NOTES ON
Roggero, G. (2011) The Production of
Living Knowledge: the crisis of the university
and the transformation of labour in Europe and
North America, translated and with a
foreword by Enda Brophy. Temple University
Press: Philadelphia
[This is quite a difficult read. It has a
scholarly Marxist style, with some unusual idiom,
although the translator has modified some of
that. It cites all sorts of Italian writers
that are unfamiliar to me. Above all though,
the first chapters presents a Marxist gloss on
postFordism which is never really appeared in the
Anglo literature, certainly not the stuff I read as part of
my leisure studies courses. This Italian
take sees postFordism as a result of capital's
ongoing struggles with the proletariat, and
discusses a substantial Italian
response—workerism, or, later, autonomism.
This analysis follows the demise of that response
and draws some theoretical lessons. It
argues persuasively that an analysis of the modern
university provides a good example of the new
forms of cognitive capitalism with all that it
implies. Apart from anything else, it
focuses attention on the Bologna Process or
Agreement, which initially came over into British
universities as yet another feeble attempt to make
courses 'relevant' to industry. We first
realized the sinister nature of this Agreement
when Gordon Brown's Labour Government announced it
would not be funding courses that did not follow
this agenda. The Conservative government
carried out this promise and withdrew funding for
the social sciences and humanities altogether,
forcing them to rely on student fees and the
market. In general, I have freely glossed the
text, reducing it to terms I can grasp,and no
doubt reducing its original poetry and power]
Translator's Foreword
Changes in the university must be understood as
part of the general changes in work and labour, as
suggested by the notion of cognitive
capitalism. The instabilities of this
approach towards accumulation are detectable on a
global scale. The response to workerism
(post-operaismo) insists that the driving
force in the relations with capital is labour's
resistance and search for autonomy: this is the
theme that can help understand all the relations
with capital—'a conflictual genealogy'
(viii). It is also a dynamic struggle, aimed
at the continual 'production of the common' in
unfamiliar circumstances.
Universities have converged with firms and
corporations, and one consequence is been to make
academic work more intensive and precarious.
Universities are also in the forefront of
globalization. From the other direction,
corporations are increasingly knowledge intensive,
but this also makes them 'collective and
flexible', and they can rely on things like the
'free productive activity of open source
enthusiasts'. Universities lose their
monopoly on knowledge, and on elite closure within
nation states. Another convergence is
between students and workers, seen in their
partial alliances in various global revolts.
There is also 'endless job retraining in a process
of "lifelong learning"' (ix), and, similarly,
university graduates appearing in 'the dead-end
precarious jobs of the service economy'.
There is a contrast between the collective nature
of the university, and the eventual marginality of
graduate work.
Student dissatisfaction also fuels a number of
revolts against insecurity and devaluation, and
lifelong debt. Precarious graduates find
increasing affinities with the others in the
service sector, including those who work in
universities to clean and maintain them.
There have been a number of struggles strikes and
occupations as a result, and a growing interest in
autonomous education activities outside of
universities. This is what Roggero calls
living knowledge, and it involves the production
of the common.
He has been a part of these movements himself,
including founding the Edu-Factory
Collective (EFC), and taking part in the
struggle against the imposition of the Bologna
process—'the construction of a pan European market
for post secondary education' (x). Roggero
pursues an Italian project, which he calls
'co-research'[conricerca], based on the
worker enquiries into labour in the 1960s, and
contemporary knowledge produced by various
resisting groups. Co-research 'is at once
the production of knowledge and organization, in
which the boundary between the researched and the
researcher dissolves [I must say I'm skeptical
about this]… transforming the object into a
subject, and turning subjectivity into the new
terrain of struggle just as it becomes a site for
capitalist accumulation'(xi) [Roggero's use of the
royal 'we' in this book indicates his
acknowledgement of collective authorship]
A conference took place in London in the late
1960s between Italian workerists and some American
militants—'the Johnson - Forest Tendency'.
Both were anti Stalinist, both for engage and
struggles with fordism and its attempts to impose
collective agreements. Both saw the future
in organist autonomy, extending to feminist and
anti colonial militants, and involving self
organisation in factories and universities.
These days, fordism has indeed collapsed, but
capitalism has extended itself still further into
formerly inaccessible regions, including
subjectivity and social relations. Hence
post workerism, and the emergence of new
concepts—'multitude, precarity, subjectivity,
biopolitical production, and the common'
(xii). There is an international dimension
as well, leading to a discussion of Black Power
and post colonial literature. This has led
to new links between Italy and North America,
sometimes clustered around the EFC [in 2013 its
online presence looks a bit quiet].
Introduction
Neo liberalism is no longer seen as a coherent
system, and the notion of the end of ideology or
the end of history, or the domination of '"mono
logical thought"'is over (1). This indicates
a deeper crisis of capitalism itself. Crisis
is not just a phase, but a permanent status, since
both production and labour have been transformed
extensively. Cognitive capitalism in
particular is unstable and offers possibilities
for subversion. We can draw on Marxist
concepts of living labour to analyze this
state. We have to take on other theorists
discussing the transition from Fordism, like
Harvey or Beck. There are implications for
the left as well, especially their 'cult of
knowledge'(2), where knowledge is always seen as
emancipatory: instead it is a battlefield.
The crisis of the university is an aspect of this
general crisis: there is no longer a productive
dialectic between public and private, as corporatization
indicates; universities no longer provide social
mobility, but rather regulate access even to
precarious jobs; modern disciplines are no longer
divided by strict borders, for example economics
is in particular crisis. Ironically,
government regulation tries to maintain boundaries
in the form of codes and classifications, for
example in quality reviews—they are even now
trying this with 'interdisciplinarity'.
The Italian university system is a mix of feudal
and corporate organization, while the American
system is differentiated. However, both can
be explained by the development of transnational
trends, when nation states are exceeded by flows
of labour and capital, but still have a role in
controlling their populations. National
borders are as fragile as disciplinary ones—real
but unproductive, aimed at limiting and
fragmenting knowledge and experience.
There is no new neoliberal consensus, but rather a
combination of global trends translated in
different contexts, and producing conflict.
Bologna shows this—despite its attempts to develop
transnational governance of universities, it is
still in crisis. Ironically, the USA seems
to be about to develop its own version across its
own states. Another example is the debt
system, part of a general process to financialize
welfare, including education, but also an
important route of crisis. Again, despite
failures in some countries, systems are appearing
in others.
This particular book is based on field work,
including interviews on both sides of the
Atlantic, and direct involvement in various
political struggles. It has developed
co-research as a method, to break down
conventional distinctions between research and
politics, university and other kinds of work, and
so on. Post colonialism reminds us that the
production of knowledge is always political and
based on particular points of view. That
includes accounts of the transformation of
capital, and we need to begin again with the class
struggle as fundamental—'the vindication of the
irreducible autonomy and partiality of the working
class' (6), against the notion of working classes
as victims or dependents, with social change
imposed on them. [This is the much-discussed
class-derivation notion of capitalism as opposed
to capital-derivation] The struggles of the
1960s are the original source for this view.
It is important to see that workerism is the
movement of thought [in Deleuze's phrase!], not
something with fixed categories that can become an
academic discipline or theoretical field, and
hence become domesticated. It uses
categories pragmatically, based on militant
inquiry, through co-research. It has
produced a new understanding of class composition,
drawing on Marx, avoiding economism and expressing
class struggle as process, resisting
categorization. Class and other identities
must be rejected. Subjectivity instead is
always a battlefield.
We can use the concept of singularity to point
towards 'the common as a field of multiplicities'
(7) [citing Empire]
and while we are here, reject the logic of
property and identity based on it. We need
to reject politics based on the traditional mass
worker in fordism, and investigate the new
composition of labour. Concepts such as
Marx's 'general intellect' can help here [see the
entry
in Grundrisse on this], as well as
autonomy, cognitive capitalism, multitude and the
common. In particular, the common is both
historical and situational.
Different commons refer to a common heritage in
nature and the environment, but also in
information and knowledge. In particular,
knowledge in cognitive capitalism must be seen as
a result of a non-natural transformation—common
knowledge really has a basis in living
labour. The multiplicity which produces
singularities is not humanity itself, but specific
social relations, including conflicts as well as
cooperation. Seemingly natural assets, like
water, need to be grasped as politically
common. The common has to be organized, used
to understand existing relations in order to
subvert them. The common itself produces the
singularity of ownership, and also makes possible
communism. Public forms in capitalism must
be used to transform capitalist conceptions and
institutions of the common.
As an aside, Badiou or Zizek work with
abstractions such as events to galvanize
opposition and struggle. That is too
abstract, and we are interested here in how the
common is embodied in actual subjects and certain
'institutions of the common'(9) [marginal
emancipated communities, often found on the
borders of universities]. These institutions
indicate tension between autonomy and subsequent
capture by capital—as in the term self-education
[better understood as 'independent study' in the
British context, which either means autonomous
study, or self-financed, unsupervised, free or
cheap versions following university agendas]. In
its radical version, it cannot be managed by
neoliberal universities, but represents living
knowledge. However, universities are
perfectly capable of incorporating radical
theories and translating them 'into the language
of value'. Another example is academic
freedom, which either preserves universities or
attempts to fracture them.
There is an intersection between the
transformation of capitalism, knowledge, labour
and the university. This has taken the form
of struggles 'within and against the global
university' (10) [with some interesting examples
of recent student revolts, including some in North
Africa]. Precariousness [precarity is
the exact specialist term but my voice recognition
software doesn't like it, so I use precariousness
throughout] is at the heart of this struggle, and
it links to other forms of the devaluation of
labour. There is also a struggle over
welfare, which has influenced conflicts over
salary by leading to demands for social incomes
and free access to social needs, including
education and housing [the old stabilizing
mechanism of 'the social contract' for social
democracy pre-Thatcher]. An aspect includes
refusing to repay debts, including mortgages as
well as student fees. It can take the form
of 'a right to bankruptcy'(10). It also
takes the form of struggles over open access to
universities, and those attempts to impose
quantified measures within them. One result
might well be a new university without borders.
The key issue is whether singularities can be
traced back [theoretically, but especially
politically] to 'a common transnational space'
(11). This is discussed in terms of 'the
category of translation'. It is important to see
that the common is not an abstract
universalism. However, capitalist elites
also deny universalism, and so do some theorists
who see no connection between different
struggles. It is universalism as defined in
the usual definitions of modernity that has to be
rejected, and inverted—partial struggles create
universality, rather than depending on them.
