Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization 9780802089236, 0802089232, 9780802086754

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UTOPIAN PEDAGOGY: RADICAL EXPERIMENTS AGAINST NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION Utopian Pedagogy is a critical exploration of educational struggles within and against neoliberalism. Editors Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, along with a number of innovative voices from a variety of different academic fields and political movements, examine three key themes: the university as a contested institution, the role of the politically engaged intellectual, and experiments in alternative education. The collection contributes to the debates on the neoliberal transformation of higher education, and to the diffusion of social movements that insist it is possible to create workable alternatives to the current world order. This critical examination of the educational dimension of social and political struggles is presented by both professional academics and activists, many of whom are directly involved in the very experiments they discuss. Rescuing and revaluing the concept of utopia, the editors and their international contributors propose that utopian theory and practice acquire a new relevance in light of the hyper-inclusive logic of neoliberalism. Utopian Pedagogy is a challenge to the developing world order that will stimulate debate in the fields of education and beyond, and encourage the development of socially sustainable alternatives. (Cultural Spaces) mark coté is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and a visiting scholar with the Institute for Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University. richard j.f. day is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University. greig de peuter is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.

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Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization

Edited by Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8923-6 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-8020-8923-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8675-4 (paper) ISBN-10: 8020-8675-6 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Utopian pedagogy : radical experiments against neoliberal globalization / edited by Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day and Greig de Peuter. ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8923-6 (bound) ISBN-10: 0-8020-8923-2 (bound) ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8675-4 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 8020-8675-6 (pbk.) 1. Anti-globalization movement – Study and teaching (Higher) 2. Social justice – Study and teaching (Higher) I. Coté, Mark II. Day, Richard J. F. III. De Peuter, Greig, 1974– LC191.9.U86 2007

303.48’4’0711

C2006-900053-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy? 3 mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter Part I: The Contested University Introduction 21 mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter 1 Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy and the Project of Educated Hope 25 henry a. giroux 2 Teaching and Tear Gas: The University in the Era of General Intellect 43 nick dyer-witheford 3 Academic Freedom in the Corporate University ian angus

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4 A Revolutionary Learning: Student Resistance/Student Power mark edelman boren 5 Exiled Pedagogy: From the ‘Guerrilla’ Classroom to the University of Excess 93 jerry zaslove

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vi

Contents

6 Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes an interview with stuart hall

108

Part II: Rethinking the Intellectual Introduction 129 enda brophy and sebastián touza 7 From Intellectuals to Cognitarians franco berardi (bifo)

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8 The Diffused Intellectual: Women’s Autonomy and the Labour of Reproduction 145 an interview with mariarosa dalla costa 9 Conricerca as Political Action 163 guido borio, francesca pozzi, and gigi roggero 10 On the Researcher-Militant 186 colectivo situaciones Part III: Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy Introduction 201 mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter 11 The Making of an Antiracist Cultural Politics in Post-Imperial Britain: The New Beacon Circle 207 brian w. alleyne 12 ‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?’: Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience 227 shveta sarda 13 Transformative Social Justice Learning: The Legacy of Paulo Freire 242 carlos alberto torres

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14 Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy 248 allan antliff 15 An Enigma in the Education System: Simon Fraser University and the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society 266 richard toews and kelly harris-martin 16 The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles and Pedagogy in Pakistan 280 imran munir 17 ‘Let’s Talk’: The Pedagogy and Politics of Antiracist Change sarita srivastava 18 Present and Future Education: A Tale of Two Economies michael albert

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Ne Travaillez Jamais: Parecon or Exodus? 324 a reply to michael albert by nick dyer-witheford Jobs Are Not the Problem 329 a reply to nick dyer-witheford by michael albert 19 Academicus Affinitatus: Academic Dissent, Community Education, and Critical U 334 mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter Contributors

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Acknowledgments

There are many people whom we, as editors of this collective project, would like to thank. First, we want to express our gratitude to all our contributors for making the book possible. From the beginning they shared and fed our enthusiasm for this project; the excellence of their submissions has taken the book beyond all our expectations; and the good nature with which they answered all our queries and requests made this a pleasurable process. We are also indebted to Siobhan McMenemy at University of Toronto Press for the steady hand and strong support she displayed from our initial proposal through to the printing press. As well, the geopolitical breadth of the book has been widened considerably thanks to our translators, Enda Brophy and Sebastián Touza, both of whom are outstanding and formidable activist-scholars in their own right. The manuscript was proofed, formatted, and massaged into shape by Rick Palidwor, to whom we are grateful for his fastidious work. We also would each like to thank our families. We are eternally grateful to our partners and children for reminding us that the everyday can provide the most wonderfully utopian moments. Finally, we want to thank all of those unnamed and unknown people who work in their communities with a commitment not only to pedagogy but to a belief that a better world is not only possible, but already among us if we can only learn how to look for it.

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UTOPIAN PEDAGOGY: RADICAL EXPERIMENTS AGAINST NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION

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Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy? mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter

This book offers a critical examination of the educational dimension of struggles within and against neoliberalism. With this volume, we hope to contribute both to the debates on the neoliberal transformation of higher education and to the diffusion of social movements that insist another world is possible.1 The voices in this book emanate from heterogeneous positions: from inside and outside academic institutions and from their margins; from divergent experiences of racial, class, gendered, colonial, and sexual relations of power; and from disparate intellectual and political traditions ranging from cultural studies to anarchism, from autonomist marxism to popular education.2 Despite this diversity, the contributors are working towards a common goal of understanding, combating, and creating alternatives to what we are repeatedly told is a glorious – and inevitable – ‘new world order.’ The educational spaces, pedagogical strategies, and intellectual subjectivities explored here can be considered radically utopian in that they strive to transcend what is conceivable within the current socio-economic order. This utopianism, our contributors overwhelmingly agree, has nothing to do with rationalistic dreams of a future perfect society. The critiques and experiments they document here are attempts to carve out spaces for becoming – through resistance, hope, and reconstruction in the here-and-now – in various sites around the globe. The book has three parts: ‘The Contested University,’ ‘Rethinking the Intellectual,’ and ‘Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy.’ Each has a short prologue that lays out its specific problematic and that summarizes the chapters that follow. In this general introduction we want to contextualize the book by addressing the links among the diverse contributions to it. We begin by surveying the main intellectual and political traditions

4 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter

expressed in this collection and by highlighting some of the affinities these traditions share with respect to these key themes: education, pedagogy, and intellectuals. Then we sketch a portrait of neoliberalism, that socio-economic complex against which the various critiques and experiments documented in this book are mobilized. We close by outlining what we mean by a ‘utopian pedagogy’ that acts within, against, and beyond neoliberal hegemony. Affinities across Disparate Traditions The contemporary scene is animated by diverse educational struggles. Any attempt to document even a small portion of them requires an inclusive approach with respect to intellectual and political traditions. Indeed, the formation of relays – in dialogue and action – was an initial goal of Utopian Pedagogy; while respecting particularities, we hoped to find both commonalities and the sympathetic resonance of differences across problems and issues, methodological approaches, and ethicopolitical commitments that might otherwise have appeared exclusive. The main traditions of our contributors range from cultural studies to popular education, antiracism, radical pedagogy, anarchism, and autonomist marxism, but are not limited to these. We have brought these disparate streams of theory and practice together in this book in order to reveal lines of affinity that traverse the particularities of each tradition. Below, we sketch out how this collection has been inspired by, and is situated in relation to, these traditions and their literatures, mainly as they relate to themes of education, pedagogy, and intellectuals. Several contributors have affinities with cultural studies, a tradition that was forged by unorthodox marxists and postcolonial intellectuals in postwar Britain. The history of cultural studies is rife with examples of scholars and activists developing relays between critically oriented education, bottom-up pedagogy, and oppositional social movements.3 An especially important incubator of many cultural studies ideas was the adult education movement, wherein socialist intellectuals such as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams taught in non-traditional settings organized through the Workers’ Educational Association or the ‘extramural’ departments of universities. Many of the teachers saw adult education not only as a point from which to expand the socialist movement but also as a living example of a democratic-socialist institution, in that it greatly expanded access to education for working-class students. These spaces of protocultural studies were inspired, said Wil-

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liams, by a philosophy of education whose ‘deepest impulse was to make learning part of the process of social change itself.’4 Interactions between critical pedagogy and social movements were further extended at the time of the British New Left in the 1950s and 1960s. These interactions were tied to many projects that linked criticism with activism, and involved networks of New Left discussion groups throughout England as well as a storefront in London. After the mid-1960s, cultural studies was institutionalized in formal university settings. Efforts to conduct radical pedagogy, interdisciplinary thinking, and action-oriented research from inside the academy brought out tensions. Engaged scholars working out of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham described an enduring dilemma: ‘The academic environment tends to absorb our politics; the local political group tends to define too narrowly the focus of our theory. We straddle the distinction made by Gramsci between the “academic” and the politically “organic” intellectual.’5 In an interview printed in this book, Stuart Hall, who directed the centre between 1968 and 1979, reflects on cultural studies’ passage – and his own – through various institutional locations, and examines the contradictory forces that allowed a market logic to reshape British universities. The limits to and possibilities for the transformation of the contemporary university as a site of radical pedagogy, amidst and against its neoliberal restructuring, are taken up in detail in Part I of this book, ‘The Contested University,’ which, besides the interview with Hall, includes chapters by Henry A. Giroux, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Ian Angus, Mark Edelman Boren, and Jerry Zaslove. A commitment to intellectual work as a political practice is what most strongly links the project of this book to that of cultural studies.6 This commitment is reflected in a trajectory of research in cultural studies on oppositional social forces, from the dissident subcultures and community-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s to the new social movements of today.7 These inquires are rooted in an expanded concept of struggle, one that emphasizes the importance of everyday practices and of contests over meaning in the reproduction and transformation of hegemonic power relations. Many have derided the depoliticized state of much of contemporary cultural studies scholarship; in this vein, several of the critiques and experiments covered in this collection are spectres of a more radical cultural studies. In particular, this tradition’s work on advancing the politics of difference has done much to legitimate a widened series of social locations from

6 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter

which hegemonic social formations can be contested – for example, in their racialized, gendered, heteronormative, and ageist dimensions. The essay here by Brian W. Alleyne, for example, uses the optic of cultural politics to analyse an experiment in antiracist, socialist pedagogy in Britain in which cultural production played a constitutive rather than a subsidiary role. And Sarita Srivastava discusses how knowledge of racialized identities is produced and circumscribed in the context of antiracist pedagogy within social movements themselves. Educational projects that are oriented towards empowering marginalized communities are commonly associated with popular education. This liberationist tradition has roots in early twentieth-century Latin America, and evolved as a series of concrete initiatives that linked education to socialist movements and to the struggles of indigenous peoples against relations of dependency and practices of exclusion.8 Popular education strategies are associated with Brazilian educator and philosopher of education Paulo Freire, who is renowned for his literacy training with Brazilian peasants. Freire’s best-known book is Pedagogy of the Oppressed; its insights have been applied in adult and community education initiatives around the world. Freire vehemently rejected concepts of education rooted in the idea that ‘knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider know nothing.’9 Insisting that education is a potentially subversive force, he advocated ‘conscientization,’ a radical pedagogy that focused on unmasking domination and mobilizing for liberation – in short, ‘praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.’10 There are many connections between the concrete projects documented in Part III of this book, ‘Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy,’ and some of Freire’s ethical commitments: Freirean projects are characterized by meeting people where they live, whether this be rural communities or inner cities. There is no one-size-fits-all method, which means radical pedagogies evolve through experimentation in the light of a particular context. All participants are ‘simultaneously teachers and students,’ for as Freire put it, a ‘revolution’ that does not grow out of ‘dialogue’ is a ‘military coup.’11 It is important to point out that for Freire, education is not a magic bullet; rather, under certain conditions, it fosters a ‘process of permanent liberation.’12 Carlos Alberto Torres’s chapter offers a lucid survey of Freirean ‘transformative social justice learning.’ Other traditions of radical pedagogy have gained by their connections to the discourses of cultural studies and postcolonial theory.13

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Deployed in myriad teaching and learning contexts – from university classrooms to media literacy programs to community-based education to co-research – such radical pedagogy strives to draw out and examine links between the practices of everyday life and wider structures of domination. For example, bell hooks has theorized the classroom as a space for feminist, antiracist pedagogy, in which the point of departure is ‘when one begins to think critically about the self and identity in relation to one’s political circumstances.’14 Positioning students and teachers as active subjects in, rather than objects of, the world, radical pedagogy starts from the assumption that social critique and selfcriticism and -creation are mutually constitutive processes. But critical pedagogy and engaged intellectuals, argues Henry Giroux, must work against despair by elaborating ‘a language of critique and possibility.’15 Giroux’s chapter develops this theme in light of neo-liberalism and the ‘war on terror.’ Education has also been a crucial element of anarchist projects for radical social change. Free schools, reading circles, public lectures, and publishing collectives are common examples of activities that seem to be pedagogical in the liberal-humanist sense, but that contain moments which look beyond education as indoctrination. ‘We revolutionary anarchists are proponents of universal popular education,’ declared Mikhail Bakunin, ‘[but we are] enemies of the state [and of all who worship] the goddess Science.’16 Like most anarchists after him, Bakunin was certain that abstract reflection emerges out of everyday lived experience, not vice versa. Thus the sciences should not develop into autonomous spheres; instead, they should serve the communities in which they are located. Anarchist popular education, then, is education for change, for autonomy of individuals and communities, by autonomous individuals and communities. This tradition has continued unbroken since Bakunin’s time. It was an important factor during the Spanish Revolution,17 and has since been reflected in diverse projects undertaken all over the world. These peaked in the 1960s and again in the 1990s, and are coming into their own again via the Internet. Any discussion of anarchist education must include the deschooling and unschooling movements, which, although not the sole purview of self-declared anarchists, include many figures who have been prominent in anarchist circles. Ivan Illich is perhaps the best known of these, through his book, Deschooling Society.18 Illich argued that traditional schools operate according to a ‘hidden curriculum,’ one which, ‘unconsciously accepted by the liberal pedagogue, frustrates his conscious

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liberal aims.’19 This is because schools in fact alienate us from our learning; they force us down pathways that serve to perpetuate the existing order instead of allowing us to pursue avenues that call out to us as particular subjects. The roots of contemporary deschooling can be traced to the Modern School Movement, begun in France by Louise Michel, Paul Robin, and Sebastian Fauré, and continued by Francisco Ferrer in early-twentieth-century Spain.20 Its central ideas have been taken up by writer-practitioners such as John Holt, A.S. Neill, and John Taylor Gatto.21 In this collection the chapters by Allan Antliff and Jerry Zaslove fall directly within the anarchist tradition; a more spectral diffusion can be seen in the contributions by Michael Albert and by Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter. Like anarchism, the tradition of Italian autonomist marxism is characterized by a rejection of the state form and by a commitment to furthering self-valorizing practices of autonomous labour and community. Since the late 1990s, autonomist marxism has been the subject of increasing attention outside Italy, especially in the wake of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s books, Empire and Multitude.22 The autonomist tendency begins by positing the dynamic capacity of labour and resistance first, and hence as that which capital and the constituted power of domination must struggle to harness and contain. It rejects Leninist models that posit the Party as a site of centralized leadership; instead, it develops ‘from below’ through the self-organizing capacity of labour in decentralized, non-hierarchical structures.23 This development was coterminous with the shift towards post-Fordist production techniques, with the increasing commodification of everyday life, and with a more politicized and creative wing of French poststructuralism. Specifically, there were links with Michel Foucault’s analyses of the microphysics of power and with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theorization of micropolitics. These influences are especially visible in the autonomist concept of the ‘social factory,’ which sees power and productivity – and thus the potential for resistance – as dispersed and as emanating from subjectivities and everyday life just as much as from traditionally defined ‘factory labour.’24 Since the early 1960s and up to the present, this line of theory and practice has persisted in various strands of the Italian radical left, with which a number of our contributors – Franco Berardi (Bifo), Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero – are directly associated.25 Their essays are collected in Part II, ‘Rethinking the Intellectual.’ From the earliest days of operaismo, the labour-focused

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political movement that preceded autonomia, methods of inquiry followed the spirit of what Marx called ‘workers inquiry.’26 In practice, these methods were inspired by workers who resisted the union bosses and union hierarchy as much as they did the factory owners. Thus there was close collaboration with workers, as activist-intellectuals bypassed institutional union structures and entered the mammoth factories of northern Italy to gather workers’ narratives, in order to better understand the changing composition of production and its concomitant political dynamics. This research into workers’ conditions was the crucible from which the theory underpinning operaismo–autonomia emerged. The chapter by Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero offers an account of this methodological innovation, known as conricerca, or coresearch. This method is now being applied around the globe. Colectivo Situaciones, a collective in Argentina, has contributed a chapter inspired by its use of a variation of the conricera method during Argentina’s recent political crisis, which involved collaborative work with the Movement of Unemployed Workers. In the interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa – who played a key role in opening autonomia to a feminist critique27 – we hear a narrative of a feminist-Marxist intellectual working between scholarship and activism. We also hear a clear outline of the conceptual shift – so crucial to autonomist analysis – that understands capitalist reproduction as something that takes place not only in factories but also throughout society. Two autonomist concepts have a special bearing on the themes of this book: ‘general intellect’ and ‘immaterial labour.’28 The concept of general intellect is taken up and extended by both Bifo and Dyer-Witheford. This term was used rather fleetingly by Marx when he imagined that collective social knowledge – general intellect – accretes primarily in fixed capital, or machinery. What interested Marx was how general intellect would undermine the ‘law of value’ and thus capitalism itself. Autonomists propose high-technology capitalism as the ‘era of general intellect,’ and see the general intellect manifesting itself in, and from, subjectivity. As Dyer-Witheford states, it ‘appears not just in production but throughout a whole network of educational and cultural relations. It is present in industrial and service workers, laboring at the interface with digital technologies, in students keeping pace with technological innovations through “lifelong learning,” and in the various technocultural literacies on which new markets for electronic and entertainment goods depend.’29 In short, ‘immaterial labour’ is becoming the ‘ether’ of everyday life, the target of capitalist expropriation, and hence

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a central site of struggle. For Bifo, the challenge is to generate ‘institutions of knowledge, of creation, of care, of invention and of education that are autonomous from capital.’30 This idea links many of the experiments discussed in this book. The preceding sketch of the traditions engaged in this volume has focused on the tacit and explicit lines of affinity between them. But this is not to erase all the profound differences between them, or to deny that they disagree sharply at times. Indeed, the limits of affinity perhaps constitute the biggest challenge to a utopian pedagogy. Thus some caveats are in order with respect to this discussion of working across disparate traditions. Given that Antonio Gramsci’s thought lurks in many of the above-surveyed traditions, he will serve as a good exemplar of what we see as a key tension across the various chapters in this book – the tension between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘post-hegemonic’ politics. In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci distinguished between two kinds of intellectuals – ‘traditional’ and ‘organic.’31 Traditional intellectuals include university-based academics but also ‘the specialist in political economy, the organizer of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.’32 Traditional intellectuals articulate the interests of hegemonic class formations but at the same time idealize and abstract their determinate position insofar as they ‘put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group.’33 Each class also produces its own ‘organic intellectuals,’ argued Gramsci. These people play a crucial role in the struggle for hegemony; they are loyal to the class from which they have emerged and are explicit in their efforts to organize, advance, and represent the interests of their class as a whole: ‘One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.’34 Organic intellectuals of the working class remain grounded in the everyday life of struggle, and organize in support of the interests of subaltern groups. As for where organic intellectuals might be ‘made,’ Gramsci proposed the factory councils as an educational space that might allow workers to better understand their current socio-economic position and work towards social transformation. From the point of view of a truly radical democracy, these vanguardist functions are utterly untenable. The chapter by Bifo addresses the concept of the organic intellectual, arguing that it privileges the Party as a

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site of mediation, and in so doing not only elides the logic of domination in the Party form but also blinds us to the potentialities of forms of political organization that move beyond parliamentary representation. One of the consequences of Gramsci’s recognition that ‘we are all intellectuals’ is that no monolithic apparatus can contain the multiple and ever-diversifying modalities of intellectual capacities; the ways in which links might be forged between that intellectual multiplicity and transformative political practices is precisely what is documented in the discussions of concrete experiments in this book. This challenge is taken up at length in Imran Munir’s chapter, which documents a mutable coalition of rural farmers, Party-based communists, an extraparliamentary revolutionary women’s movement, mainstream NGOs, urban intellectuals, and a street theatre group, all of which are struggling both within and outside of representational politics. Finally, while most of the contributors to this book explicitly reject the pursuit of new hegemonic formations, the forces of neoliberalism and militarism in our historical moment know no such restraint. Thus there is a tension in this collection – a struggle between post-hegemonic projects, which seek to move away from what Gramsci called ‘irradiation effects’ (see chapter 19), and hegemonic projects driven by the belief that the dominant order can be challenged successfully only on its own terms and terrain. What Is Neoliberalism? This rapid passage through traditions raises an important question: What are they opposed to? What is the ‘common enemy,’ if there is one, that they confront? We wish to avoid reducing any of them to the other, or all of them to a single ‘fundamental oppression.’ Some would say there is no single enemy against which the newest social movements are fighting; others would point to a single logic of domination, albeit with myriad modalities.35 Regardless, our contributors present a disparate set of struggles, each of which needs to be addressed in its particularity. Yet all of these struggles occur in an increasingly common context, which we, like many others, call neoliberalism. The neoliberal project includes what is known as the globalization of capital,36 as well as the intensification of societies of control.37 It also relies on and perpetuates shifts in how the global system of states is organized – that is, through regional agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and emerging ‘superstates’ such as the European Union.38 Within these state formations, a politics of represen-

12 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter

tation – a ‘multicultural’ politics – allows excluded identities and communities to be ‘integrated’ into the global system of liberal-capitalist nation-states and their sociosymbolic order.39 This is to say that we cannot understand state domination outside of capitalist exploitation, and that we cannot understand either of these without reference to societies of control. The interweaving of the American occupation of Iraq, the ‘war on terror,’ and the media discourse on ‘extremists’ would seem to suggest as much. It is important to add that neoliberal societies sustain state domination and capitalist exploitation by dividing populations along multiple lines of inequality based on race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and region – both inter- and intra-nationally. Thus, although neoliberalism provides a common context for disparate struggles, the divisions it perpetuates and heightens mean that its effects are far from undifferentiated. For the privileged classes of the G8 countries, neoliberalism has meant more service- and knowledge-related jobs, the exporting of heavily polluting manufacturing plants, and easy access to a vast array of cheap, low-quality consumer items. Although privatization and program-slashing have had terrible effects on the lives of women, working people, and racialized identities within the G8 countries, the carnage has been even greater outside their gates. Through World Bank and IMF restructuring plans, entire nations and continents have had their social, political, and economic structures overturned in preparation for their integration into the neoliberal order. When we refer to the neoliberal project, then, we are referring to a complex web of practices and institutions that are perpetuating and multiplying various forms of interlocking oppression.40 These allow ‘populations’ to be divided and managed and our daily lives to be more intensely immersed in capitalist exploitation and rational-bureaucratic (state) control. This has not gone uncontested, of course, from the stirring mobilizations of the Zapatistas to Seattle through Genoa and to ongoing struggles in Venezuela, Argentina, and Iraq. Work on all fronts – resistance, blockage, construction of alternatives – has been going on much longer and much more intensely in the global South, and this trend seems likely to continue. A key question for our collection is this: How do educational practices figure into this emerging neoliberal social order? On one hand, it is clear that education is central to the production of well-trained producer-consumer-citizens who will dutifully take up their assigned roles in this order. The importance of this function is observable in the

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ongoing corporate colonization of public school systems at all levels, from Coke machines in the hallways of elementary schools to computer labs ‘donated’ to universities by high-tech firms. The increasing tendency to direct research funding to those whose work has clear possibilities for commercial exploitation or who will aid in state domination is also indicative of a turn away from critical thought and basic research, which were once considered key tasks of ‘higher’ education institutions. In the wake of these various transformations, state-based education cannot be seen, by those of us who are committed to social justice ideals, as an oasis in the desert of neoliberalism. The questions thus become: Can education be saved from neoliberalism? How can and does the university do more than serve corporate powers? How are we to work positively, within and against the neoliberal revolution, not to recover some lost nugget of Euro-Enlightenment, but to survive the intense struggles we are facing and begin to move beyond them? What spaces of possibility are open to us? How do we open up new ones, and how do we maintain and disseminate what we create? These are the questions facing what we call utopian pedagogy. What Is Utopian Pedagogy? It is important to clearly distinguish our use of the concept of utopia from the tradition of excessively rationalistic dream-states inaugurated by Plato, carried on in the work of Fourier, and finding its way into the twentieth century via writers such as Huxley and Skinner.41 These fantastic utopias are based on the construction of a society that has transcended all relations of power by implementing a blueprint that in many cases becomes hilarious in its specificity. One need only cite Fourier’s classification of 810 ‘personality types’ and his incredible efforts to sort out how they might all interact so as to produce ‘harmony’ in everything from sexual activity to flower arranging!42 In compiling this collection, we asked ourselves how the concept of utopia could be revalued, in response to its many critics on the Left, to the inevitablism of the Right, and to the absurdity of fantasies of perfection. A short answer is that we looked to utopia not as a place we might reach but as an ongoing process of becoming. More specifically, the utopia that runs through this collection is both a critical attitude towards the present and a political commitment to experiment in transfiguring the coordinates of our historical moment. As is becoming increasingly clear, ‘the enemies within’ a social order of infinite war and

14 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter

imminent threat – critical thinkers, educators, activists, builders – all share the common trait of proposing something other than a new AngloAmerican world order, a beyond that exceeds not only this particular configuration, but also all possible particular configurations. Instead of accepting that the radical utopian imaginary is an anachronistic holdover from the glory days of revolutionary socialism, we would argue that utopian theory and practice acquire a new relevance as the hyperinclusive logic of neoliberalism compels us to take up positions that are intrinsically outside of and other than what is. The utopian impulse that interests us does not lead to a promised land. It knows that domination and exploitation can only be minimized, never eliminated; that struggle will persist; and that something like a state, like a corporation, like asymmetrical power relations in any form, will forever be trying to emerge from within and without our communities and will therefore need to be warded off. Also, it orients itself to the radical outside to such an extent that no blueprint could ever survive the passage from conception to implementation without becoming something entirely other than what it was. Thus it might be said that utopian experiments today share a point of departure much more than a point of arrival. Finally, it is a concept of immanent utopia, where hope is the celebration of the possible, or rather of specific, existing possibilities, a celebration that depends equally on the intellect and the will. Our hope dictates that we recognize and act on a tendency actually existing in present reality that can lead toward a potential future. This hope is not utopian, if by utopian we understand the dream of a future that is separated from the present. Hope is better conceived as a temporal vector that points from the present into the future from a specific location, with a determinate direction and force.43

These directions and forces are documented throughout this book, most concretely in the essays in Part III, from Shveta Sarda’s discussion of a project in youth-oriented ‘ambivalent pedagogy’ in India to Richard Toews and Kelly Harris-Martin’s discussion of an initiative in postcolonial pedagogy in Canada. If the purpose of ‘lifelong learning’ is to produce social subjects for the perpetuation of the neoliberal order, the goal of an oppositional, utopian pedagogy must be to foster experiments in thinking and action that lead us away from that order. Utopian pedagogies emerge out of – and point us towards – what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the coming com-

Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy?

