Hello All,
Readings are below. As is the first of a couple reminders about the special engagement with Poet, performer, & feminist, Rachel Zolf, whose book coming out of her experiences in Palestine-Israel, Neighbour Procedure, we will read later on, and whose pedagogical activist-poetry project, “The Tolerance Project,” we will also take a look at. Fascinating, important writer / artist, who will engage with us for a special class, Friday October 15, 7pm.
A couple reminders. Please bring with you your group notes on Foucault sections to lecture Weds. Also, remember that by Sat. we’ll be sharing our writings that stem from the notes we’ve taken about some piece of campus architecture and how it disciplines us socially. Remember, for that piece of writing, once you taken some time with the note-taking and experiencing of the architecture, spend only 30-45 min. writing the “creative” piece, no other constraints.
Good, difficult discussion today. Things will get easier with the secondary texts, as we began this course with the most difficult text, arguably, in the Foucault. Others might be elusive, but this is dense work, and unless you are familiar with the ideas, or Marx (who we would read if there existed a suitable short piece by him), it’s a slog. Today I wanted us to model a kind of close reading: going line by line, of a section, realizing that reading a) out loud, and b) in smaller, intensive chunks, makes the work less unwieldy, and is arguably more rewarding.
We’ve begun with the “docile” body–how it is disciplined and shaped, thus shaping “selfhood.” Note that this week is sort of a discussion about the concept “the body,” but that it’s just as much about institutional control of particular bodies–physical bodies, especially in terms of how physical spaces / places are used or built to train (eg “partition”) the body and bodies. We’ll come back to this set of discussions as we ask a slightly different question later on: what does creative-critical writing have to say about “THE body,” in other words, our various concepts about bodies–”ideal” genders, for example. This we’ll get to, especially as a way of asking whether creative writing has something unique to contribute to the social construction of the concept “BODY,” and if so, whether there’s a direct relationship between “transgressive texts” and “transgressive bodies.”
For now, Foucault’s critique of institutional control (of movement, of behavior, etc) has several implications, one of which was asked today: what about surveillance? Well, if one is internalizing the controlling and disciplining of the body by being thoroughly disciplined, one is habituated, thus one’s gestures and movements are under constant surveillance in the sense that a camera need not be on you, a pair of eyes need not be on you, for you, over time, to FEEL watched, thus changing the way you behave in ways that mirror physically being watched–even in private. That is a simplified version of Foucault’s argument here. And another implication is this: if we are, as Freire and Foucault both seem to be suggesting, under some measure of social control, how do we, as writers, “freely” investigate? And how do we as co-learners “freely” co-learn about, and through, art/writing? Use again rears its head. What does it mean for something to be useful in a controlled social environment, even where the controls aren’t direct, such as one would see, for example, in military training? Used by whom and for what? As writers and co-learners, Foucault and Freire argue, we need wrestle with these questions if we are interested in finding some way to create a social system that employs different controls, or no controls, etc. Note that Freire is arguing for a form of equal education, a balance of power, hence control, between teacher and student, so that the students are teachers and conversely. Note that Foucault isn’t necessarily arguing for a different social structure–is only critiquing existing structures. Thus Freire’s work is much more “Marxist,” whereas Foucault, though very influenced by Marx, is not Marxist. Recall that in the video, if you happened to watch it, he refused to identify any utopian, ideal social model, whereas Chomsky argued that anarcho-unionism is “naturally” an ideal state for society to exist in.
So, riffing on the body made “docile” by an environment / institution, we follow up here with readings that compliment the Foucault and Freire, that situate them historically and also give us poetic examples of post-Foucaultian art. These will form the circuit of a lecture on Wednesday. So please do these readings by Weds.
Indeed bodies will be thematic for us in other ways. As mentioned, in discussing aesthetic/artistic intervention into valuations of gender. And also when we look at site-specific creative writing work, non-institutional collectives interested in reclaiming public space. So, though Foucault is difficult, the work is important for looking at contemporary critiques of both institutionality and social norms.
