoring, against wider policies of austerity. Rather than waiting of an alternative political economy to emerge, the logics of action require an on-going rupture that is constantly reshaped by struggle and which is formative in that it emerges from below. In this way it is more likely to be representative of our humanity, rather than our increasingly cybernetically-controlled existence where our lives are routinely managed.

A key issue is where does our limited energy go in all this? Resisting on all fronts is an exhausting impossibility. Resisting whilst we try to live is also potentially exhausting. Can we resist where we have a lack of agency or control? How do we push back against the normalisation of metrics that feeds into the violence of aspiration, or the internalised desire to optimise our personal and familial outcomes, as they are set by the market?

  1. How do we work collectively inside and across institutions, and between teachers and students, to refuse the TEF? Or must we simply attempt to occupy and recompose the TEF?
  2. How do tenured academics connect to the concerns of precariously-employed staff, alongside indentured students and their families?
  3. How do we build and disseminate stories of the impact of the policies of austerity, in order to build the movement and the alternative?
  4. How do workers’ unions inside and across institutions, including students, academics and professional services staff, disrupt capital accumulation, and divert space and time to the idea of the public?
  5. How do we build a movement against standardised testing and metrics-driven education? How do we recover our humanity through connection to other campaigns?
  6. How do we connect our work inside institutions to other, concrete and local, social campaigns against austerity?

on the HE White Paper and academic practice


Posted by hallymk1

I

As I read the White Paper and the technical consultation on the TEF, I realise that I have spent so much time protesting the UK Government’s assault upon the collective, academic labour of the staff and students who work in higher education. I remember that I think of this as collective, associated labour, and yet the Government’s assault is driven by the human capital that can be accumulated and circulated by individuals and their families, or by universities as competing capitals. There is a different shape or form to the view of social relationships inside the university or inside the classroom that is articulated by those of us who see education as an act of love, as opposed to those who can only articulate it through the market and modes of incentivisation. And much of the White paper scopes a regressive space that wishes to marketise love and care if it must, or to marginalise them so that teaching intensity and student outcomes and data on future earnings can be optimised.

I remember that I wrote against learning gain and the ways in which data is used to kettle academic labour.

I remember that I wrote against the HE Green paper, situated through the Treasury’s Productivity Plan, in its obsession with teaching intensity.

I remember that I wrote some notes on saying no to the TEF, and then about the noose of student choice contained in the HE Green Paper.

And for a while I have been considering this in terms of the on-going proletarianisation of the University, in particular as it then relates to academic overwork.

And it is exhausting being against this wide-ranging assault on academic labour, academic practice, academic development, and academic identity. It is exhausting realising that their assault on the fabric of what we might refer to as public or social, and then later as a good, is the dismantling of the spaces that we once regarded as autonomous. Equally, it is exhausting bearing the brunt of their anger about our social, cultural, intellectual or oppositional capital. Knowing that their anger kettles our academic practice as staff and students. Knowing that their anger reshapes the funding, regulation and governance of the space, so that what we do has to be restructured so that it performs. Knowing that the marketisation of the space and the on-going demand for competition will force managers inside universities to recalibrate these as places for the expansion of value, and the production of surpluses, and the production of educational commodities.

And as a result, any attempt to push-back, so that education becomes an act of care, or a form of wider moral, pedagogic responsibility beyond the market, and beyond human capital theory, becomes increasingly difficult. In this moment the White Paper reveals a dominant position that stipulates improvement and enhancement as a functional imperative, shaped by employment and future earnings data.

II

And we remember that there have been evaluations of teaching and learning enhancement that view academic practice as a developmental and pedagogical activity.

there is evidence of strong institutional engagement with the national Enhancement Themes as a driver for development in learning and teaching and associated staff development. While there remains a need to encourage wider and more consistent staff engagement in this area, staff who are involved affirm the positive impact of such engagement. The combined impact of revised promotion criteria, clearer career paths and more strategic approaches to staff development is positive, and is contributing to improved staff development provision to encourage greater engagement with pedagogical and enhancement-led initiatives.

QAA. 2011. Learning from ELIR 2008-11 Staff development: Developing, sharing and recognising good practice, p. 1.