This has an objective basis to contrast with the
'noble ideal of internationalist
solidarity'. Labour and capital are being
transformed in a way which will generate
commonness.
Common production means we can now 'think through
the actuality of revolution', rejecting
conservative nostalgia, utopian hopes for the
future, and 'the postmodern apologia for the
status quo' (12). The modern situation is
dense and complex, and we have to find elements of
subversion, 'starting from the immanent and
radical partiality of the perspective of living
labour'. The point is not just to celebrate
fragmented local or micro politics, but to see how
these can be composed in the common, to connect
tactics back to strategy, to see class
organization as immanent in everyday struggles.
There is no teleological process or
guarantee. Segmentation and fragmentation
among workers persists. Objections to
precariousness and proletarianization take the
limited form of appeals to justice or
crusade against corruption. This only
preserves the system itself. Nor does an
appeal to meritocracy go far enough, since this is
only an 'artificial system of measure that creates
hierarchies within and segments the composition of
living knowledge' (12). There are some signs
of rebellion which insist that the notion of
meritocracy can be turned into that of collective
knowledge, that struggles against corruption can
be generalized into struggles against debt,
arguments about salaries can turn into debates
about social wealth, disillusion with conventional
politics 'into a radical politics of the common'.
[An optimistic example to end. The 1905
demonstration in St Petersburg was launched in the
name of the Russian people, but the repression of
it broke the ideological concept of nation, and
lead to a more accurate discussion of class
struggle. This shows for Roggero the
potential of conventional protest. He finds
the same trend in a 1962 large demonstration in
Turin, allegedly predicted by Italian autonomists
[40 years after the event!]. There is some
reason to hope that existing struggles in
universities can also become generalised into a
struggle for 'the soviet of living knowledge—that
is… the organization of institutions of the
common'(13)]
Chapter one: The Future Is Archaic
We need to understand the recent transformations
of labour and capital beginning with the 1970s,
from the point of view of workerism—'the search
for the partisan sign within… [a genealogy
of the present]… or the analysis of
capitalist relations from the perspective of
living labour' (15). In effect, we have to
clarify analyses based on the social
sciences. What does seem to be agreed is
that we have moved from large factory production
to the production of services and knowledge
organised in networks, including transnational
ones.
Globalization is one way to understand this,
although it is not a master key, which is how it
is sometimes used. All the ideas of the
national state and its sovereignty were once seen
as a necessary for capital or an element of
resistance to it, but this has lost force,
especially when there are global economic
crises. Nation states still have functions,
however, in 'control and administrative
regulation' (16). The term 'transnational'is
better to describe this combination.
Some social scientists prefer to talk about
labours in the plural, given the complexity and
flexibility of modern labour, but Roggero prefers
to continue to think of labour as a multiple
subject, which can experience the common.
Fragmentation is therefore contingent, not
irreversible, and its consequences appear in
definite political discourses designed to diminish
the idea of the collective. In particular,
the concept of new types of labour really depend
on the idea of a normal form—actually fordist
salaried labour.
This implicit concept still informs a lot of
analysis today. Flexible labour certainly
makes us realise that the classic fordist work has
gone, together with all of its 'classic
dichotomies: work time and free time, employment
and unemployment, formality and informality'
(17). There is no dichotomous term outside
of production anymore. In particular, the
process of becoming precarious is not just an
exclusion from normal work, but a technique in its
own right to produce 'segmented inclusion and
hierarchy'. Paradoxically, full employment
has been achieved, but not in the form of
universal normal work, rather the emergence of a
new form of exploitation, 'permanent
precariousness and impoverishment' (18).
It is this precariousness that underpins Beck's
risk society—'flexible, pluralized decentralised
underemployment' rather than alternations between
work and unemployment as in the past. Beck
knows that progress and poverty are
combined. However, Beck still seems to
believe that these factors are simply obstacles on
the path of an eventual ('liquid') modernity.
which will be completed, although he is not
nostalgic for the past. More typically,
analysts draw upon some notion of absent rights or
protection, an absence of the state which can no
longer protect its citizens, a growing number of
wasted lives. Often there is a model of
centre and periphery, both globally and within
metropolitan areas. However, post
colonialism has noticed the breakdown of this
model, when people at the margins migrate to the
centre, and do so in order to realise value for
capitalism, despite their impoverished and
marginalised lives: such people are not miserable
dependents of victims but productive of social
wealth. Their victim status simply deprives
them of subjectivity and political possibilities,
and can even become 'a defensive reaction by the
"centre"'(19) [I think the argument is that these
people have upset the former equilibrium and have
lost whatever rights they might have had as
colonial subjects].
The notion of precariousness [precarity] has
become central in various descriptions of modern
labour, as a reaction against all those claims of
the benefits of flexibility that used to be around
in the 1990s. Precariousness is now entered
political discourse in America and France,
sometimes in terms of the human cost of
flexibility. However, this runs the same
risks as victimhood, becoming and abstraction, a
non-subject, leaving capital as 'the only real
actor'(20). The better analysis is offered
by Boltanski and Chiapello, on the emergence of
the category of flexibility in management
discourse, as 'the recipe for salvation as far as
labour policies were concerned' (20). The
point is that this category shows the conflict
inherent in the notion of flexible employment: it
is not just something with side effects that can
be managed.
These argument show that we have 'an ambivalent
genealogy of cognitive and flexible labour as
internal to capital understood as a social
relation' (21). We are not arguing for a
dialectic notion of contradiction here, and
ambivalence is a better description of the
genealogy, not a linear progress of history,
but a 'subjective matrix of a process determined
by a field of antagonistic forces'. There is
no determinism, but rather contingency and
historicity. Labour must not accept the view
that we are witnessing simply an evolution of
events, but restore the notion of worker struggle
to gain autonomy against subordination.
The university is a good site to pursue this
issue. Corporate organization and
precariousness are visible, and there was the same
struggle to see this in terms of conflict, not
just natural development [or a simply necessary
response to financial crisis in the British
case]. Bologna had guided reform in Italy
and was used as a justification for an apparently
pure model. Since Italian universities had
hardly been studied, American universities emerged
as a kind of yardstick. Italian academics
had always had a precarious phase at the beginning
of their careers, as they worked their way towards
tenured employment, and there had long been an
academic periphery, such as an adjunct
faculty. But now, there is a much expanded
development. And there have been struggles
against it, in Italy and the USA [some examples on
page 23. The struggles of graduate students
to organise any union and demand rights for
graduate assistants is particularly
interesting]. There has also been a
diversion into identity politics, or institutional
politics, lobbying for a place within an accepted
hierarchy. This political process was seen
in terms of becoming conscious of the
opportunities emerging from the university
transformation. A workerist orientation
would see the composition of a potential class
movement has blocked by these notions, themselves
linked to technical developments.
The university is therefore a good site to
understand 'cognitization', as an element of
general transformation, which can be used to
understand much wider changes and the composition
of labour and the development of hierarchy.
We can also grasp cognitive labour at a more
specific level, in a specific context. This
offers us different ways to understand the general
relationships, but we are not arguing that the
university itself is somehow hegemonic in the
transformation of labour. The task is to
analyse the specifics and also develop 'a
homogenous image of class composition' (24).
Although there is no simple relationship between
technical and political competition, that does not
mean that they are not connected: a connection is
to be researched. We can do this by
investigating the production of living
knowledge. This concept recalls the Marxist
notion of living labour as opposed to dead labour
objectified in machines. It points to the
new qualities of cognitive labour, and new
connections between the relations of production
and the forces of production. For Marx,
knowledge had become objectified in capital,
separated from labour, and even used in the
struggle against labour, while making capital look
like the most productive element. Our
analysis is interested in how a science and
knowledge can also be incorporated in and by
living labour. For example, intellectual
labour has become embedded in productive labour,
but it is also a basis for autonomy, especially
autonomy from machines. The new 'general
intellect'is therefore not completely objectified,
but still depends on social cooperation and the
production of knowledge. It is thus
'inseparable from the subjects that compose it'
(25). Capital certainly struggles to turn
all living labour into abstract labour, for
example by insisting on measuring it, even if the
units of time are entirely artificial—and the
university offers many examples [doesn't it
just! The ludicrous simplifications of the
quality assurance regulators, or the banalities of
educational management spring to mind]. It
is therefore important to see cognitive capacity
as exceeding these limits—as an example of the
tension between autonomy and subordination,
'self-valorization'against capitalist enclosure
and domestication.
So the idea of producing living knowledge means
both explaining how it arises, and how it can be
productive, not just for capital but to lead to
autonomy. We need to research the material
conditions in which either capitalist capture or
collective autonomy might emerge. One
encouraging aspect is that these days, the
reproduction of labour power as a commodity
inevitably means the production of living
knowledge as well. Students are not just
being formed up as labour power, but are cognitive
producers in their own right [I wish this were
generally true]. The production of living
knowledge does not take place only in
universities, but they are useful sites to study,
especially since they now reveal 'a systemic
crisis'(26), where modern universities are
unrecognisable compared to the recent past, and
where the old relationships with the state are at
an end. It is not just that corporate
capital has penetrated academic life, more that
universities must themselves become firms,
capturing labour in order to compete: in some
ways, university labour points the way to the
future. Thus we can move away from the usual
analysis of universities as factories, to see
general implications for the whole transformation
of labour and capital.
Of course, universities are not uniform.
They still demonstrate apparently archaic or
feudal relations and forms of government.
These are not just residues, but features of the
transition as a complex and heterogeneous process,
not going through simple stages. We see this
especially if we consider examples in other
nations. In Italy, Bologna is simply one
aspect of a longer reform. The specific
principles have failed, and this is widely
recognized, in popular discussions of the
reduction of knowledge 'to the status of something
purchased in the frozen food section of the
supermarket' (28), and the continued failure to
relate to work. This unpopularity has also
supported conservative views, however drawing upon
a past academic world. A better way to
proceed would be to grasp the changes in the
relations between public and private, seen in the
move towards governance, as a flexible
version of traditional forms. Past and
present features coexist, and the future is now a
much more uncertain and precarious: there is no
'an accomplished project of "western" modernity to
be brought to fruition' (29). This helps us
see that the conflict between living labour and
capitalist capture is not one of different time
periods. The issues can be analysed in terms
of an interest in the production of the
common. This is not just the old idea of
cooperation. It is about the production of
subjectivity and social wealth, and the self
organization of labour. It is about
attacking techniques of capitalists capture,
forced now to deal with products rather than with
regulating processes. Financialization
is only an aspect of the whole tendency to try to
put a value, a measure, on that which cannot be
measured.
