Mute 28: Summer/Autumn 2004: July 2004
Recomposing the University
M28:: 6.07.04
by Tiziana Terranova & Marc Bousquet
Far removed from the clich’d image of the ‘ivory tower’, today’s
universities have been opened to the harsh realities of neoliberal
economics: huge volumes of students, extreme levels of
performance-geared management, casualisation of employment, and the
conversion of students into ‘consumers’. In the name of democratisation
and equality, the university has become a cross between a supermarket
and a factory whose consumers are also its hyper-exploited labour
force. Here, in an email exchange, Marc Bousquet and Tiziana Terranova,
themselves employed in US and British universities respectively,
describe the way the system works from the inside and look at the
possibilities for getting out of it. Far from being a simple question
of domination, they contend, the conditions of ‘mass intellectuality’ ‘
also shared by many knowledge workers elsewhere in the ‘social factory’
‘ create enormous scope for new alliances and forms of resistance.
Tiziana Terranova:
I think it would be good to start with the ‘big picture’, that is how
the university is an open system opening onto the larger field of
casualised and underpaid ‘socialised labour power’. The latter is also
often referred to as ‘mass intellectuality’ or even networked
intelligence (an abstract quality of social labour power as it becomes
increasingly informational and communicative). I have been thinking
about it in terms of the opening up of disciplinary institutions as
described by Deleuze in his essay on control societies. I would like to
move from the idea that the university is some kind of ivory tower or a
self-enclosed institution whose current state and future concerns a
minority of professionals to that of the university as part of the
‘diffuse factory’ as described in Autonomist work. I think that their
description of a shift from a society where production takes place
predominantly in the closed site of the factory to one where it is the
whole of society that is turned into a factory ‘ a productive site ‘ is
still very fitting politically. But in fact, the debate seems to be
stuck in the false opposition between the static, sheltered ivory tower
and the dynamic, democratic market.
Marc Bousquet: You’re right to call it a false opposition, since the
university has never been a shelter from either commerce or politics.
And yet the nostalgic idea of the university as a ‘refuge’ from social
life is amazingly persistent, isn’t it? The reality is very different.
Especially in the US, where nearly 60 percent of high school graduates
have some experience of ‘higher ed’, it should be obvious that the
university is part of the social factory. The problem is that it’s the
wrong kind of factory.
TT: Maybe.
MB: Anyway, it seems that the ivory tower myth persists because it has
so many useful functions. For intellectuals, as well as many artists
and activists, the idea of the university as a refuge often gives them
the feeling of Archimedes ‘ as if it offered a stable fulcrum from
which they can move the earth itself. For others, the ivory tower image
is a kind of smokescreen for the double-talk and structural
transformations of neo-liberalism, a chastity belt as the
Bush-Thatcher-Clinton-Blair bloc leads it to market: ‘the university is
too much of an ivory tower ‘ we have to make it practical’ on the one
hand, and on the other hand: ‘because the university is so much of an
ivory tower, we can trust that its profit-seeking will be benevolent.’
It signifies all the way around the political clock. Really, ‘ivory
tower’ is the classic ideologeme ‘ practically un-dislodgeable from any
point of view.
TT: So the university is no longer, simply, an ivory tower (although I
am sure that even the ivory tower persists in pockets of isolated
privilege too), but it has not simply turned into a ‘market’ or
‘supermarket’ either ‘ providing exciting new courses/services to
discriminating student-customers in search of that elusive perfect
value-for-money combination. If anything, it is another site of
implosion of the modern separation between consumption, production and
reproduction.
MB: Yes, the sense of ‘separate’ circuits is quickly eroding. And
‘supermarket,’ as opposed to ‘market,’ is perfect. It goes beyond the
nostalgia of the market-as-agora or public sphere to capture the sense
of total commodification.