However, as a note on the WonkHE coverage of the White paper, Where is the ‘teaching excellence’ in TEF? argued, developing national enhancement themes or reflective practice is silenced. Or treated with silence, and silenced in the process.

This morning’s White Paper, though ostensibly focused on “teaching excellence”, will not attempt to support academics in developing their own teaching practice – there will be no research projects into HE teaching at a local or national level, and no attempt to understand or collate what makes for excellent teaching, either generally or subject by subject. The TEF is a stick to draw teaching into compliance with institutional and sector norms, not a carrot to encourage the sector to examine in an evidence based manner whether these norms are the right ones.

Today’s White Paper talks at length about teaching excellence, but it won’t support excellent teachers. Neither will it develop excellence in teaching.

This is a central point made by the Second HE Convention in their open letter (NOTE: which is still open for signatures):

Students are supposedly ‘at the heart of the system’, yet the quality regime proposed – the Teaching Excellence Framework – includes no direct measures of teaching quality. Rather it is designed to facilitate increases in fees,

As Andrew McGettigan argues, the White Paper distils the Government’s animus to the established higher education order, in order to focus on student/family choice and the role of challenger institutions, in disrupting complacent or ‘coasting’ institutions. This is its sole relationship to teaching quality, the learning environment and student outcomes.

‘The primary goal is to raise quality’ and the idea is that this is best achieved by having weaker institutions end provision, and stronger institutions replace them (this also applies to individual academics. Hence there is no mention of methods to help individuals improve).

The only issue apparently is to ensure that current students are protected: previously solutions to this conundrum included ideas about ABTA-style bonds, and the Green Paper cycled through a series of options: “an insurance policy, a bond, reserve funds, or Escrow accounts.”

There is no focus on academic practice or enhancement. There is only the signal that academics need to maintain their own career-ready capital, by becoming more entrepreneurial in retrofitting their work to the labour market outcomes of their students. As I note elsewhere this deterritorialises and then creatively destroys both the classroom and the relationships that exist within it.

It is impossible to reconcile the central conditions of the [White] Paper and the [HM Treasury] Productivity Plan to non-marketised/financialised pedagogic relationships. This is the prescribed direction of travel that frames the classroom economically though relations of production that subjugate people, as human capital that can be made productive through discipline.

As McGettigan notes of the context for the White Paper:

it’s hard to give any credence to these market reform measures if they are meant to advance quality: there is no explanation as to what they will be and what evidence supports them. We seem to be asked to ‘feel the radical commitment’, but it all seems rather to express an astonishing level of resentment against the history and autonomy of the established sector. BIS and the Treasury seem to have lost any perspective on what problems there might be in the sector and how they might be solved constructively.

III

So what is left for institutions, in navigating their way through this morass? The TEF assessment criteria on pp. 13-16 of the technical consultation, are outcomes-driven and functional, and leave limited space for reflective practice by individuals or teams. In fact, they will tend to catalyse a range of additional educational services that will affect academic workloads, related to mentoring, personal tutoring, employability, technological innovation, alongside the outsourcing or insourcing of others, such as study skills. These will become increasingly critical because they help delineate graduate work-readiness beyond the content of their degree, thus helping employers overcome issues of ability-bias and signalling (people who exhibit characteristics that the labour market values like a strong work ethic or sense of conformity tend to get more education. They will therefore underpin future metrics.

Further, as UCU have noted, the precarious and insecure nature of academic employment is a painful issue, in terms of developing careers and reward/recognition, and engagement with teaching quality and professional development. Increasingly, institutional context will matter here, because as the White Paper notes throughout, competition is the pivot for reform. Yet inside the system, this will be defined through competition and appeals to the choices made by students and their families.

By introducing more competition and informed choice into higher education, we will deliver better outcomes and value for students, employers and the taxpayers who underwrite the system (p. 8)

So academics and subject teams need to get their story straight for students/families, institutional managers, and for risk-based quality assurers

There are strong arguments to encourage greater competition between high quality new and existing providers in the HE sector (p. 8)

They need to do this as self-exploiting entrepreneurs because the White Paper notes

We must establish a robust framework for gathering the information to measure teaching in its broadest sense (p. 10)

TEF judgements will be made against agreed criteria by an expert peer review panel including employers and students, and based on a combination of core metrics and short institutional submissions (p.19)

Here the section on metrics in Chapter 3a and Annex C from p. 45 in the TEF Technical Consultation are key to the ways in which academics and institutions who wish/need to play along, can then respond.