We can search existing emancipatory fragments [the
examples are black studies and self-education] in
order to investigate the possibility of new forms
of organization, autonomous cognitive labour, the
'institutions of the common', based on the
excesses of modern cognitive labour beyond that
which is required for capitalism.
Chapter two. Coordinates of Capitalist
Transition
The analysis of the transition has been much
discussed in various accounts of 'posts'.
Beck has argued that we need new theories and
apparatuses and habits of thought if we are to
investigate '"second modernity"'(31). Harvey
referred to regimes of flexible accumulation,
looking at the interdependence of various elements
and hierarchies that form in different locations,
borrowing from 'French Regulation'
approaches. These theorists broke with the
idea of a simple development of capitalist
rationality—for example, relations between
consumption and accumulation have to be regulated,
which usually means some control of salaries, and
the development of other habits, laws and
institutions.
The contrast for Harvey is with the earlier
'Fordist - Keynesian system', with a different
relationship between production consumption and
political power. As an aside, Fordism is not
the same as Taylorism, since the latter is more
abstract and disembodied, and focuses on
production only, while Fordism regulated
consumption as well. Fordism's rigidity did not
survive the oil crisis of 1973 and the recession
it brought. However, an attempt to end
rigidity was opposed by an organised working
class, and it was this impasse which lead to new
experiments in industrial organisation and new
regimes of accumulation and regulation.
Flexibility, of productive processes and of the
labour market, accompanies changing styles of
consumption, while conventional space and time are
compressed by technology and the new speed of
communication. Harvey borrows from Marxism
to predict a cyclical crisis in the usual way,
over- accumulation leading to the collapse of
productive capacity and high unemployment, but
there is a need to investigate how these cyclic
trends are managed and absorbed so as not to
threaten the social order: the usual responses are
the 'devaluation of commodities, productive
capacity and money; macroeconomic control through
the institutionalisation of some systems of
regulation… and the absorption of this
overaccumulation through the relocation of
production' (34).
Harvey builds on three different models to explain
the transition—the role of entrepreneurial
innovation overcoming rigidity; class struggle
against organized capitalism leading to a
disorganised capitalism, 'disintegration and
incoherence'; a Marxist orientation to oppose
technological determinism. However, Harvey still
wants to operate with the centre periphery model,
where intellectual labour is concentrated in the
advanced nations. However, there is no
longer a convenient geographical or historical
dimension to production and the creation of value
[the particular example is the proliferation of
sweat shops and near slavery conditions even in
New York]. Conditions of labour are no
longer different between centre and periphery, as
we have seen with precariousness, which has deeply
affected work relations in the west, including
increasing stress and deteriorating relations with
colleagues. There is also a danger that we
are back with some internal logic of capitalism,
where the system resolves its own
contradictions. Instead, class struggle
forces transitions, as it did with the transition
from absolute or relative surplus value in the
past. There is even an Indonesian study of
rainforest workers on so-called primitive
accumulation, showing combinations of modern
finance and 'archaic brutality' (36).
Capitalism is heterogeneous not neatly divided
into spaces or time periods.
Silver has analysed transition between regimes of
accumulation in terms of the effects of movements
of workers and the development of specific class
formations as the central variable. In
particular, transnationalism is the result of
struggle, and reorganization follows conflict,
including post Fordism. Far from solving
labour conflicts, postFordism simply led to the
development of new ones in other areas of the
planet: generally, labour is weakened in areas
where production has emigrated, but strengthened
in areas to which it has relocated. It is a
more complex picture than the simple idea of the
race to the bottom. There may be patterns and
overlaps, so that crises in one country can
overlap with the beginnings of the same cycle in
another.
The idea of linear progress through cycles of
crisis is particularly criticized in post colonial
studies, with its obvious underlying notion of
liberal citizenship, and notions of victimhood
discussed above. Transitions to 'posts' do
not end relations with colonial powers.
Colonialism appears at a global level, sometimes
in a metropolitan form. However, 'it cannot
manage to become a system anymore'(38), so again
anti colonial struggle has had an effect in
producing a transition. There are also
processes of neocolonialism on the transnational
scale. Post colonialism therefore does not
relate just to isolated geographical areas or
spaces, but is a present force.
Overall, the transition is 'continually
interrupted and rearticulated by forms of
resistance', and it offers a complex
'differentiated synchronicity' (39) rather than
linear progression. The new forms are
rearticulations of capitalist social relations in
all their complexity, but this complexity itself
is a qualitative matter, featuring friction,
resistance, and destabilising tendencies—and thus
'the possibility of radical transformation'.
One way to consider the changes has been to talk
about neoliberalism, using the administrations of
Reagan and Thatcher as emblematic. What is
significant is that both of them were able to
proceed only after having defeated two important
strikes, air traffic controllers and miners
respectively. Apparently, both went on to
develop monologic (pensée unique),
apparently universal and totalizing
categories. This concept was useful to
critique the moment of claims for the end of
ideology, but it was flawed because
'it exclusively stresses capitalist initiative'
(40), seeing the attack on workers' rights and
globalization as some natural development.
Inside there was a nostalgic vision for the old
nation state, and the concept of a pure society,
which had to be defended against the economy
[shades of Habermas and the life world]. It
also underestimated the contradictions and
currents of resistance, also taking the potential
form of a global movement (for example the
demonstration against the world trade organization
in 1999—[note
that these are now, 2013, almost policed out of
existence]).
Instead, we should see the transition to
postFordism as the result of class conflict, and
the innovation and mutation it provoked. The
conservative turn has not just turned back to the
old regime, but is rather a necessary response to
the conflicts of the sixties and seventies.
It was forced to incorporate some of the processes
of innovation that were liberated by this
struggle, and is therefore best seen as the
product of the tension between capital and the
resistance of proletarian and anti colonial
groups. These are not just local reactions
to global changes either, because this also
underestimates global capital as heterogeneous and
conflict ridden.
Because a new forms of labour depends so much on
knowledge language and communication, as a means
of production, cognitive capitalism as a category
offers some analytic progress. For Lebert
and Vercellone, the crisis of fordism included a
critique of scientific management, and the growth
of 'a diffuse intellectuality as a result of the
"democratization of teaching"'(41), as well as
greater demands for welfare and collective
services. It was not just a modernizing
impulse from capitalism, nor can knowledge be seen
in the positivist sense as somehow above social
contradictions. There is no technological
determinism either, when considering the new
information and communication technologies.
Instead, cognitive capitalism is seen as
conflictual, with the persisting role of profit
and the wage relation, aimed at extracting surplus
value, in conflict with the new sources of
valorization and conceptions of property.
Vercellone goes on to develop a whole new
periodization of capitalism, with formal
subsumption expressed in centralised manufacture,
mercantile and financial mechanisms, and the
strength of labour based on the role of craftsmen
and trade workers. Real subsumption
accompanies industrialisation, stripping the skill
out of labour by separating execution from
conception, and developing a minority group of
intellectual specialists: these go on to simplify
labour, and develop fixed capital and
organization, as in Fordism. In the third
stage, cognitive capitalism, the crises of fordism
and rigid divisions of labour leads to a diffuse
intellectuality, more immaterial labour: finance
mechanisms are needed to coordinate such
labour.
We can use this model as long as we remember that
the stages are not chronological, but coexist and
intersect—and some Marxists have argued that this
is the position for Marx himself. In modern
globalized capital, there are still underdeveloped
regions with earlier forms of extraction of
surplus value. Marx apparently broke with
teleological conceptions in the Grundrisse
[as in the phrase that Izhave described elsewhere
as an irritating metaphor—the capitalist mode of
production in general is seen as an 'ether' which
determines the 'specific gravity' of specific
forms].
We must use this in a Marxist way, however, not
just talking about simple complexity to attack
simple models. We need to analyze specific
differences, but locate them in some general
process. When it comes to cognitive labour,
we can see that it produces distinct class
composition. In particular, we should not
accept that there is some long-term separation
between manual and intellectual labour. In
this way, analysing cognitive labour helps us see
coexisting relations in earlier forms [described
as 'the becoming-
cognitive of labour'(45-6)]. For example,
cognitive labour still requires the exercise of
both mental and physical faculties, and is not
confined to specific sectors of the labour
force. It should not be used as a category
on its own, to somehow explains differences of
income or forms of occupational discipline.
As labour becomes cognitive, so does the response
from capital in the form of measure and
exploitation, regulating salaries, constructing
new class hierarchies. It is this that makes
cognitive labour so important as 'a paradigm', or
in the irritating metaphors in Grundrisse,
'"a general illumination which bathes all the
other colours and modifies their particularity"'
(46).
The production of commodities like the Iphone
cannot simply be explained by different
specializations between first and third worlds:
third world companies also play a role in
technological innovation [but do they add cultural
value, the key difference for people such as
Goldman and Papson?]. We have to rethink the
usual geographical and historical models of the
international division of labour, as in advanced
or developing regions, for example. Instead,
globalization can be seen to produce
interpenetration between the regions, as it builds
its networks. An ethnographic study is
cited, page 47, of the new forms of spatial
divisions and connections appearing, as in the
relation between China and Hong Kong. There
are still tensions between the increasing
productivity of, say, Chinese labour, and the
conversion of that productivity into valuable
goods: this rise in productivity means that in
Asia, 'employment in the manufacturing sector was
diminishing' (47).
China actually is a good example of coexisting
forms of production—hi tech and traditional
labour. The Chinese seem to be developing
their own technological innovations without
importing them from elsewhere. Internal
markets are as important as exports. There
has been a large investment in education.
Chinese innovation is therefore transforming the
existing notion of globalization.
Generally, cognitive labour appears in
metropolises, but the growth of cities has changed
the usual classifications again: some people have
seen this as de-urbanisation. We also see in
cities the importance of migrants, 'the
paradigmatic subjects of the process of
transformation' (49). At the same time, new
borders are being drawn, based on salary, for
example, and it is these new borders that are now
important in the organization of labour for
capital. There is a growing multiplication
of regimes of control accordingly. Other
classic boundaries, like the ones between skilled
and unskilled labour are changing—a study of
Indian engineers, for example, who have moved to
the USA, sometimes to work in Silicon Valley,
shows that such migrants are often forced to be
flexible in occupational terms, often declassed
[despite their skills] [the process of recruiting
such skilled personnel is apparently known as
'body shopping']. We also find that
'traditional' ways of life are reinvented
[including dowry and arranged marriage], even in
India itself as a result of investment and
de-urbanisation. In this way, local
communities often do not resist, but become
valuable for capital [compensating skilled people
for poor conditions in high tech occupations].