Once we see that the campus is seamlessly part of the whole (social
and global) factory floor ‘ in this sense an unprivileged location in a
vast horizontal plane “it becomes an opportunity for the
self-organisation of labour and, just as you say, reorganising the
social relations of re/production. But in my mind that would mean
giving up the fantasy of the fulcrum, of the ivory tower model in which
the university offers a ‘safe space’ to benevolent ‘directors of the
transformation,’ operating in a cloud-circled meta-plane for mental
labourers. For the university to become a site of worker
self-organisation and the reproduction of an oppositional mentality ‘
much less the catalyst of a radicalised multitude or ‘mass
intellectuality’ ‘ it would mean operating in an unsafe manner.
TT: In your writings on US academic labour, you emphasise the
increasing polarisation between tenured academics (of which many
exercise mainly administrative/managerial functions of ‘directors of
transformation’) and a large casualised teaching force of graduate
students and temporary workers.
MB: Tenured faculty schizophrenically experience themselves as both
labour and management, a contradictory position reflected in US labour
law. They also have another schizophrenia of seeking to produce or
direct a cultural-material transformation while simultaneously serving
capital (as reproductive labour) through the socialisation of a
disciplined professional-managerial class.
Getting beyond either schizophrenia is a hazardous project that
ultimately threatens the faculty’s ‘directorial’ position. In the US,
for instance, more than half of tenured faculty in public higher
education are unionised. This is not impressive by European standards,
but it’s three times the average level of worker organisation in the
US. I bring it up because ‘ with a few exceptions ‘ it has thus far
been very much an old-style craft unionism, a labour aristocracy that
preserves workplace hierarchy, and has been very much complicit in the
perma-temping of the university workforce, preserving their own jobs
while selling out the future. While those unions are moving slowly to
address casualisation, the kind of dramatic change implicit in the
notion of a mass intellectuality or even the smaller fraction of mental
labourers off the campus, would really imply a reverse of the
trajectory we usually imagine: not, ‘how can the university serve as a
platform for changing society on behalf of the casualised,’ but ‘how
can the casualised hijack the university in their own interest?’
This dictatorship of the flexible would not be a safe process for the
tenured who imagine themselves as directors of transformation and
safely above the fray.
TT: Yes, and this reversal does not necessarily need to concern only
university staff, but it must somehow construct an immanent connection
to the masses of students who are increasingly going through higher
education.
MB: Yes, absolutely.
TT: I find what is happening in the UK with higher education very
interesting from this point of view. As you might be aware, the UK
system has been through a turbulent decade. In most areas, budgets have
been cut back or frozen for a number of years, while student numbers
have increased exponentially (for example, according to UCAS statistics
the number of accepted first year students has risen from 300,000 in
1996 to almost 370,000 in 2002 ‘ an increase of 25 percent‘ in just six
years).
The UK higher education system has gone from being a manageable
cottage industry more or less autonomously run with a moderate number
of students living more or less well on a grant system, to something
that in places really looks like mass higher education ‘ without the
grants and with a new system of fees. There is obviously much to be
said about this process.
MB: More like the US model. Wide access, but fee-for-service. Though
there was a period in which the largest US public systems ‘ in New York
and California ‘ were both open-access and tuition free (or nearly
free).
TT: Many students are going into higher education because they think
that they have no choice in terms of their future occupational
opportunities and they have been told that in spite of the massive
debts that they will be likely to incur, higher education is, after
all, a good investment in terms of future earnings. There is this weird
conjuring trick where they are really ‘sold’ this image of themselves
as customers in the university supermarket, while for many of them the
reality is that they are working in supermarkets, hospitals, and
temping in offices to pay for their maintenance while they are
studying.
MB: Exactly right. Being a student is ideologically attached to the
idea of ‘leisure’ when in reality it’s increasingly visible as a way of
being hyper-exploited as a temp worker.
TT: On top of all this work, they will also get a ‘good’ start in life
by learning to live with debt and there will be a good deal of that in
their future life. Thus, while they are addressed as customers, they
appear to me to be, in many cases, very far away from the model of the
spoiled student or the education customer. They are working twice as
hard as their predecessors to support themselves through their studies;
while working they accumulate debts which they will have to work hard
to pay back once they graduate, in an accumulation of interest rates
that ranges from credit cards to personal loans to mortgages. There
aren’t really very many student-customers are there. It seems to me
that it is production through and through.