As we get into a groove, seminar will take shape, and that’s when (this week and after) we’ll really be able to dig into our own and other writings. Here’s the reading, all very, very short pieces:
Guy Debord, “Theory of the Derive” HERE
CA Conrad, (Soma)tic Poetry Exercise, “AIDS Snow Family” HERE
CA Conrad and Evergreen Students, (Soma)tic Poetry Exercise, “Evergreen Senses” HERE
Laura Elrick, “Stalk” HERE
“Bybee Memorandum,” PDF sent as email
To get us ready to talk directly about alternative pedagogical models a review by Reg Johanson (a fine poet out of Vancouver), below:
Review of Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization.
Edited by Mark Cote, Richard J.F. Day and Greig de Peuter.
University of Toronto Press, 2007.
By Reg Johanson for The Rain River Review
These essays offer diverse analyses of how neoliberal capital has changed the university, how these changes have developed a new kind of intellectuality and the locations and spaces where pedagogy has, or might, confront and provide alternatives to the world that neoliberalism is making. Despite the editors’ contention, in their essay “Academicus Affinitatus: Academic Dissent, Community Education, and Critical U”, that “whatever strategies we adopt, it is imperative for us to continue to defend the university as a site of critical inquiry”, for many contributors the university seems more likely than ever before to remain an institution of reproduction, rather than transformation. In the anthology’s first section, “The Contested University”, Nick Dyer-Witherford, Ian Angus, Jerry Zaslove and Stuart Hall, among others, offer accounts of the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed the university, and assess the university’s potential as a site of radical pedagogy.
The post-Second World War “interlude”, as Ian Angus calls it, in the universities was not without its contradictions, which have been exploited by neoliberal capital to decompose the alliances and gains of the period. As Stuart Hall points out, the opening-up of the university in the post-war years transformed its previously “elite, male, white” character, but also coincided with a decrease in state investment, which has put pressure on working and learning conditions and has forced universities to seek funding from corporate interests. According to Jerry Zaslove even though the student movements of the sixties were the only authentic social force that could name and oppose schooling as part of a system that seemed to be repeating Europe’s capitulation to fascism, […] the culture of extremes during the Cold War was lived out in both the desire for a radical pedagogical turn, and a desire to open the doors of the university to more students. The critique of the university danced in tandem with economic necessity to broaden the university to include more students, more of everything. The extremes of mass culture and the knowledge industry met.
The result is a “Wal-Martiversity”, as Zaslove calls it, where education is rationalized to corporate demands for specific outcomes. For Ian Angus the mass university was the product of a bargain with the state and capital: universities and the intellectuals they employed would be given money and space but their criticisms of society must remain “academic”. Respect for the separation of “spheres of society”—economic, academic, political, military—was part of the deal. But this separation was violated by the university’s involvement in, on one side, war research, and on the other side, by the emerging critique of the “knowledge factory”, of the university’s role in the reproduction of a specific socio-economic order and the suppression of the possibility of producing others. The gains of this period—strong tenure rights, very little contract work, academic freedom—have been under attack ever since.
For Nick Dyer-Witherford it is the growth of “cognitive capitalism” that characterizes the history of the university since the 1960s. According to Dyer-Witherford, “capitalism went cognitive in the 1960s and 1970s not only because computers and biotech innovations were available, but also because high-tech options became attractive as responses to the massive unrest that was besetting industrial, Fordist capitalism—strikes by industrial movements, the emergence of the new social movements, and guerrilla wars in Vietnam and elsewhere.” The result was a greater “integration of universities and business, which was vital to the development of high-tech ‘knowledge industries’”, and in which capital becomes more intellectual and intellectuals become not only more productive but also more entrepreneurial.
These accounts, unlike some in the anthology, do not end in calls for the “return” of a “public university”, which the authors recognize was always only a myth. However, as Angus says, “there was always a minority for whom the corporate function and even the citizenship function were questionable as such”, suggesting that the activity of the university hasn’t always or necessarily been about reproduction. And Zaslove argues that “while the system has adjusted itself to the coming of the ultramass university”—that is, recomposed itself against the threat to its order that mass education has the potential to become—“the utopian impulse to make radical pedagogy into an image of a critical institution has not been entirely misdirected in its original form, nor has it entirely dissipated”.