15

munities.’44 These can be defined positively as marginal crucibles of human sociability, potentiality, and creativity out of which the radically new emerges: working-class, Black, queer, (im)migrant, indigenous, urban youth, rural farmers, to name just a few. To the extent that these communities are the sources of energy on which states and corporations rely for their existence, it could be said that the coming communities ‘are’ the state and capital. But this process of co-optation is often contested, sometimes subverted, and never totally successful. This struggle defines the coming communities negatively, as those groupings which are not fully acceptable to – or at least not yet fully normalized within – the global neoliberal order. In this positioning lie some very interesting possibilities: singularity against integration; affinity without identity; justice without homogenization; sociability without the state; production without the corporation. It is this imaginary that we label utopian. It is those practices which seek to propagate an awareness of the existence and possibilities of the radical outside that we call utopian pedagogy, a pedagogy that is itself contested and without guarantees. Creating alternative spaces of education inevitably involves dealing with the same structured behaviours that are in evidence everywhere else. It is a terrible error, and a failure of solidarity, to assume that racism, sexism, and homophobia will somehow magically disappear from alternative spaces simply because they are ‘alternative.’ Indeed, the struggle against domination in all of its myriad forms must be relentless and central to any utopian pedagogy worthy of the name.

NOTES 1 For critiques of the neoliberal transformation of higher education, see David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); The Corporate Campus: Commercialization and the Dangers to Canada’s Colleges and Universities, ed. James L. Turk (Toronto: Lorimer, 2000); The Virtual University? Knowledge, Markets, and Management, ed. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). And for discussions of new social movements, see Ian Angus, Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2001); Susan George, Another World is Possible If … (London: Verso, 2004); We Are Everywhere: The

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2

3

4

5 6

7

Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism, ed. Notes from Nowhere (London: Verso, 2003); From ACT UP to WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, ed. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk (London: Verso, 2002). We do not assume, of course, that this list exhausts all possible positions from which one might speak for or against neoliberalism, nor does it represent all marginalized voices. We do not, for example, have any contributors who address issues of ability or sexual orientation – an outcome that reflects our own areas of expertise and the networks with which we are associated at the time of compiling this collection. This is not to say that these are unimportant, or even less important, than the issues that are addressed here. For historical accounts of cultural studies, and its links to non-traditional education, see Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Stuart Hall, ‘Life and Times of the First New Left,’ in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On, ed. Oxford Socialist Discussion Group (London: Verso, 1989); Tom Steele, The Emergence of Cultural Studies: Adult Education, Cultural Politics, and the ‘English’ Question (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997); Raymond Williams, ‘The Future of Cultural Studies,’ in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989); Stephen Woodhams, History in the Making: Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Radical Intellectuals, 1936–1956 (London: Merlin Press, 2001); Handel Wright and Karl Maton, ‘Cultural Studies and Education: From Birmingham Origin to Glocal Presence,’ Review of Education/Pedagogy/ Cultural Studies 26:2–3 (2004): 73–89. Raymond Williams, ‘Adult Education and Social Change,’ in Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education, ed. John McIlroy and Sallie Westwood (Leicester, UK: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 1993), 257. ‘Introduction,’ Working Papers in Cultural Studies 6 (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1974), 6. See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,’ in The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1999), 97–109. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Hutchinson and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1976); Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), ed. Tim Jordan and Adam Lent; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,

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8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23

17

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985); Special Issue on ‘Learning from Seattle,’ Review of Education / Pedagogy / Cultural Studies 24:1–2 (2002). Liam Kane, Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America (London: Latin America Bureau, 2001). Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Penguin, 1972), 46. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 47, 98. Ibid., 31. See Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling: A Critical Reader (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1994); Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur, Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Difference and Equality in Education, ed. Leslie G. Roman and Linda Eyre (New York: Routledge, 1997). hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 47. Henry A. Giroux, ‘Cultural Politics and the Crisis of the University.’ Culture Machine (2000), retrieved from http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/ frm_f1.htm (accessed 12 February 2003). Emphasis added. Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 135. Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists (San Francisco: AK Press, 1998), 48–50. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Ivan Illich, ‘After Deschooling, What?’ in After Deschooling, What? ed. Alan Gartner et al. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 9. Emma Goldman, ‘Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School,’ in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth, 1917). John Holt, Freedom and Beyond (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972); A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (New York: Hart Publishing, 1960); John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1992). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). For surveys of the history and ideas of autonomist marxism, see Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Leeds, UK: Anti/Theses, 2000), 23–80; Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-

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24

25

26 27 28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36

Technology Capitalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 62–90; Italy: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (New York: Semiotext(e), 1980); Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto, 2002). See Mark Coté, ‘The Italian Foucault: Subjectivity, Valorization, Autonomia,’ Politics and Culture 3 (2003). http://aspen.conncoll.edu/ politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=259. Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero, Futuro anteriore. Dai quaderni Rossi ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti delloperaismo Italiano (Rome: Derive Approdi, 2002); Franco Berardi (Bifo), La nefasta Utopia di potere operaio. Lavoro tecnica movimento nel laboratorio politico del sessantotto Italiano (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998). See Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto, 2002), 32–62. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1972). Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour,’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in HighTechnology Capitalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 222. Franco Berardi (Bifo), ‘Book Review of Geert Lovink’s Dark Fibre,’ trans. Arianna Bove (2002), retrieved from www.generation-online.org/t/ bifosreview.htm (accessed 25 August 2003). Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 10. See Richard J.F. Day, ‘From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of the Newest Social Movements,’ Cultural Studies 18:5 (2004): 716–48. Hardt and Negri, Empire; Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998); Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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19

37 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ October 59 (1992): 3–7. 38 Continental Order? Integrating North America for Cybercapitalism, ed. Vincent Mosco and Dan Schiller (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Chris Shore, ‘Inventing the “People’s Europe”: Critical Approaches to European Community “Cultural Policy,”’ Man 28:4 (1998). 39 Slavoj ~iíek, ‘Multiculturalism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ New Left Review 225 (1997): 28–51. 40 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, ‘Theorizing Difference from Multicultural Feminism,’ in Zinn et al., Through the Prism of Difference: Readings on Sex and Gender (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997). 41 Plato, The Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Charles Fourier, Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 220; Aldous Huxley, Island, a Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962); B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948). 42 Charles Fourier, The Passions of the Human Soul and Their Influence on Society and Civilization (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1968). 43 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman, ‘Subterranean Passages of Thought: Empire’s Inserts,’ Cultural Studies 16:2 (2002): 201. 44 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

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PART I: The Contested University Introduction mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter

Neoliberalism seeks to invest itself in all social spaces and reshape them according to its logic – and the university is no exception. The contributors to Part I, all of whom are academics, develop sober critiques of the neoliberal restructuring of postsecondary education. Nick DyerWitheford dissects ‘Academia Inc.,’ offering a critical account of the gradual integration of the university into global ‘cognitive capitalism’; Ian Angus examines the ‘corporate university,’ showing how ‘fiscal Realpolitik’ has undermined academic freedom, critical thinking, and democratic self-governance in higher education; Mark Edelman Boren reveals that universities around the world, pressured by neoliberal national and supranational governmental bodies, are adapting to a ‘business model’; Jerry Zaslove describes a ‘university of excess,’ whose students are increasingly reduced to ‘clients’ and where ‘totalities of knowledge and the particularities of experience are collapsed into performance indicators’; Henry A. Giroux urges that the ‘careerism, professionalism, and isolation’ of the ivory tower be replaced by a revitalized commitment to the public intellectual who makes links to new social movements and who will ‘take a stand while rejecting involvement in either a cynical relativism or doctrinaire politics’; and Stuart Hall refers to a university system ‘driven principally by economic questions’ in which ‘every procedure has been managerialized.’ These chapters provide detailed analyses of the specific techniques and practices through which the neoliberal reconstruction of education is being carried out and the consequences this process will have for diverse aspects of academic production – students, teachers, pedagogy, research, culture, and so on. The anger these authors feel towards these transformations is pal-

22 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter

pable. But these chapters are not merely bitter lamentations. At the most basic level, their critiques offer insights that might inform the development of new strategies of resistance. Also, these authors are too aware of the ambiguous history of the university and of the antagonistic potential of thought to either accept the ‘narrative of decline’ or fall into the trap of despair. So although they speak from different traditions and experiences, they share a common view of the university as a space of contestation – or at least as an unfinished project. Arguing against bad faith and dead-end cynicism, they leave kindred ambivalent academics with a challenge to protect a potentiality which is among the most valuable attributes of the university (although by no means exclusive to it): it is a space where intellectual subjectivities set to work, collaboratively, at the interstices of critical thought and constituent practice. These contributors agree, then, that labels like ‘Academia Inc.’ tell only one side of the story. For the university has always contained a constitutive tension between the production of knowledge and skills valuable to power as domination, and the critique of these products. Bleak portraits of a university increasingly rationalized to conform to an instrumental model may be accurate, but – as Angus argues in his chapter – for critical teachers and students, those kinds of characterizations utterly fail ‘to capture that for which we struggle when we teach and learn – the ability to think meaningfully about one’s experience that allows a deeper judgment of the current situation and brings one’s future actions into question.’ In reflecting on the pedagogic encounters between students and teachers, many of these authors find the continuing currency of a non-humanistic, non-Eurocentric conception of ‘enlightenment.’ As Boren shows in his chapter on campus activism, despite (and often precisely because of) the overwhelming pressure to remake students as consumers, the university remains a space of the ‘production of revolutionary subjectivity’ – an argument he supports with snapshots of outbreaks of student radicalism in various parts of the world, from Latin America to Africa. Successful efforts to alter the power relations of the university from within are described by Hall and Dyer-Witheford. Hall recounts a more open, cooperative learning environment that in the 1960s and 1970s was so vital to the experiment that blossomed into cultural studies; and Dyer-Witheford describes a more recent effort to establish concrete links between universities and social movements. Thus, these authors are working in various ways against an image of

Part I: The Contested University – Introduction 23

academia as a ‘circle closed onto itself.’1 Sharing a commitment to a kind of ‘outreach’ that goes beyond placing corporate representatives on the board to generate donations, these authors address strategies for creating bridges between universities, dissenting academics and students, and oppositional social movements. In the face of the ‘culture of compliance’ in the corporate university, says Angus, ‘the first task is … to overstep these boundaries, to raise the larger questions, to make the issues public and thus to fulfil the social task of the university by bringing critical thinking to the public outside the university.’ These boundaries, as Boren shows in his chapter, are constantly crossed by students. He assesses the tactics and strategies of various ‘student collectives,’ especially as they come into contact with forces of opposition outside the university’s walls, such as the labour and antiwar movements. Creating these linkages remains possible because, as DyerWitheford reminds us, ‘in academia as elsewhere, labour power is never completely controllable.’ For starters, the very cognitive ‘general intellect’ that capital seeks in order to fuel its future growth and profits is always already uncontainable, as witnessed in myriad counter-utilizations of communication technology. Encouraging dissenting university-based academics to creatively explore ways to link their teaching to contemporary ‘biopolitical activisms,’ Dyer-Witheford describes an intriguing experiment in this direction called ‘Media in the Public Interest,’ which is being conducted in his own university department. Others are less convinced of the space for contestation that exists within university structures today. Zaslove argues that the sheer depth of both the commodification of education and the professionalization of learning requires radical academics to become ‘saboteurs’ of a kind, refusing the ‘market model’ of education while simultaneously reinventing the classroom as a space of ‘guerilla pedagogy.’ Drawing on a project in ‘community mapping’ in which he has been closely involved, Zaslove argues for a radical pedagogy that, emerging from the particularities of specific neighbourhoods, operates according to an ‘incommensurable anarcho-communitarian model.’ Various issues central to this volume – the university, the intellectual, social movements, counter-globalization – are discussed in the interview with Hall. Addressing a number of educational projects with which he has been closely involved in the name of developing affinities between knowledge production, cultural politics, and oppositional movements, Hall argues for the continuing relevance of the Gramscian category of the ‘organic intellectual.’ In the face of corporate globalization

24 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter

and the spectre of American imperialism, he makes a passionate argument in favour of diverse modes of intellectual engagement and forms of cultural politics. Similarly, Giroux acknowledges the struggles faced by the university, which he positions within the broader context of our historical moment of neoliberalism. But he calls for a ‘militant optimism’ predicated on a utopian hope: ‘Against an increasingly oppressive corporate-based globalism, educators and other cultural workers need to resurrect a language of resistance and possibility, a language that embraces a militant utopianism, while being constantly attentive to those forces which seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or to punish and dismiss those who dare look beyond the horizon of the given.’ This ethos, which cuts across the various chapters in this part of the book, is of vital importance to continued discussion of and practice towards the creation of another university.

NOTE 1 Maurizio Viano and Vincenzo Binetti, ‘What Is to Be Done? Marxism and Academia,’ in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 250.

1 Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy and the Project of Educated Hope henry a. giroux

There is a time and place in the ceaseless human endeavour to change the world, when alternative visions, no matter how fantastic, provide the grist for shaping powerful political forces for change. I believe we are precisely at such a moment. Utopian dreams in any case never entirely fade away. They are omnipresent as the hidden signifiers of our desires. Extracting them from the dark recesses of our minds and turning them into a political force for change may court the danger of the ultimate frustration of those desires. But better that, surely, than giving in to the degenerate utopianism of neoliberalism (and all those interests that give possibility such a bad press) and living in craven and supine fear of expressing and pursuing alternative desires at all. David Harvey

Neoliberalism and Democracy Under the prevailing reign of neoliberalism in the United States, hope seems foreclosed, progressive social change a distant memory. A life beyond capitalism or the prevailing culture of fear appears impossible to imagine at a time when the distinction between capitalism and democracy seems to have been erased. As market relations become synonymous with a market society, freedom is reduced to a market strategy and citizenship is narrowed to the demands of consumerism. The upshot is that it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.1 Within this dystopian universe, the public realm is increasingly reduced to an instrumental space in which individuality reduces self-development to the relentless pursuit of personal interests and the realm of autonomy is reduced to a domain of activity

26 Henry A. Giroux

‘in which ... private goals of diverse kinds may be pursued.’2 This is evident in ongoing attempts by many liberals and conservatives to turn commercial-free public education over to market forces, to dismantle traditional social provisions of the welfare state, to hand all vestiges of the health care system over to private interests, and to mortgage social security to the whims of the stock market. There is a growing sense in the American popular imagination that citizen involvement, social planning, and civic engagement are becoming irrelevant in a society in which the welfare state is being aggressively dismantled.3 Those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate with one another, and shape the conditions that structure their everyday lives increasingly appear to have little relevance or political significance in spite of the expressions of the public good that followed the tragedy that took place on 11 September 2001. Amid growing fears about domestic security and post–Iraq war jingoism, dissent is now labelled unpatriotic, and this stance is accompanied by the ongoing destruction of basic constitutional liberties and freedoms. For example, under the Patriot Act, individuals can be detained by the government indefinitely without being charged, without recourse to a lawyer, and without a trial. The military has been given the right to conduct domestic surveillance, and the FBI can now access library records to peruse people’s reading habits. In the wake of this assault on civil liberties, leading political figures such as former secretary of education William Bennett have taken out ads in the New York Times declaring that internal dissent aids terrorists and seriously threatens the security of the United States. Appeals to patriotic fervour are feeding a commercial frenzy that is turning collective grief into profits and political responsibility into demagoguery. If the tragedy of 9/11 resurrected noble concepts like public service and civic courage, the overwhelming power of the market quickly converted these into an endless array of consumer products – everything from shoes to flag pins. But the hijacking of a terroristic act has done more than fuel market expansion; it has also provided a pretext for dismantling basic civil liberties and imprisoning the American public within a culture of fear and repression. It has provided huge revenues to major corporations that support the Bush administration, and it has spurred the U.S. military to spend billions on weapons designed to lend legitimacy to a foreign policy based on the sinister right to launch pre-emptive strikes against alleged enemies of the United States. For a brief time, the role of big government and public services made

Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times

27

a comeback, especially when it came to providing crucial services related to public health and safety. However, George W. Bush and his supporters remain wedded to the ‘same reactionary agenda he pushed before the attack.’4 Instead of addressing the gaps in public health care and in the safety net for workers, young people, and the poor, the Bush administration has pushed through Congress a stimulus plan based primarily on tax breaks for the wealthy and major corporations; at the same time, it has pressed for ‘an energy plan that features subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies and drilling in the Arctic wilderness.’5 Once again, investing in children, the environment, crucial public services, and those most in need has given way to investing in the rich and repaying corporate contributors. These practices suggest that little has changed with respect to economic policy, regardless of all the talk about the past being irrevocably repudiated in light of the events of 9/11. Where is the public outrage over a tax stimulus package that gives the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans 50 per cent of the total tax cut, while Bush simultaneously refuses to enact legislation that would reduce the financial burden for older Americans on Medicare? Where is the outrage over the administration’s willingness to give $500 billion in tax breaks to the wealthy while at the same time ‘student loans, child-care, food stamps, school lunches, job training, veterans programs, and cash assistance for the elderly and disabled poor are all being cut’?6 Where is the outrage over a government that will spend up to $400 billion conquering and occupying Iraq at the same time that it cuts veterans’ benefits? Where is the outrage over laws like the Patriot Act, or the Homeland Security Act, which gives the government unprecedented powers to spy on its citizens and suspend habeas corpus? Where is the outrage over the Bush administration’s ongoing assault on the environment, which is so evident in the government’s scornful refusal to ratify the Kyoto Accord to address global warming? Where is the collective anger over a government bent on ingratiating itself with corporate interests by gutting the Clean Air Act, by trying to eliminate federal regulations concerning mercury emissions, by refusing to regulate coal-burning power plants, and by refusing to place any restraints on companies that make cars that pollute the air? Even more serious is the government’s refusal to address the plight of the 30 million people in the United States who live below the poverty line, the 45 million adults and children who have no health insurance, and the 1.4 million children who are homeless in America.7 Some social theorists, such as Todd Gitlin, make the plunge into

28 Henry A. Giroux

political cynicism easier by suggesting that any attempt to change society through a cultural politics that links the pedagogical with the political will simply strengthen the dominant social order.8 Lost from such accounts is any recognition that democracy has to be struggled over, even in the face of a most appalling crisis of political agency. Within this discourse, little attention is paid to the fact that struggles over politics, power, and democracy are inextricably linked to the creation of democratic public spheres where individuals can be educated as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities, and knowledge they need not only to actually perform as autonomous social agents, but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The public sphere is neither homogeneous nor nostalgic. It points to a plurality of institutions, sites, and spaces. In it, people not only debate and reassess the political, moral, and cultural dimensions of the public realm but also develop processes of learning and persuasion as means of enacting new social identities and altering ‘the very structure of participation and the ... horizon of discussion and debate.’9 This struggle over politics is linked to pedagogical interventions aimed at subverting dominant forms of meaning in order to generate both a renewed sense of agency and a critical subversion of dominant power itself. In this way, agency becomes the site through which – as Judith Butler has pointed out in another context – power is not transcended but rather reworked, replayed, and restaged in productive ways.10 Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not simply about power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, ‘has to do with political judgements and value choices.’ This strongly suggests that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (for example, learning how to become a skilled activist) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy.11 Civic education and critical pedagogy emphasize critical reflexivity, bridge the gap between learning and everyday life, make visible the connections between power and knowledge, and provide the conditions for extending democratic rights, values, and identities; at the same time, they draw upon the resources of history. However, among many educators and social theorists, there is a widespread refusal to address education as a crucial means for expanding and enabling political agency, and to recognize that such education takes place not only within schools but also across a wide variety of public spheres, which are mediated through the very mechanisms of culture itself – what Raymond Williams once called the cultural force of permanent education.12

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29

Democracy has been reduced to a metaphor for the alleged ‘free’ market and has nothing to do with more substantive renderings of the term, such as what Noam Chomsky calls ‘involving opportunities for people to manage their own collective and individual affairs.’13 It is not that a genuine democratic public space once existed in some ideal form and has since been corrupted by market values; rather, these democratic public spheres seem no longer to be animating concepts for making visible the contradictions and tensions between the realities of existing democracy and the promise of a more fully realized democracy. While liberal democracy offers an important discourse around issues of ‘rights, freedoms, participation, self-rule, and citizenship,’ it has been mediated historically, as John Brenkman observes, through the ‘damaged and burdened tradition’ of racial and gender exclusions, economic injustices, and a formalistic, ritualized democracy that has substituted the swindle for the promise of democratic participation.14 Part of the challenge of creating a substantive and inclusive democracy involves constructing new vocabularies, locations of struggle, and subject positions that will allow people in a wide variety of public spheres to become more than they are now; to question what it is they have become within existing institutional and social formations; and, as Chantal Mouffe points out, ‘to give some thought to their experiences so that they can transform their relations of subordination and oppression.’15 In spite of the urgency of the current historical moment, educators should avoid crude, antitheoretical calls to action. More than ever, they need to appropriate scholarly and popular sources and use theory as a critical resource for naming particular problems and making connections between the political and the cultural, in order to break what Homi K. Bhabha has called ‘the continuity and the consensus of common sense.’16 As a resource, theory becomes important as a means of critically engaging and mapping the crucial relations among language, texts, everyday life, and structures of power as part of a broader effort to understand the conditions, contexts, and strategies of struggle that will lead to social transformation. I am suggesting that the tools of theory emerge out of the intersection of the past with the present, and that they respond to and are shaped by the conditions at hand. Theory, in this instance, addresses the challenge of connecting the world of the symbolic, discursive, and representational to the social gravity and force of everyday issues rooted in material relations of power. All this suggests that educators and others ought to be trying to produce new theoretical tools – a new vocabulary and set of conceptual

30 Henry A. Giroux

resources – that are capable of linking theory, critique, education, and the discourse of possibility to the creation of social conditions for the collective production of what Pierre Bourdieu calls realist utopias.17 In part, such a project points to constructing a new vocabulary for connecting what we read to how we engage in movements for social change, while recognizing that simply invoking the relationship between theory and practice or critique and social action is not enough. For as John Brenkman points out, ‘theory becomes [a] closed circuit when it supposes it can understand social problems without contesting their manifestation in public life.’18 It is also symptomatic of a kind of retreat from the uneven battles over values and beliefs characteristic of some versions of postmodern conceptions of the political. Any attempt to breathe new life into a substantive democratic politics must, in part, produce alternative narratives to those employed by the producers of official memory; furthermore, the attempt must address what it means to make the pedagogical more political. In part this means engaging the issue of what kind of educational work is necessary within different types of public spaces. The goal here is to foster people’s capacity to critique institutions, so that they can interrupt the dominant power and fully address what Zygmunt Bauman calls the ‘hard currency of human suffering.’19 If emancipatory politics is to be equal to the challenge of neoliberal capitalism, educators need to theorize politics neither as a science nor as a set of objective conditions, but as a point of departure in specific and concrete situations. We need to rethink the very meaning of the political so that it can provide a sense of direction but can no longer be used to provide complete answers. Instead, we should ask why particular social formations have a specific shape, how they come into being, and what it might mean to rethink these formations in terms of opening up new sites of struggles. Politics in this sense offers a notion of the social that is open and provisional; it provides a conception of democracy that is never complete and is constantly open to different understandings of its workings.20 In this formulation, the struggle for justice and against injustice never ends. In the absence of such languages and of the public spheres that make those languages operative, politics becomes narcissistic, reductionist, and unreflective and caters to the mood of widespread pessimism as well as to the cathartic allure of spectacle and the seductions of consumerism. Emptied of its political content, public space increasingly becomes either a site of self-display – a favourite space for the public relations intellectual, speaking ever so softly on