What I wonder is what this mass of students is doing to higher
education?
MB: You mean that they are changing the system by inhabiting it.
TT: Yes, I think that it is an exciting transformation and does not
necessarily need to be interpreted as a ‘dumbing down’. On the
contrary, the entry of such a mass of students into higher education
implies a political transformation in the role of the university ‘ its
reinvention, so to speak. The ways in which this transformation is
being managed over here is totally predictable and unsurprising. On the
one hand, there is a heightened level of top down, managerial,
informational control ‘ an endless, centralised output of new
guidelines, targets and initiatives which introduce post-industrial
management into the old guild-like university system and which in many
cases is pushing teaching staff workloads to extreme limits.
On the student side, although stratified, the UK system is still in a
turbulent phase of growth which means that ‘new’ and for many
suspicious degrees (such as media studies) are over-recruiting, while
older disciplines from mathematics to engineering are suffering. This
lack of synchronicity between the degree market and the labour market
is obviously a result of the interference of desire in what should be a
‘rational’ economic choice (thus undermining the notion of the
rationality of the working class as an internal variable of capital, as
Negri once put it). What seems to most concern the higher education
managers, however, is not this lack of relation between the labour
market and the degree market. They seem to be more concerned with
preserving hierarchical differences between universities, degrees, and
ultimately social classes.
MB: So the massification of higher ed represents an opportunity for
transformation (and I guess you mean to indicate a pretty wide field of
possibility, not just for a tighter fit between study and labour
markets). But management is responding aggressively to contain the
opportunity?
TT: There is an attempt to restrain the turbulence and instability
introduced by rising student numbers by engineering a differential
system of value ‘ one that would be able to clearly distinguish, for
example, prestigious institutions (an Ivy League) from their less
prestigious, but still reputable peers (red brick universities), from a
bottom layer of vocationally-oriented, hands-on, working class
not-quite-universities (ex-polytechnics). This is why we are going from
the ‘star’ system of evaluation (where different departments get a
number of stars depending on performance at the research assessment
exercise) to a ‘league’ system. Apparently there were too many high
ratings and not enough of a sense of ‘value-difference’. A league
system will thus be introduced allowing a fine-graded hierarchisation
of university degrees and research environments. The underlying idea is
that ‘excellence’ can only be produced through a concentration of
resources (including the best students) which goes against a great deal
of what we know about ‘knowledge ecologies’ for example. An American
colleague has suggested that here too the model is the United States
where higher education has always been solidly stratified.
MB: Yes. More so every year.
TT: So I wanted to ask you about your experience. In which ways have
the discourse and technologies of managerialism and privatisation
interacted with the ferocious educational hierarchies that we know are
a feature of the US higher education system?
MB: That’s a great question. There’s at least two issues here ‘ the
ranking of campuses against each other, and the role of higher
education as a system in reproducing the ‘ferocious hierarchies’ of
class relations in the US and globally (which still remain largely
invisible to the US population).
The increasingly fine-grained ranking of campuses against each other
is most important to the upper fractions of the professional-managerial
class, for whom the ideology of the US as a ‘classless meritocracy’
remains partly viable (a fraction that includes most higher education
faculty themselves, as well as media professionals, many lawyers and
physicians, etc.). With the intensification of the ranking, the
percentage of persons who feel that the ‘meritocracy’ is working
appears to shrink. That realisation is probably a good thing overall.
For instance, the appearance of graduate employee union movements at
Ivy League campuses over the past 20 years (Yale, Columbia, Penn,
Brown, Cornell) reflects in part the collapsing viability of merit
ideology even while the ‘rank’ of schools against each other gains ever
greater ‘cultural capital.’ The problem is that the ‘cultural capital,’
while real, is relative. The rank of schools acquires more relative
value because overall the ‘cultural capital’ disseminated by schooling
has become scarcer in some way that it’s important for us to try to
understand.
