°Oikos Academicus
Those making their way from an increasingly huffy merchandiser of ‘higher education’ - bothered by this- might also like to peruse this, the AutoUni event coming up in Sydney this w/end..
And those heading over via recent disputes over Theory’s Empire might like to do the same. Some focus on what’s at stake might be helpful.
Is that a joke site also? Are they that stupid? Or are they just clumsy? What the hell is “Initial feasibility, scoping and accreditation submission meeting all state and territory requirements mandated by the National Protocols for Higher Education Approval Processes”?
I can’t tell anymore - the Fin and the Guardian know that it’s a spoof, but these consultants are apparently trying to justify their existence by making the Threat to Certification real. But really, when someone is promising “Ongoing, strategic compliance solutions” with “Self audit and site audit solutions to ensure yearly compliance requirements” , how can you take them seriously?
T.C.O. [August 10, 2005 @ 4:52 pm]
Maybe so. With a few pictures, it could be a lovely corporate porn site. ‘Strategic compliance” - cwor!
s0metim3s [August 10, 2005 @ 6:08 pm]
I’m afraid I’m a little dense; how does this relate to the Theory’s Empire debates exactly? Sorry.
Matt [August 11, 2005 @ 7:40 am]
It’s not always clear what’s at stake in these debates about Theory’s Empire, for those who are debating it.
Is it the discipline (Cultural Studies, Literature, etc), or (as Jodi Dean suggested) the discipline within the context of the academic labour market, or the figure of ‘Theory’? Obviously, it’s all of these and more. But without being clear about what’s at stake, the debate won’t move beyond creating friction and onto the question of how to respond to what is at stake, beyond the appearance and marketting of one book.
What do you think is at stake in these debates?
s0metim3s [August 11, 2005 @ 2:26 pm]
A lot of professional egos, apparently.
Matt [August 12, 2005 @ 2:35 am]
No doubt egos are involved. But the blogosphere has a very particular relation to the consitution of markets, audiences, etc in which egos are mobilised, take on particular kinds of egoism.
In the case of this rather boring book, the interactions between the publishing industry, the universities and debates in the blogosphere seems important. It’s not, I think, simply a debate over ‘Theory’ - although that can involve very particular questions, like the extent to which theory might exceed the valorisations of both the academy and the publishing industry. But ‘Theory’ can be just another commodity, and those who imagine that there is something inherent to theory that transcends these processes are being disingenuous.
By the by, I came across this recently, which I thought was interesting. From Andrew Ross’s Low Pay High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor:
“The education system (both at the high school and collegiate levels) is overdeveloped in relation to the needs of an economy that will only provide so many meaningful jobs that pay a living wage… [A]t a time (quite distinct from the Fordist era) when creative gratification is more and more touted as an obligatory feature of the realm of no-collar work, the collective educational capital that once stimulated and supported consumption and leisure time is more and more invested in gray areas of unwaged work that the new cultural economy is creating […] All in all, the creation of the World Wide Web has been the most massive, uncoordinated effort in the history of unwaged work. Education is not, then, wasted, as it appears at first sight. Rather, it is being unsystematically converted into un- or undercompensated labor in ways that remain to be adequately charted (just as the hidden costs of unwaged domestic labor of women have sustained the economy for so much longer).”
s0metim3s [August 12, 2005 @ 5:24 pm]
Theory as a commodity would have a different form than say, coal or even blueprints for shoefactories, wouldn’t it? For instance, if I have a patented blueprint for shoefactories, then I can sell it, this is intellectual property of a clearly commodized and state-sanction sort. But that isn’t the case with theory, specially not pomo theory (which is often devoid of use value beyond the generation of more theory… ), where the aim is actually (a) to maximise the diffusion (ie. quasiplagiarism) of your ideas, or vocabulary in case you don’t happen to have any actual ideas, and (b) to maximise your own value as a unit of academic labour, which is partly a function of (a), citations and cred. But for most people this is wishful thinking. There are, like, six million lit crit PhDs, and only one can be Zizek. Only a handful will be Elizabeth Grosz, and maybe a couple of thousand will not get utterly screwed on a contract. For most people, academic life can be a pretty nasty drudgery (marking papers is fucking awful; academics are often terrible workmates), and the function of theory is really to provide a life-buoy and lottery ticket that might facilitate an escape from this into the higher echelons, from the circuit of teaching into the circuit of writing.