This also blurs the distinction between production
and reproduction. The reproduction of the
labour force in these cases clearly shows both
material and cognitive or cultural factors,
especially 'in the production of "affection"'
(50). We see this with poorly paid emotional
labour in the caring services. To see this
as 'feminised labour'means not just employing
women, but looking at the various emotional and
relational qualities that are being used, those
which were traditionally associated with women.
Thus Iphones are both designed and produced in
Taiwan and the USA, the high tech workers are
sometimes migrants, they often occupied mixed
positions in terms of rewards, and it is necessary
that they are 'sustained by the invisible net of
caring labour' (51). [To be pompous about
it] 'space - time coordinates… are
completely different with respect to the past',
continually being redefined at the level of both
cities and individuals. Really poor labour
conditions are internal to high tech, and high
level education. What
used to be split between first and third worlds is
now copresent. Struggles over borders of all
kinds are likely to become a central theme of
conflict.
It is common to celebrate new forms of networking,
not just among radicals, particularly those
involving the Net. Even rightwing economists
can celebrate the development of '"commons-based
social production", and have opposed the
conventional intellectual property system.
This has produced criticism of the patent system,
for example, seen as a way to encourage
restrictive practices. Some have recognized
the value of tacit knowledge which can only be
expressed in networks, and which is difficult to
translate into explicit knowledge: as a result,
firms themselves should be organized in order to
share knowledges. This will of course
produce an excess, above and beyond that which can
be measured and appropriated. For right wing
thinkers, this shows the superiority of the free
market, and the dangers of conservatism, which is
holding capitalism back and is the source of
crisis. However, we can get from Marx the
idea that the real crisis would be the collapse of
the ability to quantify and thus manage labour,
control its productivity and so on, with the
emergence of the general intellect. This
would release an excess [which would make the
claims of capitalism look redundant?]. Right
wing economists, however, imagine that the excess
will simply lead to a better kind of contemporary
capitalism [a bit like the old leisure society
thesis].
Nevertheless, the relationship between fixed and
variable capital is now a problem. Knowledge
can no longer be completely transferred to
machines owned by the firm. Human beings
become a new kind of fixed capital, and the
management of human beings becomes primary.
The educational sector in particular becomes
important as the source of investment in human
capital, while welfare and health sectors, and
even cultural sectors have a role.
The objectification of knowledge still goes on,
and it gets embedded in machines, but in 'much
shorter segments of time, from which there escapes
an excess of living and social knowledge'
(55). One analysis might be the relation
between proprietary and open source software—early
attempts to claim copyright of software threatened
the spread of software itself, and blocked
innovation. Hence the alliance between IBM
and Linux and Microsoft's making available some of
its code, and the adoption by commercial companies
of open source as producing more networking. The
growth of the Net itself shows the restrictions of
intellectual property, and we now see the
phenomenon of large corporations opposing
intellectual property rights. There is
convergence between right wing and left wing
commentators in support for the idea of capitalism
without property found in Web 0.2 firms [Netscape
started that]. For Roggero, however, the
issue is whether this is an alternative to the
free market, or an indication that capitalism now
has to appropriate the common in a new way. [The
first example of creeping doubts about the
eventual triumph of the commons -- head dominates
heart just for a second].
Capitalism now has to operate 'downstream', trying
to manage a flow of goods and other works after
they have been produced. One consequence is
that profit becomes more like rent, [with
knowledge generating value by being used not
owned?], a kind of return to feudalism.
However, new versions of rent require cooperation
[the example is a rather idiomatic one referring
to 'the cool hunter', page 57. The principle
seems to be that various branding agencies try to
valorise existing forms and styles of life, but in
a cooperative way not parasitic one—this could be
rather like the way in which Nike 'empowers'
women?]. Other convergences arise with open
source software, which despite its cooperative
nature, still provides rent for web
companies. When corporations work with open
source, Roggero says it's still possible to detect
both formal and real subsumption (57). Firms have
reorganised their productive structures, and made
their boundaries more porous with social
production. They should not be seen by the
punters as attempting to take over networks [since
this would diminish the creativity of the network
]. Similarly, managers must encourage
productive networks and patterns in the community,
and not just exploit them for the benefit of the
firm [too late for educational managers!].
Marx's scheme of transition seems to begin with
primitive accumulation, which then comes to act as
a kind of mythical starting point for
capitalism. Really, the process acts as an
original separation of labourers from the
ownership of the means of production. The
separation has to be continually repeated and
extended, so capitalism has to reinvent itself
every day. We can have no simple linear
progression, no simple periods or
successions. The transition has to be
continually repeated, private appropriation has to
constantly capture new appearances of the
common. There is no simple geographical
division. The economic has always been
interwoven with the social and political.
The current attempt to appropriate knowledge is
yet another appearance of this process.
However [and right at the end, the optimistic
reversal] —'the production of the common
nonetheless permanently reopens the reversability
of the processes of transition'(59).
Chapter three.
Corporatization of the university
[Now we have got the basics of the class
derivation view, we can crack on a bit faster]
We might be moving to a post fordist
university, or towards academic
capitalism [Italian and American terms
respectively]. [I also like Ritzer's
McUniversity] Academic capitalism has to be
seen as not so much for private ownership, but as
the increasing importance of market forces and
capitalist definitions, such as human capital and
entrepreneurship. Again, this seems to
happen at a global level, but it is useful to
examine two case studies, the USA and Italy.
In the USA, the crucial date seems to have been
1980, the Bayh-Dole Act, which moved universities
towards entrepreneurship, external funding, links
with the corporations, and the use of terms such
as stakeholder. Intellectual property was
also developed, for example in patenting certain
DNA sequences. This particular Act is only
one in quite a long history of the development of
corporate universities, private funding, corporate
management, links with the market and industry,
intellectual property, and 'the concentration of
power in the hands of university administrations'
(63), with a growing management function for
academics. In Europe, it was 1999 and
Bologna, aimed at reforming the university systems
in Europe, through a transformed curriculum
structure [between initial general and
specialized], the development of educational
credits [as a solution to the issue of measuring
student performance], and a certain
'diversification of educational offerings' (64).
Bologna also met resistance and inertia.
Apparently, the British were able to ignore it
because they already had a model of higher
education that was close to it. In Italy, it
was different, since the Process was intended to
drive through reform. It was implemented
immediately to forestall resistance, while other
European countries took a more gradualist
approach—in Germany, there were two kinds of
higher education organizations, old and new, and
reforms were driven more by incentives. The
reforms are widely understood to have failed, but
they remain important to understand
transformations of the university.
Comparing Italy with the USA is not easy, since in
the USA there is no national regulation of
universities, but a whole range, from ivy league
to community colleges. In Italy, the state
can decide the shape of both curriculum and
pedagogy, while individual institutions manage
themselves. Italian universities do not fit
any of the three major models—Anglo Saxon,
Humboldtian or Napoleonic'(66) [Lyotard is good on
these]. Institutional autonomy is considered
to be a major goal in reform. The Italian
State has tried to assume some 'procedural
autonomy'(67), on the means to operate, but, more
effectively, through insisting that universities
come to see themselves as efficient
businesses. Italian companies, which tend to
be small and specialized, are not interested in
investing in education research, unlike the
USA. As a result, the state remains as the
only real source of funds, and this limits the
development of modern governance [management] in
Italy [local autonomy within a capitalist system].
A number of commentators have noticed that the
university in the sense they knew it no longer
exists—for example, according to Readings, the
university is in ruins, having lost its link with
nation states and national culture, and becoming a
bureaucratic transnational corporation working
with global companies. Instead of reason or
culture, the university now pursues an abstracted
'excellence'. These trends are exaggerated
by the precariousness of academic workers who are
also forced into producing 'dereferentialized'
knowledge (68).
The notion of pursuing excellence turns
universities into simulacra, responding to student
demands of 68, and reflecting the turn to
corporatization. Universities now cultivate
human resources, and operate with cost benefit
analysis. Education now becomes a matter of
accumulating course credits. Students are
allowed as customers to express the degree of
their satisfaction with the service they have
purchased. The university now becomes not just an
ideological state apparatus to produce the
relations of production, but a generator of
surplus value through the 'production of
subjectivity'(69).
Corporatizaton does not just refer to the balance
of private and state funds. Often, these are
combined, for example with private funding and
public enrollment of students. Italy has so
little private investment in universities that it
is scarcely appropriate as a term in this
sense. However, universities are operating
according to corporate parameters—accountability,
planning knowledge production, measuring outcomes,
and now even measuring impact [Roggero says this
initially meant the effects on economic
development of the surrounding region]. The
old debate about public or private is no longer
adequate.
'The theory of "new public management"' (70) is
both an intellectual movement and a philosophy of
reform, borrowing techniques and logic from
private organizations. Specifically, it
introduces competitive mechanisms in allocating
resources, the reduction of state funding, a
concern with customer satisfaction, ensuring the
comparability of different values produced by
teaching and research [through accreditation and
quality criteria], a modification of internal
governance, rethinking the mission according to
corporate values, and undertaking
competition. Universities now operate as one
corporation among others in the educational
market, and there has been a proliferation of
them. One case study shows that in India,
private institutions have provided the demand for
high tech skills and accreditation.
In Italy, corporatization still seems remote,
although the state is introducing its
values. The Italian route is best seen as an
'"adaptive logic"' (71). Different forms
coexist, including feudal ones, 'artisanal
research activity', precarious post fordist labour
relations, even just in time organization
delivering graduates to the market [Marjon meeting
the short term demand for speech therapists] , and
increasingly ferocious competition for the
diminishing state funds. Some Italian
universities have formed an elite group, with
international reputations, and they have resisted
corporatism: the group now bargains for state
funds in competition with an organization of
Italian University Rectors [the feudal barons,
Roggero calls them]. Again, we should not
see these feudal elements as historical leftovers,
but as playing an active role in developing
complex kinds of knowledge factory.
This last category has been developed by Aronowitz
among others, and again it has to be
modified. It certainly alludes to the
current 'productive becoming of university'(72),
including the way in which labour is now
disciplined [and the examples are 'frenetic
modularisation', and the 'vertiginous acceleration
of the times and rhythms of study']. However, the
term can not be pushed too far. For example
there is no equivalent of Taylorism, applied to
assembly lines [ed tech got close, OU production
makes it closer] . It is even possible, that
the link has gone the other way, that modern
enterprises have become more like universities,
with much more autonomy for employees, and their
location on campuses. Nevertheless, this
contradiction between capitalist measure, and the
creative potential of university relations,
provides the possibilities for both conflict and
transformation.