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U.S. National Public Radio – or it functions as a site for reclaiming a form of social Darwinism, a form represented most explicitly in realitybased television with its endless instinct for the weaknesses of others and its masochistic affirmation of ruthlessness and steroidal power. Or, it becomes a site where citizenship is stripped of its civic responsibilities and is reduced to the obligations of consumption. Escape, avoidance, and narcissism are now coupled with the public display, if not the celebration, of those individuals who define agency in terms of their survival skills rather than their commitment to dialogue, critical reflection, solidarity, and relations that open up the promise of public engagement with important social issues. Or, even worse, escape takes the form of a new breed of reality television in which the children of the obscenely rich flaunt their arrogance, vapidity, and utter contempt for those who cannot casually run up thousand-dollar bar tabs on any given night. Millions tuned in to watch Fox TV’s The Simple Life, as socialite Paris Hilton illustrates the benefits of privilege against the everyday lives of a farm family in Arkansas. Reality TV now embraces the arrogance of neoliberal power; it smiles back at us, even while it legitimates downsizing and the ubiquity of the political economy of fear. Educated Hope Against an increasingly oppressive corporate-based globalism, educators and other cultural workers need to resurrect a language of resistance and possibility, a language that embraces a militant utopianism, while being constantly attentive to those forces which seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or to punish and dismiss those who dare look beyond the horizon of the given.21 Hope, in this instance, is one of the preconditions for individual and social struggle, for the ongoing practice of critical education at a wide variety of sites; it is also a mark of courage on the part of intellectuals inside and outside of the academy who are using the resources of theory to address pressing social problems. But hope is also a referent for civic courage and its ability to mediate the memory of loss and the experience of injustice is part of a broader attempt to open up new locations of struggle, contest the workings of oppressive power, and undermine various forms of domination. The views of philosopher Ernst Bloch are instructive here. He argues that hope must be concrete, a spark that not only reaches out beyond the surrounding emptiness of privatization, but also anticipates a better

32 Henry A. Giroux

world in the future, a world that speaks to us by presenting tasks based on the challenges of the present time. For Bloch, utopianism becomes concrete when it links the possibility of the ‘not yet’ with forms of political agency that are animated by a determined effort to engage critically with the past and present in order to address pressing social problems and realizable tasks.22 Bloch believed that utopianism could not be removed from the world and was not ‘something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.’23 In Bloch’s view, utopianism as a discourse of critique and social transformation is characterized by a ‘militant optimism,’ one that foregrounds the crucial relationship between critical education and political agency, on the one hand, and the concrete struggles needed, on the other hand, to give substance to the recognition that every present is incomplete. For theorists like Bloch, utopian thinking is anticipatory, not messianic; it is mobilizing, not therapeutic. Anson Rabinach argues, that at its best, utopian thinking ‘points beyond the given while remaining within it.’24 The longing for a more human society in this instance does not collapse into a retreat from the world; rather, it emerges out of critical and practical engagements with present behaviours, institutional formations, and everyday practices. Hope in this context does not ignore the worst dimensions of human suffering and exploitation; on the contrary, it acknowledges the need to sustain the ‘capacity to see the worst and offer more than that for our consideration.’25 The great challenge to militant utopianism, with its hope of keeping critical thought alive is the emerging consensus among a wide range of political factions that neoliberal democracy is the best we can do. The impoverishment of intellectuals, with their increasing irrelevance – and at times their growing refusal to address human suffering and social injustice – is now matched by the impoverishment of a social order that cannot conceive of any alternative to itself. Feeding into the increasingly dominant view that society cannot be fundamentally improved except through market forces, neoliberalism strips utopianism of its possibilities for social critique and democratic engagement. In doing so it undermines the need to reclaim utopian thinking both as a discourse of human rights and as a moral referent for the project of dismantling and transforming dominant structures of wealth and power.26 Moreover, an antiutopianism of both the Right and the Left can be found in those views which reduce utopian thinking to state terrorism and progressive visionaries to unrealistic if not danger-

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ous ideologues. The alternative offered here is what Russell Jacoby calls a ‘convenient cynicism,’ a belief that human suffering and massive inequalities in all areas of life are simply inherent in human nature and an irreversible part of the social condition.27 Or, in its liberal version, the belief that ‘America’s best defense against utopianism as terrorism is preserving democracy as it currently exist[s] in the world.’28 Within this discourse, hope is foreclosed, politics becomes militarized, and resistance is either privatized or aestheticized or collapsed into hypercommercialized escapism. Against a militant and radically democratic utopianism, the equating of terrorism with utopianism seems deeply cynical. Neoliberalism not only appears flat, but also offers up an artificially conditioned optimism – one that operates at full capacity in the pages of Fast Company, Wired Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes as well as in the relentless entrepreneurial hype of figures such as George Gilder, Tom Peters, and the Nike and Microsoft ‘revolutionaries.’ This artificial optimism makes it increasingly difficult to imagine a life beyond the existing parameters of market pleasures, mail order catalogues, shopping malls, and Disneyland.29 The profound antiutopianism that is spurred on by neoliberalism with its myth of the citizen as consumer, and of markets as sovereign entities, and with its collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civic liberties, on the one hand, and a market economy and a market society, on the other, not only commodifies a critical notion of political agency, but also undermines the importance of multiple democratic public spheres. Against the dystopian hope of neoliberalism, I argue for the necessity of educated hope as a crucial component of a radically charged politics ‘grounded in broad-based civic participation and popular decision making.’30 Educated hope as a form of oppositional utopianism makes visible the need for progressives and other critical intellectuals to attend to the ways in which institutional and symbolic power are tangled up with everyday experience. Any politics of hope must tap into individual experiences while at the same time linking individual responsibility with a progressive sense of social agency. Politics and pedagogy alike spring ‘from real situations and from what we can say and do in these situations.’31 At its best, hope translates into civic courage as a political and pedagogical practice that begins when one’s life can no longer be taken for granted. In doing so, it makes concrete the possibility for transforming hope and politics into an ethical space – into a public act that confronts the flow of everyday experience and the weight of social suffering with the force of individual and collective resistance

34 Henry A. Giroux

and the unending project of democratic social transformation. By emphasizing politics as a pedagogical practice and a performative act, educated hope also emphasizes that politics is played out on the terrain of imagination and desire and is grounded in relations of power mediated through the outcomes of situated struggles dedicated to creating the conditions and capacities for people to become critically engaged political agents. Combining the discourse of critique with that of hope is crucial in order to affirm that critical activity offers the possibility for social change. In this way, democracy is viewed as a project and task, as an ideal type that is never finalized and that has a powerful adversary in the social realities it is meant to change. The postcolonial theorist Samir Amin echoes this call by arguing that educators should consider addressing the project of a more realized democracy as part of an ongoing process of democratization. According to Amin, democratization ‘stresses the dynamic aspect of a still-unfinished process’ while rejecting notions of democracy that are given a definitive formula.32 An oppositional cultural politics can take many forms, but given the current assault on democratic public spheres, it seems imperative that progressives revitalize the struggles over social citizenship, especially those struggles aimed at expanding liberal freedoms, the equality of resources, and those forms of collective insurance that provide a safety net for individual incapacities and misfortunes. Simultaneously, any viable cultural politics must address the need to develop collective movements that can challenge the subordination of social needs to the dictates of privatization, commercialism, and capital. Central to such a politics would be a critical public pedagogy that attempts to make visible alternative models of radical democratic relations at a wide variety of sites. These spaces can make the pedagogical more political by raising fundamental questions such as these: What is the relationship between social justice and the distribution of public resources and goods? What are the conditions, knowledge, and skills that are a prerequisite for political agency and social change? At the very least, such a project involves understanding and critically engaging dominant values within a broader set of historical and institutional contexts. Unfortunately, many educators have failed to take seriously Antonio Gramsci’s insight that ‘every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ – with its implication that education as a cultural pedagogical practice takes place across multiple sites, as it signals how, within diverse contexts, educa-

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tion makes us both subjects of and subject to relations of power.33 Next, I conclude by commenting on two matters: what it would mean to make the pedagogical more political as part of a broader effort to reclaim the radically democratic role of public and higher education; and the implications of addressing educators as critical public intellectuals. Public Intellectuals and Higher Education In opposition to the corporatization of schooling, educators need to define public and higher education as a resource that is vital to the promise and realization of democratic life. Such a task, in part, points to the need for academics, students, parents, social activists, labour organizers, and artists to join together and oppose the transformation of higher education into a commercial sphere, to resist what Bill Readings has called a consumer-oriented, corporate university concerned more about accounting than accountability.34 As Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, schools are one of the few public spaces left where students can learn the ‘skills for citizen participation and effective political action. And where there are no [such] institutions, there is no “citizenship” either.’35 Higher education may be one of the few sites left where students can learn about the limits of commercial values, address what it means to learn the skills of social citizenship, and work to deepen and expand the possibilities of collective agency and democratic life. I think Toni Morrison is right in arguing that ‘if the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.’36 Defending higher education as a vital public sphere is necessary if we are to develop and nourish the proper mediation between civil society and corporate power, between identities founded on democratic principles and identities steeped in those forms of competitive, selfinterested individualism that celebrate selfishness, profit-making, and greed. This view suggests that higher education must be defended through intellectual work that self-consciously recalls the tension between the democratic imperatives or possibilities of public institutions and their everyday realization in a society dominated by market principles. Education is not training; at its best, learning is connected to a

36 Henry A. Giroux

culture of curiosity and questioning, the imperatives of social responsibility, and at the same time recognizes that political agency does not reduce the citizen to a mere consumer. Academics and others bear an enormous responsibility in opposing neoliberalism by bringing democratic political culture to life. Part of this challenge involves educators, students, and others beginning to organize individually and collectively against those corporate forces that increasingly define the university less as a social institution than as a business, less as a public good than as a private benefit. Higher education is being subsumed by market sovereignty, and as a result, academic labour is being reconfigured in ways that remove faculty from issues of governance. Increasingly, full-time faculty are being replaced by part-time workers and limited-term appointees. For example, in ‘2001 only about one-quarter of new faculty appointments were to full tenure-track positions (i.e., half were part-time, and more than half of the remaining full-time positions were “off” the tenure track).’37 To resist this ongoing assault on higher education, educators will have to take seriously the importance of sustained political education and critical pedagogy as a necessary step in redefining the meaning and purpose of higher education as a public sphere essential to creating a democratic society. Radical pedagogy as a form of resistance might be premised in part on the assumption that educators vigorously oppose any attempts by liberals and conservatives, in conjunction with corporate forces, to reduce them to the role of technicians or multinational operatives. But equally important, these questions need to be addressed as part of a broader concern for renewing the struggle for social justice and democracy. Such a struggle demands, as the writer Arundhati Roy points out, that as intellectuals we ask ourselves some very ‘uncomfortable questions about our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our “democratic institutions,” the role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community.’38 Edward Said argued that the public intellectual must function within institutions in part as an exile, as someone whose ‘place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations.’39 From this perspective, the educator as public intellectual becomes responsible for linking the diverse experiences that produce knowledge, identities, and social values in the university to the quality of moral and political life in the wider society; and he or she does so by

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entering into public conversations unafraid of generating controversy or of taking a critical stand. The issue is not about whether public or higher education has become contaminated with politics. It is, more importantly, about recognizing that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. The crucial matter at hand is how to appropriate, invent, direct, and control the multiple layers of power and politics that constitute both the institutional formation of education and the pedagogies, which are often outcomes of deliberate struggles to establish particular notions of knowledge, values, and identity. As committed educators, we cannot eliminate politics, but we can work against a politics of certainty, a pedagogy of censorship, and institutional forms that close down rather than open up democratic relations. To do this, we will have to work diligently to construct a politics without guarantees, one that perpetually questions both itself and all those values, practices, and forms of power and knowledge that appear beyond the processes of interrogation, debate, and deliberation. Against a pedagogy and politics of certainty, it is crucial for educators to develop pedagogical practices that problematize considerations of institutional location and mechanisms of transmission. Public intellectuals need to approach social issues mindful of the multiple connections and issues that tie humanity together; but they need to do so as border intellectuals moving within and across diverse sites of learning as part of an engaged and practical politics that recognizes the importance of ‘asking questions, making distinctions, restoring to memory all those things that tend to be overlooked or walked past in the rush to collective judgment and action.’40 For educators to function as public intellectuals, they need to provide opportunities for students to learn that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what students say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform when necessary the world around them. More specifically, these educators need to argue for forms of pedagogy that close the gap between the university and everyday life. At one level, this suggests pedagogical practices that affirm and critically enrich the meaning, language, and knowledge that students actually use to negotiate and inform their lives. Unfortunately, the political, ethical, and social significance of the role popular culture plays as the primary pedagogical medium for young people remains

38 Henry A. Giroux

largely unexamined. When they are teaching about important issues framed through, for example, the social lenses of poverty, racial conflict, and gender discrimination, educators need to challenge the assumption that popular cultural texts cannot be as profoundly important as traditional sources of learning. This is not a matter of pitting popular culture against traditional curricular sources. Rather, it is a matter of using both in a mutually informative way, always mindful of how these spheres of knowledge might be used to teach students how to be skilled citizens, whether that means learning how to use the Freedom of Information Act, build coalitions, write policy papers, learn the tools of democracy, and analyse social problems, or learning how to make a difference in one’s life through individual and social engagements. At a time when the forces of mass persuasion are assaulting all things democratic and non-commercial on this planet, intellectuals bear a special ethical and political responsibility. The urgency of the current historical moment demands that intellectuals discard the professionalism, careerism, and isolation that make them largely irrelevant. Intellectuals inside and outside the university have an important obligation to offer alternative critical analyses, to dismantle illusory discourses of power, to work with others to create an international social movement for social justice and radical change. In short, educators need to become provocateurs; they need to take a stand while rejecting involvement in either a cynical relativism or doctrinaire politics. Central to intellectual life is the pedagogical and political imperative that academics engage in rigorous social criticism and become a stubborn force for challenging false prophets, deflating the claims of triumphalism, and critically engaging all those social relations that promote material and symbolic violence. At the same time, intellectuals must be deeply critical of their own authority and how it structures classroom relations and cultural practices. In this way, the authority they legitimate in the classroom (as well as in other public spheres) will become both an object of self-critique and a critical referent for expressing a more ‘fundamental dispute with authority itself.’41 This does not mean that teachers should abandon authority or simply equate all forms of authority with the practice of domination, as some radical educators have suggested. On the contrary, authority in the sense I am describing it here follows Gramsci in calling on educators to assert authority in the service of encouraging students to think beyond the conventions of common sense, to expand the horizons of what they know, and to discover their own sense of political agency and what it means to appropriate education as a critical function. Crucial here is the recognition that while the teacher ‘is an

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actor on the social and political stage, the educator’s task is to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion.’42 As Said notes in a different context, ‘the role of the intellectual is not to consolidate authority, but to understand, interpret, and question it: this is another version of speaking truth to power.’43 Conclusion There is a lot of talk among academics in the United States and elsewhere about the death of politics and the inability of human beings to imagine a more equitable and just world in order to make it better. I would hope that of all groups, educators would be the most vocal and militant in challenging this assumption by reclaiming the university’s subversive role, and by combining critiques of dominant discourses and the institutional formations that support and reproduce them with the goal of limiting human suffering. I would hope that at the same time they would attempt to create the concrete economic, political, social, and pedagogical conditions necessary for an inclusive and substantive democracy. Critical scholarship is crucial to such a task, but it is not enough. Individual and social agency becomes meaningful as part of the willingness to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. Scholarship has a civic and public function, and it is precisely the connections between knowledge and the broader society that make visible that ethical and political function. Knowledge can and should be used to amplify human freedom and promote social justice, not simply to create profits or future careers. Intellectuals need to take a position, and as Said argues, they have an obligation to ‘remind audiences of the moral questions that may be hidden in the clamour of public debates ... and deflate the claims of [neoliberal] triumphalism.’44 Combining theoretical rigour with social relevance may be risky politically and pedagogically, but the promise of a substantive democracy far outweighs the security and benefits that accompany a retreat into academic irrelevance and the safe haven of a no-risk professionalism of the sort that requires, as Paul Sabin observes, ‘an isolation from society and vows of political chastity.’45 To think beyond the given is a central demand of politics, but it is also a condition for individual and collective agency. At the heart of such a task are the possibilities inherent in hope and the knowledge and skills made available in a critical education. At this particular moment in the United States, cynicism has become an important tool in the war against democracy. But rather than make despair convincing, I think it is all the more crucial to take seriously Meghan Morris’s argument that ‘things

40 Henry A. Giroux

are too urgent now to be giving up on our imagination.’46 Or, more specifically, to take up the challenge of Derrida’s provocation that ‘we must do and think the impossible. If only the possible happened, nothing more would happen. If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.’47

NOTES 1 This is actually drawn from Fredric Jameson. ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.’ Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii. 2 Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992), 335. 3 Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998). 4 Editorial, ‘Bush’s Domestic War,’ The Nation, 31 December 2001, 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Molly Ivins, ‘Bush’s Sneak Attack on “Average” Taxpayers,’ Chicago Tribune, 27 March 2003. Retrieved from www.commondreams.org/ views03/0327-04.htm (30 March 2003). 7 See Jaider Rizvi, ‘United States: Hunger in a Wealthy Nation,’ Tierramerica/ Inter Press Service, 26 March 2003, retrieved from www.foodfirst.org/ media/news/2003/hungerwealthy.html (30 March 2003). See also Jennifer Egan, ‘To Be Young and Homeless,’ New York Times Magazine, 24 March 2002, 35. 8 See, for example, Tony Bennett, ‘Cultural Studies: A Reluctant Discipline,’ Cultural Studies 12:4 (1998): 528–45; Todd Gitlin, ‘The Anti-political Populism of Cultural Studies,’ in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. Majorie Ferguson and Peter Golding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 25–38; Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994). 9 John Brenkman, ‘Race Publics: Civil Illiberalism, or Race After Reagan,‘ Transition 5:2 (1995): 7. 10 Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, ‘Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Signification,’ JAC 18:3 (1998): 741. 11 Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Institutions and Autonomy,’ in A Critical Sense, ed. Peter Osborne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8. 12 Raymond Williams, preface to Communications, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 14. 13 Noam Chomsky, Profits over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 92.

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14 Brenkman, ‘Race Publics,’ 123. 15 Cited in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, ‘Rethinking Political Community: Chantal Mouffe’s Liberal Socialism,’ JAC 19:2 (1999): 178. 16 Cited in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, ‘Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,’ JAC 18:3 (1998): 11. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘For a Scholarship with Commitment,’ Profession (2000): 43. 18 John Brenkman, ‘Extreme Criticism,’ in What’s Left of Theory, ed. J. Butler, J. Guillory, and K. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 130. 19 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 5. 20 Simon Critchley, ‘Ethics, Politics, and Radical Democracy: The History of a Disagreement,’ Culture Machine 4 (2002). Retrieved from www.culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm (6 November 2002). 21 This section draws from a chapter on utopian hope in Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 22 Bloch’s great contribution in English on the subject of utopianism can be found in his three-volume work, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 [1959]). 23 Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,’ in Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 3. 24 Anson Rabinach, ‘Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,’ New German Critique 11 (1977): 11. 25 Thomas L. Dunn, ‘Political Theory for Losers,’ in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 160. 26 See Russell Jacoby, ‘A Brave Old World: Looking Forward to a NineteenthCentury Utopia,’ Harper’s 301 (December 2000): 72–80; The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, ‘Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination,’ in Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias, ed. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 1–29; David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 27 Jacoby, ‘A Brave Old World,’ 80. 28 Norman Podhoretz, cited in Ellen Willis, ‘Buy American,’ Dissent (Fall, 2000), 110. 29 For a critique of the entrepreneurial populism of this diverse group, see Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism

42 Henry A. Giroux and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000). 30 Carl Boggs, The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 7. 31 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 96. 32 Samin Amin, ‘Imperialization and Globalization,’ Monthly Review (June 2001), 12. 33 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Press, 1971), 350. 34 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 35 Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 170. I take up this theme in detail in Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 36 Toni Morrison, ‘How Can Values Be Taught in the University?’ Michigan Quarterly Review (Spring 2001): 278. 37 Martin Finklestein, ‘The Morphing of the American Academic Profession,’ Liberal Education 89:4 (2003): 1. 38 Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 3. 39 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 11. 40 Ibid., 52–3. 41 R. Radhakrishnan, ‘Canonicity and Theory: Toward a Poststructuralist Pedagogy,’ in Theory/Pedagogy/Politics, ed. Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 112–35. 42 Stanley Aronowitz, ‘Introduction,’ in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 10–11. 43 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 503. 44 Ibid., 504. 45 Paul Sabin, ‘Academe Subverts Young Scholars’ Civic Orientation,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 February 2002, B24. 46 Cited in Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Why Does Neo-Liberalism Hate Kids? The War on Youth and the Culture of Politics,’ Review of Education/Pedagogy/ Cultural Studies 23:2 (2001): 114. 47 Jacques Derrida, ‘No One Is Innocent: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida about Philosophy in the Face of Terror,’ Information Technology, War and Peace Project. Retrieved from http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/ 911 (13 November 2001).

2 Teaching and Tear Gas: The University in the Era of General Intellect nick dyer-witheford

One April day a few years ago, pedagogic utopia visited me in a cloud of tear gas. The place was Quebec City, the occasion a demonstration against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, one of a sequence of counter-globalization street protests, after Seattle, before 9/11. A few hours earlier, I had been standing in a crowd of labour militants, witches, antipoverty campaigners, and eco-activists cheering black bloc anarchists as they vaulted the security fence surrounding the summit site before being repelled by riot police. The day then spiralled into semichoreographed encounters between security forces and demonstrators, punctuated by regular volleys of chemical agents. For some time I avoided the worst of the tear gas, but eventually a canister landed at my feet. Reeling out of the vapour, I sank to my knees, scarcely able to see or breathe, amidst a stampede of protesters. Someone from the running crowd halted to offer me water. As I doused my streaming eyes, I looked up and was surprised to recognize a student from a university undergraduate course I had taught the year before. There was in fact nothing surprising in my rescuer being a student – many, perhaps most, of the demonstrators were in high school or university. This specific student was, however, a shock. He had always sat at the back of my large, required classes on the political economy of the media, one (I had guessed) of a regular contingent of business-oriented enrollees who suffered through my mutated-Marxian analyses of the information industry with thinly concealed hostility. He had never asked a question or spoken to me. I did not know his name, could not pick out his work from nigh on two hundred final papers, and remembered him only because of the special ferocity of the silent scepticism he radiated. Yet here he was, bandana across his mouth, making like a

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member of an anticapitalist Medivac team. I coughed out something to the effect of ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’ ‘Oh well,’ he replied nonchalantly, ‘after that course of yours, I thought I’d better see what was going on. Never imagined it would be like this. This is amazing.’ And he disappeared back into the fumes. This was a moment when, for reasons not entirely limited to selfpreservation, university teaching seemed worthwhile – a moment of pedagogic utopia sufficiently interesting and unusual to warrant some analysis of its conditions of possibility. To this end, I will put in play some theoretical concepts derived from the lexicon of autonomist Marxism: ‘general intellect,’ ‘cognitive capitalism,’ and ‘the multitude.’1 I then offer a concrete illustration of these ideas in a brief case study of the Canadian university program where I teach, and conclude on an unabashedly utopian note by framing the preceding observations within a revised version of Marx’s concept of ‘species being.’ General Intellect ‘General intellect’ is an idea given recent currency by a group of theorists – Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato, Jean Paul Vincent, and others – who in the mid-1990s clustered around the Parisian journal Futur antérieur.2 They derive the concept from Marx, who introduced it in his Grundrisse of 1857. Here he prophesies that at a certain moment in capitalism’s future the creation of wealth will come to depend not on direct expenditure of labour time but rather on the ‘development of the general powers of the human head,’ ‘general social knowledge,’ ‘social intellect,’ or, in a striking metaphor, ‘the general productive forces of the social brain.’3 The emergence of general intellect is signalled by the increasing importance of machinery – ‘fixed capital’ – and in particular by the salience of both automation and transportation/communication networks. Marx’s observations on general intellect are brief and fragmentary. But read sympathetically, they can be seen as a prefigurative glimpse of today’s ‘post-Fordism’ or ‘information capitalism,’ whose production teams, innovation milieux, and corporate research consortiums yield the ‘fixed capital’ of robotic factories, genetic engineering, and global computer networks. (See Franco Berardi, in this volume.) But if this is the case, what happens to class conflict when capital reaches the era of general intellect? Marx’s dialectical prediction was that technologies of automation and communication, by reducing di-