The emphasis in the provider submission should be on demonstrating the impact and effectiveness of teaching and its outcome (p. 28).

This response is likely to shape any institutional/provider narrative (the short institutional TEF submissions) that enables competitive edge to emerge. And this is the critical moment in this White Paper – that the Government wishes to catalyse a higher education terrain solely defined by work/human capital and the production of value. Thus, the institutional context that will form part of the regulatory landscape will be shaped by this. How will academic teams or institutions describe to students/families and the sector how they “meet expectations”, are “excellent” or “outstanding”?

How they answer this will relate to the place of pedagogical or enhancement-related innovations inside institutional culture: as imposed and functional (training), or as developmental and reflective. This will then inform the renewal or restructuring of academic careers rooted in teaching, such that outcomes- and risk-based refocusing recalibrates progression through Post-Graduate Certificates, internal teaching excellence awards (including applications for readership/professorship by pedagogic practice), and then potentially national awards (if they still exist), alongside an institution’s relationship to the UK Professional Standards Framework. How will this outcomes- and risk-based refocusing, rooted in competition, connect to teaching innovation funding and projects? How will the professional identity or professionalism of academics be supported, rather than eroded as the University is proletarianised?

IV

The White Paper notes the complexity in trying to measure the effectiveness of teaching.

Other important aspects include weighted contact hours and teaching intensity. There is strong evidence that such factors make a difference to students: the HEPI/ HEA 2015 Survey showed that contact hours correlated with both student satisfaction and perceptions of value for money. However, we recognise that these are difficult to measure, if we are to capture the complexities of digital delivery, peer assisted learning and the difference made by both varying class sizes and the status of those carrying out teaching (p. 48)

Yet, in order to drive productivity academics and their managers are coerced into conformity, in order to reinforce hegemony. What we see is that the raft of proposals is an attempt to subsume academic life, so that it becomes more productive, competitive, entrepreneurial and atomised.

The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move — these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour. The means — unconditional development of the productive forces of society — comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production.

Marx. Conflict Between Expansion Of Production And Production Of Surplus-Value. Capital, Vol. 3.

Revealing the ways in which the White Paper is part of a process of on-going expropriation and pauperisation, of everyday life, of academic autonomy, of care and love inside the classroom, of academic development, is a starting point.

What follows must describe and play-out the conditional development of the social productivity of academic labour, for an alternative set of values beyond the market and instrumental financialisation.

Here we might ask, what can we do in association to resist and refuse the disciplinary instrumentalism of the White Paper and the TEF?

What can we do in association with those struggling for labour rights like trades unions, or with cross-sector groups like the HE Convention/Campaign for the Public University?

What can we do in association to refuse the competitive urges of some university “leaders”?

What can we do in association to frame a counter-position that frames an alternative vision for higher education?

What can we do in association with other public-facing workers, in education, in health, in social care, and so on, to define an alternative vision for our collective work? Can we use this as a moment to define alternatives to the law of value as the organising principle for social life?


Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety


Posted by hallymk1

With Kate Bowles, I have an article coming out in volume 28 of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, entitled:

Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety

The article looks at the psychological impacts on academics and students of the re-engineering of HE, and of concomitant academic overwork. It undertakes this from a transnational perspective, with a focus both on anxiety amongst academic workers including students, and on the idea of the University as an anxiety machine. The article is in a special issue that employs Marx and Engels’ critical categories of labor, value, the commodity, capital, etc. in reflexive ways which illuminate the role and character of academic labor today and how its existing form might be, according to Marx, abolished, transcended and overcome (aufheben). Our focus is on the concept of subsumption.

The abstract is appended herewith.

This article analyses the political economy of higher education, in terms of Marx and Engels’ conception of subsumption. It addresses the twin processes of formal and real subsumption, in terms of the re-engineering of the governance of higher education and there-production of academic labour in the name of value. It argues that through the imposition of architectures of subsumption, academic labour becomes a source of both overwork and anxiety. The article employs Marx and Engels’ categorizations of formal and real subsumption, in order to work towards a fuller understanding of abstract academic labour, alongside its psychological impacts. The article closes by examining whether narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour.


Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

With Keith Smyth I have a new article out in a special edition of the Open Library of Humanities journal on The Abolition of the University. Our article is titled: Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education.

Abstract

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market. This article argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the bounded nature of the curriculum is central. One possible way to address this crisis is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces an on-going colonisation by Capital. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in a co-operative curriculum, and which might enable activist-educators to build an engaged curriculum, through which students and academics no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage their own alienation.

Keywords: community; curriculum; praxis; sociability; university


notes in support of Rhodes Must Fall


Posted by hallymk1

I

My two most recent articles have referenced Rhodes Must Fall. The first, “Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety” (with Kate Bowles), argues that narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour. It develops a point that I have been trying to articulate about the process of abolishing academic labour. The second, “Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education” (with Keith Smyth), argues that the university is reproduced by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. One possible way to address crisis is by decolonising and then re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Master’s House community.

In both instances I have been trying, with my collaborators, to imagine what educational repair might look like. The idea of educational repair is critical because it focuses on liberating the curriculum as a social use-value, through a critical questioning of the received canon and the pedagogic practices that reinforce or reproduce hegemonic, social positions. One reading of educational repair is that by revealing and then challenging the racialized nature of the curriculum, it becomes possible to enable repair as a form of social justice. Just as the dominant social goals of education enact forms of violence against specific groups by marginalising or silencing them, more progressive pedagogic practices enable repair to the fabric of society and education. This is one of the key reasons why I support Rhodes Must Fall.

II

A range of campaigns by students and staff of colour have emerged as critical, transnational and local movements and moments in the struggle against power and capital in the university. These include: Rhodes Must Fall; the work of Cambridge students to get the Benin Cockerel statue returned to Nigeria; Dismantling the Master’s House at University College London, and related campaigns around #whyismycurriculumwhite and #whyisntmyprofessorblack; the campaign at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, #StandWithJNU; and the campaign to get the Harvard Law School to drop its shield because it incorporates the crest of Isaac Royal Senior, who built much of his wealth through slave labour.

As Azad Essa argues:

From Delhi to Addis Ababa to Durban, students have recognised that a grand collusion of capital and state is in the process of destroying their futures. The status quo is untenable.

In India, the rage manifests itself against caste inequalities, misogyny, communalism, and rising Hindu authoritarianism that hides itself under an agenda of “development” and “Make in India” or “India shining”.

In South Africa, the rage seen over the past six months over tuition fees and outsourcing, is a refusal to accept continued economic apartheid that excludes the majority of black South Africans under the guise of the “rainbow nation” and “non-racialism”.

[D]issent is not just restricted to education fees – students are demanding a decolonisation of syllabus, language, and the very ways in which knowledge has become a tool to keep people from thinking.

Azad Essa. #StandWithJNU and #FeesMustFall: The reemergence of the student movement.

I read these campaigns inside the university through a deeper connection with the work of those fighting for Black Lives Matter, and in particular its focus on restorative justice across society.

We are committed to collectively, lovingly and courageously working vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension all people. As we forge our path, we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

The guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter campaign, focused upon intersectional empathy and justice, might be the organising principles for a deeply pedagogical, alternative social form.

The collective work of students/staff across higher education matters because the university is a critical node inside which the intersection of societal injustices, through class, gender and race are revealed. For instance, campaigns like 3cosas demonstrated the asymmetrical impact on women of colour of the disparity between university and contract workers, in terms of sick pay, holidays and pensions. Injustice is also revealed through the governance and regulation of the university, and in the definition, design and delivery of its curricula. In particular, as a recent ContestedTV round table on What has and what will #RhodesMustFall achieve?, the movement is detonating issues that flow from the symbolism of artefacts (be they statues or the curriculum) inside and beyond higher education. These include the following.