I think these social processes are the important ones to look at if you need an explanation for why it is that so much pomo theory stinks, is full of idiocies everyone is too embarrassed to admit, is immune to criticism and instead settles disputes by fission and sect-formation; generally it serves functions that are simply outside the orbit of what ‘theory’ sounds like it would be about. It also explains why people react so violently when a book like this is published. It is bad form to put all the junk in the one place, the odour becomes unbearable.
But back to the question about the commodity form of theory - it seems to me that theory can only function in this structuring role and value-adding role only if it does not become a proper, formally sanctioned IP objectivity: then it would stop diffusing. Actually pilfering someone’s chapter might get you in deep shit, but ‘using’ theory - that’s great, we should encourage the students do use this and that! You can’t do that with a properly commodified piece of immaterial labour like Microsoft Windows. On the other hand, theory is really more of a method of structuring labour, and rarely objectivised as such. How would you see it?
Damn, too much coffee means too many keystrokes too little sense
commit it to the flames, must roast marshmellows [August 14, 2005 @ 12:35 am]
The category of ‘pomo’ is an invention of the anglo-american publishing industry and (by association) academy. So, if you think this doesn’t bear a relation to value, you’re wrong. In any case, the whole economy of citation, cred and neologistic vocabularies is inseperable from the constitution of niche markets, audiences, readerships, the innovation of industry (academic, publishing, etc). Some more on niche markets here.
I think you’re also wrong if you equate the ‘higher eschelons’ of the academy with writing, the time to write/read. Most of the ‘higher eschelons’ fulfill managerial functions. The idea that if one climbs the ladder of the academy one has more time to write and read is a dream that the ‘lower eschelons’ have, I suspect. The ‘upper eschelons’ subcontract (things like reading - RA’s producing annotated bibliographies -, research, essay marking, etc). But for them to put their names to things, they still have to spend a lot of time managing those subcontractors.
s0metim3s [August 14, 2005 @ 1:48 pm]
Can you say more on theory as commodity etc please? It’s very interesting stuff, but I’m not sure I understand some of the points being made.
It seems to me that there’s different aspects to theory-as-commodity. Theory as a commodity in books isn’t much different from recipes or short stories in books. There’s specifics to various markets and marketing strategies, but that’s true of nearly any commodity.
Theory as a trait connected to the labor of academics, as an activity, is different. There’s various aspects of this activity, too though. One part is writing books for publishing capital,activity which is not directly financially serving the writers of most of the books (by ie, the ‘theorists’ are generally not small scale productive firms producing commodities “theory books”, rather it’s more one aspect of the variegated labor of academics, and a labor which is something like piece wages, and low ones).
Another part is labor in the classroom, teaching theory, the function of which I don’t really get. And there’s also the production of prestige for the university by publishing etc, in order to compete for revenue sources (academics produce activity which the people who request funding can turn into lines on their requests, in the way that employees of “not-for-profit” capital produce activity which can be turned into grant reports).
I think that with respect to the above two paragraphs, it’s less that there’s a commodity called theory than that there’s an activity called theory that is connected with the traits looked for in academic labor power, traits deployed in certain labor markets in order to be picked for jobs (kind of like skills and experiences for any other job in an industry with a largely nonunionized and unorganized workforce [at least in the US], with the added twist that some of the traits desired - the ability to reproduce hierarchies via polysyllabic utterances, the ability to obfuscate, pontificate, and capitalize on market trends in order to produce more market share for the employer - are not admitted to by the employer).