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rect labour-time and socializing production, would inexorably render wage labour and private ownership obsolete, so that ‘capital … works towards its own dissolution.’4 Things hardly seem so simple today. On the contrary, high technology and globalization appear – at least at first sight – to have brought about an unprecedented triumph to the world market, and disarray or extinction to its revolutionary opposition. Yet at the very time that capitalism’s apologists were announcing the ‘end of history,’ deep social unrest was manifesting itself in so-called antiglobalization movements, which challenge capitalism, albeit in ways very different from Marxism’s classic predictions of an industrial working-class uprising. This was the dilemma that the Futur antérieur group attempted to think through as its members revised the concept of general intellect, seeking a new analysis of the factors that would determine the dominance or dissolution of Information Age capitalism. The critical issue, they suggested, was not just the accumulation of technology – the fixed capital of advanced machines that Marx had focused on. Rather, it was the variable potential of human subjectivity, which continues to be vital – though often in indirect and mediated ways – for the creation and operation of this apparatus. This subjective element they variously term ‘mass intellect’ or ‘immaterial labour.’ It is human know-how – technical, cultural, linguistic, and ethical – that supports the operations of the high-tech economy, something that is especially evident in the communicational and aesthetic aspects of high-tech commodity production. Negri describes ‘mass intellectuality’ as the activity of a ‘postFordist proletariat’ … ‘increasingly directly involved in computer-related, communicative and formative work … shot through and constituted by the continuous interweaving of technoscientific activity and the hard work of the production of commodities, by the territoriality of the networks within which this interweaving is distributed, by the increasingly intimate combination of the recomposition of times of labour and of forms of life.’5 The crucial question thus becomes how far capital can contain what Vincent terms ‘this plural, multiform, constantly mutating intelligence’ within its structures.6 The context of this analysis was a rising tide of social discontent with the privatization, deregulation, and austerity programs of the Juppe government – programs that were to culminate in the great French general strikes of 1996, which have sometimes been described as ‘the first revolt against globalization.’7 These strikes involved large numbers of technically skilled workers – nurses and medical paraprofes-

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sionals, air traffic controllers, and workers in the most up-to-date cyborg car factories. They also involved universities. Rising tuition fees and declining conditions had brought students and instructors onto the streets, into cyberspace (computer networks were used to coordinate protests), and into public debate about globalization processes. The centrality of the university to the analysis of general intellect is apparent in a passage by Vincent. He observes that capital ‘appears to domesticate general intellect without too much difficulty.’8 But this absorption, he goes on to note, demands an extraordinary exercise of ‘supervision and surveillance’ involving ‘complex procedures of attributing rights to know and/or rights of access to knowledge which are at the same time procedures of exclusion’: Good ‘management’ of the processes of knowledge consists of polarising them, of producing success and failure, of integrating legitimating knowledges and disqualifying illegitimate knowledges, that is, ones contrary to the reproduction of capital. It needs individuals who know what they are doing, but only up to a certain point. Capitalist ‘management’ and a whole series of institutions (particularly of education) are trying to limit the usage of knowledges produced and transmitted. In the name of profitability and immediate results, they are prohibiting connections and relationships that could profoundly modify the structure of the field of knowledge.9

In what follows, I extend this analysis to the situation of North American universities – Canadian ones in particular – and suggest that the absorption of general intellect by contemporary capitalism is partial, incomplete, and contested by the emergence of a ‘multitudinous campus’ linked to broader counter-globalization movements. Cognitive Capitalism: Academia Inc. Let us call the commercial appropriation of general intellect ‘cognitive capitalism.’10 Cognitive capitalism is a regime that mobilizes collective intelligence to generate high-tech innovations for corporations to sell as commodities, and/or to produce other commodities. Its critical mechanisms include intellectual property rights, venture finance, and university–corporate partnerships. Indeed, no site could be more vital to cognitive capital than academia, for it is here that there proceeds what David Noble terms ‘the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital, and, hence, intellectual property.’11

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The absorption of North American universities into cognitive capitalism was not a natural process. It has a history. As Negri and others have noted, the corporate resort to increasingly ‘intellectual’ modes of production was the outcome of a cycle of struggles. 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 workers, the emergence of new social movements, and guerrilla wars in Vietnam and elsewhere. Making the shift from industrial to cognitive capital – or from Fordism to post-Fordism – required pacifying and restructuring academia. Campuses from Paris to California, from Kent State in Ohio to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, were in tumult as the ‘1968’ generation of students rose against the cruelties and conformities of the Fordist military-industrial complex. After the immediate discipline of police action, shootings, and academic purges, the neoliberal response was radical reorganization. This reorganization arose from a dovetailing of two sets of interests: the state’s and the corporate sector’s. Governments, beset by the ‘fiscal crisis of the state’ (in fact largely induced by a corporate tax rebellion), were keen to cut costs; business, on the other hand, wanted more control over the troublesome but increasingly valuable education sector.12 Over the late 1970s and 1980s, funding for university education in most capitalist economies was cut. Tuition fees and student debt loads rose sharply. Programs seen as subversive or simply inutile to industry were slashed. These measures, alongside a climbing unemployment rate and general economic austerity, chilled student protest. The conditions were thus set for an integration of universities and business, which was vital to the development of high-tech ‘knowledge industries.’13 In this new order, basic research has been sacrificed to applied programs of immediate benefit to the corporate sector. Research parks, private-sector liaisons, consultancies, cross-appointments with industry, and academic–corporate consortiums are now burgeoning. Moneys subtracted from base operating budgets are being reinjected back into programs of direct utility to high-tech capital, such as schools of communication, engineering, and business administration and special institutes for computer, biotech, and space research. University administrators now move effortlessly between interlocking corporate and academic boards. Enabled by changes in intellectual property laws that entitle them to exercise ownership rights over patents result-

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ing from government-funded grants, universities have become active players in the merchandising of research results. Amidst this intensifying commercial ethos, the internal operations of academia have become steadily more corporatized, with university management practices mirroring those of the private sector. This new rapprochement with academia has performed two functions for capital. First, it has provided business with the facilities to socialize the costs and risks of extraordinarily expensive high-tech research, while privatizing the benefits of the innovations. Second, it is subsidizing capital’s retraining of its post-Fordist labour force, which is being sorted and socialized for the new information economy through increasingly vocational and technically oriented curricula that emphasize skills and proficiencies at the expense of critical analysis and free inquiry. Capitalism, mutating into its informational phase, has become more intellectual: Microsoft calls its production facilities in Redmond, Washington, a ‘campus,’ and Motorola and McDonalds now run their own ‘universities.’ Simultaneously, universities are becoming more industrial, and are serving as ancillary facilities for capital’s overall project of high-tech development. This is the dialectic of corporate–university interaction in the era of cognitive capital. Cellular Counter-Knowledges As many essays in this book attest, cognitive capitalism’s assimilation of the universities has not been seamless. Let us look first at professors and instructors – the immaterial labour force that is so vital to research and teaching. The various inducements and threats offered to win their assent – appointments, tenure, grants, and so forth – have undoubtedly been widely effective. In the knowledge fields most important to cognitive capital, lucrative entrepreneurial possibilities have led to a prodigious signing on.14 Survival demands frantic attempts to seem useful within the parameters of the new order. Yet there remain various ‘cells’ of intellectual opposition within the faculty of Academia Inc. Schematically, we can identify four clusters of this dissent: the ‘hermits,’ ‘long marchers,’ ‘whistleblowers,’ and the ‘migrant labourers.’ The hermits represent a traditionalist opposition to the new utilitarian model, one that is founded in a commitment to the merits of detached scholarship. This exists both in the humanities (where its roots run back to the philosophic privileging of contemplative over practical activity) and in the natural sciences (where it is allied to the defence of

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basic rather than applied research). In many ways it is a conservative opposition; often it is as hostile to activism as it is to commodification. It is rooted in an idealization of an ‘ivory tower’ past, and, because of this nostalgic orientation, it has been thinning out over time. Nonetheless it remains a residual source of disaffection and is sometimes very incisive in criticizing the manifest corruptions of academic–corporate involvement. Then there are the long marchers – the cadre of the professoriate that took form during the cycle of social struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of these people were student radicals or social activists during those years, and responded to the ebbing of the protest tides by making what Rudi Dutschke has called ‘the long march through the institutions.’ A more precise analysis would distinguish various waves of neo-Marxists, feminists, and new social movers. The directions this march has taken have been, to put it mildly, various, and include a spectacular number of recantations, repentances, and reversals. Nonetheless, there remain many faculty – especially but by no means only in the social sciences, and some now in senior positions – with pedagogical commitments and connections to the historical legacies of these activisms. These people are the source of much of the Right’s perennial anxiety about the Left-liberal nature of universities. Then there are the whistleblowers. Unlike the hermits and long marchers, who tend to be situated in disciplines marginalized by the high-tech thrust of university development, these people are found in the disciplines that have been most energetically corporatized, such as biological, medical, and computer science. They feel compelled by ethics, or even by professional standards, to speak out against instances of secrecy, fraud, and deception arising from corporate-determined research. One can cite two recent cases at the University of Toronto. One involved Dr Nancy Olivieri, a clinician who spoke out against the influence of pharmaceutical companies on drug trials; the other involved Dr David Healy, who was offered a position as director of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, only to have it withdrawn after he delivered a speech criticizing the drug Prozac, manufactured by Eli Lily, one of the university’s most important corporate partners. There are very few of these whistleblowers, who often pay a very steep price for their actions, but their significance is disproportionate to their numbers, since the scandals they provoke open one of the only public windows onto the inner workings of Academia Inc. Finally there are the migrant labourers. Following the overall

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downsizing logic of post-Fordist capital, academic administrators have been seeking ways to get the immaterial labour force of the university to do more with, or for, less. A classic strategy of casualization decreases permanent hiring in favour of reliance on pools of teaching assistants, sessional instructors, and junior faculty, who form a contingent academic labour force subjected to chronic insecurity and lack of benefits, and who are required to exercise mind-bending flexibility in pedagogic preparation (celebrated in Doonesbury’s immortal ‘will teach for food’ cartoon).15 This experience of the dark side of pedagogic labour makes this group a seething mass of discontent, and in some ways the most organizationally dynamic of all. These layers or clusters of internal opposition to cognitive capital in Academic Inc. are in fact intertwined and hybridized in very complex alignments. For example, I would situate myself as a long marcher whose rather late departure ensured a recent exposure to the experiences of the migrant labourers. All have genealogies stretching far back into disciplinary and cultural history. This intellectual complexity is to some extent protected by the sedimented institutional history of the university (see Ian Angus, in this volume). Attempts to enact corporatist models find themselves entangled in a melange of practices – such as tenure – that combine neofeudalistic privilege with the highest liberal commitments to freedom of thought and expression. Even the entrepreneurial models of cognitive capital, with their emphasis on faculty as grant-getters and enrolment-maximizers, can in some circumstances be twisted to provide havens and shelters for dissent. Despite the attempts of cognitive capital to purify the universities and turn them into intellectual laboratories for high-technology accumulation, academia remains wormholed with pockets of faculty dissent. The Multitudinous Campus The other critical factor in the changing composition of academia’s collective intelligence is of course the student population (see Mark Edelman Boren, in this volume). Cognitive capital’s reorganization of the universities as training institutes for immaterial labour has drawn into universities increasing numbers of young people for whom a degree has been frankly defined as a job qualification, and for whom higher education is a means for self-commodification. Such socialization seems inimical to political activism, and in many ways it is. These generations are divided from the student radicalism of 1968 not only by

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age but also by the vast cultural amnesia induced by neoliberal restructuring. To them, the anti–Vietnam War movement and the Berkeley free speech movements seem like quaint items of parental nostalgia or retro-movie sets. Yet these new populations have their own sources of discontent. The most important of these is economic stress. The downloading of education costs onto students has been an integral part of university restructuring. Tuition fee increases have made university materially nerve-racking for many. Skyrocketing debt loads mean that this education figures for many as the inauguration of indentured servitude. It also means that many students must work their way through school – very often in service-industry positions, in ‘McJobs’ or as ‘netslaves.’ In those positions, they get a good look at the underside of the new economy, as well as a rapid and practical education in the various registers of exploitation. These tensions are increased by students’ exposure to the consumption side of capital. University students are among the demographic niches targeted most intensively by marketers, who have made ‘youth culture’ a field of saturation advertising, branding, and promotions. Yet the result is not necessarily a passive induction to consumerism. In many ways, exposure to these forces has generated a heightened awareness among students of the forces attempting to shape their subjectivity. Critique of commercial media, curiosity about alternative practices of culture jamming, ad-busting, and subvertisements, and a cynical hyperawareness of how such alternatives can be co-opted by cool hunters and viral marketers, are an integral part of student culture.16 Today’s students are thus undergoing an extraordinarily intensive double apprenticeship; they are subjects both of penurious, labouring discipline and of compulsive hedonistic consumption. They are positioned in the cross hairs of the ‘cultural contradictions of capitalism’ long ago acknowledged even by intelligent neoconservatives such as Daniel Bell – a situation of inherent multiplicity that generates responses ranging from frantic self-promotion to indifferent cynicism.17 This is also a situation against which the properly ‘utopian’ impulses of youth – the desire to experience education as self-development rather than as social conditioning, and to experience life creatively and ethically – often manage to gain traction. Indeed, in the early 1990s, new currents of student activism began to percolate across North American campuses.18 Much of this activism focused around protests against fees, debt loads, and deteriorating

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learning conditions. But it also involved anti-sweatshop activism, ‘buy nothing days,’ actions against the commercialization of campuses, resistance to the commercial development of university lands, and campaigns against university linkages to authoritarian foreign regimes. In this context, the protests of students and the pedagogy of dissident instructors entered into a feedback loop, with each reinforcing and amplifying the other. Both also began to interweave in complex ways with academic labour protests. Cognitive capital’s corporatization of the universities, and its embrace of business management models, has produced a response that should not have surprised administrators as much as it has. On many North American campuses, including some of the most prestigious, regular university faculty are now unionized – something unthinkable even a decade ago. Graduate students in particular are now an important constituency for labour organizers. Teaching assistants’ strikes have spread across North American campuses, involving institutions as famous as Yale and scores of others.19 The new campus activism resulting from these converging forces has a very different flavour from that of the 1960s and 1970s. The revolts of forty years ago were resisting capital’s tendency to make the university a ‘knowledge factory.’ But because this assimilation was only partially complete, these uprisings had a certain isolation. Campuses might become temporary red ghettos, but there was a fundamental divorce between these enclaves and the more general conditions of work and exploitation. Today, the much tighter fusion of academia with business, and the manifest subordination of education to the job market has ended this relative isolation and has opened other possibilities. The conventional distinction between university and the ‘real’ world – at once self-deprecating and self-protective – is becoming less and less relevant. If students and teachers have lost some of the latitude of action and relative privilege that universities once afforded, they have also become connected to and potential participants in movements outside the university. In the mid-1990s this radicalism began to contribute to and connect with the much wider currents of social dissent known collectively as the counter-globalization or altermondialiste movement – what Negri and Hardt refer to as the revolt of ‘the multitude.’ The path to this wound through the participation of students and instructors in wider movements against deregulation, privatization, and cuts to social programs. Participation in these movements has pulled academics and students

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into contact with labour and trade-union organizations, with public service workers who are protesting cutbacks, and with diverse other constituencies surging against capital’s agenda of high-tech austerity. Out of these contacts has evolved a corporate–university interaction very different from the one that capital intended – one that is injecting opposition to corporate rule from the streets into the campuses, and from the campuses back into the streets. Polymorphous Communication The insertion of universities into this global circulation of struggles is not, however, just a matter of either campus protests or classroom teaching and learning. It also involves the role of universities as nodes of high-tech activity in the web of communication. As Vincent puts it, general intellect is in fact ‘a labour of networks and communicative discourse … [It is] not possible to have a “general intellect” without a great variety of polymorphous communications.’20 One of the defining features of cognitive capitalism is precisely its elaboration of high-tech communications systems, especially the digital networks, of which the best known is the Internet. Universities have been tightly associated with the Internet at every moment of its history. From its origins in Pentagon research, to its academic elaboration as a civilian system based on public funding and open protocols, to the launching of the ‘dot.com’ boom fuelled by the corporate privatization of university-based research, academic labour has been central to the emergence of this network of networks. At the same time, academia has itself been transformed. Campuses have become sites of mass digital apprenticeship. To study today means to know how to use a computer, and preferably to own one – indeed, possession is a mandatory requirement at some universities. It means to be familiar with search engines, websites, online databases, chat rooms, and e-mail. From one point of view, this merely signifies the intensifying subsumption of academia by digital capitalism. Universities themselves have become a direct target of dot.com enterprise with the drive towards the ‘virtual university’ – code for the activities of corporate– academic partnerships entrepreneurially pushing the commercial development of large-scale telelearning systems. Critics such as David Noble have tellingly challenged the paucity of the pedagogical theory behind this project; furthermore, they have argued that such ventures

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aim at nothing less than the commodification of the university’s teaching function, which would convert academia into what he scathingly terms ‘digital diploma mills.’21 There is, however, another side to the networking of the universities. In many ways, the great irony of cognitive capitalism is that it has failed to adequately contain and control the network that is the greatest achievement of general intellect. The early take-off of the Net blindsided corporate moguls, who then frantically scrambled to turn it into an engine of accumulation. The bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000 signalled the failure, however temporary, of this attempt. Today, in the aftermath of this debacle, cyberspace is where the vectors of e-capital tangle and entwine with those of a molecular proliferation of activists, researchers, gamers, artists, hobbyists, and hackers. And one consequence of the networking of universities is that millions of students have access to these alternative and sometimes subversive dynamics, of which I will mention only two: cyberactivism and peer-to-peer networks. The importance to the counter-globalization movement of the ‘electronic fabric of struggles’ is now widely recognized.22 From the emailed communiqués of Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos, to the networked opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, to the parody of official WTO websites on the ‘Battle of Seattle,’ to experiments in electronic civil disobedience, Net strikes, and other forms of hacktivism, the Internet has been turned into a vehicle of contemporary anticapitalist self-organization. Cyberactivism is no magic bullet against cognitive capital, and it has its own problems. But one of its effects is that there is now washing through cyberspace an immense tide of discussion and critique about neoliberal policies and alternatives to them. Much of this stream of counterknowledge has been created by students and academics, and all of it can be found, through intentional search or serendipitous discovery, by any student researching a paper in economics, sociology, political science, environmental science, or a thousand-and-one other topics. This is a truly astounding enlargement of what was once termed alternative media. There are other network activities that challenge capital equally or more severely, by decommodifying its digital products – for example, piracy, open-source and freeware initiatives, and gift economy practices. Ease of digital reproduction and the speed of network circulation are warping the fabric of intellectual property and blasting gaping holes in it. As Richard Barbrook notes, while the official ideology of post-Cold War North America is triumphal celebration of the free

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market, in their daily practices millions of Americans are actually involved in the online digital circulation of free and unpaid-for music, films, games, and information that in effect amounts to a form of ‘dot.communism.’23 These practices are part of the daily life of university students. The peer-to-peer (P2P) networks of Napster and Gnutella, and their various successors, are very largely college-based phenomena. The music industry is now seriously contemplating ‘that parents could be presented with a bill for their child’s downloading activities at college, and degrees could be withheld until someone pays,’ and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has had to resist subpoenas from the industry ‘seeking the names of students it suspects of being heavy file-sharers.’24 P2P is the product of a generation for whom the potentialities to freely reproduce and circulate digital information have become the basis for what Hardt and Negri call ‘a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism.’25 The point here is not to offer a simplistic celebration of P2P networks, which, like cyberactivism and hacktivism, involve complex ethical, economic, and political issues. I am suggesting that 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. The communication systems that constitute general intellect remain polymorphous, a matrix of possibilities within which to learn, and teach. Pedagogical Possibilities To make these points more concrete, I now want to offer a brief example of curriculum innovation, drawing on my own experience as a professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), where I have taught for the past eight years. UWO is a large university (about fifty thousand students) in a quiet town two hours from Toronto. Dominated by its professional schools – medicine, law, engineering, and the internationally renowned Ivey Business School – it has traditionally been seen as a conservative finishing school for the sons and daughters of Ontario’s business and professional elites. The student population is ethnically and culturally quite homogeneous – certainly more consistently white and affluent than in universities in Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. Although UWO has a respectable academic standing, it also has a reputation among under-

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graduates as something of a party school. With its green and pseudomedieval campus, it is a pleasant place – but not obviously auspicious terrain for politically utopian academics. In the mid-1990s, UWO created a Faculty of Information and Media Studies, formed by a wary marriage of two distinct professional schools – Library and Information Science, and Journalism. New faculty (including myself) were hired from a variety of backgrounds – cultural studies, cognitive psychology, political economy – to make up a school that would integrate pre-existing graduate programs in librarianship and journalism with a broader undergraduate (and eventually graduate) program in ‘media, information and technoculture.’ There were various agendas at play in the formation of FIMS. University administrators hoped to capitalize on the cultural and commercial excitement buzzing around the Internet, e-commerce, and high-tech by creating a program that would lend some flash to UWO’s rather staid image. They hoped this would boost its competitive position vis-à-vis other universities in the province in the war for undergraduate enrolments. FIMS was also seen as a possible magnet for corporate support. If this had been the only force at work, one might have expected the outcome to be a program functional for cognitive capital: a training ground for e-entrepreneurs and professional ‘excellence.’ What complicated this trajectory was that the actual design of the curriculum fell to a group of left-liberal faculty with critical perspectives. Most had backgrounds in journalism and librarianship. These are professions whose immaterial labour is central to cognitive capital. But both also have long, complex traditions of antagonism to, and critique of, corporate power – librarianship because of its public service tradition, journalism because of its tradition of investigative journalism. A combination of initiative and chance meant that faculty aligned with or at least open to multitudinous perspectives conducted both the initial design of new programs and the hiring for those programs. These initial decisions had a crucial and cumulative influence. What emerged was a faculty that offered courses in, for example, the political economy of media; collective intelligence, war, and propaganda; intellectual property and ethics; feminist perspectives on media; and many other communication issues. And many of these courses were taught from what can broadly be described as a Left perspective. This program consistently attracted high, and high-quality, student enrolments. The faculty became – as administrators had hoped, and in a way that surprised many instructors – a ‘hot’ program. This was in part

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because of students’ professional aspirations: they were looking for careers not only in journalism or librarianship, but also in entertainment or public relations. But it was also because the issue of media had ‘immediacy’ to a generation that had been socialized in the communication-saturated environment of post-Fordism and raised with the Net and that had participated in a youth culture formed in the synergistic webs of media empires. For these students, issues around copyright and censorship, privacy, hacking, mediated representation and performance, search engines, blogging, and digitized work settings were matters of everyday experience. Out of this exposure rose a host of opportunities for leveraging critical perspectives, especially when these issues could be taught using the full resources of ‘multimedia’ classrooms, including film, music, and Internet sites. These opportunities were intensified by the eruption of counterglobalization movements. The creation of FIMS coincided with a rising arc of struggles, from the Zapatista insurrection in 1994 through to the Seattle demonstration in 1999. It was thus caught on a tide of anticorporate activism that permeated student and youth culture; demonstrations against tuition increases and ‘social justice’ days were already emerging, even on conservative campuses such as UWO. All of this was grist to the mill of ‘information and media’ studies, for in cognitive capital every political event is inescapably a media event. Classroom discussions of information and communication issues fed news, images, and analyses of issues such as free trade policy, intellectual property rights, and representations of street demonstrations back into the student population. As my opening anecdote suggested, the demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in April 2001 were a watershed, for Quebec City was close enough for UWO students to attend. The teaching assistants union, which had recently negotiated its first contract, sent a busload of graduates. Several undergraduates also went, drawn by curiosity as well as commitment, and returned more deeply politicized by the experience. Some produced their own media – websites, videos – recounting these events. Our undergraduate program has been rapidly identified as the ‘radical’ course on campus – an ethos celebrated, however ironically, by student fashonistas, who with impeccable branding sense have designed a program logo based on retro-Soviet futurist styles. The Left ethos of FIMS was a topic of controversy – even, indeed especially, among students within its programs. Criticisms of the undergraduate

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program for not being more ‘practical’ or vocation-oriented, and for the predominance of broad-brush designated ‘Marxists,’ appeared in the student press, and catalysed hot debate. In fact, the actual practices of the faculty are in many ways quite typical in an era of university corporatization. It offers undergraduates some academic credits for unpaid work internships in media-related fields (thereby supplying information capital with free labour); it has established joint programs with the business and law faculties (thus demonstrating its willingness to help produce subjects-in-suits); and many of its classes, both undergraduate and graduate, involve more or less straight vocational instructional or skill acquisition (Web design, and so on). In this sense, it is very much a part of Academia Inc. But because of the factors detailed above (critically oriented instructors supported by sympathetic senior faculty, supportive students, high enrolments, cultural climate), it has been possible to maintain radical curriculum content alongside these mainstream practices, and even to mount some countervailing initiatives. For example, in 2003 FIMS initiated an undergraduate degree program called Media in the Public Interest. This is aimed specifically at students who want to do mediarelated work with social movements, NGOs, and the public sector generally. It includes special courses on alternative media and on communication practices in social movements. It also includes an ‘internship’ program whereby students receive credit for paid or unpaid work on media issues with social movements. The Media in the Public Interest program might have been considered radical, given UWO’s traditional conservatism. Yet it was approved by the University Senate without any problem. My own view is that the initiative was shielded by some of the more ‘corporate’ connections that FIMS had made. Since it already had joint programs with the business school, connections with the ‘third sector’ could be legitimated as merely an act of balance. Since we already offered academic credit for media-related corporate work, why not for volunteer activities in, say, a network of independent media centres? University–business linkages have been rationalized under the name of breaking down the ‘ivory tower’ and connecting academia to the ‘community.’ Once such an ideological motif has been launched, however, it is very hard to reject arguments for connections that go beyond the business community. Cognitive capital’s rhetoric can thus be played back against itself. The Media in the Public Interest program is, at the time of writing, barely launched, and the FIMS is still early in its development. The

