°Edu-factory02 - 02
Part two of the edu-factory contribution, also in draft and incomplete. The first part is here.
So, the initial question I posed – that of how to approach questions of hierarchisation without supposing, or imagining, that this might be set aside by the ostensibly universalising reach of the general equivalent – could be better put as a question that does not only obtain for the university, but instead as the suturing of affects, norms and labour that the university partakes in but by no means exhausts.
In a recent discussion of the debates in Italy around precariousness, Laura Fantone suggests that without assuming the universality of what were always highly gendered, generational and racialised distinctions between public and private realms, paid and unpaid work, or the analytical centrality of a Europe that perhaps never existed except at the level of representation, the indistinction between labour and life that precariousness has brought to the centre of considerations of work cannot be regarded as the disastrous shattering of a previously steadfast norm (“Precarious changes: Gender and Generational Politics in Contemporary Italy”, in Feminist Review, 87, 2007). In the re-arrangement of what is experienced and represented as normal by what has been heretofore regarded as a marginal condition, the question becomes something other than how to reinstate norms of a familial hierarchy, gendered submission and the Eurocentrism that underwrote the presumably universal conditions of ‘regular’ work. She writes:
Some Italian feminist networks like Prec@s, A/Matrix or Sconvegno claim that precariousness, when defined according to gender, can be transformed and retooled to oppose traditional values that Italian society still imposes on young women. A precarious existence is not solely a negative phenomenon for the generation of women in their twenties and thirties who chose to do creative work, to teach or to emigrate. In these cases, a different sense of precariousness is starting to emerge, and with it, new strategies and networking across genders, generations and ethnicities take shape.
Elsewhere and by contrast, Lauren Berlant has explored the “aspirational normativity” that precariousness brings with it (“Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta”, in Public Culture, 19:2). Here, in the absence of any “continued affective experience of solidity and importance that should have been provided by parents and the family form”, and in the diligent refusal of welfare, “the affects of belonging are all tied up with what happens at the point of production”, optimism becomes tethered to becoming a ‘good worker’ who earns their value, is deserving of it. She asks what happens when the promise of the good life becomes privatised, deeply personal? Moreover, “How can we understand the singular tragedies of [two of the characters in the films,] Rosetta and Igor in light of the recent uprisings in Paris, where students marched to maintain the same statesecured labor protections enjoyed by their parents, who benefited from the postwar Western European promise of social democracy?” For Berlant, the post-Fordist affective landscape is one of persistent bargaining with a never-attained normalcy “in the face of conditions that can can barely support even the memory of fantasy”, most notably that of the collective fantasy of meritocracy in which one is a solitary agent imagined as capable of attaining the good life on capitalism’s terms. But never quite does, and certainly is not capable of resting in the midst of the attempt to do so. One might add that, insofar as the postwar conditions of the Western European social democratic promise no longer prevail, and never did in much of the world, the preoccupations of those at the ‘bottom-end’ of labour with attaining something approximating normalcy and rest may not be all that distinguishable from what preoccupies students and lower-rung academics.
In any case, if it seems that these two accounts diverge in their rendition of the experience of precariousness, that they enter the discussion at dissimilar points in the stratifications of the workforce or the dispersal of traditional forms of relation, what they both nevertheless share – aside from an analytical regard for difference – is a concern with the possibilities of relation and the strategies that exist in the midst of precariousness. Significantly, those possibilities are thought without recourse to normativity and its various nostalgias for the supposedly generalised condition of a labouring regularity that never was, for the family, for a distinction between public and private realms or, for that matter, as Berlant puts it, “community and civil society”.
In this sense, the problem of precariousness is not perceived as the fragmentation of an otherwise or previously homogeneous class, identity or public sphere, assumed to be, in turn, the precondition of political strategies and resistance as such. On the contrary, the problem resides in the tension between the opening of the horizon of possibilities beyond traditional hierarchy that Fantone discusses and a tightening of the connection between precariousness and precor in the turn toward submission that Berlant remarks on. That is, the tension remains, as it perhaps always was, in the paradoxical nexus of equality and hierarchy – put another way: in the tension between the axiomatic and the code, or indifference and difference. How might politics here be thought otherwise, strategies reconfigured, difference and indifference practiced against their specifically capitalist registers?
I cannot say I have any answers to these questions. They cannot, I think, be answered by theoretical discussions, but remain questions for practical experimentation with forms of organisation and relation, connection and disconnection, though preferably without being folded back into the reiterations of hierarchy and equality presented as the false choice between vertical or horizontal (see here Rodrigo Nunes’ “Nothing Is What Democracy Looks Like: Openness, Horizontality and the Movement of Movements”), public or private, collective or individual, subject or citizen. Capitalism exists on both sides of the oscillation between these ‘poles’, quite literally organises them and in no sense does it do so as epochal, temporal shifts.