  • The role of knowledge production in the heart of the historic British Empire, as an ongoing process for the transnational, colonial production/reproduction of capital. This does not accept the premises on which the curriculum and the university are built, namely dispossession. The legacy of Rhodes is the legacy of corporations and vested interests that despoil the planet continuing to enact their legitimacy through philanthropic work inside HEIs. This forces us to question how we conduct ourselves today, and how our educational cultures, curricula and organising principles enact violence in contemporary society
  • The hegemonic cultural context of knowledge production, scholarship and research, which reiterates the white voices that are to be heard and those (non-white) that are silenced. As a result, the power that is reinforced in the classroom defines who speaks/listens/assesses and on what terms. Importantly, the curriculum is often presented as neutral, in spite of its context.
  • That the construction of the curriculum and its assessment enforce differentials in attainment that then form the reproduction of racialized inequalities. Wider societal inequalities are amplified inside the university.
  • Control of the curriculum ensures that political knowledge and therefore political activism is limited. Cybernetic forms of control, through the reduction of the curriculum to a system prescribed by functions, feedback, analytics, and degrees of control, then tends to naturalise assumptions about performance. This risks creating ghettos inside-or-outside the curriculum.
  • The thinking led us into this wider crisis of sociability, which infects political economy and our global socio-environment, is not that which will liberate us. Moreover, the trans-historical nature of this thinking, rooted in neo-colonial, capitalist discourses, is provincial and racialized.
  • What is required is a decolonisation of the hierarchy of knowing/doing, inside the university, which then pushes back against fetishized university knowledge both in terms of its content and organising principles. This work sees the university as a node for the intersection of protest, where links to local communities emerge against a reified academia in response to concrete issues.
  • This movement of decolonisation cannot be created through university diversity manuals, which sidestep the everyday realities of silencing and political activism, and which ignore the intersection of race, gender and class. As Tadiwa Madenga notes “I also think it’s important to recognise the word that they will never use, which is decolonisation. They will always only ever use diversity. There is a reason they don’t want to even touch that word.”
  • Symbols, like statues and curriculum, remind us of the systematic violence on which much of higher education is built; they form reminders of accumulation by dispossession. They force us to interrogate domination. This is a process of decolonising our minds that is a reference point in the creation of counter-hegemony in the movement to abolish power.
  • The movement to decolonise or dismantle the university in its current form is one of disrupting the function of Empire, primarily in support of decolonising the global South (the former colonial/neo-colonial world). This is an entry point into a wider discussion about decolonialism and structural forms of racism.

When probed about what they mean by ‘history’, many of our critics actually reveal a deep ignorance of Africa, and Rhodes. What they really express is a desire to preserve infantile fables that reinforce their identities. History is not as simple or static as colonial apologists want it to be: removing the statue from its current position would itself mark the moment at which Oxford entered a more honest present. We should not be so overawed by history that we are afraid to make it.

By calling for the removal of the Rhodes statue, RMF wants to show just how far Oxford will go to defend the indefensible. Just how unwilling it will be to look itself in the mirror. Just what reflexes still dominate its systems of power.

Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh. Rhodes Will Fall.

III

Support for Rhodes Must Fall is immanent to academic activism, and the refusal of instrumental, conservative ideological positions that stress the exchange-value of higher education over its social, use-value. This forces us to question our engagement with the heart of the university, as a functional, technocratic space dominated by business cases for growth that are rooted in new markets rather than reparation. As Giroux argues, this is never enough.

In an age of overwhelming violence, war, and oppression, universities must create formative cultures that allow students to assume the role of critically engaged citizens, informed about the ideologies, values, social relations, and institutions that bear down on their lives so that they can be challenged, changed, and held accountable

Thus, intersectional, intergenerational movements that refuse the violent imposition of hierarchies onto our lives enable alternative infrastructures to be imagined. Student activism against such imposition has been, and continues to be, met with state-sanctioned violence. In the accelerated implementation of neoliberalism within the UK, opposition is branded as outlaw or is brutalised in the kettle. As societies are disrupted by climate change, debt, food production and energy availability, there is a quickening of the transformation of the state towards an iron cage of control, in the name of business-as-usual, growth and capital. And all this is a world where, as Žižek argues, our liberal aim is “to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on.” Žižek queries whether it is enough that “the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned.” We might argue that very set-up is demarcated by gender, race and class, and is framed by the failure of liberal democracy to humanise in the face of the State’s oppression and antagonism.