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balance between corporate and critical content continues to be fought out among both faculty and students. Any number of factors, local or global, could stall or shift the dynamics I have described. It is, for example, too soon to assess the impact of the post-9/11 situation. Students and faculty from FIMS were among the organizers of the first protests in our town against the American invasion of Iraq, and discussions of ‘sexed up’ intelligence dossiers and spin-manufactured weaponry will long fill our classrooms. But the long-term effects of the ‘war on terror’ may drastically chill the climate for radical teaching and learning. Nonetheless, my experience in FIMS does suggest possibilities, however minor, for ‘utopian’ pedagogical experimentation within Academia Inc. To harness general intellect effectively, cognitive capital requires a certain degree of openness within universities. Part of what business seeks from academia, and of what university administrators seek to provide it, is the creativity and experimentation of general intellect, qualities vital to a high-tech economy based on perpetual innovation. Business also requires chances for unpredicted invention and unforeseen synthesis – such as that attempted in the FIMS creation I have described. But this opens up possibilities for unexpected swerves and departures, which may become lines of possibility for those who want to teach and learn something different from what cognitive capital intends. Conclusion: Species-Being Why was I so pleased to see my student amidst the tear gas in Quebec City? Because what is at stake in the collision between cognitive capital and the multitude is nothing less than the trajectory of species-being. ‘Species-being’ is the term Marx uses to refer to humanity’s self-recognition as a natural species with the capacity to transform itself through conscious social activity.26 In the era of general intellect, projects such as the Human Genome Project and the globe-girdling communications of the Internet constitute a techno-scientific apparatus capable of operationalizing a whole series of posthuman or subhuman conditions. By entrusting the control and direction of this apparatus to the myopic steering mechanism of marketization, cognitive capital is navigating its way onto some very visible reefs: a global health crisis, biospheric disaster, and yawning social inequalities that are dividing a world well seeded with terrifying arms. The ‘counter-globalization’ movements

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that started to race around the planet from Seattle to Genoa and Porto Allegre in the closing years of the twentieth century are a mutiny against this course. They are species-being movements, or, perhaps, movements of species-beings. Species-being movements contest the ‘general exploitation of communal human nature.’27 The diversity of agencies involved reflects a situation of hypersubsumption, where, though classic forms of exploitation persist (and are often intensified), capital taps the psychophysical energies of species-life at every point on its circuit: not just as variable capital (labour), but also as a circulatory relay (consumerist consciousness, ‘mind share’), a precondition of production (the general pool of biovalues and communicative competencies necessary for ‘general intellect’), and even as constant capital (genetic raw materials). Rife with contradictions, the genuinely new movements, and the most dynamic ones, are biopolitical activisms that are opposed to both the world market and reactive fundamentalisms. They are characterized by cosmopolitan affinities, transnational equalitarianism, implicit or explicit feminism, a strong ecospheric awareness, and a practical critique of the world market. They are rebellions generated within and against a capitalism that is ‘global’ both in its planetary expansion and in its ubiquitous social penetration, and whose processes generate subjects able to envisage – and willing to fulfil – the universalisms that the world market promises but cannot complete. Such movements represent a nascent alternative to capitalism’s organization of general intellect. They invoke some of the same intellectual and cooperative capacities that cognitive capital tries to harness, but point them in different directions, and with a vastly expanded horizon of collective responsibility. They establish networks of alternative research, new connections and alliances; they build a capacity for counterplanning from below. Universities are key in this contestation. Earlier, I cited Vincent’s suggestion that capitalism’s managers are, in the name of profitability and immediate results, interdicting ‘connections and relationships that could profoundly modify the structure of the field of knowledge.’ Some of these emergent ‘connections and relationships’ include the following: the establishment of new planetary indices of well-being beyond monetized measurement; investigation of new capacities for social planning and participation provided by information technologies; the development of forms of social and cultural validation that are not tied to

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obligatory wage labour; the emergence of new models of P2P and opensource communication systems; the critique of nineteenth-century paradigms of political economy, both free market and Marxist, in the light of ecological and feminist knowledges; the examination of global ‘public goods’; the elaboration of concepts of global citizenship; and the exploration, even, of ideas of autonomy, general intellect, and species-being! Opportunities to open these fields exist because globalization is drawing capital onto the ground of these questions, even while it attempts to contain and circumscribe the answers it receives within the formulae of marketization, monetization, and profit. But in academia, as elsewhere, labour power is never completely controllable. To the degree that capital uses the university to harness general intellect, insisting that its workforce engage in lifelong learning as the price of employability, it runs the risk that people will teach and learn something other than what it intends. If the academics linked to species-being movements can occupy this space and enlarge their frontiers beyond those of cognitive capitalism – to research and teach on topics of value to movements in opposition to capital; to invite activists and analysts from these movements onto campuses and into lectures and seminars; and to use the university’s resources, including its easy access to the great communication networks of our age, to circulate news and analyses that are otherwise marginalized – we may have more opportunities to hear students say, ‘After that course of yours, I thought I’d better see what was going on. Never imagined it would be like this. This is amazing.’

NOTES 1 The tradition of Italian autonomist Marxism is discussed in greater detail in this volume in the chapter by Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero, and in the interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa. 2 Some of the writings of this group can be found in the collection edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). A key essay is Paolo Virno, ‘Notes on the General Intellect,’ in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (London: Routledge, 1996). For later discussions of ‘general intellect’ see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution (New York: Continuum, 2003). See also Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,’ Social Text 18:2 (2000): 33–57. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 694, 705, 706, 709. Ibid., 700. Antoni Negri, ‘Constituent Power,’ Common Sense 16 (1994): 89; see also Virno and Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, 213–24. Jean-Marie Vincent, ‘Les automatismes sociaux et le “general intellect,”’ Futur antérieur 16 (1993): 121 (my translation). See Raghu Krishnan, ‘December 1995: The First Revolt against Globalization,’ Monthly Review 48:1 (1996): 1–22. Vincent, ‘Les automatismes,’ 121. Ibid., 123. On ‘cognitive capitalism,’ see the papers from ‘Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism,’ University of Paris, 15–16 February 2002, available at www.geocities.com/cognitivecapitalism (accessed 18 September 2002). David F. Noble, ‘Digital Diploma Mills,’ www.firstmonday.dk/issues/ issue3_1/noble/index.html (accessed 12 August 2003)) James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin’s, 1973). My analysis of this process draws on Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business: Universities, Corporations and Academic Work (Toronto: Garamond, 1988); Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Richard S. Ruch, Higher Ed, Inc.: The Rise of the For-Profit University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Sheila Slaughter, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entreprenurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University Industrial Complex (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). See Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labour in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). See Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf, 2000). Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1976). See Tony Vellela, New Voices: Student Activism in the 80s and 90s (Boston: South End Press, 1988); Paul Loeb, Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

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20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27

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Press, 1994); Robert Ovetz, ‘Assailing the Ivory Tower: Student Struggles and the Entrepreneurialization of the University,’ Our Generation 24:1 (1993): 70–95. On these developments, see Stanley Aronowitz, ‘The Last Good Job in America,’ in Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation, ed. Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler (New York: Routledge, 1998), 216, 213; Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mahan, Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge; 2003). Vincent, ‘Les automatismes,’ 127. David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002). Harry Cleaver, ‘The Chiapas Uprising,’ Studies in Political Economy 44 (1994): 145. Richard Barbrook, ‘Cyber-Communism: How the Americans are Superseding Capitalism in Cyberspace,’ Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster, London, www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk. (accessed 3 May 2000). ‘Tipping Hollywood the Black Spot,’ Economist, 30 August 2003, 43. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 257. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964). For recent discussions, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 73–81; David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 206–12, 213–32. See also, for a poignant application of this concept, Keith Doubt, ‘Feminism and Rape as a Transgression of Species Being,’ in his Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 61–6. Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 148.

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3 Academic Freedom in the Corporate University ian angus

The university has historically played many distinct roles – elite, public, corporate – and has been perpetually haunted by another possibility – the democratic university. These roles have defined the relations between the university and capitalist society.1 However, the university’s structure and functioning do not simply mirror the social and economic environment with which it must come to some accommodation. Similarly, politics within the university does not straightforwardly mirror politics outside it. The complex articulation between the two sets the framework within which a democratic politics can today be carried on within the university.2 How does one define the university? It serves many functions – economic, political, ideological, and so on – and undertakes many activities – research, instruction, technical innovation, and others besides. In today’s climate it is tempting to define the university ‘materialistically’ as a private–public or corporate–state joint economic institution that produces training and credentials recognized in the global corporate economy or the national bureaucracy (and thus defines those who do not attend or who fail as untrained and without credentials). This is not wrong; indeed it is the reality of the contemporary corporate university, and those who work and learn within it must address this reality in some fashion or another. For many, it is simply the environment in which they go about their daily business and is thus as natural and unquestionable as any other. But given the relatively recent transformation of the public university into a corporate environment, and given the still incomplete nature of this transformation, a memory of other practices and legitimations survives. In the era of the welfare state the publicly funded university was understood to play a public role in

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developing citizenship and social awareness – a role that shaped and overrode its economic function. This memory makes many people uncomfortable with the new corporate reality of the university. University culture is now torn between memories of better days that lead to a narrative of decline and despair and a new ‘realistic’ resignation to the ‘fact’ that the university is simply an economic institution no different from any other except insofar as making shoes is different from renting highrises. There was always a minority for whom the corporate function and even the citizenship function were questionable as such. The university after the Second World War continued its function of social criticism, a function that has always hung around those who ask basic questions about the human condition and social organization. The socially critical activities of individual faculty were more or less tolerated in the 1960s; but when faculty and students tried to align the university as an institution with democratic forces outside in opposition to the governmentcorporation nexus – such as at Simon Fraser University and the London School of Economics – the possibility was soon closed down by the police. The critical minority was more acceptable within the public university than within the corporate one, though there were always limits. Thus, there is a tendency for radical critics to succumb to the liberal and social democratic narrative of decline, forgetting that the public role of the university in the welfare state was an interlude in a longer history in which university education was a key ideological and practical preparation for a career in the imperial adventure. Like all empires, the British Empire needed administrators and bureaucrats as much as soldiers, informants, and head-breakers. The Canadian state continued to play this role within its own borders. The public university was itself a transformation of the traditional elite university. This sort of materialistic definition provokes discomfort in those of us who work and study in the university. Not because it is wrong, but because it is right. Nevertheless, it fails to capture that for which we struggle when we teach and learn – the ability to think meaningfully about one’s experience that allows a deeper judgment of the current situation and that brings one’s future actions into question – that one can still perhaps call for short ‘enlightenment’ (without implying any specific allegiances). The struggle for enlightenment in its individual, social, and biological dimensions has never by any means been limited to the university, but the dignity of the university’s role has rested on its claim to a link with the project of enlightenment. It is this claim that

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unsettles the purely materialistic definition of the university. Thus the ‘idealistic’ definition that the university is ‘a community of scholars’ resurges when one attempts to articulate the project that animates learning. It is all too easy to document the failures that prove that this definition does not capture the everyday practice of university life. It is more difficult to abandon it entirely in the face of an inquiring student or one’s own struggle to confront despair or madness. The university is an institution of thought. Thus its economic and political functions are pervaded by a practice whose distinctiveness consists in its attempt to transcend those functions by inquiring into their justification and their place in the wider social order. The university has been most itself when it has approximated in practice this struggle for enlightenment. Must this definition remain ‘idealistic’? That is to say, must it ignore the realities of economics and politics? Is it only an ideology that dissimulates? It would seem so if the struggle for enlightenment were severed from its practical base in the encounter that produces education. However, even the most mundane practices of the university appeal to legitimations that refer to the moral and social significance of education. While such legitimation contains a perennial slide towards becoming a comforting ideology that merely masks a rude reality, it can never become entirely so, because of the specificity of education as a practice. It is this specificity that accounts for the fact that there was always a minority for whom the corporate function and even the citizenship function were questionable as such. Thus, in this sense the critics are well placed. Their criticisms are rooted in a practice that cannot be entirely dissipated as long as any distinction remains between education and selling shoes. The practical and organizational core of the institution of thought is the seminar room with its interchange between younger, beginning thinkers and one or more older, experienced ones. This encounter is not an exchange of information (which produces nothing new), but precisely an encounter, an event. The event of embodied reflection animates the struggle for enlightenment. It is no wonder that the corporate university in most wealthier countries in the world cannot find sufficient resources to fund encounters in seminar rooms. While the public university of the welfare state was more accommodating, it also contained a tendency towards imparting information to serve purposes decided elsewhere. Both citizenship and corporate models prefer the lecture hall with its many listeners and few experts to the common struggle of the seminar room. Lectures can be learned and witty. They can be benign,

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taken in moderation, but the core of the university is the search for a not yet discovered understanding, a still elusive formulation. This search produces enlightenment, not the supposed possession of knowledge itself that could be transmitted to the largest possible number of adherents. To define the university in this manner is not necessarily ‘idealistic’ in the sense of ignoring the material realities that make the university possible and that invade its practices. It is simply a definition through the best of what the university does, based in a specific activity which the university did not create but to which it has given form. This activity concretizes enlightenment as the most fundamental and universal human task.3 Thus, the core of the university is the encounter between students and faculty, and it is their responsibility to undertake that encounter in a spirit of enlightenment. Otherwise, what they do could be done better elsewhere. A community engaged in the search for knowledge enacts critical thinking. The justification for academic freedom lies in the activity of critical thinking. Genuine searching requires criticism of received truths and constituted powers and demands the mutual criticism of students and teachers based in the quality of their ideas rather than their social positions. Criticism is of the idea, not the person; it is compatible with mutual respect, and in fact demands and reinforces such respect. Though embodied in the seminar room, this activity cannot be confined to the university. It has a wider importance that provokes a critique of all those forces which prevent enlightenment and which entrench domination and ignorance. Occasionally, thinkers who have taken this project seriously have been drawn to articulate in the public realm as social criticism the ethic that is built into the practice of university teaching and learning. For this, they have often been stigmatized by the powerful in universities and society as ‘outspoken academics’ who have wandered outside their supposed academic specialties without understanding, or even repressing, the ethic that is embodied in all such inquiries, specialist or otherwise. The socially relevant critical thinker has no guarantee of truth – any more than any other human – but the corrective for this is in an expanded sphere of critical thinking, not in its curtailment. One must ask who is really outspoken in the society in which we live. Corporations, governments, and the media say long and loud what they have to say. They shout from all corners and are impossible to avoid in today’s propagandistic consumer environment. When these powers stigmatize an academic for being outspoken, the intent is clear: it is to keep public awareness and

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debate from extending to these powers and their social role. Universitybased thinkers are not the only ones to raise such issues, but they are one crucial source for social criticism.4 A conception of the university based in the educative encounter that holds social relationships up to critical inquiry necessarily finds itself in conflict with entrenched powers. The public university gained a certain autonomy by accepting the legitimacy of the corporate economy outside its gates and by confining its criticisms to the classroom. This bargain was possible through a conception of ‘spheres of society’ in which different principles prevailed. While the university was dedicated to critical thinking, the economy was dedicated to profit-making. One has only to remember the outrage that visited from all corners when this separation was breached. In the 1960s the student movement expected ‘the critical university’ to play a social function as well, and thereby drew the wrath of both public powers and university administrators, whose distance from economic powers was thus threatened. But it is important to remember that the separation was not breached first by the student movement: it was the role of the university in war research, anti-union activities, and job training for the corporate elite and its technical lieutenants such as engineers and personnel department flunkies, it was corporate funding of technological developments, it was the failure of the university’s critical function, that provoked the student movement’s rejection of the separation of spheres. The critique of the ‘knowledge factory’ was a key element of that movement. Indeed, the ‘spheres of society’ seemed to apply only to a restriction of the critical function of the university, and not to its increasingly strong ties with corporate and warfare powers. It was an uneasy conception at best, though it offered more independence than the subsequent corporate university ever could. During the 1960s, in a period of expansion of the universities driven by the requirements of a more scientific–technical, bureaucratic capitalism, protections of academic freedom became more widespread and extensive. For a short moment, professors were in demand and could expect greater protection of their role.5 Those who are senior faculty in universities today formed their expectations of tenure, peer review, and academic freedom of inquiry and expression during this period.6 It is hard for us to resist a narrative of decline, but one element of resistance must be to understand that the greater university freedoms institutionalized in the 1960s constituted a specific moment of gain; they did not reflect some natural state, as has often been assumed. We must also keep in mind the predominantly individual

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nature of academic freedom thus understood, though the gains in democratic self-government within the university were of a more cooperative nature. The corporate university has been waging a battle for some years now against those aspects of the public university that are rooted in the gains of the 1960s. The main weapons in this battle have been fiscal. Right-wing governments at the provincial and national levels have begun their restructuring with the claim that there is not, or is no longer, sufficient money to sustain current social insurance/welfare practices; in the same way, university administrations have justified their restructuring with the claim that governments are no longer willing to support the public university and that they have no other option but to seek funding from other sources. This is by no means an empty claim. Public funding of universities has been falling steadily for decades now, and important issues about the functions and purposes of the university need to be addressed. University administrations, on the whole, have avoided addressing these questions directly because of their bureaucratic (rather than political) approach to society and have presented the new fiscal environment as an inescapable force that has turned them towards corporate sources of funding. Dedicated funding, grant money, distance education money grabs … The university is no longer a unity that can define its own priorities; funding of specific functions prevails, and the whole is simply the sum of its dominant parts. Increases in corporate funding have supported some aspects of the university at the expense of others and have helped to transform the public university into the corporate university with barely a word of debate. Mainly, this has been done without dismantling procedures and practices directly but rather by simply voiding them of real content. All debates are cut off by referring to fiscal Realpolitik and the priorities of the dean or higher administration. The corporate university has thus come into being in concert with two things: the undermining of democratic decision-making in the university, and the rise of the power of administrations that are responsible only to government and corporate sources of funding and not to the internal core of the university based in the educative experience. The suppression of genuine debate about the function of the university and its social role has been key to this transformation. While fiscal abandonment by a waning welfare state is certainly a reality, the absolute necessity of a corporate transformation is not. The absence of debate on this crucial fact has spread throughout the corporate university like a virus: we are now confronted with dis-

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courses of necessity and decline on all fronts. But this helplessness is a product, not a fact. The tail is now wagging the dog: administrations and administrators run the university; there seems no alternative to corporate funding – which means corporate priorities – and the university’s critical function has become vestigial. Those who keep it alive are used as window dressing so that others do not have to see what’s going on. Academic procedures mediate between the corporate world and the actual functioning of the university (see Hall, in this volume). These procedures are the result of a history of the university, which has always accommodated itself to the capitalist environment but at previous stages gained a certain independence from it. The history of struggles for academic freedom is one major component of this; another is struggles for equity. The present demands of corporatization have generated a pressure that is eroding this hard-won independence. Thus, the administration voids procedures and rules of self-government within the university, and when it cannot do this, it violates them altogether. One current task, then, is to defend the rules and procedures within the university that limit the administration’s version of corporate rule and at the same time extend the democratization of the university in light of the principles that led to academic freedom in the first place. All this is based in the educative encounter of the seminar room that animates those with a vision of the democratic university. What happens when the corporate university violates academic freedom (as it is likely to do when establishing the corporate agenda on the remains of the public university)? There is good reason why recent years have brought us a number of academic freedom cases that go to the heart of the functioning of the corporate university. Well, they don’t come down to your office and announce that that is what they are going to do. Since there are still vestigial procedures and rules that make such violations look bad, they must rationalize their actions in another way. Since they are, obviously, responsible administrators doing a necessary job, the fault cannot be theirs. If fault is not theirs, it must lie elsewhere. Thus, a frantic search ensues for those others who are at fault. Finger pointing at ‘troublemakers’ who ‘do not play by the rules’ is essential to the administrative diktat of corporate rule. This phenomenon has emerged in all the recent cases of violation of academic freedom in Canada – Nancy Olivieri, David Healy, David Noble. All three have been transformed miraculously and instantaneously from respected academics worthy of high-ranking jobs and research grants into irresponsible troublemakers and charlatans. The logic of the scapegoat

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underpins the violations essential to the corporate university’s transformation of the purpose of the university. If critical thinking is out, ritual blaming is in. Here is the logic: The university has procedures that, theoretically at least, rule out non-academic grounds and ‘old-boy’ connections and rumours. If the administration wants to make a decision based on such rumours, old-boy connections, or non-academic grounds, then it must interfere with the procedures. Then, if anyone points this out, they must defend themselves from wrongdoing. (After all, even if rules were broken, they were only doing what’s necessary in the current corporate environment.) If they are not wrong in interfering in this way, then someone else must be culpable: the people who pointed out the violation, the committees that made the overturned decisions, and most of all, the person whose academic freedom has been violated. The violated one is transformed in an instant into a powerful source of wrongdoing, thus justifying the ‘special means’ that were necessary to avoid this error. Expel the outside agitator! Then our nice and peaceful university will function smoothly again. This strategy works well, given the congenital timidity of the professor type relative to the current corporate forces that make all of this seem the only ‘realistic’ option. Such expulsions do not occur only in the publicized cases. They occur also wherever students and faculty overstep the bounds of a narrow specialty to ask more general and universal questions. Keeping everyone within defined and safe boundaries ensures that difficult questions will not be asked. The corporate university cannot address openly such difficult questions, thus it must make sure they do not arise. Therefore, it promotes and polices a confinement of inquiry to technical questions within pre-established boundaries – a confinement that violates not only the procedures but also the function and rationale of the university as an institution of free inquiry. It is a university in name only, and then only because the right to so name it as such is vested exclusively in the government. The culture of compliance that prevails today allows the corporate university to veil its usurpation of the name. The first task is thus to overstep these boundaries, to raise the larger questions, to make the issues public, and thus to fulfil the social task of the university by bringing critical thinking to the public outside the university. Contemporary society is pervaded by knowledge-based innovations of all kinds. Medical research, new drugs, technical innovations, and so forth affect millions of people daily. Government institutions of regulation and testing, such as Health Canada and Environment Canada,

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have been seriously degraded by underfunding such that they often have to rely on privately funded testing to make their decisions. Without an independent body capable of testing the claims of such knowledge-based innovations, the public is left vulnerable. I take it as obvious that corporations that test their own products – from which they intend to make huge profits – are not genuine sources of independent assessments. University-based researchers, in contrast, have both the expertise and the independence to make assessments in the public interest. Moreover, they are able to raise questions concerning the larger social context and the consequences of such innovations (when they are not hampered by being confined to delimited technical questions). In sum, the corporate agenda needs university-based research because it has a greater purchase on the public trust due to its presumed independence; yet at the same time, it must undermine this independence because it tends to raise questions that might challenge the corporate agenda. A politics of the democratic university in the corporate age will have to address this contradiction; to do so, it will have to take its critique and agenda beyond the university faculty, to the students, whose education is being compromised by corporate-dominated research and to the public, whose welfare is being sacrificed to it. This point is perhaps easy to see in the case of medical and technical innovations, but it is no less pertinent to those who study the social sciences and humanities. Relevant thinking about social structures and practices, their history and their prognosis, is required by a democratic society that relies on informed citizens capable of sensible decisions. Academic freedom has an important role to play in a democratic society, and a defence of the democratic university cannot succeed unless it reaches the active citizens with whom it has a common interest. Social democratization and the democratic university, while not exactly equivalent, cannot ultimately prosper without each other. The policy of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) on academic freedom recognizes this connection. It begins: ‘The common good of society depends on the search for knowledge and its free exposition. Academic freedom in universities is essential to both these purposes in the teaching function of the university as well as in its scholarship and research … Academic freedom does not require neutrality on the part of the individual. Rather, academic freedom makes commitment possible.’7 Its logic proceeds from the good of society, to the search for knowledge, to the necessity for free inquiry in the search for knowledge, to the necessity for individual commitment and expres-

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sion in this search. To this degree, my argument is nothing more than an independent and somewhat more extended statement of this logic. But note: the CAUT policy ends with the statement that ‘academic freedom carries with it the duty to use that freedom in a manner consistent with the scholarly obligation to base research and teaching on an honest search for knowledge.’ Again, no disagreement, but the policy on academic freedom ends here with the defence of freedom of inquiry. It defends only the individual freedom of academics and extends neither to democratic decision-making within the university nor to the social responsibility of the university institution as such. At no point does the CAUT policy return to its point of departure in the concept of social good. In this respect, my argument suggests more. Society as a whole, through its dominant powers, always makes decisions, not only about inquiry but also about the application of knowledge. Health and technical innovations, and also social and political ideas, have social applications. One should investigate them freely, but should one remain silent about their application? Is there no concept of academic freedom that pertains to the question of whether the products of free inquiry are being properly and sensibly applied? Certainly, this kind of evaluation always takes place in some form. Powerful institutions such as corporations, governments, and the media engage in it regularly. When academic freedom does not extend to the evaluation of knowledge-based applications, it is completing only half its task. The question, ‘What is a social good?’ must be raised both in universities and outside them. This is the connection between the democratization of the university and the democratization of society. Without it, academic freedom in the corporate university is just a wizened, empty shell capable only of justifying the freedom of researchers to accept the large grants proffered by private interests. It is sustained by the logic of the scapegoat. A democratic society demands a more lively conception of academic freedom. Its logic must be one of free inquiry and expression complemented by responsible evaluations of the social good and actual applications of research. The corporate university undermines academic freedom and selfgovernment entirely. But the possibility of a democratic university that respects individual academic freedom while enacting an institutional social freedom through democratic decision-making haunts both the recent history of the university and its contemporary situation. Recalling this history should establish the importance of defending those gains made in an earlier period, but it should also avoid the narrative of

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decline. The public university repressed, no less than the corporate university, the democratic possibility that is rooted in the respectful give-and-take of cooperative learning in the seminar. This possibility cannot be kept alive unless we raise basic questions about the meaning and function of the university in a corporate environment and pressing for the greatest possible cooperative autonomy that will sustain criticism of that environment. Nothing less befits the institution of thought.