TT: Do you see any consistent strategy or tactical manoeuvres through
which such cultural capital is made scarce and then given a value?
MB: Well, the classic strategy of creating a ‘surplus’ of workers that
has finally hit the American and European professional-managerial
class, and the expansion of higher ed ‘ not just internally, but
globally ‘ is a big part of that, isn’t it? The US business papers have
been full of panicky articles about the ‘new’ outsourcing ‘crisis’ of
white-collar work (engineering, programming, design). It wasn’t a
‘crisis’ when outsourcing referred only to manufacturing. The
outsourcing of professional and managerial labour (even the reading of
CAT scans performed in the US or UK by Indian physicians) puts a lot of
pressure on the (formerly) national frames of higher ed/cultural
capitalism.
Equally important, as your great ‘Free Labour’ piece and Andrew Ross’s
‘The Mental Labour Problem’ demonstrate, is the way that higher ed
creates opportunities for hyper-exploitation.1 Don’t you think that
higher ed is a primary vector for the harnessing of affect, socialising
bodies to the necessary technologies and creating the psychological
desire to give mental/affective labour away for less than a wage?
TT: Well this would be consistent with Louis Althusser’s notion of
education as ‘Institutional State Apparatus’ wouldn’t it? And there is
no doubt, as Foucault once put it, that the university still partially
‘stands for the institutional apparatus through which society ensures
its uneventful reproduction at the least cost to itself’. Sadie Plant
used this quote to contest what she thinks is the ‘Platonic’ bias of
many pedagogical approaches to higher education which contribute to
making the university what Foucault said it was: the idea that
knowledge is something that is ‘recalled’ ready made from an original
source and then simply transmitted from mind to mind. This is really
the uneventful reproduction of readymade knowledges for the purposes of
social reproduction.2
There is no doubt, that is, that the university is a site of
reproduction of social knowledge and class stratifications. The range
of courses and degrees now offered by higher education institutions
means that today the university is producing nurses and doctors;
managers and IT technicians; journalists, scientists, filmmakers,
lawyers, artists, teachers and even waiters and the unemployed (yes a
degree does not always guarantee a ‘middle class’ job).
On the other hand, it is not simply reproducing classes and
professions but also participating in a larger process of qualitative
recomposition at a moment of crisis for post-fordism in the mode of
information of which the outsourcing of white collar work from the US
is an example. Higher ed is not simply engaged in the production and
reproduction of knowledges but also in that of an abstract social
labour power which can be multiply deployed across a range of
productive sites (from call centres to Reality TV shows).
MB: Right.
TT: For me a key moment of this process involves an engagement with
managerial control. I would like to talk about your essay on
managerialism in ‘rhet-comp’ [rhetoric and composition].3
MB: That piece just observes that the informationalising or
perma-temping of academic labour is not a neutral condition with
respect to the knowledge that the academy produces. We call this the
problem of ‘Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers.’
In rhet-comp, which is a subfield of English language studies,
traditionally lower in status than literature and linguistics, more
than 90 percent of the teaching is done by flex workers. (Flex workers
deliver labour ‘in the mode of information,’ as if they were data on
the management desktop ‘ easily called up by a keystroke, and then just
as easily dropped in the trash.) Tenure is primarily reserved for
persons who directly manage the temp workers, or who creatively
theorise the work of supervised teaching. To a very real extent, the
knowledge produced by the field is a knowledge for managers. Of course
not all the knowledge is about the work of management. Much of it is.
But I think you could argue that even the field’s knowledges on ‘other
questions’ increasingly show the taint of the managerial world-view.
There would have to be more research into that.
TT: So the tendency is for a collapse of the academic and managerial
function in the service of institutional and social reproduction?
MB: Yes, but the real change is that it’s more than just reproduction.
Academic managerialism is increasingly in the direct service of
extracting surplus value from students as well as staff. The university
is an accumulation machine. It employs students directly and it farms
cheap or donated student labour out to its ‘corporate partners.’
