We say that the University belongs to those that work in it
k-punk's recent experience of a craven, stupid university politics tallies with my own. At college on Tuesday, I heard a student bitching about the union action, how terrible it was, how she wasn't going to get her grades. I asked her about it, she said the following: 1) that the lecturers didn't go into academia because they thought they could make money; 2) that people didn't have the right to strike, 3) that she didn't want to talk to me about it, because she was talking to her friends.
Now, all of this would be easy to dismiss as simply ridiculous, but there is a serious point The fact is that, this student, at this august institution, had no idea whatsoever what was, and is, at stake in politics and capitalism, and in order to explain this troubling fact it seems necessary to think about how it is exactly that she has been so badly educated.
In my view, the reason is simple, and it is systematic: it has to do with the organization of the university system itself, and the division of labour operative within it. This is hardly an original thesis, but I mean something highly specific by it, which is the following: students are led to believe that what they do for their degree is work, and that what they do for the rest of their time is something else - what exactly never being said. Furthermore, various guidelines establishing how exactly students must go about producing work for their degree serve to reinforce an ideology of bourgeouis individualism - all work must be your own work, all work must be original, etc. As a consequence of both these points, students are encouraged into believing they are autonomous individuals somehow disconnected from the social, and that the things they learn about are somehow not related to them - but rather, only to some fictive other elsewhere. Like in history, for instance, or some mythical third world, or elsewhere. Perhaps Kansas.
In all of this, the fundamental drive remains the same: the denegation of the immanent, and the commensurate but secret and sublime valorization of transcendence. Time accordingly thus becomes changed into a series of discrete enclosures: term times, first years, so on and so forth- Foucault of course analyzed this in Discipline and Punish - and all desire correlatively becomes transformed into nothing more than the desire for escape. A false escape - one which traps the most tremendous violence, and conceals its real effect and name: this is to say, deliverance - to an analogous, or indeed, even more constrained environment - so that no gain is ultimately made and all desire is negated.
If there is any possibility for some kind of renegotiation of this situation, then it must occur on an immanent basis, in terms of a becoming-political of concrete situations carried out through a series of esoteric interventions which perhaps should not even bear the name of politics. After all: politics have become a dirty word, become in the contemporary imaginary equated to a total and repressive domain - that of the political, and in a certain sense, this is not even wrong. In the UK, the present official Leftist parties are exactly at the stage that French Communist Party was at in 1968 - the SWP and Respect both ultimately structurally compliant in the Blairism - if for no other reason than incompetence - with both essentially still mired in what is basically no more than a toothless crypto-Stalinist mode of organization.
The problem, then, is this: how can one enact a becoming-politicized that is not equivalent to a becoming-political? I can only suggest the following: the necessity is to avoid at all costs the politics of ressentiment. Even the politics which may appear as this: the "no" in fact is that provided by the government, and is that "no" that must be turned into an affirmation: we cannot expect or dream that the reverse could ever happen. Meanwhile, since the Government seems so intent on proleterianizing the University, then why not take them at their word, and push them to the limit?
What I mean is what Samuel Eto'o meant, when he began a monkey dance after burying a goal before the racist Spanish fans who had been abusing him: "If they're going to treat me like a money," he said afterwards, "Then I'm going to act like a monkey."
In other words: if they are going to treat us like proleterians, then we don't we start acting like it.
Now, all of this would be easy to dismiss as simply ridiculous, but there is a serious point The fact is that, this student, at this august institution, had no idea whatsoever what was, and is, at stake in politics and capitalism, and in order to explain this troubling fact it seems necessary to think about how it is exactly that she has been so badly educated.
In my view, the reason is simple, and it is systematic: it has to do with the organization of the university system itself, and the division of labour operative within it. This is hardly an original thesis, but I mean something highly specific by it, which is the following: students are led to believe that what they do for their degree is work, and that what they do for the rest of their time is something else - what exactly never being said. Furthermore, various guidelines establishing how exactly students must go about producing work for their degree serve to reinforce an ideology of bourgeouis individualism - all work must be your own work, all work must be original, etc. As a consequence of both these points, students are encouraged into believing they are autonomous individuals somehow disconnected from the social, and that the things they learn about are somehow not related to them - but rather, only to some fictive other elsewhere. Like in history, for instance, or some mythical third world, or elsewhere. Perhaps Kansas.
In all of this, the fundamental drive remains the same: the denegation of the immanent, and the commensurate but secret and sublime valorization of transcendence. Time accordingly thus becomes changed into a series of discrete enclosures: term times, first years, so on and so forth- Foucault of course analyzed this in Discipline and Punish - and all desire correlatively becomes transformed into nothing more than the desire for escape. A false escape - one which traps the most tremendous violence, and conceals its real effect and name: this is to say, deliverance - to an analogous, or indeed, even more constrained environment - so that no gain is ultimately made and all desire is negated.
If there is any possibility for some kind of renegotiation of this situation, then it must occur on an immanent basis, in terms of a becoming-political of concrete situations carried out through a series of esoteric interventions which perhaps should not even bear the name of politics. After all: politics have become a dirty word, become in the contemporary imaginary equated to a total and repressive domain - that of the political, and in a certain sense, this is not even wrong. In the UK, the present official Leftist parties are exactly at the stage that French Communist Party was at in 1968 - the SWP and Respect both ultimately structurally compliant in the Blairism - if for no other reason than incompetence - with both essentially still mired in what is basically no more than a toothless crypto-Stalinist mode of organization.
The problem, then, is this: how can one enact a becoming-politicized that is not equivalent to a becoming-political? I can only suggest the following: the necessity is to avoid at all costs the politics of ressentiment. Even the politics which may appear as this: the "no" in fact is that provided by the government, and is that "no" that must be turned into an affirmation: we cannot expect or dream that the reverse could ever happen. Meanwhile, since the Government seems so intent on proleterianizing the University, then why not take them at their word, and push them to the limit?
What I mean is what Samuel Eto'o meant, when he began a monkey dance after burying a goal before the racist Spanish fans who had been abusing him: "If they're going to treat me like a money," he said afterwards, "Then I'm going to act like a monkey."
In other words: if they are going to treat us like proleterians, then we don't we start acting like it.
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