Like I said, I’m keen to hear your thoughts on this - I’m starting uni again after five years out and have many a mixed feeling, particularly about this thing called theory which gets talked about with tones that imply cultural superiority as well as an inherent radicality which is also moral virtue. I’m not much beyond vague unease and dismissiveness, though, and would like to understand it better in order to understand my workplace and its pitfalls.
Nate [August 14, 2005 @ 7:55 pm]
Obviously ‘pomo’ bears some kind of ‘relation’ to value - but since anything at all does, the question should be: what is this relation? Does it have the form of a general commodity? What kind of commodity is it, then? I was just pointing out in kind of hurried up sort of way, some of the aspects of ‘theory’ that seem to me to be a little bit at odds with the paradigmatic IP commodity form. This is assuming we can specify pomo clearly enough; I think in a sense, ‘pomo’ is closer to being a method of production than a commodity. Maybe I have made myself confusing - I mean something very obvious, that is that you can’t go out there and buy shares in post-modernism, or own it like IP, but it is by the same token a factor in the production of certain organizational structures.
Sure, high echelon academics are often harvesting well, my work. (I have experienced some of the worst aspects of this bargain, I am sure I’ve told the story elsewhere.) Writing isn’t really freedom; it’s a life-buoy, as I wrote. But in the first place, there is a big difference from being a postdoc whose work gets ripped off, or even being an RA, and being a semicasualised tertiary teacher. Some people, like me, have gotten into this mess because they actually like teaching, but I think that I am a minority. Most people go into academia with an academic career in mind, and that involves lifting yourself out of the bottom scum as fast as possible and start writing. And sure, I agree with you entirely that what is called ‘writing’ in academia should not be equated with time for reading/writing, it is precisely an industrial enterprise.
TCO [August 14, 2005 @ 10:43 pm]
http://www.inwriting.org/weblog/archives/000163.html
Perhaps another way of describing the ’stakes’ might involve something like a radically shifting economy of interest? I was reading this passage/post card from _Counterpath_ last night:
“Spoke a lot also about the lie and pardon (today in politics, but also beyond the political or juridical). Well received. No perceptible bad conscience on their part, just a discourse of the victims–of Nazism, then communism, now of “postmodernism,” that word so many intellectuals, here and everywhere else, stuff everything into, and which here they confuse with a symmetrical liberal antithesis of totalitarianism: the market, drugs, anything at all. Anything whatsoever, really. It’s difficult. I’ll have to give up describing all that to you, like the press and television, which, as you know, I consent to more easily abroad. Wrongly, but why?…”
–J.D.
I’m intrigued, TCO, by your readings of Agamben.
Matt [August 15, 2005 @ 3:23 am]
That’s a particularly sharp review of one manifestation of the relation between ‘theory’ and the publishing industry. There’s one aspect that seems pertinent to add. I’ve been sitting on a review of a book (not the Federici, another), and the thing that struck me was that the proliferation of bitesize theory books isn’t simply about publics, niche markets, etc, but that this tells us something quite significant about time.
Certain strata of the labour market require anything but specialisation. Yes, the category of ‘expertise’ still functions, but more so in the manner of a stratification I think. Anyway, the ‘overeducated’ strata that Ross refers to are trained to be flexible, innovative, etc. The corollary of that is that they have ‘variegated tastes’. But they have little time - so the bitesize theory book, the canonical textbook which provides the list of top five ‘Thinkers’, the disputes over the canon, these are all directed to a readership which has less time to read, may or may not be in the universities, but which nevertheless does read. The unpaid labour that Ross refers to works between and on those two points: the absence of time to read (and write) and a passion for reading (and writing).
So, mixed feelings is precisely what one should bring to a consideration of ‘theory’ or the university. I can’t resolve that question for you Nate. But I will say that it’s worth exploring the ways in which ambivalence is both complicit with and exceeds its post-fordist conditions of production.
s0metim3s [August 15, 2005 @ 2:27 pm]
Isn’t Caputo one of those neothomists?