The university’s extraction of surplus value needs to be seen as an
under-regulated ‘semi-formal’ economy. For-profit universities
accumulate investment capital. But ‘non-profit’ universities also
accumulate in the form of buildings, grounds, libraries (fixed
capital), and as investment capital in endowments. Accumulated
resources such as campus sports facilities have to be understood, to a
degree, as the collective property of the ruling class (as opposed to,
say, the property of students). For instance, at my public research
university few students can afford to go to basketball games ‘ local
elites occupy all the seats.
As has been suggested elsewhere, especially by the players themselves,
student athletes are unpaid workers contributing to campus and
corporate accumulation.
TT: What seems to be at stake, then, is not simply the reproduction of
a dominant ideology, but also more explicitly the attempt to induce
and/or capture (and contain and control) a biopolitical surplus value
that exceeds social reproduction, a potential to induce social
transformations and produce new forms of life.
What I am saying is that even if many graduates are going to be
disillusioned with the actual earnings and working conditions (or lack
of) that they will have to face, it is difficult to know what this
outsourced and redundant surplus of educated labour could turn into ‘
how it is going to interact with the communication machine, for
example. I think that the early phase of the ‘free labour’ bonanza
(where many chose to perform work that they perceived as rewarding
either for free or for very little money) is over. At least in Europe,
I have noticed a great interest in the problem of the exploitation (and
economic sustainability) of autonomous, ‘creative’ labour.
MB: I wish there was a similar interest in the US. It’s definitely a
question within managerial discourse, but still far less so in the mass
of ‘creative’ labour. There is of course the graduate employee union
movement, but there’s almost nothing in the undergraduate population.
The primary form of undergraduate labour activism remains the
anti-sweatshop movement. It’s very encouraging, of course. But it has
real limits. It’s not an activism that proceeds from the situation of
the student as labour, but from the situation of the student as
consumer. The problem of the undergraduate as labour ‘ as you say, an
element of production ‘ is almost completely unexplored. I have had two
students write dissertations that partially speak to the topic. But
there’s really almost nothing on it. At least in the US, there’s very
little law and policy on the question as well. That’s what I mean when
I talk about the ‘informal economy’ of the informationalised
university. The relations of production going on under the sign of
‘student’ or ‘study’ or ‘youth’ are desperately under-regulated. It’s a
question of hyper-exploitation.
There is a bit more work on the student as a future worker, especially
as a mental labourer, but very little. It’s not framed as a question of
a reserve army, but rather as a question of ‘extended youth,’ which
young people are represented as ‘choosing.’ It’s really a version of
the Puritan discourse, where your social and economic positioning is
read as a function of your moral state. The under-employed (with ‘slack
time’) are so because they’re morally slack, therefore require the
benevolent intervention of work disciplines such as speed-up.
TT: Yes, the Protestant spirit is, at many levels, well and alive in
managerial discourse. And maybe you have a point when you say that,
from capital’s viewpoint, it is simply a matter of building an
informational reserve army of workers. On the other hand, we also need
to ask what social needs and desires and what processes of
subjectivation does this reserve army express ‘ what values it is
capable of creating.
The question is also that of a direct and active engagement with
specific student populations and their relation to this socialised
labour power at large. This is why I have problems with a common
counter-hegemonic argument against tuition fees (the hegemonic
arguments being that ‘we cannot afford mass higher education’ or the
‘many should not pay for the few’ and that ‘a degree is a financial
investment for the future’). The counter-hegemonic argument, by
contrast, says that by making financial costs between different
institutions variable, poorer students are kept away from the ‘best’
institutions. The argument is that tuition fees make social mobility
across classes more difficult.
All of this is true, of course, but I think that it only captures a
fraction of the huge depletion of resources that is thus perpetrated at
the expense of a mass intellectuality. By making tuition fees variable,
as you know well from the US, you also automatically make working
conditions (and pay usually follows) dramatically different across
different layers and sections of academic labour.
MB: You want to get beyond the liberal complaint about social
mobility. It’s a more fundamental question of equality?