And so Rhodes Must Fall resonates for me with something I noted a long time ago:

what is needed is our co-operative conquest of power as a step towards the abolition of power relations. At this point we are able to re-inscribe a different set of possibilities upon the world. At this point we are able to move beyond protest about economic power and occupations of enclosed spaces, to critique how our global webs of social relations contribute to the dehumanisation of people, where other humans are treated as means in a production/consumption-process rather than ends in themselves able to contribute to a common wealth… As the everyday is folded into the logic of capital, and the everyday is subsumed within the discipline of debt and the apparent foreclosure of the possibilities for an enhanced standard of living for us all, then the everyday becomes a space in which revolt can emerge.

This echoes John Holloway’s work against power.

For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of the world is not whose power but the very existence of power. What is at issue is not who exercises power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations.

We cannot live in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives. As teachers we cannot teach in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives. As students we cannot learn in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives.

NOTE: Danica Savonick and Cathy Davidson have produced An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies of Gender Bias in Academe. It includes a growing range of analyses of the struggles that are being recounted in the university, including the following (chosen here for their focus on gender and race).

Chavella T. Pittman. 2010. “Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students”. In Teaching Sociology.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. Gonzalez, and Angela P. Harris, eds, 2012. Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Available at: http://www.usu.edu/usupress/books/index.cfm?isbn=8695
https://www.facebook.com/PresumedIncompetent?ref=br_tf

Joan C. Williams, Katherine W. Phillips, and Erika V. Hall. 2014. “Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias Against Women of Color in Science”. The Center for WorkLife Law.

These might also be extended to focus upon the experience of precariously employed staff, the mental health of graduate students and staff, the labour conditions of professional services staff, and so on.

IV

The political economics of this struggle are also critical, and reinforce the position of the university as a node in the flows and reproduction of global capital, in its productive, cultural and intellectual forms. Reflecting on Holloway’s discussion of the constrictive nature of capital and that the only autonomy possible exists for capital itself, we might think about the relationship of the university and struggle inside the university to this system of domination.

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the [University] from its social environment: it attributes to the [University] an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

As Mike Neary notes: “The struggle is not for the University, but against what the University has become.” This includes the role of the University in processes of global labour arbitrage, which strengthen the transnational power of activist networks that are using education as a countermeasure against a global reduction in the rate of profit. Thus, the World Bank Education Sector Strategy ties educational innovation and the rights of the child to ‘strategic development investment’, with an outcome being a strengthening of those labour pools for privatised knowledge, innovation, and enterprise. The globalised deployment of technologies is critical in this process, and underscores the aims of organisations that sponsor capitalist development through philanthropy, as philanthro-capitalism. Moreover, educational technology becomes a fundamental strand of a strategy for commodity-dumping and value extraction from other arms of the globalised system, including the flow of skilled labour from the global South to the global North.

This matters in the context of Rhodes Must Fall because, as Michael Roberts argues:

the huge low wage proletariat that has emerged in the last 30 years is the key to the profits of imperialism, transferred from the South to the North… In 2010, 79 percent, or 541 million, of the world’s industrial workers lived in “less developed regions,” up from 34 percent in 1950 and 53 percent in 1980, compared to the 145 million industrial workers, or 21 percent of the total, who in 2010 lived in the imperialist countries (p103). For workers in manufacturing industry, this shift is more dramatic still. Now 83 percent of the world’s manufacturing workforce lives and works in the nations of the Global South.

Roberts quotes John Smith’s recent book on super-exploitation:

The wages paid to workers in the South are affected by factors that have no bearing on or relevance to the productivity of these workers when at work, factors arising from conditions in the labor market and more general social structures and relations affecting the reproduction of labor-power, including the suppression of the free international movement of labor and the emergence of a vast relative surplus population in the Global South. This knocks a large hole in the tottering edifice of mainstream economics.

The exploitation of labour has increased through a shift in both absolute surplus value through a longer working day and a surplus population, and in relative surplus value through technological and organisational innovation, which both reduce the value of labour-power. However, a raft of super-exploitative movements impact workers globally by driving wages below the value of labour power, through an attrition on labour rights, an assault on social care and pensions, zero-hours contracts and precarious employment, enforced entrepreneurship, and so on. Moreover, this super-exploitation is also cultural, and ignores the fact that much growth or GDP in the global North, including that which is produced inside universities, is predicated upon resources from the global South.

much of the value in, say, US GDP is not value created by American workers but is captured through multinational exploitation and transfer pricing from profits created from the exploitation of the workers of the South. GDP confuses value creating with value capture and so does not expose the exploitation of the South by the imperialist North: “GDP as a measure of the part of the global product that is captured or appropriated by a nation, not a measure of what it has produced domestically. The D in GDP, in other words, is a lie.” (Smith, quoted by Roberts, p278).