However, the line of thinking I am most grateful for in this anthology leads out of the university. Although “being free in a classroom might be as close to a portable radical utopia as one can get”, Zaslove argues that “where the utopian pedagogy of the classroom would lead, no university can tell us. No pieties about liberal studies, no humanities as citizenship, no remixing of interdisciplinary studies as a new technology of knowledge, has the answer.” For Zaslove “the real question” is “in the global market, where is the critical education public sphere? And who is excluded from the education that at one time was assumed to be open to all? Those outside can be labelled the new global proletariat, the new exiles.” These are the migrants, the slum dwellers, the maquiladora workers, those pushed off land and out of jobs by the new enclosures. “If it is to be a vibrant force”, Zaslove argues, “a utopian practice must address the discarded, the victims of the excesses, the ones who qualify only as an afterthought, and those who don’t qualify at all for entry into institutions built by a now calcified neoliberal ideology. Not with ‘human rights’ or ‘multiculturalism’, but with what I would call the ‘displaced radical pedagogy’ of those who stand at the door of the future and carry the weight of the world.”
Dyer-Witherford, on the other hand, does see the university as a potentially viable site for radical pedagogy. The cognitivizing and networking of the universities has put the means of production in the hands of the labourers/students: “The great irony of cognitive capitalism is that it has failed to adequately contain and control the network that is [its] greatest achievement.” For Dyer-Witherford, “the networking of the universities, while in some ways deepening academia’s integration with cognitive capital, is simultaneously creating opportunities for students to test the limits of this subsumption.” As a result of this integration, “the conventional distinction between the university and the ‘real world’ […] is becoming less and less relevant.” On this account, struggles against neoliberal capitalism are also struggles in and against the neoliberal university.
The anthology offers two very different subjects of utopian pedagogy. Are they Zaslove’s “new exiles”, the people Stuart Hall characterizes as “the multitudes” who are “doing the shit work of global capital, […] servicing it, feeding it, washing its windows late at night, cleaning its offices and looking after the children of global entrepreneurs”? Or are they Dyer-Witherford’s new “mass intellectuals”, the “immaterial” and “cognitive” labourers that have been produced by globalized, networked capital? It would seem obvious that the answer is “both”. Writing from the perspective of the “global north”, the theoreticians of the “general intellect” privilege immaterial and cognitive labour. In Part Two of the anthology, “Rethinking the Intellectual”, Franco Berardi’s “From Intellectuals to Cognitarians” argues that labour has become increasingly “intellectual”:
in the second half of the twentieth century, following mass education and the technoscientific transformation of production that came about through the direct integration of different knowledges, the role of the intellectual was redefined. No longer were intellectuals a class independent of production; no longer were they free individuals who took upon themselves the task of a purely ethical and freely cognitive choice; instead the intellectual became a mass social subject that tended to become an integral part of the general productive process. Paolo Virno uses the term ‘mass intellectuality’ to denote the formation of social subjectivity tied to the massification of intellectual capacity in advanced industrial society.
Berardi calls these mass intellectuals “the cognitariat”, who “represent the social subjectivity of the general intellect.” According to Dyer-Witherford, the term “general intellect”, from Marx, refers to “the increasing importance of machinery […] and in particular the salience of both automation and transportation networks. [Marx’s notion of the general intellect] can be seen as a prefigurative glimpse of today’s ‘post-Fordism’ or ‘information capitalism’, whose production teams, innovative milieux, and corporate research consortiums yield the ‘fixed capital’ of robotic factories, genetic engineering, and global computer networks.”