NOTES 1 The precapitalist medieval university and its ancient progenitor, the Platonic academy, are outside the scope of this essay, which will not reach any further back than the nineteenth century. 2 My involvement in such matters has been, until recently, only through daily university politics. The motivation for trying to think more systematically about them derives from the recent (since 2001, as yet unresolved) controversy over administrative violation of academic freedom in the proposed hiring of David Noble by the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Documents relevant to this controversy can be found at www.ianangus.ca. 3 See my ‘Appendix Two: Why Are We in the University?’ to ‘Sharing Secrets, or, On Burrowing in Public,’ in Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory in Honour of Jerry Zaslove, ed. Ian Angus (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001), 376. 4 Another important source, which also often stimulates research questions for academics, is social movements. I have discussed the impact of social movements on democracy and public debate in Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2001) and Primal Scenes of Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 5 Michiel Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), chapter 10. 6 One other aspect of this expansion was the entry of a large and dominant number of American professors into the Canadian university system. While the politics of such professors was by no means uniform, this had the effect of marginalizing specifically Canadian issues and traditions of thought, calling forth the report The Struggle for Canadian Universities, ed. Robin Mathews and James Steele (Toronto: New Press, 1969). The argument that Canadian universities need to be rooted in Canadian society in order to

Academic Freedom in the Corporate University 75 effectively address its problems retains its relevance even though the more recent government regulation concerning hiring has altered the American predominance. University culture often opposes such regulation because it is committed to a free-floating idea of excellence that is rooted in that 1960s dominance – an idea that has had a huge impact in that it has muted the critical potential of Canadian universities. See my discussion of Canadian nationalism in A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and Wilderness (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), chapter 2. 7 CAUT-ACPPU, Policy Statement on Academic Freedom (approved by the CAUT Council, May 1977), available at www.caut.ca/english/about/ policy/academicfreedom.asp (accessed 14 July 2003). After this text was written, a new Policy Statement on Academic Freedom was passed by the CAUT Council (in November 2005) and posted on their website (in 2006). The wording of this policy differs in some respects, and is improved in some respects, from the one to which I refer, but these changes do not affect the interpretation and argument given in the body of this essay.

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4 A Revolutionary Learning: Student Resistance/Student Power mark edelman boren

Historically, students have generated tremendous power and provoked large-scale social, political, and economic changes. They have reformed universities and social institutions, toppled regimes, and transformed national politics and economic practices. As we enter the twenty-first century, which is already proving to be as dangerous and as politically complex an age as any, the role of the student is an extremely important one. Forces in the world both ancient and new are shaping our respective and common futures, and students are in a unique position to influence those forces, which range from ethnic strife, war, terrorism, and physical exploitation to globalization and economic imperialism. While at the university, students are not simply preparing to enter the ‘real world’; they are firmly embedding themselves in it. Student activists are, more often than not, trying to make visible the web of forces in which they as citizens are caught, and endeavouring to become participants in determining the nature of their societies. The power that students wield is specific to their existence in the university environment and historically has hinged on the formation of student collectives. It is vital to recognize student activists’ efforts in terms of power explicitly – that is, as vectors vying for dominance in an ever-shifting field of contending forces. Manifestations of student power are dependent upon struggles between oppositional and competing forces; they are thus always political in nature, even when a given action is over local or, from all appearances, benign concerns. The formation of student collectives is itself an overtly martial act in a struggle for self-definition and political strength. And universities are sites of extreme if sometimes hidden contention. In the past decade alone, for example, a tremendous number of universities around the

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world have buckled under government and economic pressure to restructure and enact educational reforms based on business models. By examining key instances of student resistance and viewing them in terms of power relations, tactics, and political struggles, we can see more clearly how student power operates and why activists’ efforts have succeeded or failed in the past.1 Of course, such investigations will help interested parties develop and refine future actions. Conceptualizing Student Resistance The concept of ‘resistance’ is central to student actions. Students have historically situated their activist efforts as ‘responses’ to injustices or aggression, viewing their causes and themselves as the targets of oppression or suppression. This is not mere narcissism, however; it is highly strategic. The act of defining the forces of suppression facilitates the articulation of student positions, suggests the need for collectives to form, situates the field of combat, and determines the tactics to be used. Student actions arise in the midst of ongoing conflicts between competing forces in complex systems of power. They do not simply ‘occur.’ When students claim the role of the subjugated, they are situating a priori the struggle’s martial nature, and at the same time are making a pre-emptive move to claim ethical high ground – an effective tactic for garnering additional support and for widening conflicts. Students have not traditionally had a vast array of weapons at their disposal, but they have become quite adept at using the ones they have. From the beginning of the modern university, the success of student resistance has hinged largely on the ability to involve greater social and economic forces. Students can physically fight for a cause and sometimes do so quite effectively, but such cases are rare. In 1968, students led a riot that caused de Gaulle to flee Paris temporarily. But the more effective power that students wield tends to come from activating larger forces in society, such as labour or public pressure. When more than 100,000 students occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese government was not impressed. But when one million residents and workers gathered to support those students, and threatened to turn the demonstration into a popular uprising, the state had to act and chose to suppress the demonstration with violence. The important lesson for the purposes of this essay is that the students of Beijing, though their occupation ultimately failed, were able to situate themselves as oppressed and to articulate a

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position that had a wide social appeal. And they did so in such a way as to raise an oppositional force that grew into a social collective large enough to challenge an extremely powerful government. History suggests that the core group of activists need not be large to generate a sizeable following. When a very small group of American Indian activists, led by a Native American student named Richard Oakes, occupied and staked a claim to the abandoned prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay in 1969 under provisions cited in an 1868 treaty between the United States and the Sioux, they garnered tremendous public support for their cause. Local and national television coverage drew supporters and forestalled a government crackdown. The U.S. Coast Guard blockaded the island, but residents ran the blockade to deliver food and medical supplies. Although the island was eventually retaken by federal agents – after internal strife weakened the core protest group – the original action succeeded in raising the profile and political cachet of the Native American movement.2 It is rare, though, that students succeed in physically challenging the power of a government, for they are too often ill-equipped to win direct confrontations. That said, images of troops or police beating or killing students can incite a powerful popular response.3 This is why students often resort to confrontational strategies to provoke violence, especially when the media are present. In this way, even a tiny collective can suddenly expand into a mass movement. A great number of student demonstrations are non-violent in nature, and the decision to hold this sort of protest is a tactical one. Non-violent sit-ins and demonstrations can capture the moral high ground by forcing institutions and governments to use physical force to end them; this confirms the oppressive nature of those powers and thereby justifies the students’ cause – a manoeuvre that can widen the sphere of a conflict. Although great provocateurs, students have always had trouble managing power and steering larger political forces, especially after they have seemingly defeated their opposition; that is to say, what makes for a successful campaign or revolt rarely makes for good government. One thing this suggests is that the efficacy of student power is often contingent on its own formulation as resistance. In 1848, students staged an organized revolt that for a brief time liberated the city of Vienna; they then formed an Academic Legion and a Committee of Safety and through these, effectively ran the city for a few months. But internal conflicts and power struggles within the Academic Legion and between it and labour organizations in the city caused the movement to fracture

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and fall apart. Subsequently, the city was easily retaken by regional troops.4 When immediate threats or well-defined forces of oppression subside, resistance actions lose strength and collectives disintegrate. Protesting students can and often do find themselves momentarily in positions of power, but unless they recognize that the context has changed and can make the transition from radicals to politicos, their tenure is relatively brief. Most often, what happens in large-scale uprisings is that students provoke a political or social movement and then cannot control the forces at work, even those they wield themselves. When students spark a coup d’état, which they did on many occasions in the twentieth century, they often deliver a country into the hands of another powerful figure or organization, one more prepared to rule. On a smaller scale, when students protest effectively for changes within the university, concessions strategically given by institutions can fracture or destroy a movement by changing the political context or by eliminating the points around which the collective formed. For example, when students concerned with campus diversity organized a hunger strike to draw attention to a lack of ‘ethnic professors’ on San Francisco State University’s campus in 1999, they succeeded immediately in getting a few professors hired. In making those concessions, the university avoided a major media event in which it would have been charged with racist practices; this would have damaged its reputation and perhaps cost it revenues.5 Student Knowledge / Student Power The history of student protest must be viewed as a history of power relations. Although student activists cast their struggles as a resistance to suppression originating from above, they are actually in the midst of avenues of power that circulate in all directions. Student power manifests itself through exchanges with other institutions, be they economic, social, educational, political, or physical. Thus any act of resistance, no matter how small, is important because it generates energy in the articulation of a given cause and wields power in action. The shift from idea to action is also vital to the production of revolutionary subjectivity. The university by its very nature is especially conducive to the formation of student revolutionaries. Students lead paradoxical lives: within the confines of the institution and the society in which they live, bound by political and economic realities, they are taught to challenge them-

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selves and the knowledge by which they have come to understand their world. They are taught to probe the limits of the known. It is no wonder that while many students do learn the rules of a discipline and accept their education as a step towards assuming ‘productive roles’ in a given social order, others – for a variety of reasons – do not. Discourses of student activism, if not of radicalism, promote the formation of identities that thrive in the conflict between competing social forces. There are many reasons why the modern university is ‘a breeding ground of activism.’ It is the site par excellence for the formation of revolutionary subjectivity because it is often a protected if not autonomous environment in which the dynamic and unstable interplay of many different and competing social and political discourses is visible. The conflicts that students witness between ideas, ideologies, methods, and interests affect how they respond to the competing discourses around them. A recent example of this happened at Yale. Students there discovered that the school’s janitors were not earning a living wage, and chose to intervene; the conflict facing students took place between discourses of social ethics, institutional economics, class privilege, and student activism. It is not surprising that some students – who are encouraged to challenge ideas and compare systems of thought in the classroom – attempt to translate theory and critical analysis into praxis. Yet the manufacturing of ‘radicals’ and ‘student unrest’ serves universities as well, by highlighting the need for devices to control students, by defining ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ behaviour, and by generating guidelines and rituals for dealing with ‘disruption.’ The existence of activists or ‘agitators’ on campus also suggests a need for ‘productivity markers’ such as ‘progress tests’ and time-to-degree limitations to keep students focused on courses rather than causes. It is no coincidence that financial aid often is linked to a student’s behaviour and academic record. We cannot look at the history of student resistance actions as necessarily linear, progressive, or causal, even at a given movement. Students’ actions cannot be isolated from broader historical and social contexts. One weakness of analyses of particular student movements is that they tend to suggest a narrative of causal events and a progressive amassing or loss of power. Such narratives can be informative – for example, histories of the Students for a Democratic Society and of the Iranian student movement of the 1970s tell us how they were organized and developed. Yet once a student movement generates the power to provoke a reaction from a more powerful and entrenched institution or

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government, it is transformed by its new context. This is why the flashpoints of student resistance can offer insights into larger and often hidden webs of social and political power. The very unpredictability of student movements and actions – of how and when they form and what happens once they do – is one reason why they are a perennial threat to institutions and the status quo. A tremendous amount of effort goes into organizing and educating activists, and most resistance movements are grass-roots affairs. But whether the organizers are able to garner effective support often depends on their ability to articulate wider concerns and to clearly define the oppressive forces against which it is necessary to act. When they do these things effectively, they can jump-start a collective, and a widescale movement can blossom, sometimes almost overnight. The spontaneous and seemingly chaotic nature of student movements is one of their strengths; because they are unpredictable, entrenched opponents cannot strategically anticipate them. This is why student actions are potentially one of the greatest resources for anti-establishment or ‘radical’ causes that challenge the powers that be. It is no accident that individuals and organizations fighting the twenty-first-century ogres – neoliberalism, globalization, the corporatization of the university, imperialism, war, and other trends that seem overwhelmingly vast and sophisticated – are endeavouring to link campus-based support around the world. Amassing Student Power The first Western universities were founded in the Middle Ages as loose guilds for scholars. The word universitas meant simply a collective of students similar to other labour guilds. Students realized that by forming collectives, they could threaten to relocate to another town unless the local costs of room and board were lowered to accommodate them. It is important to know that governments and other benefactors did not originally form universities as sanctuaries for the pursuit of knowledge or the production of workers; rather, scholars formed them expressly as a tactic for wielding economic power.6 In medieval Bologna, for example, students repeatedly left or threatened to leave the city to leverage reductions in living costs. In 1158, Frederick Barbarossa officially sanctified their scholarly enterprise as a favoured institution, by granting city scholars a power of protection. A subsequent three-year boycott of the city by the entire student body (1217–20) was particularly effec-

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tive at reducing local costs, but it was also important in that students were able to dictate educational reforms to their own university – reforms that included setting standards and practices of behaviour for the masters hired to teach them.7 In 1200 the University of Paris threatened to withdraw from the city after a town-and-gown riot in which a few students were beaten to death.8 Their collective action drew significant legal and economic concessions from the city. Students quickly carved a powerful niche for themselves, negotiating between local, governmental, and religious institutions, and resorting to economic, political, legal, and sometimes physical power. One tactical response by governments and religious institutions to thwart such boycotts was to donate buildings and land to university collectives. The scholars were subsequently reluctant to abandon these. Of course, resistance actions came with a cost. Town-and-gown riots were commonplace and often quite brutal. Throughout the fourteenth century, clashes between the citizens of Cambridge and of Oxford and the scholars studying in those towns ended with parties on both sides maimed or dead. One especially bloody conflict in 1354 in Oxford left the university decimated and a number of scholars scalped.9 In 1381, Cambridge’s officials and a contingent of citizens allied themselves with peasants to attack the local university. Armed with crossbows, axes, and scythes, Cambridge residents overran the university; their rampage was stopped only after a neighbouring aristocrat’s personal army intervened.10 Following such actions, however, the state repeatedly awarded the universities increased economic power over their host towns (after all, many of the students had important political and familial connections to the aristocracy). For example, by the end of the century, through collective actions, battles, and political wrangling, Oxford University won sovereignty over the town and control of its market. Medieval students’ conflicts shed light on contemporary campus struggles because those earlier resistances were mainly and explicitly struggles for economic and political power. Students had political channels open to them that local residents often did not; that said, it was their manoeuvres as organized collectives that led to their greatest advances. In the modern world, university power often seems to flow from the top down, due in large part to the gradual reshaping of institutions over time by those who have had longer relationships with them. A student may spend only a brief time at a university; administrators and governments have more time to influence the forms of these

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institutions. Donating buildings in order to prevent student boycotts is an excellent example of this. Modern strategies have included sanctioning student associations, awarding financial aid, and designating ‘official’ areas for protest on campuses. All of these ‘opportunities’ have the effect of controlling student behaviour. But the top-down image of power that has been carefully crafted by administrations is still often challenged. The UNAM strikes in Mexico, the U.S. anti-sweatshop movement, and the anti-imperialist/antiprivatization efforts on many African campuses remind us that student collectives are still forces to be contended with. Institutions and governments are more sophisticated than ever in their strategies for dealing with students, and over the years they have refined their methods of control; even so, students today have unprecedented access to tactics that employ economic, political, legal, moral, and social power. To understand how student resistance actions generally succeed, we need to look at the history of student collectives and their competition with institutional forces and other collectives. During the rise of the medieval university, bureaucracies of masters and administrators formed to push their own agendas, and they could afford to wait for moments when student collectives were relatively weak to effect changes. By the nineteenth century, European models of universities had been exported around the world through imperialism and mimicry. Unfortunately for many governments seeking stability, the discourses and ideas that produced revolutionary subjects were exported as well. Realizing that schools could be employed to control volatile youth (this began with lower educational levels first), governments strongly supported institutional reforms that emphasized discipline, and government support shifted away from students and towards university administrations. Students have tended, however, to resist overt government interference on campuses. In the late nineteenth century, Russian universities were so filled with revolutionary students that they were often unmanageable; students terrorized unpopular lecturers and sporadically held massive strikes for educational and political reforms.11 The radicalization of Russian students was in part a reaction to the tight control that police troops exerted over political demonstrations, but there was also a popular student discourse of radicalism sweeping the Russian universities. Prevented from publicly demonstrating, student activists resorted to violence; some of them even assassinated a number of unpopular government officials. As a result, saber- and whip-wielding Cossacks were repeatedly unleashed on demonstrations and on relatively innocuous

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student gatherings. Political students were forced underground. As radical groups became more and more extreme in their methods, they lost their broad-based student support and were marginalized and suppressed. In the twentieth century, students began to modernize their collective power. German students were especially adept at forming political and social collectives, and these organizations came to be so fashionable that students often belonged to three or four. Most of these were academic in nature, but a great many promoted German nationalism. Students organized locally and then formed national umbrella groups. By the rise of the Third Reich, much of the German student body was connected through a vast network of social and political alliances. The National Socialist German Student Group, a branch of the Nazi Party, managed to capitalize on the nationalist fervour and dominate the student groups, in large part because its networks were so pervasive. By funding lectures, debates, and student activities, as well as student groups directly, the Nazi Party was able to take advantage of university student collectives to promote its own agenda. Of course, once in power, the Nazis decimated political dissent and free thought in German universities. The organizational strategies of the pre-Nazi German students were copied throughout the world, and by the mid-twentieth century, universities around the world were connected by student organizations and packed with a huge number of student groups. In the United States, an explosion of activism occurred in the early twentieth century, with students forming a great many political and educational organizations. Many of these were socialist and pro-labour, and some of them became extremely powerful through national networks, only to fall victim to the Red Scare that swept the country in the 1940s and 1950s. The National Student League and the Student League for Industrial Democracy were very effective, however, at forcing university reforms through mass demonstrations and strikes.12 In 1968 in France, students were able to organize enough collectives to hold strikes that effectively shut down the city. By forging bonds with labour (uniting with Renault factory workers, for example), students turned what might have been only a Left Bank affair into a national crisis.13 A decade later, in 1979, an Iranian student group protesting U.S. imperialism seized the American Embassy in Tehran, holding a number of American citizens hostage.14 Finding themselves at the centre of an international media blitz for which they were unprepared, the students became pawns in a struggle over the government of Iran itself. Their

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provocative action, however, shifted political power enough to determine the future of the country. Thus the collective has always been crucial to generating and wielding student power. But individual collectives are usually in and of themselves not enough to challenge major institutions. To bring about large-scale reforms or challenge strong institutions, students generally must form alliances with other social groups in order to widen their power base. From the anti–Vietnam War movement in the United States in the 1970s to the pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in the 1980s, what modern student movements have shown us is that the means are there to generate large social support quickly. In the current age of information technologies and globalization, activists have access to more and more tools for broadening support for given causes (see Dyer-Witheford, chapter 2, in this volume). Some Recent Conflicts on Campus: Globalization, Imperialism, and the Corporatization of the University Today it is clear that many student struggles that have historically seemed isolated are in fact connected to one another. The anti-sweatshop movement in the United States, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) strikes, the increases in tuition fees in countries ranging from Argentina to England to Australia, the antiwar/anti-imperialism movement, the standardization of curricula, university marketization agendas, and the stampede to embrace information technology systems – all these are part of a web of power that binds universities around the globe. Students are more implicated than ever before in the political and social changes happening in the world; and they themselves are participating in those transformations, whether they acknowledge it or not. In the past two decades, as a consequence of government underfunding, public universities around the world have been restructuring themselves as quasi-businesses. Universities have continued to increase enrolments but without increasing the numbers of faculty positions at the same rate. This has created what is tactically referred to as an ‘efficiency problem.’ In the United States, the common solution has been to hire part-time faculty, who are paid less and who receive no medical benefits. The direct savings for institutions have been substantial. By casting the problem of overcrowded universities as a financial one, and by reforming these institutions as capitalist ventures, govern-

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ments and the universities themselves have created an apparent need to immediately and comprehensively restructure educational practice and facilities. In the new, corporate-based model, students are consumers who are buying products (an education and a degree) with the express intention of entering the professional workforce. Then in order to guarentee quality control, universities standardize curricula, evaluate and reward teachers based on performance (university-sanctioned competitiveness), and limit experimental, radical, ‘marginal,’ and other ‘inessential’ or ‘inefficient’ courses. Core classes are given priority, and faculty are pressured to teach them. Human interaction becomes limited as class sizes soar and information technologies are packaged (virtual classrooms and distance learning) in order to streamline the educational process. In sum, in the past decade universities around the world have sought to change the nature of higher education (see Angus, Hall, and Zaslove, in this volume). Of course, universities don’t restructure themselves overnight, and they generally don’t do so without encountering resistance. For example, during the 1980s and 1990s, students at the massive UNAM staged a series of strikes against the implementation of tuition fees and time-to-degree limits. The universities were literally falling apart due to underfunding, and because there were no time-to-degree limits, the UNAM campuses had become refuges for political activists. Tuition fees and time-to-degree limits were touted as a way to save the public university system; as an added bonus, they would professionalize and deradicalize campuses. Reformers pointed out that the fees were minimal and would only amount to a few U.S. dollars a year; UNAM students retorted that the reforms were unconstitutional, as citizens of Mexico are guaranteed education as a constitutional right. Repeatedly, UNAM officials tried to institute the reforms, and en masse the students went on strike, occupying the campuses and marching in numbers large enough to gridlock the streets of Mexico City, thus forcing the administration to back down. Local officials were deeply reluctant to use force to end the demonstrations, as the country was still haunted by the student massacres of the 1960s. The UNAM strikes are often cited as among the first to explicitly challenge the effects of globalization and neoliberal, free-market economic practices on university systems.15 UNAM students were successful for two decades due to their unity and sheer numbers. But their ability to repeatedly field those numbers was in large part due to the fact that every student would feel the effect of tuition increases. Realizing this, UNAM officials changed their tac-

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tics. They made some progress by initiating reforms piecemeal, such as time-to-degree limits and entrance exams. In 1999 they again tried to impose a comprehensive tuition hike, arguing that because of the dire state of Mexico’s economy, they simply had no choice. Students again went on strike, and occupied the campuses until the spring of 2000, when university officials announced that if the occupation continued, students would lose their credits for the year. Student solidarity suffered as the occupation leaders became more and more extreme in their rhetoric and ideologies. Disgruntled with the radicalization of the action, and fearing the potential impact the demonstration would have on their academic standing, most students withdrew their support of the strike. The collective crumbled, and UNAM officials brought in the police to remove the remaining activists. Immediately after the strike ended, fearing another demonstration, the administration abandoned its plan to impose tuition increases. But it has continued to seek less volatile ways to restructure along business models. Across Latin America – in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and elsewhere – students have been fighting similar attempts at university reform, although without the relative successes and international exposure of the UNAM students. During the 1990s, the restructuring and privatization of universities was also heavily promoted in many African countries by the World Bank. Because of their economic situations, many governments had little choice but to accept World Bank ‘growth grants’ and national debt reductions that were contingent on privatization reforms. At first, most reform efforts were met with tremendous resistance by faculty and students, but by the new millennium, the World Bank had softened its approach and African governments, needing aid more than ever, had accepted the Bank’s conditions for aid. In 2000, for example, the World Bank offered Nigeria a $100 million loan to oversee the ‘modernization’ of its ailing universities.16 Students in Africa have formed collectives to combat government control of institutions, and often encounter harsh repression. In 2001, thousands of Ethiopian students protesting for a greater role in university affairs were arrested after a rally at the University of Addis Ababa was brutally suppressed. More than forty demonstrators died, and hundreds were injured.17 That same year, students demonstrating against tuition increases at the University of Lubumbashi in Congo were viciously suppressed by riot police. In Kenya, students rioted at Egerton University after standardized progress examinations were instituted.