Moreover, for Smith there are critical questions that have ramifications for the organisation and reproduction of the higher education as a node in a global web of production, namely:

the exploitative character of relations between core and peripheral nations, the higher rate of exploitation in the latter, and the political centrality of the struggles in the Global South (p223).

At issue are the connections between super-exploitation in both the global North and South, and struggles to decolonise not just the academy but our minds, as we become aware of the intersecting domination of our capitalist system of producing life as it plays out in race, gender and class terms. As Roberts argues

There may well be more room for imperialism to exploit the proletariat globally and so counteract falling profitability again, for a while. There are still reserve armies of labour from the rural areas in many countries to be drawn into globalised commodity production (and yes, often at below-value wages). But there are limits to the ability of imperialism to raise the rate of exploitation indefinitely, not least the struggle of this burgeoning proletariat in the South (and still substantial numbers in the North).

How we connect local examples of historical, material and on-going super-exploitation and dehumanisation, that respect and emerge through campaigns like Rhodes Must Fall, is one step in a movement of abolition.

V

I want to think about this movement in the context of the abolition of academic labour, in particular through an intellectual (rather than fetishized and academic) mental inversion. This takes Rhodes Must Fall as prefigurative of an alternative form of society that is decolonising its racism and neo-colonialism, as a precursor to decolonising our minds from capital. Here intersectional forms of solidarity, between communities fighting for reparative justice in a range of contexts, is central. These are systematic problems that demand a systematic movement the constituent elements of which articulate collective solidarity, and that contribute practices to that wider struggle. These situate the university as a node in the flows of capitalist social relations, and as such it becomes a space that needs to be refused, abolished, overcome, and reimagined through a process of social transformation.

At present the reproduction of the university for value is underwritten by a social infrastructure that has been corporatized. Indenture, bonds, debts, precarious employment, ad so on each reinforce the domination of a specific, financialised view of life, which then squeezes the space for students and staff (let alone activists) to reproduce themselves beyond the market. What movements like Rhodes Must Fall may offer us is an idea of an alternative infrastructure that gives us the capacity to move consistently against forms of oppression and domination, both inside-and-outside the university. This inside/outside context is important where we recognise that they have weaponised social reproduction (how we find the resources to remake ourselves for the market), in its racial, gendered and class-based forms. In so doing, we may be able to generate serious alternative versions of reproduction, where more exclusive forms are increasingly closed to many of us through the State.

As Robin D. G. Kelley argues, a movement for imagining alternatives operates both inside-and-outside, and enables:

black students to choose to follow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call to become subversives in the academy, exposing and resisting its labor exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and security.

However, Kelley is sanguine about the political limits of such practices in the face of silencing and (de)legitimisation.

The fully racialized social and epistemological architecture upon which the modern university is built cannot be radically transformed by “simply” adding darker faces, safer spaces, better training, and a curriculum that acknowledges historical and contemporary oppressions. This is a bit like asking for more black police officers as a strategy to curb state violence. We need more faculty of color, but integration alone is not enough. Likewise, what is the point of providing resources to recruit more students of color without changing admissions criteria and procedures? Why do we stay wedded to standard “achievement” measures instead of, say, open admissions?

Here there is a connection to the reality that the university is constrained by its position inside a wider, transnational geography and topography of capitalist domination.

A smaller, more radical contingent of protesters is less sanguine about the university’s capacity to change. Rejecting the family metaphor, these students understand that universities are not walled off from the “real world” but instead are corporate entities in their own right. These students are not fighting for a “supportive” educational environment, but a liberated one that not only promotes but also models social and economic justice. One such student coalition is the Black Liberation Collective, which has three demands:

1) that the numbers of black students and faculty reflect the national percentage of black folks in the country;

2) that tuition be free for black and indigenous students;

3) that universities divest from prisons and invest in communities.