From the perspective of the “global south”, Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis have criticized (in The Commoner 12 [Spring/Summer 2007]) this privileging of the general intellect, pointing out that “capitalist accumulation has thrived precisely through its capacity to simultaneously organize development and underdevelopment, waged and unwaged labour, production at the highest levels of technological know-how and production at the lowest levels.” A similar critique comes from within the anthology in the interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa. For her, the globalization of reproductive and affective labour, primarily done by women and primarily low-tech, is the critical terrain of struggle. The fact that “the conditions of the labour of reproduction have worsened for the overwhelming majority of people in advanced countries and even more so in developing countries” is a result of neoliberal economic policies. New enclosures in the form of the Structural Adjustment Programs of the imf and World Bank in the global south have caused mass migrations, famine and war. Against Berardi and Dyer-Witherford, who see the networked, cyborg mass intellectuals as revolutionary agents because they are technological, global and diffuse, Dalla Costa proposes a critical reversal of perspective: “I maintain something that might sound heretical for those who [believe] that globalization is an ineluctable fact—that there is a need, in many respects but beginning with the agricultural and nutritional one, to relocalize development and ruralize the world again.” Because “the expropriation of the land, local cultivation, the local diversification of crops,” and the production of export crops are crucial issues for both the developed and nondeveloped world, “it is time that the debates around the money-form and technology were united […] with those of the land and of agriculture.”
Other articles in the second section offer critiques of academic research and political militancy as well as new possibilities for the form and location of pedagogy. Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi and Gigi Roggero, in “Conricerca as Political Action”, and the Argentinian collective Colectivos Situaciones, in “On the Researcher-Militant”, propose new figures of the activist-researcher-intellectual-pedagogue. In Borio et al, this new figure is the “coresearcher” who does “coresearch” (conricerca); in Colectivos Situaciones, it is the “researcher-militant”. These new figures are critiques of academic research, of the intellectual, and of the militant.
For Borio et al, conricerca is “a production of knowledge that is ‘other than’, an experiment in organizational practices, and a space of resubjectification.” It is a form of research in which “one has no certainties, when that which is made an object of knowledge, and how to intervene in it, is not known.” The Colectivos argues that the researcher-militant must remain faithful to “not-knowing”; she is antipedagogical, that is, her work is not based on explication but on the discovery of what is not known: “It is not about teaching, nor is it about disseminating key texts; rather it is about looking into practices for a new sociability […] Research-militancy develops through workshops and collective reading. Together, these produce the conditions for thinking about and disseminating productive texts.”
Unlike other contributors to Utopian Pedagogy, Borio et al reject the notion that there is any such thing as a “leading figure” in contemporary struggles. To the extent that neoliberalism has imposed “a despatialization of forms of labour and workers” there is no worker nor space that is central. Instead “a certain subject is not politically central exclusively insofar as it works in a strategic place within the overall systemic plan, nor only because it is quantitatively great in number: it becomes central when it is capable of producing conflict, of breaking given equilibriums, and of generalizing its own struggles”.
Colectivos Situaciones makes a distinction between research militancy and both academic research and political militancy. Unlike academic research, which is “linked to the market and to scientific discourse, […] research militancy is the quest for sites where those same knowledges can be composed with popular ones […] It tries to generate a capacity for struggles to read themselves, and to capture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices.” And unlike the political militant, “the researcher-militant is a character composed of questions and is not saturated by ideological meanings and models of the world […] The goal is neither to politicize or intellectualize the social practices. It is not a question of managing to get them to make a leap in order to pass from the social to ‘serious politics’.”
For Colectivos, academic researchers and activists “idealize” and “objectualize”, positing their knowledge of things as external to themselves. They do this “without interrogating themselves about their own values—that is to say, without having a subjective experience that transforms them.” They remain blind to themselves: “They can construct consistent knowledges of the situation so long as, and precisely thanks to, their being outside, at a prudent distance.” In Borio et al, the transversal movement of the coresearcher is not only about creating knowledge for the subjects of the oppressive system and thereby offering the potential for the “resubjectification” of others—the coresearcher must also resubjectify, becoming “functional for the system but also negating [her] function for the system […] in this process there is the possibility of constituting a form of social cooperation that is ‘other than’ and politically counterposed to the capitalist political character, that structures autonomy and constructs individual and collective counterpaths of liberation, all the while subtracting territory and undermining the progress of the systemic perspective.” Here, cooperation and power confront capitalist cooperation and power; it is a constitutive process, a “counter-accumulation of know-how and particular abilities directed towards the achievement of precise antisystemic goals.”