Measurements of process and output is crucial to
capitalism, while education has become more
'plural and complex' (74). Education also
seems to provide an excess, beyond the traditional
spaces which limit individuals, including the
family and school as well as university and
work. Without measurement, the capitalist
criteria for exchange and the allocation of value
cannot proceed, and there is no way of grasping
products which increase their value as they are
spread and shared. Somehow, capitalism has
to reimpose some
artificial scarcity. Credit transfer and
accumulation systems are one attempt, where
knowledge is simply reduced to a notion of time
spent in HE.
We need to develop a 'political economy of
knowledge'. There has been a number of
attempts to transform scientific knowledge into a
commodity, but never in such an intense way
[following the rapid application of knowledge, and
the introduction of commercial agendas and time
frames]. Universities themselves now market
their own products, both directly, and through a
longer term transformation of the utility of
knowledge in terms of market factors. This
has now become permanent and institutionalized,
working through the growth of intellectual
property, new research groups set up to generate
patents, and the encouragement of entrepreneurial
spin offs.
The university and the firm are now
interpenetrated, where 'the functions of various
actors overlap'(75)—universities are
entrepreneurs, firms take on educational
functions. Exploratory and applied research
converge. Science now becomes immediate in
terms of its application, with no long-term.
The public interest is sometimes evoked to protect
commercial secrets. These have contradictory
affects as argued above.
The autonomist line is to see knowledge as having
been stolen, produced by cooperation, despite the
appearance of managerial organization, and then
captured, even the 'micro acts of resistance,
refusal and sabotage'(76) [which are seen as
worker inspired useful short cuts]. As an
example, the result of biotechnology have become
'biocapital' —the whole set of social relations in
which biotechnology can be valorized.
It is not that the genome itself has been
patented, but rather how to produce knowledge of
it. As a consequence, 'life is produced as a
data and knowledge sequence' (77), a transformation
of what was earlier considered to be
natural. It is important that capitalist
mechanisms exist to take risks in these
innovations. The genome has been abstracted
just as has money. Patenting the production
of value avoids some of the rigidity of earlier
forms, which focused on specific products.
Investment in the production of knowledge is
sometimes called conversion, a similar
process to translation, although of a particularly
narrow kind, one which goes on inside an agreed
language [for example in the ability to narrowly
abstract as above]. Capitalism can be seen
as continually translating heterogeneous knowledge
into capitalist knowledge, which is linear and
progressive, and abstract. This translation can
operate upstream to complement to capture
downstream.
Another example is the notion of investment in
human capital, based on calculations of possible
productivity, using actuarial principles borrowed
from insurance [apparently, such investment now
includes investment in bodily health and social
relations]. The concept therefore reduces
human life to a term compatible with capitalism,
and, since human capital is inseparable from the
person who possesses it, the subject also becomes
transformed into a kind of firm, or
entrepreneur. There is a link here with
human capital interests in genetic research.
The university takes on a new role of
credentializing, including the accumulation of
human capital. The process shows the
contradictions over the notion of the subject
discussed above. Knowledge becomes abstract,
and this is the object of a political
struggle. To analyze these conceptions of
knowledge necessarily means 'the critique of the
subject of modernity and of the uniform model of
capitalist temporalization'(79).
Universities are also moving from exclusion to
'differential inclusion' (80), with different
types of involvement in different types of
university. Tight selection has disappeared
[Roggero wants to say this is partly the result of
student revolts, at least in Italy].
European countries still vary in terms of their
proportions of university graduates, one target of
Bologna. In the USA, the system has been
institutionalized with its different levels of
degree [the Ph.D. was invented in the USA] and the
hierarchy of colleges, and the development of a
series of attitudinal tests, persisting in the
regulation of ambition. In both America and
Europe, selection is still suspected of being
partisan, however.
The development of mass education 'and diffuse
intellectuality' has produced a potential for
crisis, however. As a result, universities
now have to focus on a more qualitative kind of
inclusion and exclusion, including selection
inside the institution [especially the kind we
developed, with lots of friendly inclusive
continuous assessment completely canceled out by
nasty formal exams at the end, which apparently
attracted only a small weight]. This is
parallel to what has happened with the changes in
'normal work' discussed before, where unemployment
is now an integral aspect of work. In this
operation, people encounter their first experience
of precariousness, in forms they will meet in
work. The different qualifications produced
by university systems actually contribute to
exclusion, since everyone now needs them, and only
high quality ones are accepted for less precarious
labour. At the same time, 'Degrees are a
necessary but not sufficient condition for
movements within the occupational system' (81).
The old demand for an education has been
accompanied with devaluation of knowledge and
degrees. People now have to navigate a whole
series of filters and divisions, between
institutions and programmes, which effectively
regulates them. Some student movements have
tried to struggle with these tendencies. In
America [and UK], students take on additional debt
as well, while in Italy the family tends to bear
the cost. In the USA, a growing system of
loans seems to be dependent on merit.
Nevertheless, early adult life is now
characterised by substantial debts, the transfer
of risk, where failure becomes a matter for
individual guilt. Precariousness becomes
permanent, together with notions of risk or
investment, and other forms of financial
valorization. Bologna can be seen as simply
the transfer of regulatory principles in post
fordism to universities. It's possible to
see that one of the implicit objectives was the
development of general precariousness, as a
disciplinary technique, rather than the narrower
goals of vocationalism, and this objective has
been achieved [apparently, the Bologna group
openly recognised this outcome, defining it the
institutionalisation of a power relation, becoming
'a genetic condition'(84), becoming part of the
self perception of the individual].
So the university now is merely one of those
metropolitan forms of labour power regulation,
aimed at the production of knowledge.
Students become much more hybrid and precarious,
as the education and labour market converge,
assisted by internships and placements, and
students who work during their studies. The
usual linear progression between present and
future is changed, as the future increasingly
intrudes 'for the normalization of the present'
(84). Students have become workers, even
though they are still 'peculiar and unpaid'.
In Italy, resistance to Bologna was assisted by
student practices continuing to move from general
to specialist, perhaps 'prolong the form of life,
to accredit themselves on the skills market, to
put off, to explicitly refuse "normal" employment,
or may be in some combination of these things'
(85). A new solidarity is emerging in the
new conditions [one-line optimism as usual at the
end].
Chapter four. The Production of Living
Knowledge
For some economists, the development of networks
has weakened capitalist domination, while
producers have become convergent with
consumers. There is an notion of self
organization here, as a naturalist process.
Class becomes irrelevant in the face of
individuals and communities. Beck says
something similar happens in second
modernity—everything, including conflict, becomes
individualised, and higher education has played a
major role in weakening class culture. He
even sees Marx in terms of immiseration and
alienation as blocking individualization, so that
even for Marx class is an historical phenomenon,
economically determined, and has now been
surpassed.
This is an example of how class has been
interpreted as stratification, referring to
different occupational levels of income,
combinations of different elements. In some
Marxist traditions, class is a matter of objective
membership of a location. Both approaches
see class as fundamentally economic.
Analyses of knowledge work, like that of Drucker,
follows this argument—knowledge workers emerge as
the leading stratum. Others have followed
this view of knowledge workers as somehow in the
vanguard. We find the same view in accounts
of the creative class, the creative sector, and so
on, possibly internally divided into an elite
group and others. This leaves the declining
working class. It has even been possible to
measure creative capital, on lines similar to that
of human capital, although placing more emphasis
on occupation rather than educational
qualifications, because these are likely to be
redundant. Other analyses of class restore the
notion of conflict within the creative class,
distinguishing between those who actually
innovate, and those who monopolise information and
its vectors—it follows that this creative group
must become a class in itself and for itself,
acquiring class consciousness, in order to fully
developed capitalist innovation. These analyses
are like those of the middle classes in the past,
seen as a classically important stabilising and
progressive layer for capitalism. Any
political activity will be limited to demands for
recognition and appropriate rights, which
justifies existing hierarchies and systems,
including segmented labour markets.
How well does the workerist notion fit modern
conditions? The issue is the relation
between technical composition and political
composition of class. There is no historical
mission for classes, nor an automatic relation
with production, 'because class does not ore-exist
the material and contingent historical conditions
of its subjective formation' (92). Class
formation is what is at stake in the struggle, as
well as a precondition of it [and Althusser is
cited in support of the preeminence of struggle—a
kind of political-derivation theory]. For
workerists, notions of class as produced and
defined by capitalism have to be refused.
However, this analysis also depended on the
factory system as central: new notions of
productive and unproductive labour are required to
analyse current compositions, including the role
of cognitive labour.
Class emerges in the 'cleavage between labour
power and working class' (93). It is a
split, as in the notion of the citizen in
Marxism. The process can be described as
'becoming partial, in which the irruption of class
interrupts and overturns universalist rhetoric',
and this characterises subjectivity. We have
to follow Marx away from circulation into the
"hidden abode of production".
Capitalist production requires cooperative
relations in order to produce and reproduce.
How does this work with cognitive labour
specifically? Examining New York University
can help—it is both a global university, and an
important player in New York itself, especially
gentrifying or studentifying the city. It
happens to be expanding into areas normally
occupied by Puerto Ricans [actually Nuyoricans].
The spatial boundaries of the university are much
less clear, and university administrators are
beginning to have a role in metropolitan
development based on the university, not on the
classic service sector. The area being
colonised used to be 'an mportant space for social
movements and counter cultures' (95), and even
spawned new York's hi tech area—'silicon
alley'. What we're seeing is the
'"industrialisation of Bohemia"'. The value
of this cultural space is to preserve differences,
which are important for economic development, just
as the 1960s countercultures 'resides in the very
DNA of the creative class'. Tolerance is
productive for economic growth, as long as it is
domesticated. This is just like the
development of links with open source networks for
companies. New York University is helping to
build a creative city, again with abstract
knowledge, stripped from the actual social
relations that produce them—'knowledge in
general'(96). [Nice autonomist take on city
gentrification --useful complement to the usual British stuff]
This has similarities with the Marxist concept of
abstract labour, which again appear to offer
freedom and universal rights, but permitted
exploitation. [The argument seems to be that
this is the source of the optimistic notion of
eternal resistance]. Living labour stands as
a contradiction to abstract labour. We need to go
on to analyse subjectivity. Here, Marxism
used concepts like ideology and consciousness,
located in a superstructure, or the product of an
historical process. The notion of
subjectivity also offers more dynamism than that
of culture which tends to be seen as
essentialist. It is not the case that
subjectivity is just produced by the functioning
of capitalism, including functional
conflicts. There is a permanent tension
instead between capitalist subjectification and
other forms [which does tend to look a bit like
Habermas]: the other forms are excessive compared
to capitalism's needs, and act as the basis of
autonomy, 'multiplicity and resistance'(97).
