archive : s0metim3s

The Australian student movement is dead! Long live the global undercommons, may its defiances proliferate! (Read more, download the pdf of an article by Mickie Skelton)

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.

Part one, still in draft, of the edu-factory contribution. Part two here. The edu-factory site is here.

Addendum: The final version of the below is here - the second part has been delayed by travel …

How to consider the forms of hierarchisation, submission, intolerance, meekness and domination that obtain in the university without at the same time deferring to either the dream of a universality or, what is the same thing, the nightmare of a total mobilisation – which is to say, the absolute hierarchy of the general equivalent?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …

This declaration is many things, but it is above all the articulation of a seeming paradox that will preoccupy dialecticians of various shades for centuries.

Here’s what I just sent off for the edu-factory discussions.

– ή θα νικήσει ο τρόμος, ή θα νικήσει ο δρόμος

As is more or less well-known, Kant’s writings on the university, collected under the heading of The Conflict of the Faculties, are preoccupied with establishing limits, borders – above all, the limits to conflict.

After over month-long occupations of universities and protests throughout Greece - below a report from D, via edu-factory:

A group from the Roman social centre ESC Atelier Occupato hosts edu-factory - “a series of transnational web-based discussions on the condition of the university today.” The first series (Feb-Apr 2006) is titled “Conflicts in the Production of Knowledge” - on the “conflicts of knowledge produced on the (always more porous) boundary between the university and society” and “the ambivalence of oppositional knowledges as challenges to the institution and processes of domestication.” The site is still being put together, but the schedule for the first series is as follows:

22-28 feb: Catedra Autonoma Rosario - Brian Holmes - Marc Bousquet | 1-4 mar: Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai | 5-11 mar: Gordon Lafer - Denis Brutus - Amit Basole - KK Surendran | 12-18 mar: Sunil Sahasrabudhy - Nigel Gibson | 19-25 mar: Eileen Schell - Claire Pentecost | 26 mar -1 apr: Angela Mitropoulos - Melinda Cooper - Jon Solomon | 2-8 apr: Carlo Vercellone - Randy Martin - Mike Hayes - Kaushik Sunder Rajan | 9-15 apr: Michael Goddard - Dmitry Vilensky - Lin Chiming | 16-22 apr: Stephen Shukaitis - Gordon Mathews - Pablo Ortellado | 23-29 apr: Jeffrey Williams - Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma - Avinash Jha | 30 apr-6 may: Andrew Ross - Jie-Hyun Lim - Chandra Mohanty | 7-13 may: Gary Rhoades | 14-22 may: Conclusion |