There is, however, something to be said about Berlant’s account of aspirational normativity as the orchestration of scenes and the reaching for a sense of normalcy which approximates feelings of “belonging to a world that doesn’t yet exist reliably” and which makes it possible to experience play, however fleetingly, as the interruption of work.
[…] Some last paragraphs to go.
I guess I have to confess I don’t see how you could make ‘precariousness’ into something positive without an institutional framework that patched over the hard times between this bite and the next. Maybe you have some idea, but it’s been years now that this stuff has been bouncing around. Face it, precariousness is useful to the working class so long as there is welfare. The task, I think, is to organize so that welfare serves you, rather than vice versa. There is no way of doing this once and for all. It is a constant struggle; we can hope to make the institutions and systems of support more subservient to us, but there isn’t really much hope if we just ignore this. But that’s good, right? Do we really want to arrive at some formula that excuses us from having to fight?
I find much of this stuff just hysterical. “…conditions that can barely support fantasy…” Is it really that bad in Paris? And let me ask you: do you think that people believe in meritocracy? I don’t think anybody takes it seriously, except yuppies. I think I know one guy who tried to convince me once that Bill Gates really does work one hundred million times harder than the both of us put together. And is it a big deal that they don’t? I mean, that’s a good thing: people are not stupid. As for the faux psychology: do you think it is true that people’s main experience of affective bonding is to work? Like, maybe it is - via Dilbert, or Office Space, or hitting on your workmates, or office Team Fortress championships. But to work itself? That’s just reheated Weber. What evidence is there for it? What would even count as evidence here? Sure, your boss tells you you should love your work - what’s new? Who takes him seriously? My experience is that people pretent, they don’t want to get fired, so they go along with the stupid novelty pants days and whatever, but go to the pub, drink three beers and guess who is the target of everyone’s contempt.
TCO [January 4, 2008 @ 3:46 pm]
Whether a welfare system functions as a means to patch over the really rough times or as a prompt to get any kind of work no matter how terrible is what’s been in question in the shifts to (as someone else called it) normfare (both generally, and very much in the recent spate of legislation directed at indigenous people in AU).
Much of this turns around the extent to which welfare is already refused by people as a sign that they’re ‘losers’. And of all the people I’ve known on welfare for any protracted time, I can count on one hand those who managed to shake this feeling. Or, the welfare system itself is directed toward generating this internalisation (which for the most part it is).
So, my problem isn’t about how to stop precariousness with some form of guarantees that stop people fighting. If I wanted that, I would go for the ‘basic income’ stuff, believe the rubbish that precariousness is a recent phenomena, etc.
My question is about how it becomes possible to fight what are increasingly an internalised set of socialising norms. And that’s a question which has to transform the very sense of what it means to fight, do politics, something beyond any public/private split.
I do think people believe in meritocracy - this, after all, is what underwrites many campaigns for university access (from my experience, which as you know was long enough).
And, Belgium, not France - which I’ve been told is particularly miserable.
Anyway, I think Berlant’s piece is very precise about the conditions under which work, even terrible work, becomes the index of selfworth. I can’t see what’s “hysterical” about it (an odd statement coming from you, who tends to get a little overwrought quite often in the comments here - plus would have thought you’d learnt not to refer to any woman as being “hysterical”) .
Yes, work itself. There is some cynicism, but there is also a good deal of faith. Those Hillsong people are one example, the shift to normfare another. And I think there is a very particular kind of faith in work that attaches to the work of the university.
s0metim3s [January 4, 2008 @ 5:39 pm]
Thiago, sounds to me like you need a hug or a few beers - you sound crabby.
Angela, in the US at least if you get merit based financial aid then the university is like a sort of welfare/work scheme - it can get you health insurance, gets you housing, etc. Those aren’t as generous as they were (I think?) in the UK, and have been largely eroded. I think one of the main functions of the university is to inculcate a sense of meritocracy (which involves in part by a fear of not measuring up, partly as a matter of self-worth and partly due to fear of the financial consequences such as useless and absolutely unforgivable loans [student loans survive bankruptcy here]), I’m surprised that Thiago doesn’t see that.
Nate [January 6, 2008 @ 3:48 am]
Thiago should probably get out of Australia - I highly recommend it.
s0metim3s [January 10, 2008 @ 7:51 pm]