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Universities in cash-strapped countries such as Zambia and Zimbabwe have repeatedly been closed after faculty-led strikes over low or unpaid salaries. One significant problem that students in the South face in the neoliberal age – especially in countries with repressive regimes – is that universities have trouble retaining qualified teachers. Their universities are often held up as ‘models of inefficiency’ and thus deemed in need of World Bank–funded reforms. In Africa and Latin America, students’ strategies for resisting neoliberal education reforms have mostly involved traditional demonstrations and public protests. When police try to use force to break these up, they sometimes turn into riots. The success of these direct-conflict actions depends to a great extent simply on numbers. Protests against tuition increases and privatization have been held at universities in countries around the world, not just Latin America and Africa. Canada, Britain, Germany, India, and Australia, for example, have witnessed relatively large demonstrations and strikes related to the increasing cost of higher education and the restructuring of public universities. Again, the effectiveness of these protests hinges on the mobilization of large numbers of students, often with collateral public support. Recently, as part of their struggles against the economic superpowers, students, civil activists, and labour groups have fielded massive demonstrations against the WTO and the IMF at international summits. The WTO Seattle protest was important in our context because it reenergized student activists throughout North America and joined organizers of student and labour movements with anti-imperialists connected with the environmentalist, socialist, and anti-globalization movements. In the United States, students have generally not protested in significant numbers against the tuition increases and privatization efforts sweeping their campuses. But they have demonstrated effectively against specific neoliberal economic practices. For example, the American antisweatshop movement endeavoured to make universities exercise control over how clothing manufacturers were treating and paying foreign workers. Students held sit-ins and demonstrations on local college campuses and used negative press coverage to pressure university administrations into monitoring and regulating apparel manufacturers that had been licensed to market their school logos. The Worker Rights Consortium, a national organization, provided students with compelling figures and statistics, and offered them instructions and help for local protests, sit-ins, and hunger strikes. By 2003 the consortium had repre-

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sentatives on more than 150 campuses in the United States; this exerted tremendous pressure on the $2.5 billion apparel industry. The consortium was effective in part because it was able to clearly articulate ethical positions, backed by research, that appealed to large numbers of students. It also was adept at distributing information and creating a national network of activists through e-mail campaigns, websites, and highly visible protests. More recently, student activism in the United States received a jolt of energy in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and the American invasion of Afghanistan. But rampant patriotism, and the lack of a clear opponent for disparate activist groups to focus on meant that cohesion between various organizations remained elusive. Student concerns about the war, imperialism, corporate imperialism, and so forth were the subject of separate albeit related battles. But then the Bush administration set its eyes on Baghdad and the various activist collectives had something to unite around. On campuses all over the country, students organized local antiwar demonstrations and found willing participants who were already engaged in struggles against the Bush administration and big business. The obvious confluence of government and corporate interests (especially those related to oil and defence contracts) – historically situated in a context of cultural, economic, and religious imperialism – made it clear to a great many American students that the battles many smaller groups had been fighting locally were, in fact, part of an ongoing global enterprise. Of course, to students in many parts of the world, this was not an especially new revelation. Both established and new international networks coordinated simultaneous massive demonstrations in major cities around the world, including Tokyo, Mexico City, Washington, Berlin, London, and Paris. Through e-mails, online petitions, Internet spamming, websites, flyers, lectures, and workshops, student activists spread calls for action and distributed tactics of resistance. In the Anti-War March on Washington, for example, major political figures such as Jessie Jackson sought to connect the disparate interests of the participants – of those concerned for civil rights, for the environment, for social justice, for peace, for human rights – in an effort to define a cohesive national and international youth movement. The potential for a tremendous collective was there – one assembled from below. And the numbers, combined with the presence of political figures and media stars, brought international

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television coverage, which in turn made more people aware of the issues and the efforts. The growing movement stalled, however, shortly after the United States invaded Iraq. Internationally, student efforts shifted their focus to the imperialist nature of the American and British governments. Within the United States, nationalism immediately soared: those student-citizens who opposed the war were vehemently attacked as unpatriotic. The antiwar movement was unprepared for the speed with which American forces overthrew the Hussein regime and for the new context of a postwar Iraq. Unable to articulate and organize a cohesive stance against what quickly became perceived once again as separate issues – American imperialism, globalization, human rights, the environment, big business and so on – the larger social activist collectives disintegrated. Student Resistance and the Future The focus of this essay has been on how students have historically generated power by forming collectives, and some of the ways they have wielded it recently, ranging from direct conflicts and physical struggles to eliciting widespread public support for causes and coordinating efforts with other collectives, especially labour. It is clear that the world is still a very dangerous place and that students’ struggles will continue to be fought both on and off campuses. Students’ tendencies towards idealism, their seeking to put into practice the ideas they learn, their challenging of the status quo – all of these serve to refashion our societies to make them publicly rethink where they are heading. Similarly, how a government responds to its students suggests as much about the future of that society as it does about its current state. When students begin to resist, when they form collectives and articulate stances, they are telling us that they too have a stake in this world and are claiming the right to wrestle with the competing forces already vying for power in their societies. The history of student resistance suggests that revolutionary subjectivity develops through the critical awareness of existing political situations – an awareness combined with a social mandate to act. When they articulate a cause and generate collateral support, students can dramatically reshape their world. Thus the future of humanity may depend on the university containing a revolutionary subject.

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NOTES 1 The length and focus of this essay preclude any in-depth analysis of specific acts of student resistance. For analyses of the power relations of specific student actions, see my Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject (New York: Routledge, 2001). 2 Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996), 1–35. 3 The 1970 Kent State Massacre in the United States and the subsequent popular backlash is an excellent example of this. See Peter Davies, ed., The Truth about Kent State (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1973). 4 See R.J. Rath, The Viennese Revolution of 1848 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957). 5 As the subtitle indicates, my perspective on student resistance is heavily influenced by Michel Foucault, who argues that individuals are always caught in and manipulated by systems of power. His analysis of institutions and how individuals internalize rules and regulations to monitor their own behaviour is especially appropriate for understanding how modern universities work, especially in relation to state governments and economic imperialism. For discussions of power, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977); and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 6 See Willis Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914 (Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984). 7 See Charles Haskins, ‘The Earliest Universities,’ in Student Activism: Town and Gown in Historical Perspective, ed. Alexander DeConde (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 19–32. 8 Ibid. 9 See Robert Rait, Life in the Medieval University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 124. 10 Ibid., 25–7. 11 For a detailed discussion of the Russian student uprisings of this time, see Lewis Feuer, Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (New York: Basic Books, 1969). 12 See Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973).

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13 See Bernard Brown, Protest in Paris: Anatomy of a Revolt (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1974); Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989). 14 Parvis Daneshvar, Revolution in Iran (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996); Robin Wright, ‘Letter from Tehran: We Invite the Hostages to Return: The Extraordinary Changing View of Iran’s Revolution,’ New Yorker, 8 November 1999, 38–47. 15 See, for example, Rhona Statland de Lopez, ‘Mexico’s Largest University Ends Semester amid Student Occupation of the Campus,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 July 1999. 16 Burton Bollag, ‘Nigerian Universities Start to Recover from Years of Violence, Corruption, and Neglect,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 February 2002. 17 Wachira Kigotho, ‘Academics in Ethiopia Are Again under Siege,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 May 2001.

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5 Exiled Pedagogy: From the ‘Guerrilla’ Classroom to the University of Excess jerry zaslove

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again, finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony. Franz Kafka A distinction needs to be made between academic art based on classical and Renaissance models and the academicizing process by which all styles are in time tamed and made to perform in the circus of public taste. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Academia in Totalitaria’

In Lieu of a Prelude – ‘Lost Illusions’ and the ABCs of a Radical Pedagogy This essay is written in equal parts as a manifesto and a personal project. The underlying story is the fate of the ‘utopias’ related to education that came into being in the 1960s – a story that is now part myth, part prophecy. Myth in the sense that the universities and cultural movements of the 1960s are easy to parody, as films like The Deer Hunter, Pulp Fiction, and The Big Lebowski have made all too clear. Myth also in the sense that these cultural movements changed nothing and were eventually ‘tamed and made to perform’ – that they eventually succumbed to the lures of what Herbert Marcuse called the ‘onedimensional’ society.1 It is the story of the classroom – that part of teaching that cannot be reproduced in the way it happens. The underlying deep taboo on any

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teaching that moves outside of the always narrowing boundaries of university education requires an ethnographer, or a Dostoevskian narrator as in Notes from the House of the Dead, where the story is told as a living history through which one learns about others and oneself. Teaching is a form of colportage driven by a sense of non-contemporaneity – part legend, part fairy tale, part market exchange. It is driven by the wish that all learning were true and all truth more than a free-floating dream world.2 The idea of a radical pedagogy guided by utopian impulses is not new. However, in the wake of the Cold War and the brutal, futile war in Vietnam, it felt new for a very brief time. Although the most trenchant critiques of American life came from writers of the 1950s, it fell to the 1960s generation of middle-class students and fugitives from urban racism and suburban conformity to present themselves on the stage of history as 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. In retrospect, the illusion of changing the university into another kind of institution was prophetic of our helplessness in the face of the corporatism we live with now. Many chapters in this book document that illusion and that helplessness. The failures of the movements of the 1960s haunt my own story. Those failures were preceded by the terrible ambiguities of the 1950s, which themselves were preceded by a long list of critics who attacked monarchy, church, and state, but not the university as such. Yet universities were always places of privilege, capable of purging nonconformist elements, as the example of the German and Austrian universities’ compliance with dictatorial regimes makes clear. The McCarthy era in the United States showed that educational institutions were vulnerable not only to reactionary politics, but also to other forms of state coercion. But this is not a history of universities as besieged institutions. It is the story of the Archimedean point between the contemporary university’s technocratic rationality and any practice of radical pedagogy. This is a point of balance, struck between hope for something different and the one-dimensionality of today’s societies, with their experiences of overwhelmitude, exile, and social attention deficit disorder. For while the system has adjusted itself to the coming of the ultramass university, 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.

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Radical Pedagogy between Extremes When I began teaching in the early 1960s, universities seemed like heavenly cities: sanctuaries for thought, whose social contradictions had not yet become a part of the society of their times.3 It is a poignant travel in time to revisit the writers and books that were part of the critical educational public sphere of that time, such as Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (1956). Goodman described those times in his characteristically upbeat way: ‘Our immense productivity … has been pre-empted and parceled out in a kind of domainal system: but this grandiose and seemingly impregnable feudalism is vulnerable to an earnest attack. One has the persistent thought that if ten thousand people in all walks of life will stand upon their two feet and walk out and insist, we shall get back our country.’4 Nothing in the book, read then or now, would have given anyone but the most Pollyannaish room for hope. Except of course Goodman’s anarchistic belief in a human-centred community that could counter the most alienated forms of poverty, dependence, and brutality, and in the process free individuals from illegitimate authority. Goodman brought us the deep insight that pedagogy is classroom guerrilla work, although he never thought of himself as an academic. He assumed that individuals could understand that intellectual work creates ‘leaking boundaries’ within the multivocal relationship of classroom to student to university governance and eventually to social transformation. Many of the art practices of the time, for example, sought models that were subversive of the object of art as a patronized and saleable commodity in a so-called modernist art market. (At the time, modernism was seen as radical, not as ‘traditional’ and reactionary as it is today.) My own classroom practices, like those of many others, were participatory, conceptual, and sensuous; I hoped they would respect and explore the social and aesthetic functions of learning, as well as its internal experiences. Absurdity, humour, and playfulness along with fading Dada and soon-to-be-isolated surrealism were vital parts of this pedagogy. When Jürgen Habermas wrote about the German student movement in 1967, he admitted: ‘We sociologists did not reckon with the possibility that students could play a political role in developed industrial societies. The values of status-mobile and socially climbing middleclass families accord with the universalistic values of the university tradition.’5 Students feared that they were being reconstructed as uni-

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versities turned themselves into middle-class training grounds, and that this would reinforce economies of scale vis-à-vis all those expeditionary forces pitted against poor countries. The barrier against the exploitation of cultural capital was the student. The essence of these classrooms, however, cannot be explained as ‘pedagogy’; they were places of particular experiences that were fleeting and transient, that could be described as proto-incommensurable communities whose measure could not be taken with certainty, because in the long run these experiences were not easily transportable to other circumstances. They were made up of the ambiguity of the Vietnam War as the image both of complicity with the extremes of capitalism and of a society that really had no new name. Military-industrial complex? Administered society? Corporate America? One-dimensional society? Often the war was carried into the classroom, as if the individual professor was complicit with the system.6 This concreteness and particularity of the experience of war7 gave the illusion that the past could be mastered by mastering the university, which was itself a product of the unmastered past of the translation of economic production into cultural production. One did not grasp the depths of the contradictions. ‘Utopia is a historical concept,’ Marcuse declared in a 1967 talk. ‘It refers to projects for social change that are considered impossible.’ Impossible for what reasons? At the time Marcuse said these words, the students were the incipient intelligentsia. But when the Vietnam War ended the student movement ended as well – or migrated into the disciplines. Colonial liberation struggles emerged throughout the world of the poor but also helped open up this world to the overwhelming spread of capitalism and new nation-state power. One response to this crisis was to rebuild the universities as bastions and citadels. Thus 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. Growing Up Overwhelmed: Everything under One Roof – The Wal-Mart Model Franz Kafka’s parable, cited at the opening of this chapter, describes the assimilation of the natural anarchism of the human species into a soci-

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ety where the leopard takes revenge on the surplus of knowledge by creating more and more disciplines and research parks. The university has become the secular temple where everything that exists in knowledge can be found under one roof: the Wal-Martiversity. The utopian qualities that might have seeded the desire to transform the university must be placed against today’s University of Excess – the University of Scale – with all its pious phrases of ‘excellence’ coded to the lucrative word ‘research’ with all its bureaucratic superstructures. At the end of this essay I will argue that one must now become something of a saboteur with regard to the lessons of our times. The marketplace, brutal and conservative to its core, has now invaded every institution that would allow us to have a place where we do not tolerate a clientlike posture of total identification with the system.8 Pedagogy now means mostly how to teach in the classroom, how to make the universities into measurable, accountable, mobile, and ‘nimble’ benchmarks of the larger society. Universities have become ‘sites of excellence’ where totalities of knowledge and particularities of experience are collapsed into performance indicators. Under what circumstances teaching might exist in an age when money cuts into everything else by the Damocletian sword of profit is anyone’s guess. But what is certain is that today there is no intellectual vanguard leading a discussion of the pedagogy that would address the total university that conditions what knowledge is. The utopian period of the critique of university education can be illustrated with a few names and dates. In our anti-utopian age, during which ‘utopia’ has become a synonym for ‘totalitarian’ – creating amnesia with regard to the utopian stream of educational critique – the following names and works have been exiled to the world of ‘the gods that failed’: Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (1967); Maxine Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision (1965); The New Left Reader, edited by Carl Oglesby (1969); The Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper (1968); Protest and Discontent, edited by Bernard Crick and William A. Robson (1970); David Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence (1970); George Dennison, The Lives of Children (1969). One knows from Daniel Boorstin’s The Image (1962) and from C. Wright Mills that Eisenhower’s campaign in 1956 used advertising firms for the first time to sell the presidential image of total power. And there was McLuhan and more McLuhan, and let us not forget that Time magazine in 1966 exploited the ‘image’ of the hippie and the yippie, the SDS, and the ‘Chicago’ generation as its ‘Man of the Year.’ The New Left discovered what the older generation – my own – had known all along:

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that the United States had become a system of professional managers manipulating public opinion about the Vietnam War. Journals like Telos were seriously attempting to link European thought to a new politics. And then there were the European émigrés and exiles who spoke from the heart of history – most importantly Herbert Marcuse, whose essay ‘The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition’9 already sounded the death knell of the New Left’s ability to form an organization that, like the Old Left, would address the non-technological needs of the unprivileged. To recall this today is like sighting old cars in the slow lanes of the educational freeways. These names gave experiential weight to the often terminal radicalism of the counterculture especially after the counterculture disappeared. The point: class analysis, and the critique of schooling as a mass of disciplines. The issues have now become the growth patterns of the multiversity and finding ways to recycle the 1960s into new disciplines and eventually to create the ‘Market Model University.’10 That is the alpha and omega of my story and of the exilic paradigm at large. Since the Vietnam War ended, radical pedagogy has become caught in the dilemma of the client-student who has regressed to dependency on the university’s mandate on the one hand to provide careers and survival skills, and on the other to professionalize critique and thus accommodate it within incommensurable disciplinary boundaries. But one risks sentimental nostalgia by complaining in these postmodern times, when, after all, universities have created complex disciplines with newly minted high status. Yet the suspicion remains: the university has been remade on the Wal-Mart model, so that everything is available in any size or quantity, and with no centre. In this context, radical pedagogy becomes an exiled form of education in search of a utopian critique. With all these challenges, we must again search for bolt holes and breathing spaces in the system that will allow us to take a more Brechtian defamiliarizing position with regard to the now universal claims that universities are part of the marketplace that forms their identity. What has been lost? And what remains of past struggles over a utopian pedagogy? By whom, and for whom, is the struggle being waged today? How do we counter the social pressures of the market, and of the courtiers, courtesans, and commissars of power? Chomsky puts it well, if perhaps too simply: To speak truth to power is a particularly honorable vocation. One should seek out an audience that matters – and furthermore (another important

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qualification), it should not be seen as audience, but as a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively. We should not be speaking to, but with. That is second nature to any good teacher, and should be to any writer and intellectuals as well.11

This call to speak ‘with’ and to find a community in which the radical nature of education itself lives has been my own guerrilla credo for more than forty years as a teacher. I have been persuading, cajoling, engaging, and searching for this community of truth-telling, not for the illusion of changing the university in order to aggrandize the role of the intellectual, or even to make the university itself the scapegoat for society’s ‘extremes,’ but rather as the life or death proposition it is: being free in a classroom might be as close to a portable radical utopia as one can get. It may be the incommensurable community – a crossroads, a ghetto in a train station, a Kairos where one crosses boundaries and lives without passports, identity cards, or allegiances to ‘vocational’ or professional careers. 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. There can be no doxa about the classroom – we must reject the entire carnival of learning, including the caricature of the university professor as an obsolete intellectual. Rather, the classroom must be seen as a place of exploration for exiles from the system. It must welcome fools and tricksters and any negativity in the approach to culture and art. The task is to find new audiences, new individuals, new readers even as they may be disemployed migrants. A Portrait of the ‘Neo-Student’ – Is It Exile or Diaspora or Inner Immigration? Universities have been incorporated into the bourgeois public sphere. What might once have been named the ‘proletarian education public sphere’ – which had no label when it was breaking down the walls of educational privilege – must today become a more polemically charged ‘anarchist public sphere’ for those who are outside the institutions.12 The real question: In the global market, where is the critical educational 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.

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Here it would be appropriate to note that we are feeling the impact of – even as we forget – the previous century’s great movements of stateless peoples, as in Europe in the early Middle Ages and again in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. UN records (as of 1991) tell us that if our world had 1,000 people (as if living in one village), it would contain 564 Asians, 210 Europeans, 86 Africans, 80 South Americans, and 60 North Americans. Of these villagers, 60 would control half of the total income, 500 would be hungry, 600 would live in shantytowns, and 700 would be illiterate.13 Is this the ‘end of history’ and its helpmate, the end game of capitalist ideology? The coming anarchy? The coming of the millennium? No. It is indicative of the new role of states in administering the neoserfdom of clients, refugees, immigrants, and migrants living in tent cities – the new dependent collectives without community. We study them. The wars of attrition are in the statistics, which are a new form of invasion – a violence that can be quantified, packaged, and contained. Container shipping on the tracking webs of statistics. Universities as knowledge factories claim to represent ‘humanity’ and ‘progress,’ yet the overwhelming presence of the discarded defines the current historical Archimedean point: those who wait in the anterooms of citizen-blessed societies; people living in camps, zones, enclaves, and ghettos ‘governed’ by refugee commissions and UN agencies. Exilic culture is the missing component of any thought about the totality of ‘humanity.’ Exile is contemporaneous with wars at the borderlands, where those who do not make it into the shelters of the states die or are returned ‘home.’ In the mutating world of tent cities there is no capitol, no representation, no real territory, and no democratic structure. Exile is the trashcan of statelessness and the trans-settlement of peoples (Indonesia, Africa) and mobility of migrant workers. To speak today of ‘overwhelmitude’ only in terms of numbers constitutes the narcissism of small differences; it causes social attention deficit disorder. The new student is just this kind of diasporic subject – a slave manqué, a displaced being who is a stand-in actor for the teacher as weird official. The neostudent sees the world from within the borders of a university that promises redemption and reconciliation with society through a career of unspeakable debts. The Professor is the Model of Opportunity, the Inorganic Intellectual with access to brain-working technologies. The students can be compared to the ‘internal exiles’ who take refuge from the war zones. The student lives in a twilight zone without borders, the client of the state and an image of the future: pariah to parvenu and back again like a nervous bird.14

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The modern university is not a monastery, an enclave, or a battleground. It is not even in the current jargon a ‘contested site’ or a ‘site of resistance.’ It is ‘hybridized’ into training for the present, not the future. In this sense, universities are simulacra of postmodern thinking about the ‘now.’ Education is more expensive than at any time in history, as if higher admissions standards justify the idea that money equals progress. This domesticates the student, who becomes an inner exile. Why? Because the neotraining system, with its promises of employment in the urgent world of the now, saps the will to resist the larger social order. The university renders pleasing and acceptable the idea that labour and social suffering can be managed together. For the student, this is an unbeatable combination of spectacle, technology, and speedy mobility through the ranks of the division of labour. It leads away from the university of leaking boundaries towards the coming of age of the client. The neostudent is thus both inside and outside the state’s desire to make knowledge its divine mission for the few who make it in.15 Where is the exit? New Contexts for an Incommensurable Community – Sabotage and Pedagogy of the Exiled More than ever before, an anarchist utopian pedagogy as a way of seeing the details within the totality of human relationships might open the world up to a rights-based vision, one that is already on the agendas of the mutating cities. At the same time, any genuine anarchist would have to discard the words ‘human rights’ in order to understand the absence of such rights as they are assimilated into physical violence at all levels of society. What, then, is to be done, as the Russians used to ask? First, all large universities should be broken up into smaller institutions. An anarcho-communitarian, mutual aid model would then be able to exist to counter the systemic delusions and the in-built managerial nature of overly complex institutions, which mirror the metropolises in which they reside and which, in turn, require the ‘educated’ – that is, ‘trained’ – individuals to perform the negative archetype of the citizen of the system. Training is necessary – the bridges can’t fall down. But training for ‘overwhelmitude’ internalizes the system into us, and this inner colonization precedes our exiled, nomadic future. More polytechnics should be founded, not just universities expanding like helium-filled balloons, and these polytechnics should require foundational

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liberal studies programs and critical studies based on our common ground as proto-exiles. Second, one must subvert the university as the only cultural mediator that humans use to protect what they have made. If anarchist pedagogy makes any sense at all, it must accept in some way that we live in an open-ended bridging time, which most forms of democratic ‘progressive’ thought distort into ideas of ‘transition.’ ‘Transition’ camouflages ‘progress’ and is the worst word of all, because it hides the utopian promise of progress. When students are in ‘transition,’ they mimic the world outside. Transition ritualizes the cult of dependence. Today, the enlightened have no choice but to see that the systemic violence of a society that worships mobility imagines a future unprepared for a world of refugees and displaced and dislocated wanderers and neostudents.16 The countertendencies to the state should hold on to the belief that universities are not the only normative institution. Non-traditional institutes and schools should be created, where expressive forms, as well as forms of memory and transference boundaries, can help recover from traumatic, external interventions, including the ‘natural’ ones that are themselves created by our existing educational institutions. New anomalous institutions have to be funded. Otherwise we will keep fooling students with the pretence that the ‘applied’ vocations automatically preserve humane and formative values. The future of the world is cultural or there is no future at all. Third, anarchist, libertarian, and other controversial models of pedagogy based on a sense of the crisis of society and the state – which includes all forms of community – should be taught at every level of education including primary and secondary schools.17 In times of administered needs, we make good with ‘treating’ the victims of social dysfunction and economic failure. We are so good at this that victims increase. Universities provide analytical techniques – technology, rationality, calculation – that are supposed to cure the ignorance of the society about the reigning model of community. Education faculties should not be isolated from other faculties, as is now the case. In most universities, no one knows what they do. Yet we know that there are models of mutual aid and invention without which no capitalist state can function; there are forms of reciprocity that have no name. They need names. All university classes should become dialogical-experiential models that educate by expanding the zones of contact with wider communities. Why ... ?