The third section of Utopian Pedagogy, “Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy”, offers a wide range of specific instances of forms and locations of pedagogy beyond the university. Brian W. Alleyne, in “The Making of an Antiracist Cultural Politics in Post-Imperial Britain: The New Beacon Circle”, documents forms of black cultural production and antiracist organizing and education that challenge the terms of official British multiculturalism. Shveta Sarda in “‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought Of A Place Like This’: Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience” discusses a project in the slums of New Delhi in which students of a computer education program make and share knowledge of their neighbourhood—mohalla—through digital media. Richard Toews and Kelly Martin-Harris report, in “An Enigma in the Education System: sfu and the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society”, on their experiences as teacher and student in an educational partnership between Simon Fraser University and the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council. Sarita Srivastava, in the excellent “Let’s Talk: The Pedagogy and Politics of Antiracist Change”, argues that “contrary to their intended outcomes, the pedagogical practices and philosophies in antioppression or diversity workshops often produce people of color, queers, and other marginalized participants as the objects of knowledge”. “The goal”, she claims, “becomes knowledge about race that is produced by and about people of colour—knowledge for whites to scrutinize, reject, or express gratitude [towards]”. Imran Munir’s essay about secular Pakistani peasant struggles against enclosures, “The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles and Pedagogy in Pakistan”, is pertinent as Pakistan becomes more central in the struggle against neoliberal capital and its wars.
Utopian Pedagogy suggests exciting possibilities for pedagogy outside of the university, but implies an untenable future for pedagogy within it. Should radical pedagogues fight for another university, within another, more just, state structure? Or should they begin to smuggle as much out of the neoliberal university as they can, like gangsters might distribute cigarettes or liquor (or books or computers) off the back of a hijacked truck? As a teacher in the post-secondary system myself I am aware that while the content of my courses—the things I say, the readings we do and the conversations we have—might be radical or encourage radicality, the structure in which we work undermines or vitiates real transformation and liberation. At best I can say “there are alternatives”. I cannot be or do those alternatives. At worst, my radicality can be recuperated by the neoliberal university, as one more “choice”, “point of view” or “lifestyle” on offer for the tuition dollar, bolstering the illusions of liberal democratic freedom. I may be merely providing my students with that highly recuperable skill: “thinking outside the box”.
As announced on the PRESS Series Blog:
Mark it on your calendars! I’m really pleased to announce that poet and performer Rachel Zolf will be reading @ Evergreen as part of the PRESS Literary-Politics Series, co-sponsored by Evergreen affiliated programs, Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, and my course Experiments in Text. Zolf will read from, among other work, her new, critically acclaimed book, Neighbour Procedure (Coach House, 2010). Please visit the PRESS Blog in the coming days for room and other, detailed information.
PRESS EVENT (from the PRESS BLOG)
Rachel Zolf
October 15
7pm
The Evergreen State College
Sem II Building, Room TBA
Admission is free
RACHEL ZOLF’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth full-length book, Neighbour Procedure, was released by Coach House Books in 2010. Previous collections include Human Resources (Coach House), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Masque (The Mercury Press), Shoot & Weep (Nomados), from Human Resources (Belladonna books) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). Born in Toronto, Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.
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Of potential further interest (optional readings):
Liz Grosz, “Bodies and Cities,” sent as pdf in email
David Wolach, “The Ideal Glass: On Laura Elrick’s Stalk & The Poetics of Spatial Practice HERE
PhillySound feature / interview on David Wolach’s Occultations HERE (interview discusses “bodily” knowledges, how the body is ignored in favor of western intellectualism etc)
Hannah Weiner, Clairvoyant Journals 1974 HERE (feel free to look around, read part of the book, etc)