TT: In a way. In another way, this notion of equality still identifies
knowledge too much with access to a limited cultural capital ‘ rather
than the huge, diverse and mutating flux of specialised knowledges and
transversal connections which is a trademark of social production in
network societies. It is not only a matter that the best lecturers will
tend to flow towards the institutions where working conditions are
better (less students and admin; more money for research; access to
international academic networks etc.). It is mainly about how a large
part of the living labour within the higher education system will be
impeded by higher workloads, scarce resources and tighter managerial
control from actively engaging and experimenting with the massification
of socialised labour power. Such power does not express itself simply
as a unified or even fragmented class, but also as a constellation of
singularities connected by communication machines and informational
dynamics. All of this at a moment when organised labour is lagging
behind (or is being easily accommodated by) the huge transformations
induced by post-fordism and globalisation.
MB: Going back to the question you raised about the role of living
knowledge labour in transformation. I completely agree with you that
the biopolitical potential is there in the lived experience of the
student.
Their experience, especially of frustrated expectations, leaves them
‘primed’ and potentially volatile in all the ways you describe. After
all, the huge role the US professional and managerial fraction plays in
organising production globally has thus far created an oversized
managerial fraction relative to the size of the state. And the
oversized role of the US ‘ also Europe and Japan of course ‘ in world
consumption is related to the expectations associated with the labour
of managing globally.
So the frustration of those outsized expectations is volatile in ways
we totally haven’t explored. And yet there is at the same time a
proportionately greater effort devoted to containing it.
TT: It’s hard to know where it might go.
MB: The question of tuition brings me back to what you said before
about the socialising function of education debt ‘ about students being
schooled by indebtedness. That is such an immense field for future
research. Randy Martin has written about it in ‘The Financialisation of
Daily Life,’ in a great chapter about the politics of debt.4 Debt is a
way of making the relationship to dead labour more intimate than any
possible relationship to living labour.
TT: Yes.
MB: There’s something to be said about schooling, especially the
university, and the whole system of cultural capitalism and shaping the
relationship of living labour to dead labour. It would be great to
think in more detail what it means to understand ‘cultural capital’ as
dead labour.
Anyway, what I really like about the questions you’re posing is the
way it insists that we return to the question of the relationship of
mental labour to other forms of labour. Are knowledge workers a ‘class’
unto themselves? Or are they a class fraction? If the latter, are they
‘ la Bourdieu, the ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class’? Or ‘ la
Gramsci, are they the fraction of the working class that tends toward a
traitorous alliance with the ruling class?
I tend to think that your work confirms the Gramscian position. I
suppose that follows necessarily from the autonomist point of view.
TT: This is a really interesting question. Gramsci was a keen observer
of ‘civil society’ ‘ and he was very aware that the complex relation
between social classes was a historical and dynamic relation of
shifting alliances, with hegemony constituting a kind of ‘moving
equilibrium’. The space of civil society, however, is relatively solid,
stratified and bounded. Classes enter relationships of alliance but are
clearly distinguishable within the overall boundary of the nation state
and the dialectic opposition between the dominant and the dominated.
MB: But for you it’s more a question of reinventing the terms of the
struggle itself.
TT: Autonomist work started with trade-union sponsored social research
into the reasons for declining union membership. The result of that
theoretical, empirical and political inquiry was a foregrounding of the
alchemical dynamics of class composition. Union membership was
declining because neither the structure of the union nor its culture
could cope with a shifting class composition (such as an increasing
number of young, male, unskilled immigrant workers and their refusal of
the unionist work ethic). This was not simply a new contingent coming
to join the old generation, but also implied a new set of social needs
and desires which not only the union but factory work as such could not
satisfy. The figure of this first transformation was the ‘mass worker’
‘ unskilled, mass factory work that challenged the industrial
production machine through the rigidity of its escalating demands and
its simultaneous social mobility. The mass worker demanded and caused a
reinvention of politics, rather than simply joining the class struggle
as a new contingent would ‘ it gave new impetus to the struggle for
life time against the ‘time-measure’ of the wage/work relation. An
implication is that class is not simply about the reproduction of
dialectical domination, but it is also endowed with its own historicity
‘ a kind of dynamic potential, a surplus of value that antagonistically
produces new forms of life and demands new modes of political and
cultural expression.