Look, I agree with you there, even before we get to the fact that writers like Zizek are far more interesting when writing little things. But I think it is interesting how the discussion of pomo, once the theory was essentially blown into smithereens, moved rapidly into the analysis of the text as product. So now, we have the publishing blitz itself as something that is analysed, the books and their reasons for being essentially merge into just the one and same problem. Now, I think this is both very important and something of an avoidance. Postmodernism isn’t only publishing, much less books, just as christianity isn’t bibles. So, if you really want to look at the commodity form of theory, looking at books is a bit misleading, it yields a far too objectified and marketeable item. It’s also a bit of a cop out to look into the parameters that allow a certain kind of book to be successful, rather than with the sort of structure of academic production that thrives on senselessness. It’s not obvious to me, also, that there is much at stake in dethroning fads; it’s a bit like complaining about the awful state of commerical music and longing for a return to real music, free jazz or something like that. Actually free jazz is a good analogy in another way, because some of it is amazing, profound music, and yet…
BTW. I think Agamben is fantastic, I really do - just obviously not the clearest thinker when it comes to set theory. Badiou is the real shit merchant. I would not intervene except that I like Agamben, and I hope someone, for instance him, actually states the logic of the exception rigorously…
TCO [August 15, 2005 @ 3:06 pm]
Seriously though, I don’t know what/who you mean by ‘pomo’ that’s inseperable from the anglo-american reception of certain Names. The academic production that thrives on “senselessness”, for sure - but this has a relation (if only as ambition) to books, conference papers, citation, attention, etc. But as a category, ‘pomo’ doesn’t make sense to me outside those terms. ‘Theory’ makes more sense to me as something that’s not synonymous to ‘pomo’, but not always distinguishable is all.
I do agree with you about Badiou - “shit merchant” is right.
s0metim3s [August 15, 2005 @ 4:27 pm]
hi Angela, all,
Ambivalence indeed, and frankly a bit of desperation…
It strikes me that many people I meet in my in person life have no ideas what so ever - and a great deal of despair - when it comes to building and exerting power collectively in/against their place of employment, and that theory talk stands in much of the time for those other conversations that, in my opinion, need to be had between co-workers in places where theory is part of the labor performed. And when initiatives do happen, they are very traditional and often unsucessful (years long union campaigns including court battles etc), which is ironic given that these are sectors of relatively self-consciously immaterial labor at least parts of which are onboard (in theory!) with a general critique of representational politics. (In other circles I’m around it’s not theory talk but politics talk - Bush and Blair etc - which gives one various pleasure kicks, though with bitter aftertaste, but don’t build much or trouble the boss much, who much prefers us sitting the break room smoking talking Marx or foreign policy than workplace grievances and how to change them…)
Thiago’s comments makes me think about ways one can read Marx, and reasons for doing so. The bit where uncle Karl talks about turning from circulation to production (tracing a trajectory from the commodity-in-circulation to production-for-commodity-sale), I like that, but it’s got to be with an eye toward pulling out of production (right?) which is part of what I take to be at stake in your critical comments on universities etc, Angela (I was thinking that that’s perhaps one of the troubles with Jason Read’s book - the stuff on the reproduction of the mode of production - it assumes a continuation of of some iteration of the present order, when then goal is precisely the opposite). I wonder if in the theory-laden workplace the basic problems of organization in/against the workplace aren’t generally common with other jobs and not very theoretically complicated - just really, really hard.
take care,
Nate
Nate [August 15, 2005 @ 5:38 pm]
Oh, sure, it is definitely a matter of the reception of names. Yale definitely beat Arecibo in receiving stakes. Look, maybe I am being naive and taking people like this half seriously about there having been a pomo social movement. Sure, the it revolved around books and marginalia writing on an industrial scale, but then there is this wild-eyed, ‘we’re in it together’, remember Haigh-Ashbury in the day dude, sort of thing. Maybe there is a little bit of truth to that, though in my opinion it just makes it even funnier.
TCO [August 15, 2005 @ 8:23 pm]