Indeed, we can see struggles over subjectivity
like this are as marking history itself, in the
form of 'different becomings'.
Capitalism must try to stabilise the relation
between social relations or social production, and
market firms. The modern university is a
good example of such an interface, where a lot of
blurring takes place, between productive and
unproductive labour, between life and labour,
between objective and subjective conditions of
production. A new form of productive labour
appears in the constant 'artificial imposition of
measure and of the regime of the salary', a
process not without conflict. [Rather like
Habermas's veterans who can remember a
premanagerial era], past histories can constantly
appear to interrupt totalization. Capitalism
can not fully control living knowledge, but has to
divide and capture it, enclose it, as in the
example of the creative city above. But
'these borders can never crystallise at the risk
of losing the dynamic management of knowledge and
excessive that is at the heart of innovation'
(98).
The relations between cognitive labour and capital
are dominated by this movement between autonomy
and capture, open frontiers and rigid
borders. Marx's example of laborers
deserting factories in America in order to develop
land for themselves [and an hilarious account of
British entrepreneurs finding the same thing when
they relocated to Australia] shows how wage labour
itself has to be manufactured. The same goes
with an account of leaving and protest in East
Germany. Initially, the options were voice
or exit, but in the last days, the two combined to
make the regime collapse. Exit does not
always weaken voice.
Cooperative labourers want to retain flexibility,
but without the precariousness. Mobility
itself therefore becomes a key source of conflict
[both the migration of capital and
outsourcing]. Labour is no longer loyal
either, and can cite back to their bosses the
rhetoric of flexibility and post fordism.
Increasing loyalty is now the problem for
transnational corporations, or '"worker
selfishness"'(101) [long seen as a problem, dating
back at least to the affluent worker studies of
the 1980s—the cash nexus is no ground for a loyal
relationship]. Why should not living labour
be as flexible and mobile as capital?
There is also the problem of customer retention
and the new 'spectre that haunts cognitive firms:
knowledge theft'. Because living labour can
never be fully abstracted, it can also disappear
from a firm: intellectual property laws have
contradictory outcomes as we saw. This is
another example of an excess. Exit and voice
are strong enough to offer a thorough interruption
of capitalist capture. We also see 'a sort
of excess of passion' (102), especially among
precarious university workers. There is a
danger that such passion will simply help people
put up with the otherwise unacceptable conditions,
but it can also lead to a search for
autonomy. Even Bologna saw the need for such
autonomy to guarantee self development and self
training.
The clash between autonomy and subordination is
essential to modern capitalism, rather than
hierarchy. It is a matter of 'the quality of
inclusion', and the response to inadequate
quality, the development of exit and voice.
This is the sense in which 'the material
constitution of subjectivity' is the issue.
To some extent, it rewards talented individuals
whose skill remains even if transnational
companies come and go, since it can not be
transferred.
The case of New York University is useful again,
in the struggles that developed there. It
was forced to recognize the union of graduate
students, although it then tried to marginalize or
break it. Graduates mobilised in response,
offering 'demonstrations, acts of disobedience
(with over 100 arrests), and the
proclamation of an ongoing strike' (104).
The University argued that graduates should be
understood as students not workers, apprentices at
most. There is also the matter of academic
freedom, 'the longstanding hobby horse of
liberals' (105)—if graduates choose to be workers,
they can no longer claim the rights of academic
freedom. This latter argument found a
response in the self-perception of faculty as
professionals not workers, and there is some value
in claiming a traditional role. However, the
struggle did 'break with the usual
imaginaries'. In this way, the most
precarious are often the most active—and most
unionised in America.
This conflict over the meaning of academic
apprentices indicated how the traditional
relationship between graduate and professor has
been broken, precisely by precariousness and lack
of guarantees, as well as universities demanding
to exercise the rights over any intellectual
property. Sometimes the debate used terms
from former varieties of training, invoking the
suspension of normal labour rights in
apprenticeships, but the modern context of
precariousness and graduate debt is combined with
this formerly feudal notion. Overall,
Roggero thinks that forcing the issue meant by
graduates exposed the class line quite clearly,
and polarized faculty.
Mobility is important for graduates in American
universities, and is even expected. It can
help the precarious, as we saw. However,
struggles like the ones in New York also show that
individual strategies are difficult to turn into
collective ones, and there was some interest in
defending the traditional academic roles.
Nevertheless, the possibility of exit widens the
options beyond demands for rights in particular
organisations—in Italy, it certainly damaged
feudal loyalties in universities. It also
makes people realise that academic conventions are
often the result of informal codes, particular
discourses, taking on the strength of an order of
truth in Foucault's terms.
Some researchers have been content to demand a
permanent position, validating hierarchy and
competition, and have abandoned the construction
of an alternative discourse. Some have
adopted a status identity which has also prevented
them from liaising with students and others who
are precarious. Voice has not always
questioned context [because exit is not available
for all—this reminds me of the old studies on the
apparent deferentialism of agricultural workers,
who simply were powerless in the absence of any
alternative work]. Some engaged in struggle have
contented themselves with simple bread and butter
demands. This also leaves unchallenged
techniques of control and capitalist
operations.
It is the concept of class that needs to be
revived, to articulate differences, disjunctively
of course, and trace back singularities to what
they have in common. Specifically, we should
focus on technical composition as the basis for
differential inclusion and various other kinds of
capitalist articulations, but we should not
restrict ourselves to struggles over technical
composition, the politics of recognition, or the
demand for difference within a hierarchy.
Instead, we should follow Rancière and argue for
disidentification, a challenge to the supposed
naturalness of positions in hierarchies, a
challenge to capitalist articulation. We're
talking about 'becoming class'(110), something to
be achieved in struggle, the more general mode of
subjectification [still Rancière—Disagreement:
Between Politics and Philosophy]. But
the same time, we need to maintain the relations
between technical and political composition.
Both the processes involve the production of
subjectivity and the domination of capitalist
valorization: both can be seen as snapshots of the
processes of conflict at stake. The issue is
to try and develop a new individuated relationship
between the two, building on the inherent tensions
in them. The old simplicities of fordism
will not do. Nor do accounts of
individualization like Beck's stand up: mass
education and a shift to cognitive production have
not ended class formation, because there are still
possibilities in the new context. New forms
of commonality will not result automatically, but
must be struggled for.
Chapter five. Borders and Lines of Flight
We can use the same analysis of how flexibility
emerges as a form of discipline and response to
struggles to understand some of the debate about
the decline of political and trade union
organisation. The usual approach sees this
decline as a result of the attack on labour
rights, fragmentation, individualization and so
on, often taking the existing forms of labour
parties or trades unions are somehow
natural. However, the network, so important
as the technical form, can also be an
organisational model, given its role in the
development of collective cognitive labour and
intelligence. However, again, care has to be
taken not to see this in capitalist terms, or
idealist terms—networks are also uneven, striated,
clustered, and hierarchical.
Networks should aim at overturning valorization
and capture: the network is not simply the
abstract opposite of hierarchy [a point against
any simple oppositions between tree and
rhizome]. Capitalist networks are techniques
of governance, aimed at capturing productions
downstream. The issue is to organize a
network of production. At the same time,
electronic networks have ceased to be simply
useful for capitalism in objectifying human
activity. They are used in the search for
freedom as well, and stand as a living
demonstration of the specificity of the factory as
a site for work.
The same tensions are apparent in universities
with e-learning and distance education
technologies [fully developed in the USA, says
Roggero]. They are designed to cut costs,
especially labour costs, and to permit a
widespread privatisation in the market through the
for-profit university like the University of
Phoenix. It adds to precariousness and
devaluation of knowledge, and helps manage
conflict and social relations—the administration
provide the only organised perspective.
However there is resistance by unions and other
groups, and they sometimes use the web themselves
to organise networks and special interest groups,
circulating living knowledge among the
precarious. This idea has taken particular
route in Italy, while in the USA, the traditional
union is still a major player, as in the struggle
for recognition described earlier. However,
in the USA, unions are dominated by organisations,
and are actually chosen by them, and membership is
based on specific interest. Sometimes this
produces unlikely alliances—'project based
representation' (116). This is suitably
flexible, but again attracts no loyalty from
members, and they can shift between unions.
Unions classically confine themselves to rights
and privileges and bread and butter issues, and
can even help in governments, as in the craft
guild.
In Italy, there is a 'National Network of
Precarious Researchers' (117), although this
turned into a small lobby. The polemical
objective was good, but it was difficult to
realise, and the network turned into a collection
of issues rather than a well organized
group. This shows there is no necessarily
emancipate read potential in networks. An
Italian ethnographic study [connected with the
work of the legendary politician Beppe Grillo]
showed that important factors included how the
meetups were organized, who were likely to be
activists [often young adult males with degrees],
the extent to which virtual communities combat
solitude, and the importance of telling life
stories to build relationships. Disillusion
with traditional unions can become 'bitter
populism'(118), based on a perception of exclusion
from existing hierarchies. There is even a
respect for meritocracy, and criticism takes the
form of condemnation of corruption. There is
no realisation that precariousness results from
the normal workings of capitalism.
Formally horizontal organizations need to become
substantively horizontal, while managing 'the
irreducible excess of singularities'. It is
important to engage in 'heterolingual
translation', resisting abstraction and dominant
ideology, and talking exclusively in 'the language
of singularity and of multiplicity… The
language of the common' (119).
Capital is now so globalized that there is no
geographical exterior, no central periphery, no
historical elimination of earlier forms such as
primitive accumulation. There is a constant
attempt to reduce everything to the language of
value. This is 'a "capitalist
common"'. The only frontier that matters now
is not a natural one, but one that runs through
social relations. The notion of the commons
includes that which exists in nature and 'that
that must be defended from modification' (120).
Polanyi is important here, in his analysis of the
struggle between self regulated markets and social
relations, 'utilitarian principles and
communitarian cohesion'. Capitalist analysis
becomes something deviant, 'an "inhuman"
utopia'. Social ends must be reasserted
against means.
The analysis has been applied to understanding the
net economy, with free contributors on one hand
and monopolies of information on the other.
Virtual communities have emerged to prevent
commodification through alliances with hackers, or
by trying to develop a new culture such as
anarchocapitalism, or possibly just the
empowerment of consumers. This struggle is
apparent in areas such as intellectual property or
copyright. [We have learned above that
capitalists also want to attack this concept,
though].