Which brings us to today’s question. Should we read the expansion of
higher education as, primarily, a desire of capital (for better
trained, more manageable, stratified and hegemonised workers)? Or
should we read in this transformation also the recomposition of class
dynamics ‘ a new production of values and forms of life which produce
the basis for the reinvention of politics?
MB: Would it be waffling of me to say both are true? Just as the
university is industrialised (albeit on a post-fordist footing of
perma-temped labour in the mode of information), it ‘ like the factory
‘ becomes the location of an oppositional agency. Students ‘ in their
new character as workers in the present rather than the future ‘ will
in my view eventually understand themselves as the agents of their own
exploitation. In that moment, we’ll understand the information
university to have called forth its own gravediggers.
TT: Sure. And as usual, we must be careful about not repeating the old
mistake of thinking of the working class as existing in a state of
‘unrealised consciousness’ which needs to be awoken by an external
agency. If we keep this in mind, the main question becomes then not so
much to map different fractions of the dominant and dominated classes
and their relation to each other within the overall war of position,
but to understand the shifting mode of class composition, its dynamics
and the values that it produces (taking into account for example the
heterogeneous axes of subjectivation linked to ethnicity, race,
nationality, gender, sexuality and so on). The shift from the ‘mass
worker’ to ‘socialised labour power’ (or a multi-skilled, fully
socialised and abstract labour power), was for the early Negri a matter
of achieving a new working class identity ‘ one that was adequate to
the increasing levels of abstraction and socialisation of labour. The
old transcendent dialectic was replaced with an immanent one: class
composition, capitalist restructuration, class recomposition.5 In other
authors, such as Franco Berardi or Felix Guattari, however, the break
with the dialectic is more radical. The emphasis is more on the
heterogeneous production of subjectivity, which takes place at the
level of material connections (crucially including desiring and
technical machines, from the assembly line to media and computer
networks).
Subjectivity and class are not simply modes of reproduction but also
alchemical, microbiological and machinic factories of social
transformation.
MB: I agree.
TT: We could maybe close by talking about the place of academic labour
within the labour movement at large (including all those mutant forms
of labour that the trade union movement cannot reach).
MB: The one thing I would say is that it couldn’t be a privileged
place. To give academic labour a vanguard position would be a disaster.
A big part of the academic ‘labour of reproduction’ is the production,
legitimation, and policing of inequality. I think academic labour,
including organised academic labour, needs to submit itself to the
tutelage of more radical forms of labour self-organisation. More
radical than the trade union movement, as you say. Mass intellectuality
implies a revolutionary transformation in the academic consciousness,
faculty especially.
That’s why I place so much emphasis on thinking about students as
already workers, not just futur
FOOTNOTES
1 Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital
Economy’ and Andrew Ross, ‘The Mental Labour Problem’, both in Social
Text 63, vol.18, no.2: Summer 2000
2 Sadie Plant ‘The Virtual Complexity of Culture’ in G. Robertson et al
(eds) FutureNatural: nature/science/culture. London: Routledge, 1996
3 Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, Leo Parascondola, eds. Tenured Bosses and
Disposable Teachers: Writing Work in the Managed University, Southern
Illinois, 2004
4 Randy Martin, The Financialisation of Daily Life, Philadelphia:
Temple UP, 2002
5 Antonio Negri ‘Archeaology and Project: The Mass Worker and the
Social Worker’ in Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx,
Keynes, Capitalist Crisis & New Social Subjects 1967-83. London: Red
Notes, 1988
Marc Bousquet is the founding editor of
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour (www.workplace-gsc.com) and
co-editor of The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of
Social Change, Alt-X, 2004 (free downloads available from:
www.altx.com)
Tiziana Terranova lectures in media, culture
and film at the University of Essex. She is author of Network Culture:
Cultural Politics and Cybernetic Communication (Pluto Press)