Kelley makes the key point that through diversity and equality legislation, universities will become marginally more welcoming for black students, but they are wedded to systems of production that are alienating. As a result they cannot deliver the social transformation that Marx sees as central to humanity.

Harney and Moten disavow the very idea that the university is, or can ever be, an enlightened place, by which I mean a place that would actively seek to disrupt the reproduction of our culture’s classed, racialized, nationalized, gendered, moneyed, and militarized stratifications. Instead they argue that the university is dedicated to professionalization, order, scientific efficiency, counterinsurgency, and war—wars on terror, sovereign nations, communism, drugs, and gangs. The authors advocate refuge in and sabotage from the undercommons, a subaltern, subversive way of being in but not of the university. The undercommons is a fugitive network where a commitment to abolition and collectivity prevails over a university culture bent on creating socially isolated individuals whose academic skepticism and claims of objectivity leave the world-as-it-is intact.

This work is grounded in political education and activism that takes place outside the university. This work reveals the tensions of existing and being reproduced both inside-and-outside the university.

Why black students might seek belonging and inclusion over refuge is understandable, given their expressed sense of alienation and isolation, combined with the university’s liberal use of the family metaphor. It also explains why students are asking the university to implement curriculum changes—namely, the creation of cultural-competency courses, more diverse course reading lists, and classes dedicated to the study of race, gender, sexuality, and social justice. They not only acknowledge the university’s magisterium in all things academic, but they also desperately wish to change the campus culture, to make this bounded world less hostile and less racist.

But granting the university so much authority over our reading choices, and emphasizing a respect for difference over a critique of power, comes at a cost. Students not only come to see the curriculum as an oppressor that delimits their interrogation of the world, but they also come to see racism largely in personal terms

Violence was used not only to break bodies but to discipline people who refused enslavement. And the impulse to resist is neither involuntary nor solitary. It is a choice made in community, made possible by community, and informed by memory, tradition, and witness. If Africans were entirely compliant and docile, there would have been no need for vast expenditures on corrections, security, and violence. Resistance is our heritage.

And resistance is our healing. Through collective struggle, we alter our circumstances; contain, escape, or possibly eviscerate the source of trauma; recover our bodies; reclaim and redeem our dead; and make ourselves whole.

This, for me, is a key moment in my support of Rhodes Must Fall. That it offers us this: the possibility to love, study and struggle (c.f. Kelley) for reparative justice. It therefore offers us the possibility of reconciliation that reject the borders of exploitation. In the face of global crises of sociability, it prefigures alternative, mass intellectual and conceptual possibilities.

It is a choice made in community, made possible by community, and informed by memory, tradition, and witness.

 


New article: technology, co-operative practice and the neoliberal university


Posted by hallymk1

I have a new article out in Interactive Learning Environments. It is based on some work I was involved in with in 2013 with Helen Beetham, Debbie Holley and John Traxler, including a panel at ALT-C on global crises and responses, and an Alpine Rendez-Vous. My article has the following, snappy title: Technology-enhanced learning and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university.

The article is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10494820.2015.1128214

There is an eprint here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QPWM8ZPsjxtVP4dJKqZP/full

Abstract

Neoliberalism is a global pedagogical project aimed at the dispossession of free time so that all of life becomes productive, and education is a central institutional means for its realisation. This project aims at marketising all of social life, so that life becomes predicated upon the extraction of value. In part the deployment of technologies, technical services, and techniques enables education to be co-opted as an institutional means for production and control. This occurs inside both formal and informal educational institutions and spaces, like universities and Massive Open On-line Courses, as one mechanism to offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to re-establish accumulation. This pedagogic project also tends to recalibrate and enclose the roles of staff and students as entrepreneurial subjects, whose labour is enabled through technology. This is achieved through learning analytics, big data, mobility and flexibility of provision, and so on. At issue is the extent to which this neoliberal project can be resisted or refused, and alternatives described. This article will analyse the relationships between technology, pedagogy, and the critical subject in the neoliberal University, in order to argue for the use of technology inside a co-operative pedagogy of struggle. This demands that we ask what education is, before we ask what it is for, or the place of technology-enhanced learning in the university. The article considers whether it is possible to uncover ways in which education might be used for co-operation rather than competition, and what technology-enhanced co-operative education might look like?