None of these subjects engaged in struggle can be
reduced to social class, it is argued, and we can
see the struggle is a matter of colonisation and
counter colonization of markets. Again,
workerism and Marxism seem to be redundant.
However, this is another kind of economism [shades
of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis], which
takes capitalism and its word, as simply an actor
that must be regulated by society, separately from
cultural struggles.
The issue again is what is the subject of the
conflict—the preservation of something natural or
uncontaminated against capitalism? If so,
subject or individuals and society, conceived
classically as universal subjects and organic
wholes respectively, both standing for humanity
itself. In the scenarios, class is
abandoned, but these new identities are just as
dubious, but have to be maintained for fear of an
'undifferentiated multitude' (122).
Similarly, the state and sovereignty are seen to
be the representatives of society against the
economy. Politics becomes negative and
defensive. The only argument is a normative
one about defending individuals from catastrophe.
Polanyi's views seem to be supported by the
emergence of a number of networks, including open
source and free software. The web become
seen as 'an uncontaminated space of cooperation',
and participants think they have escaped to the
market, ignoring issues of capture and
exploitation. In fact, these networks are a
' motor for capitalist accumulation' and forms
that can even develop into 'free labour and self
exploitation' (123). There is been debate
about whether a 'digitariat'is emerging, neither
proletarianised nor marketized -- the return of a
'guild mentality'for Roggero. Members can
see themselves as a labour aristocracy, struggling
against monopoly over issues such as
copyright. Bourdieu reminds us that
intellectuals are 'a fraction dominated by the
dominant class', so the struggle for open source
is really a narrative of a class fraction—and
another example of the production of modern
subjectivities and attempts to control them.
The main requirement is 'to denaturalize
knowledge'. Knowledge is not itself
necessarily opposed to capital, nor is it already
a commons. It must become one in the
struggle for autonomy. There is no abstract
idea of humanity to unite singularities, but
rather 'specific relations which are at every
moment constituted in multiplicitous forms'.
Nature is not the same as biocapital, and there is
a similar risk that identifying the commons as a
matter of nature will expose it to capitalist
juridical relations.
Cognitive labour should concern itself with
autonomy and corporation, which will immediately
engage with struggles over exploitation.
Struggle should take both forms of struggles
against proletarianization, and struggles over the
whole organization of production—there is no
linear history that connects the two, since
capital is constantly engaged in valorization.
There are real immediate implications. For
example, we can see gentrification or
studentification as capitalism colonizing existing
communities, with 'extraordinary violence' (124)
in which case we would struggle to conserve such
areas. However, communities are already
inside a transformed social composition, while
traditions are easily coopted as we saw in the
development of high Tech Industries. We need
instead to connect studentification with the whole
process of extending the system of rent based on
exploiting precarious work in universities through
high finance and investment. There is a
constant struggle between the mobile transverse
crossing of borders, and attempts to recompose
them and make them artificially natural.
However, the conditions of metropolises can often
help participants see what they have in common and
translate their conflicts [an example is given in
New York where graduate students linked up with
transportation workers and did common
picketing—like those marvelous Italian examples
where workers in power companies refuse to cut off
those withholding their payments].
So the common arises out of conflict between
collective production of subjectivity, and
capital's continuing attempt to valorize it.
We need to go both beyond liberal notions of the
individual and 'the socialist cult of the
collective' (125). The common is 'therefore
not universal; singular, therefore not individual;
multiple, therefore not natural' (125).
A lot of critics of the university display a
nostalgia for the old ideals [Stoakes and Cooper
say they yearn for the Humboldtiann University!],
or apology for technocratic demands. They
want to energise critical thought against
deferential versions, acting within the ruins to
produce a detournement, operating on the borders
to keep them as open frontiers. American
universities literally benefited from the
existence of the frontier, developing a number of
autonomous initiatives rather than cooperate with
a hierarchy. We have also seen the
importance of the frontier when discussing exit
and voice. Capital must recapture this
autonomous cognitive labour, which turns into a
struggle over a voice. We have seen that the
existence of a frontier with flight does not
always produce liberation— and new territories can
also feature oppression and exploitation, but even
slavery was the unwilling vehicle to circulate
subversive political culture [the reference here
is Gilroy].
The important issue about the production of an
knowledge is that it is temporal and that this
affects the spatial, so that exit is not
necessarily geographical, and an 'outside', an
arena for struggle, is not meant to be taken
geographically. The outside must be produced
in living knowledge. The struggle is often
about time, as E.P. Thompson demonstrated in the
early struggles about factory discipline, and the
eventual demands for adequate payment for
time.
In universities, the issue becomes one of self
education. This can be incorporated in the
production of the flexible individual. Self
education is not just courses organized by and for
students, as in 1960s countercourses, but attempts
to make people solve the contradictions of the
system themselves, by building their capacities,
including those for entrepreneurship. This
sort of self education became important in the
1970s. Advocates of autonomous organisation
need to take on this capitalist capture—one
strategy appears to involve demanding credit for
self education in such a way as to produce
'"inflation" of its unit of measure' (128).
[one example here might be the way in which work
experience or life experience gets credit in a way
that completely demoralises university
professionals]. The best of it goes for
autonomous institutions and aims to construct
autonomy.
An aspect might be the production of oppositional
knowledges. Black studies will be an
important case study here [and gender
studies]. They originated outside the
academy, in social movements not academic
specialisms. They have been a central demand
in student revolts, strikes and occupations.
Conventional attempts to include black students
had failed to incorporate them. One
corporate strategy in response to their
establishment in universities was to reward
'moderate' black leaders and students and[punish
'extremists'. Another was to treat race in
terms of an affirmative action programme, even a
race industry, while changing the terms from
'black' to 'African-American', to remove any
connection with Black Power. [The agent of
these strategies was a politician who was also
chair of the Ford Foundation—McGeorge
Bundy]. These counter strategies have been
quite successful in recuperating black studies
departments through a form of partial inclusion
and affirmation, an example of how capital can
feed off differences. However, black studies
have not been completely dominated, and are still
capable of producing debates about legitimacy.
Thus we can see these moves towards autonomous
education as fragments that can occasionally
interrupt and question dominant narratives.
They are still immune to recuperation and
domestication, especially in academic forms of
governance. They can even provide a certain
energy to keep universities alive and operating to
produce value. Opposition is not
enough—movements have to avoid being made
compatible—'becoming-institution' (132).
However, this also means that governance never
fully achieves control, and is open to a number of
interruptions from a number of places.
Sometimes these interruptions can link up [demand
for black studies, demand for women studies, and
demand for queer studies?]. Concrete
political forms are denaturalized. Class
composition is immanent. As a result, 'the
institutions of the common trace their line of
flights from the crisis of the dialectic between
public and private, and are continually traversed
by the possibility of their subversion' (133).
[pessimistic conclusion for a change].
Chapter six. Brief Observations on
Method
Three splits have affected Italian sociology –
between disciplinarity and interdisciplinary,
between theory and practice, and between macro and
micro. Big issues have included the
difference between subject and objects, research
and observer effects. Sociology has also
been undertaken by extra academic groups,
including the workerists, who did research into
the conditions at the end of fordism. These
were '"anarcho- sociologists"' (136) [especially
the Quaderni Rossi lot]. They also
introduced international comparisons. This
was the origin of coresearch [conricerca], both
political and methodological as an approach.
Such research requires cooperation people in
different positions with different knowledge and
experience, and aims at transformation from the
interior, including the constitution of alterity
[I am glossing the definition on 136].
Disciplinary boundaries are no longer relevant,
and theory is supposed to be united with practice,
akin to Althusser's theoretical practice.
Observers enter the interior of the processes
being analysed, and can become the subject of
their own research, through realizing that
knowledge is always linked to partial
perspectives. The apparently naive outsider
of tradition ethnography is abandoned, but
nor is there a drift towards
autoethnography. The approach denies
capitalist universalism and acknowledges that all
spaces for observation must be partial.
There was an earlier version called worker
inquiry, based on Marx's work of political
economy, aiming to be rigorous and logically
coherent. The aim is to develop knowledge
for political organization of the market.
However, it still flirted with the idea of neutral
science, and with producing knowledge that someone
else could use [this is rephrased pompously as
introducing a temporal distinction between
knowledge and use, a device to preserve the
neutrality of science while blaming users for any
evil effects].
Both these assumptions are challenged by
coresearch. There is a need to avoid
empiricism, however as well as a phony
egalitarianism between interviewer and
interviewee. However, both positions can be
seen as singularities referring to a common
process. There is the same struggle to
achieve 'horizontality and equality'(138).
The issue of subjectivity is raised right at the
beginning, and all parties have to free themselves
from idealism, such as classic notions of class
consciousness.
In particular, this is led to an understanding of
worker passivity – not just the result of factory
discipline, nor full integration into capitalism
[and the Frankfurt school comes in for criticism
here], but as the refusal of labour, as hatred for
worker conditions. Traditional socialists
and communists found this difficult—when workers
began demanding '"more money less work" rather
than justice' (139). Deterministic accounts
invoking base and superstructure were replaced by
examining actual relations between technical and
political composition [reminds me of the work on
working class images of society in Britain, all
the more general work on the 'structuration' of
consciousness at the level of the company].
Ideas of the linear progression to full
consciousness had to be abandoned in favour of a
more aleatory connection between the productive
system, subjectivation, and the ability to develop
antagonistic organisation [the reference is to
Althusser again,, but it could be Deleuze].
Coresearch has criticised science in quite a
different way from post moderns who have announced
the end of grand narratives. The issue turns
on relating theory and practice within the
overarching framework of living labour. In
this way, scientific truth is to be seen not as
objective or absent altogether, but as emerging
from 'a relation between forces'(140) 'the product
of a process of cooperation and conflict, defined
by the relationship between singularity and the
common'. Coresearch is not to be confused with
('practical') action research intended to mediate
conflicts, or market research.
Having said that, coresearch itself tends to lag
behind the transformations that have been analysed
in the text, and its methods need to be
recalibrated. Is useful to think about three
axes: on the vertical axis of the location of
subjects within the labour market, including
hierarchies; the horizontal axis the dynamics of
mobility and diffuse resistance in the name of
self valorization; on the transversal axis the
self perception of individuals and the likelihood
of struggle transformation. The new kind of
coresearch will be interested in the combination
of exit and voice in the new contexts of the
metropolis and transnational space. Overall
it is necessary to get research to take sides, to
resist the incorporation of intellectuality in
production, and to trace exploitation and
cooperation. In this way, coresearch can
assist the move towards autonomy and the
construction of the institutions of the common.
