archive : s0metim3s

Lauren Berlant writing of potentiality, and the sense of its cut-short incompleteness, turns again around the question of optimism, remarking that the “act of ideation itself embodies the form of optimism”.

What is the nature of this act [….]

The remarks below about the connections between student visas and work in Australia were written by Liz. I moved them from the comments under the post about the taxidrivers’ strike in Melbourne so as to prompt further discussion. - a.

So - if you look at Australia, obviously there has always been the use of low-wage migrant labour, and worse, slave labour for indig crew and Pacific Islanders.

However, I would suggest that the transformations in the Australian economy since trade liberalisation in the 1980s (1989 - Professor Ross Garnaut - Australia and the north east asian ascendancy - the policy document that Rudd’s new climate guru wrote convincing Hawke to move to tariff reductions - in textiles this actually predated tariff reductions in the rest of the West), as well as the nationalist counter-reaction from the trade and student unions, have created new and more direct manifestations of the attempt to drive the wage floor down by deliberately tweaking migration schemes towards the creation of low wage and precarious labour markets. As Ange has said many times, it is possible to trace the intersections between the internment camps and the labour market. I’m going to try to do this with a little bit on student visas too… actually, most of this is going to be about student visas, but with other stuff thrown in as poorly organised thoughts.

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)

A couple of lengthy fragments from Catherine Mills’ “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 107:1, 2008), following on from these meanderings around questions of norm and precariousness here and here:

Toward the end of his book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben writes:

One day humanity will play with law just a children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.1

What would it mean to explore precariousness without seeking to resolve its tensions, to regard it as the space of experimentation whose significance is reducible neither to a catastrophe brought down from some transcendental realm nor the destruction of a prior commonplace considered to be the premise of antagonism as such? Both of these approaches, in understanding precariousness as the unconditioned consequence of a capitalist strategy for decomposing an identity that was neither universal nor indisputably (or effectively) antagonistic, constrain politics to the eliciting of a victimised, at times emasculated, subject. Here, capital assumes a god-like demeanour; and it is not surprising that politics becomes ever-more theological, as the prayer that the state might deliver us from its own contingencies through a codification of rights or in the recourse to an explicitly Christian figuration of Lenin.

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.