Conclusion.
The very building of New York University began in
struggles with local stonemasons, and used the
labour of prisoners in Sing Sing. Now, the
University is engaged in new struggles as we saw,
although the old militant organizations of
American labour are gone. Newer forms, like
the graduate union, restricted themselves to bread
and butter demands. However, the new figures
of living labour can still be described ['represented'],
and can even appear in struggles for recognition
or identity.
However, the old forms have to be abandoned, and
an effort made to develop 'the new language of the
common' (144). Heterogeneity of labour is
not just a result of fragmentation or a
development of capital, but shows the emergence of
new partialities. The struggle for black
studies is an example— black militants clearly can
be represented in conventional terms, but they
cannot be reduced to the usual abstractions of
workers and their needs. The same goes for
Indians students in the west and other migrants,
who are not easily expressed in terms of the
classic occupational skills based models.
Similarly, the idea of an knowledge worker might
reforge the links between student conflict,
demands for autonomous education and
non-university workers.
The university students and precarious staff help
us to see the links between technical and
political composition [because of the
heterogeneity described above, the old
classifications based on technical composition no
longer serve—it is now a 'disjunctive nexus' (145)
between the two. Differences are not always
divisive, or reduced to identities: in the past,
they have been a central way in which capitalism
applied the law of value to people. This
capitalist translation is no longer effective, and
this opens up a space for politics and the drive
towards autonomy.
The old strategies of exit and voice for labour
can still help us understand the conflicts in
cognitive capitalism in particular, where they
tend to be less limited by segmentation.
Capitalism exposes some of its limits here.
It still attempts to capture the products of
autonomy, but autonomy is now gaining the upper
hand and producing problems like the need to
valorize 'downstream'. Firms are now
unusually vulnerable to the flight of cognitive
labour, and struggle to encourage faithfulness:
flexibility is no longer a technique confined to
capitalism. The chances of exit are more
diverse, ranging from movements within the labour
market, to attempts to develop autonomous
institutions, and the problem now is to combine
these strategies with political
organization. There is no appeal to bodies
outside of capitalism as a kind of vanguard, but
networking in corporations now has the potential
to challenge capitalist governance, especially by
breaking the monopoly of [fordist] capitalist
production, and by generating an excess which can
effectively challenge capitalism. [I have
done an awful lot of rendering in ordinary speech
the flowing Marxist and technical rhetoric].
Global universities have long been composite in
the struggle to translate differences into
capitalist homolingual discourse, through
different forms. They should not be resisted
by conservatism, such as the reviving the public -
private issue. Instead, we should see the
university in particular as displaying the tension
between the excesses of living knowledge and
capitalist capture. Ironically, universities
cannot meet the needs of cognitive capitalism—it
no longer monopolises knowledge, and has itself
blurred the distinction between the campus and the
metropolis. Universities are corporations,
but corporations have become universities.
The American System shows one way to restore a
value through differential inclusion [artificial
measures]. Universities are competing by
accumulating various kinds of social capital
including 'the presence of figures of some
importance' (147): this kind of competition is
also a sign of precariousness, which now have
penetrates all levels. Universities have to
recruit or develop stars, and offload teaching to
the precarious. Other forms of
precariousness include adjunct faculty, or the
employment of graduate students. There is a
continual development of 'artificial indexes
imposed conventionally' (148), apparently
developing the idea of meritocracy. These must be
opposed, a new forms of evaluation developed
relating to production of the common.
In Italy, criticism has taken the form of
nostalgia or attacks on corruption and
malpractice—but these can only preserve the system
overall. There are feudal elements, with
professors as barons, but this can still lead to
corporatization as the only alternative.
Comparing the Italian and the American System
reveals that different singularities can appear
within general trends, and this also helps reveal
the partisanship of reforms in the two
systems. In Italy, there is no developed
educational market using evaluation techniques,
but rather a nostalgia for the old public and
private split. In the absence of serious
private investment, even the private institutions
draw upon public money.
Current policy in Italy seems entirely negative,
the submission to the idea of capitalist capture
and for cognitive capitalism, competing
internationally by producing cheap yet highly
skilled labour, developing hyperspecialization to
enter particular segments of transnational
chains. Liberal reform is not possible, only
total transformation. Any revival of the
public has also come to grief with the
contemporary economic crisis of neo
liberalism—Keynesian remedies are not seen as
credible in the new transnational era.
However, there is a recognition that this is a
systemic crisis. The shift to finance
capital seems to be the only option, despite
reservations about it not being the real
economy. If it is ever fully developed, it
will become a capitalist common, able to capture
production in the form of rent [seen here as a
kind of indirect form of exploitation rather than
one revealing the direct intervention of capital].
There are some signs that knowledge based
enterprises, including universities, are also
turning to finance, and the profits in stock
markets and rating agencies. The emergence
of student debt is a further sign of the growth of
finance capitalism, with selective loans based on
merit been discussed in Italy. This makes
students bear the burden of the crisis, and is a
further step towards urging them to see themselves
as human capital which requires investment for the
future. Debts like this already devalorizes
labour power, and attacks future salaries in a
further advance of precariousness. Students
are now fully inserted in the labour market.
They also experience attempts to valorize their
efforts through educational measurement, including
the reduction of their knowledge to the value of
abstract labour. However, although the expansion
of debt has financed educational expansion, there
is a risk of insolvency, a version of the classic
crisis between productive forces and relations of
production.
Ironically, it is in the interests of capital now
to restrict the production of wealth that cannot
be captured, to block further creativity.
This includes attempts to increase the
faithfulness of the labour force, despite the
'years of rhetoric surrounding flexibility' (151).
Indebtedness and a poor market position are
techniques for producing subjectivity, needed now
more than ever with the growth of living knowledge
and its threat to finance capitalism.
Foucault needs to be revised, since struggles
about regulation are 'immediately'connected to
exploitation. The struggles also show an
underlying class struggle. The old theme of
freedom is also exploitable. It used to mean
freedom of opinion, and this is now crucial to
accumulation, the source of creative
identities. It is also seen as a kind of
reward so that knowledge workers can become
distinct from other workers and feel
superior. Overall, this is accompanied with
the lowering of salary, however.
Nevertheless, it should be possible to see such
freedoms as 'incarnated in the relation between
the singularity and the common'(152), so that it
forms the basis of radical critique of
exploitation. This is an example of how a
partisan, partial, issue—freedom of
expression—relates to the common freedom.
Debt brings risk, and the limits of freedom,
introducing a new splits between experience and
expectation [apparently considered as crucial to
the 'formation of individual and collective
biographies', 152]. But there are positive
characteristics here two, and you ambivalence, no
longer linear, are no longer filled with hope in
progress or destiny. All capitalism can
offer now is something more stable in the
future. The future can no longer be seen as
a way to neutralise conflict in the present [as a
promise]. History itself seems more
open. The shift to finance capital has also
broken the old rhythms of the economic cycle,
including promises of an end to crisis. As a
result, it is hard to represent current economic
crises—there seems to be 'a permanent plane of
precipitation', rather than a watershed
(153). The transition now is no longer
associated with waiting for improvement, and we
now see 'the exercise of the violence of command'.
Post colonial politics seem appropriate, with
their struggle against some historical notion of
progress. We know see 'the irruption of the
"now" as the time of the subject that speaks up
and seizes her political constitution'
(154). The Colonies no longer see themselves
as prehistoric, but as 'genuine laboratories of
modernity'. In the same way, the figures of
living labour need no longer be seduced by a
prosperous future, given precariousness, or and
this can turn into a new relation with the
present. Transition is no longer linear
progress, and the production of suitably docile
subjectivity and the capture of living labour are
obvious.
We can engage in a struggle over concepts like
revolution, once seen as linked to a linear
perspective in history. Now, it is immanent
in present situations. We no longer believe
in regular cycles or even tendencies. We
understand instead that there are 'points of
discontinuity that compose a new constellation of
elements' (155), with all sorts of possibilities
for new kinds of conflict over translations.
We have examined the code presence of different
elements already. There is a space for
political action to replace 'fanciful
naturalness'.
The present is now 'temporally full'.
Because the features precariousness, but there is
also a possibility to develop the common in the
present, without waiting for the future.
Living knowledge itself will produces
institutions, including the recapture of
'cognitive and flexible employment', a new
equality and freedom through cooperation.
Class composition takes on a new form, the
struggle between autonomy and subordination,
heterogeneity and capitalist homogenization.
The notion of autonomy is valued, but ambiguous,
and a terrain of struggle. Analysing it will
lead to questions of hierarchy and the emergence
of class subjects. Political awareness no
longer depends on technical development that will
develop consciousness. Instead, the new
politics refuses technical composition, in the
form of 'the rearticulation of labour power in the
relations of exploitation' (156). Capitalist
capture of the common is both contingent and
reversible. Cognitive labour is increasingly
penetrating other kinds of work, as a co-presence
rather than exclusion, a process of 'becoming -
cognitive'.
The struggles are also found in the
university. They emerged when voice was
blocked in the name of a technical
recomposition. The possibilities of exit are
also affected by capitalist hierarchies, although
unfaithfulness is still an option. The sorts
of resistances put up by students have had an
effect, and forestalled Bologna in Italy, for
example. They extended to have rejection of
capitalist knowledge, but also 'the refusal of
labour in its classic sense' (157). The
university itself is no longer a stage in some
linear progression to work, but rather 'a present
without anticipation', and this again has focused
attention on its actual operations.
Student mobilization increasingly looks and sounds
like labour struggle. There is no collective
bargaining, although this is open to
reformism. The issues of autonomy are seen
in discussions of the birth of new subjects such
as black studies. There is a strategy of
using forms of inclusion and integration to
domesticate protest, but there is now the
emergence of a demand for opposition or knowledges
and autonomy, although they risk being reduced to
the politics of identity. Again, they have
to be turned into an institution of the
common.
Autonomous education can be developed on the basis
of critiques of the emptiness of contemporary
measures of value, compared to social
wealth. It is necessary to C the commons as
produced, rather than as natural, as in some
universal appeal to a right to nature. In
general, the struggle still takes an aleatory
form. There are still major attempts to
impose value on cognitive labour, and to extend
governance, but there is 'the permanent risk of
the multiplication of points of rupture'(158), the
emergence of the notion of dual power, excess, and
autonomy.
Students and the precarious are refusing to pay
for the crisis. New subjects have
emerged—pragmatic, fully at home in metropolitan
productive contexts, and transnational or at least
mobile. These form the basis of a new
European space, confronting Bologna.
Passivity does not mean that objections have been
crushed.
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