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Fourth, participatory activism – internships and cooperative models of learning – should become part of all social sciences, humanities, and technologically oriented programs. Authentic dialogical communities need to find names and identify communities of reciprocity, of meanings and significance, ceremonies and rituals, symbolic transactions and celebrations, as well as ideologically formative languages. These places of formative learning open up for examination new and old forms of mediation, negotiation, and contract-based dispute resolution. In order to live out the classroom as a pedagogy of the exiled in which a radical pedagogy can thrive, the walls of universities must be broken down by sabotaging the market model on which capitalism thrives. The dialogical becomes an ‘incommensurable’ model that acknowledges the shifting and changing experiences and political forms that create particularities: it does so by relating the academy to experiences outside of its own highly integrated communities. This was the hope of the 1960s counter-culture and remains the hope of whatever they are called now – ‘irrational’ communities, or aesthetic communities, or avantgarde communities, or mutational communities. An illustration of the incommensurable anarcho-communitarian model can be found in a community-based ‘mapping’ project that focused on Grandview-Woodlands, an urbanized residential neighbourhood in Vancouver. (See the chapter by Coté et al. in this volume.) The project became a local classroom as it situated community groups in a dialogical relationship to other groups, issues, cultural formations, and social programs that were active in the area. Using the metaphor of a geographic ‘map,’ the organizers sought to undercut the cliché of referring to the population as inhabitants of the ‘inner city.’ Sociological categories faded away when the neighbourhood workers and inhabitants saw through the lenses of needs and crises: their lives’ true social and economic boundaries became vital and real. The project used an anarchistic pedagogy that reorganized the field of forces within cultural memories – recent and traditional – of the ethnic and cultural landscapes that comprise the area. Each day confirmed the residents’ underlying sense that their neighbourhood was changing rapidly and was becoming a paradise for developers and politicians.18 Neighbourhoods today are made up of ‘exiles’ who do not want to see themselves as clients of the state framed only by rights-based multicultural relationships.19 The community should be seen not as a feeder to universities or as a launch pad for ‘citizenship.’ We must learn that we live in dependency on the city in the face of its expansionist

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greed. Even the fashionable term ‘hybridity’ does not give us an image that solves problems; rather, it mimics disciplinary arrangements in the university. A new way of thinking is required, a new form of ‘participatory schooling.’ The thinking that there is one community is false; there is no one community; rather, there is a place that is made up of many shifting alliances with their contradictions and incommensurable individualities. No forced synthesis is possible. A Guerrilla Utopian Future? The anarcho-community as a ghost in the machine is not based on any redemptive view of ‘discourses of resistance,’ although one cannot be entirely hostile to the emancipatory models that have founded new authorities of expression as well as new social movements. At the same time, common values are required in order to counteract the assumption that the state is eternal and is the only mediator of institutions that humans use to protect what they have made. An anarchist must make some mandatory demands. How contradictory! But they must be made in the sense of a Brechtian belief that one starts by negating the negations. We conclude that communitarian education and the dismantling of the techno-abstraction of the university as a medieval heavenly ‘city’ should be sabotaged by starting with the assumption that the university has become an integral part of the market system. If it is to be a vibrant force, 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. It must begin at this point in every university curriculum. Not with ‘human rights’ or ‘multiculturalism,’ but with what I would call the ‘displaced radical pedagogy’ of those who stand at the doors of the future and who carry the weight of the world. Dimensional humans, if indeed they have all their dimensions, still fight the wars and bleed when they die.

NOTES 1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 2 For ‘colportage’ and utopian thinking see Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). Colportage is the form of literacy related to

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exile alluded to here; it differs from the forms of literacy pursued by Paulo Freire. See my ‘Theory and Resistance in Education,’ in Journal of Education, 66:3 (Fall 1984): 321–30. Also see the excellent study by Tom Steele, The Emergence of Cultural Studies: Adult Education, Cultural Politics, and the ‘English Question’ (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997). I came to Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, Canada, in 1965 – this has been over half my life, which I have devoted to teaching and writing in areas that at the time I arrived were unusual in Canada – European literature, culture, and the way political change and depth psychology influence our receptions of literature and art. I was informed by anarchoMarxist and Freudian approaches and by anarchist social thought, and I always attempted to find new ways to integrate these with the responsibility of intellectuals to criticize the system of learning itself. I did not define this as working in the institution, but rather as making ideas available to the public, including primarily classrooms. The classroom was the ‘public’ – it was a special obligation because the form of teaching was as important as the content. The form of teaching was the life and death of the institution. Teaching at the time was by definition radical because teaching was a risky leap into the unknown. Teaching is like cultural bungee jumping in that you are pulled back to the thought that this may not last – something is always in the wind. The risks of the classroom present a choice: Do you take a road prepared for you by allowing yourself to join the crowd, or do you leave some surplus knowledge behind for those who will have to face the system outside? The classroom was the only way to keep alive the idea that a radical pedagogy with utopian outlines would not be suffocated by careerism, professionalism, or even the ambiguous notion of ‘relevance’ – a notion the university has now adopted and manipulated into its very own sloganeering about excellence. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1956); Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement, Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Jürgen Habermas, ‘Student Protest in the Federal Republic of Germany,’ in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 28; original German title was Student Protest and University Reform. See my essay ‘The Lost Utopia of Academic Freedom – Intellectuals and the Ethos of the “Deinstitutionalized University”, in Len M. Findlay and Paul M. Bidwell, Pursuing Academic Freedom: ‘Free and Fearless?’ (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 2001). See Wayne Burns, Journey through the Dark Woods (Seattle: Howe Street

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Press, 1982), for one of the best accounts of the 1960s I know. Burns, an anarchist, pacifist, non-conformist teacher, and long-time partisan of nonconformist students, was driven into retirement by the excesses of the student movement. ‘The End of Utopia,’ in Five Lectures (London: Allan Lane, 1970) 63. See also Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). The classic analysis of the loss of the public sphere is Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989 [1962] and 1993 [1972]). Also see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1972]). They discuss ‘inward imperialism’ of cultural institutions against labour on pages 170 to 177. Theirs is a more utopian analysis than Habermas’s normative one. ‘The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition,’ Five Lectures, 83– 109. As trenchantly critiqued in Harvard Magazine, May-June 1998. Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 61. Italics in original. Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feeling) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000). These figures are culled from UN High Commission on Refugees sources and came to my attention partly through the installation ‘Refugee Republic’ by Engo Günther and Stefan Matthys, ‘Surveillance,’ Prague Castle, Prague, June 2002. Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1993]). See David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1998). This would have to be discussed in terms of works like Michel Maffesoli, The Contemplation of the World: Figures of Community Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974); Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004). These ideas are not new. They were advanced by many anarchist-influenced art and cultural theorists, most notably by Herbert Read, who is

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now virtually forgotten, in his more than one thousand essays and books. See Education through Art (New York: Pantheon, 1958). See David Goodway, ed., Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1998). It is Read, not just Raymond Williams, who should be consulted, as I argue in ‘Herbert Read and Essential Modernism: The Loss of an Image of the World,’ ibid. 18 The Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser and the Britannia Community School in Vancouver were the institutional links to the project, which was funded through the Bronfman Family Foundation’s unusual community education–community activism projects. 19 For a critique of this model of community see Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Day critiques ‘managed diversity’ and the location of current Canadian immigration policy with regard to exiles, the female household, and the racialization of megacities. The flight to suburbs and the destruction of neighbourhoods and public spaces within the current fascination with ‘citizenship’ as the paradigmatic democratic principle are on the table. See my essay on loss of space, ‘Decamouflaging Memory, or How We Are Undergoing “Trial by Space” while Utopian Communities Are Restoring Powers of Recall,’ West Coast Line 34/35 (2001): 119–57. This essay relates to what I call the exilic and hybrid forms of literacy within older modernist practices, which are taking place at the borders of nations where the market prison of globalization is working its duplicitous havoc. On this, see my essay ‘Vindicating Popular Culture in Latin America: A Response to Garcia Canclini,’ in Canadian Journal of Latin American and Carribbean Studies, 23:46 (1998): 133–55. See also Michael Taussig in The Magic of the State (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).

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6 Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes: An Interview with Stuart Hall interviewed by greig de peuter

The Restructuring of the University in Britain gdp: I would like to begin by asking you to comment on the current situation of the university, specifically in relation to what seems to be an inexorable drive towards the restructuring of the university according to a neoliberal model of governance. How do you see the neoliberal restructuring of the university playing out in the British context? sh: In the British context there is no question that the pace of the neoliberal reconstruction of education has accelerated in the last fifteen years. I do not want to put this as an inexorable drive, but that process has extended into higher education since the 1970s and then moved at a much more rapid pace more recently. That is in keeping with the broader political climate in Britain: first, in the context of Thatcherism, which was our break with older social democratic and egalitarian traditions of politics in the 1980s; and second, in the context of New Labour, which came to office in the 1990s and is in ascendancy now politically. New Labour is a curious combination of neoliberalism in the driving seat and the residue of social democracy in order to carry political consent. New Labour is a different configuration from Thatcherism, but maintains the investment in the neoliberal program, both domestically and globally. For a long period, New Labour did not make direct interventions in the universities. It simply allowed the general climate of market forces to reshape the university from below. The university, because it is squeezed in terms of investment, and pushed in terms of expanding numbers, has moved to market mechanisms to organize its financing. More recently, we have seen the rise of what is called the ‘audit culture’

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in Britain, which involves much more careful scrutiny of market outcomes and attempts to measure outcomes and set standards. That has been applied to one after another of the public sectors under New Labour, and gradually the universities came under those regulations. In the 1980s and 1990s, ‘research assessment’ is a significant intervention in British universities. Every four years, every academic and the work of entire departments is assessed in terms of outcomes, and future research funding is then tied to the results of that performance. The same regular assessment is now applied to teaching, which had never been assessed in British universities. This assessment has the impact, first of all, of making ‘performance’ standardized across the disciplines. Everybody is required to have the same performance level, which flattens out the distinctions between one discipline and another. It does not reward teaching because research is prioritized, though next year you will be examined for your teaching! Every academic also must produce the requisite number of research papers. Everybody now has an administrative task: in monitoring, in admissions, and so on. The more junior you are, the more likely it is that you will be loaded up with administrative tasks. This means there is a squeeze on the time of every academic. Research assessment also places tremendous pressure on the standardization of thought and of academic programs. Each discipline is supposed to produce a summary of what is ‘basic’ to their discipline and how their courses are teaching that content. This has damaged the diversity of programs. It also has the effect of straightening the disciplines up, because when you are audited you are required to respond within a known discipline. If you are interdisciplinary you fall between domains and so you have to report to more than one board. As a result, the experimentation in education is squeezed. These squeezes are basically neoliberal in character. But it is important to stress that they have slightly mixed origins. The British education system was originally extremely narrow and elitist: only 16 per cent of the relative age group went into higher education. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a push to expand, to double the numbers, which has in fact happened over the last twenty years. Today, over 30 per cent of the relative age group goes into higher education. This is a positive push, and it enlisted people’s support: ‘Yes, draw in students who have been kept out: more women, more poor students, more adult students.’ But there has been no investment so academics are teaching twice the number of students in the same amount of time. This pressure of numbers has a massive impact on people’s careers, on time, on the

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nature of teaching, on the nature of the disciplines, on how much students are getting from their degrees, and on the diversity of programs. Added to this are more direct interventions in funding. For example, the grants that were given to poorer students, so they could go to the university of their choice and maintain themselves while doing an undergraduate degree, have been frozen. I don’t know the exact proportions but I would estimate that now over 60 per cent of students are doing part-time work. gdp: What do you see as the major impacts of the neoliberal restructuring on the meaning of the university at our current conjuncture? sh: The idea of the university as an ‘open’ institution, ‘freely’ in pursuit of knowledge, was, of course, never quite the case. It has always been a bit of a myth. That accompanies the elitism of academic life, the closure around the profession, and the hidden assumptions about who can benefit from it and who can’t, and so on. Universities have always been selective institutions in one way or another, either formally or informally. This institution has always been ripe for democratization, especially in Britain, where it is immured in such a deeply hierarchical social system; it is riven with and shaped by the class system. Before these reforms started that I have been describing, overwhelming numbers of people who went to universities were from middle- and upper-middleclass professional families. Parents sent their children to British ‘public schools,’ which had an overwhelming number of their students go on to Oxford, or Cambridge, or Imperial – the elite institutions. These were the people who received university educations and did graduate work. The benefits were skewed. That is why the expansion of numbers would seem to be a positive step in democratization. The process of neoliberal restructuring in Britain, because it is intervening in an older, deeply hierarchical system, carries an ambiguous resonance. The market can portend to be more open than an old, basically aristocratic system. This is New Labour’s version of neoliberalism, and it can represent itself as being a populist drive. It wins over many people who are attached to the democratization of higher education and of research institutions because it seems to be a way of bringing air into a closed system. But the form which this opening takes is encapsulated from on top: it is a market-driven opening, moving very much against the social democratic idea of education, which goes back not just to the traditions of the labour movement – which are egalitarian – but even to Adam Smith, who, after all, said that a market democracy

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depends on people having knowledge, that it depends on a state that is responsible for educating its population. There is a long tradition of education reform that has been central to the social democratic tradition. The current situation is a break with that tradition. Indeed, it is a break within social democracy itself, so it is very confusing for people; it is not an easy line-up. Nonetheless, anybody who stands back and looks at what this has done to the conception of the university will see that it is now pulled or driven principally by vocational and economic questions – principally in terms of its contribution to larger economic purposes. It is driven by a kind of managerialism. Managerialism is not only the hallmark of neoliberalism but actually what I would call the motor: if neoliberalism is a set of ideas, how neoliberalism then gets into the system is through managerialism. It has swept over and transformed the university, where every procedure has been managerialized. This is very different from the old system, where universities, in a way, managed themselves, always remembering that that autonomy was limited to a small number of people. But there was still a certain ideal of a free movement of ideas and of personal contact. The best of our education for students, which was an elite practice, was a one-to-one tutorial in the Oxbridge system where, whoever it was – even the most outstanding scientist – you, as an undergraduate, had an hour with that person reading him or her a paper you had written. You cannot have a bigger exchange between the bottom and top of the hierarchy! That’s going even at Oxford and Cambridge, and certainly can no longer be repeated elsewhere. Inside and Outside the University gdp: I would like to turn the discussion to struggles to transform the university from within. You have been involved in experiments in pedagogical practice that, although they are located inside the university, depart in significant ways from its dominant institutional practices. I am speaking here, of course, of your work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the 1960s and 1970s and then at the Open University in the 1980s and 1990s. If we start with Birmingham, could you tell us something about the pedagogical practices that took place at the centre, and the broader context in which they took shape? What has that experiment taught you about the possibilities of engaging the university as a site of radical pedagogy, as a space for oppositional intellectual practice?

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sh: This is a long, complicated question. It’s part of my life, I suppose. The openings represented by the Open University and Birmingham are, of course, very different … The centre’s students were initially graduate students in an English department. Now we were studying the popular press, the tabloids, and television. ‘How do you talk critically about these forms?’ ‘What were we doing?’ We had to give it a name and we called it ‘cultural studies’! ‘What seminars do you give these students?’ You give courses in how to read critically, how to listen to language, including popular language, and how to talk about the visual domain. We were interested in the cultural dimension and in how to analyse the society in a way that intersected with more text-based studies. Gradually, a program of work developed around these interests and students. In addition to working on their dissertation topic, students had to read the literature by attending what we called ‘subgroups.’ They might as well read the literature together, we thought. People working in youth culture would go to the subculture subgroup; people working in media would go to the media subgroup; people in history went to a historical studies subgroup, and so on. The program developed as these subgroups acquired a life of their own. Subgroups became the central way of working in the centre. Feminism arose and people wanted to read feminist literature. There was no protocol. We didn’t need to go to anybody to say: ‘We’re teaching feminism.’ What I am stressing is the absolute openness. More critical work could be done; students could read what they liked; students could argue about Marxism; we could teach other subjects. We wanted to read the German tradition, Max Weber, Western Marxism, like Lukacs and Adorno, whose texts were beginning to be published. We read alternative traditions in sociology, like social constructionism and deviancy. The whole intellectual program was, relatively speaking, up to us. Remember too that a student’s decision to use her or his grant to come to the centre, rather than do research within a traditional discipline, was itself a rather bold and self-critical move as you didn’t know what career would follow. We had students who were wrestling against the limitations of their discipline. They were interested in interdisciplinarity, if I can put it that way. It was not a conventional graduate student body. The centre partook of the notion of collective intellectual practice that was around at the time. This was a moment of collectives, a moment of collective reading: reading Marx together, reading Freud together. Part of that spirit was imported as an intellectual milieu in which the centre operated. It was quite open at this point. The openness eventually led

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us into tremendous trouble with the authorities: they didn’t like its autonomy, they didn’t like what it was doing, and they didn’t like its view of culture. It was a difficult path: we were inside and outside. Nevertheless, there was room to try and transform basic academic practices from an individualist basis into a more collective one, and from a reproduction of traditional knowledge into a construction of critical knowledge. As a good Gramscian, I could see that what was at work at the centre was a different conception of the intellectual. Gramsci had a notion of two types of intellectual. ‘Traditional intellectuals’ merely refine existing knowledge as it is; they produce rarified and expanded knowledge but for the sake of the powers and structures that currently exist. In contrast, ‘organic intellectuals’ are those who are working critically and whose work is in some way aligned with emerging oppositional social forces. For Gramsci, that meant the working class, but the notion of the organic intellectual also stresses the general importance of critical work and carries an expanded notion of intellectual politics. It wasn’t only that workers should be involved but that everybody was associated with an historical movement. The problem in the days of the centre that I am describing was that there was no big movement outside. Gramsci had an emerging Communist Party and a massive movement in the factories in Italy, so his intellectual work could relate itself to a wider oppositional force. We didn’t have one, in part because the Labour Party was in turmoil, trying to come to terms with global capital. We could only move at the centre in a utopian relation to this other force. We had to say: ‘There is a force out there, and when conditions are changed, we have a tiny role to play in making available to it – whatever “it” is – critical knowledge about the culture which is currently not being generated.’ It was an attempt to mobilize what Brecht called ‘the means of mental production,’ putting it at the service of somebody else. I began to think of the centre as a place where organic intellectuals could be formed. There are two points in Gramsci’s argument about the organic intellectual that I want to stress. Gramsci shows us it is no use to have critical knowledge that is simply driven by polemic. Critical knowledge has to be ahead of traditional knowledge: it has to be better than anything that traditional knowledge can produce, because only serious ideas are going to stand up. There is no point changing the society in the light of a misconstrued analysis of what your culture and society is about. Built into Gramsci’s idea is also a point about the social limits of

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academic knowledge. Critical intellectual work cannot be limited to the university but must constantly look for ways of making that knowledge available to wider social forces. That is why the centre published, why we tried to push out beyond the confines of the university. It had to be serious intellectual work done in the hope of making it spread. It is hard to say, and, in some ways, it is too early to say, whether that happened at the centre. Undoubtedly, cultural studies broke into other disciplines and transformed the university; its ideas were picked up and entered a wider discourse. But you could not guarantee all the points of transmission into the wider world. You could just think, write, and work – always in the intention of doing that. One example is Policing the Crisis (1978), a book that was collectively written out of the centre.1 It was based on a racial incident that happened in Birmingham, which we got news of from having connections outside the university. Some of our students were working locally in the black communities and in the poor white communities in Handsworth in Birmingham. They were running community houses; they were trying to get places for black kids to stay so they could leave their parents and not be on the streets; they were trying to oppose the police, who were picking up every kid who had dreadlocks, and so on. Students were actively working educationally and politically in a neighbourhood. This was the moment of ‘community action,’ the movement to ‘the people,’ which was very much implicit in 1968 and the politics of the 1970s: no longer trusting established institutions and organizations, and also trying to move below them to make direct connections with people. Making contact with people meant living side by side with them so that you were not parachuting into their conditions from some other place. We began to mobilize the resources of the centre to study this racial incident and to write a book about it. Policing the Crisis began as an account of this event and ended up as a political critique of the 1970s, a political critique which ends with the prophecy that Thatcherism is about to take over, making it one of the few sociological books I know of that was right in its prediction! It is partly the result of the condensation of different minds, skills, and political orientations. It took us a long time, eight years, to write. It produced a book that had massive impact in sociology, criminology, and political science. It is still used. It had a political insight into a shift that was taking place. History will have to say whether instances like that make up for the inevitable isolation of the centre. Although the centre was a kind of free space within an

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organized space, its connections to the outside world were limited by the nature of graduate student ideas: they don’t pass easily into the popular press! Those transmissions cannot be made just because you want to make them. gdp: This point about the transmission of critical intellectual work to wider audiences takes us to the pedagogical practices of the Open University, where you went on to teach after leaving the centre. Can you comment on this notion of transmission in the context of the Open University? sh: I decided to leave the centre. I found it increasingly difficult to be there. I thought, ‘The transition has to take place. I’ve got to be able to leave for this experiment to continue.’ I did not want to go to another traditional university. I decided to take a job as professor of sociology at the Open University, because it gave me an opportunity to translate many of the ideas we were working on in the centre for a non-academic, non-elite public. The social character of the Open University student body was very different from a provincial university like Birmingham. Some people saw the creation of the Open University as the last social democratic gasp within old Labour: to set up a distance-education university that was available to adults, people over twenty-one, who had not had the opportunity to go to university, who were not traditional students, and thus who would not have a traditional academic background but that would still allow them, over a longer period, to get a degree while they were working or bringing up families. Taking one course a year, students could get a first-class degree at the end of eight years. The challenge for me was how to translate these ideas so that they were not only germane to middle-class or upper-middle-class professional students. These are people who have neither been to school nor probably written an essay since they were fifteen. For the ideas to pass, you had to build in the skills of learning into the courses: how to write an essay, how to read a book, how to take notes, how to listen to a lecture, and how to come out with something at the end. Pedagogy was a builtin part of any course. Open University academics were involved in producing courses, readers, and radio and television programs. I had to learn the traditions of distance education, though you got some direct teaching in summer schools when students would come to the universities when other students were on holidays. The Open University was not a counterpractice; this was a reformist strategy, if you like, but

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nevertheless a crucial one because one in ten of every student in Britain was a student of the Open University at that time. You reached a fantastic number of people. Academics throughout the country would join our course teams and criticize courses, not simply in terms of academic content but in terms of how that content was conveyed to ensure it was interactive and that every concept was self-explanatory, to enable the students to take an argument on. If you set a reading, you had to set questions with it. ‘What he seems to be arguing here is this. But some people criticized him. Do you think that idea holds up?’ That exercise would allow the student to move on to the next stage in the argument. There had to be a dialogic relationship. After all, this student could be in the north of Scotland with no other classmates. It encouraged the autonomy of learning by giving the student many pedagogic supports. The introduction of how to teach into the heart of what to teach was an important transformation of the pedagogic process; it was the equivalent transformation in the context of the Open University that collective reading and writing was in the centre. The two experiments took place in two different contexts. The beady eye of the education authorities was on the Open University in a way that it never was on Birmingham. Nonetheless, it was a period of relative freedom. You could not go as far in radical knowledge as you had to respect the breadth of your student body; many of them had not come to be politicized. If students felt they were getting a line, they would have rightly complained. This setting meant you always gave the other side to the argument. You had to risk having a student say: ‘Well, I think that’s right.’ You could argue it through in tutorials or in summer school, but if they were convinced, they were convinced. It implied a trust in the autonomy of your interlocutor. These students were people often forty or fifty years old, with responsible jobs and families: you weren’t going to convert them into anarchist rebels overnight! The content always operated within the context of a dialogue in which you had to work for intellectual hegemony. Somebody could always say: ‘You’re just telling me what you believe and that’s not why I’m here.’ If you are going to carry an argument, you carry the argument because you won. gdp: Your remarks on pedagogical practice open up questions around learning as a process of politicization and as a cultural practice. Some contributors to this volume have affinities with the tradition of popular

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education, and, with writer-activists like Paulo Freire, stress the transformative dimension of education – as a ‘practice of freedom.’ If I could interpellate you as a philosopher of education, what are your thoughts on the nature of, or possibilities for, learning as a process of radicalization? sh: I have a utopian hope that to know more is really to understand more. It has never been my view that the left has a monopoly on knowledge. There are, after all, clever conservative people, with deeply conservative ideas. I think the most important thing that the left, broadly defined, has to do is to actually engage, contest, and also learn from the best that is locked up in other traditions which it is opposing. I do not believe there can just be a process of internal repetition of the left’s virtues, on ‘our side of the line.’ Knowledge is a contested practice, and you always contest it against the best of the other side. You don’t give yourself an easy time. You take on the best partly because, often, profound insights that you need are locked up in older paradigms or are attached to older, conserving projects. You first of all liberate the potential critical content of ideas. I don’t think this can be an insular practice: you have to operate on the whole terrain, the ‘field of knowledge,’ in Bourdieu’s sense. I think learning is an active practice where the learner and the teacher are always in dialogue. I am not, I suppose, a true liberationist in this field because I believe in the responsibility of teaching. I believe in the capacity of learning, and in refining the capacity of learning. In this process, eventually, the learner knows as much or more than the teacher, moving from apprentice to equal. I am fantastically lucky to have lived long enough to be now the interlocutor of my old graduate students who are professors, journalists, and writers and so on. They don’t come to me to learn anything; they’re my friends. But our relationship had to begin with an acknowledgment that I had been some place that they hadn’t, and I had something that they wanted. That can be contested, of course. There are many ways one can be a teacher. You can be a teacher who understands the modesty of the amount of knowledge that both you and your student have but nevertheless take seriously the pedagogical function. The teaching/learning process is a long process, a process of a kind of equalization, but it is not equally equal at all the stages. I am wary of people who are so aware of the dangers of patriarchalism and authoritarianism in adopting the teaching role that they pretend it does not exist, that they are not in that division: ‘We are just equal

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spirits.’ But we don’t live in an equal world. Teaching is a cultural practice in that you cannot teach against the cultural grain. Everything you are teaching has to be done in such a way as to acknowledge the cultural frame of the learner with whom you are intersecting. At the Open University there is no point of just thinking that you are teaching a philosophical argument. Rather, you are teaching a person who is not supposed to understand philosophy because they come from a poor or poor academic background. The teaching/learning/knowledge process is always embedded in that wider set of cultural assumptions. Teaching is therefore a process of activating knowledge in the social context in which you learn. That is, of addressing the ‘how’ of teaching alongside the ‘what,’ alongside the content of what you are teaching. Teaching is also a cultural practice in that our culture is stratified by class and power. The people who come into the learning process come into it already placed in this hierarchical system. You do not get out of a hierarchical system by pretending it doesn’t exist; you get out of a hierarchical system by working against the hierarchies, by gradually equalizing the dialogue between teacher and taught. I am also for this: teaching has to be done with a respect for difference, with working at the differences, as a part of a long process – a ‘long revolution’ in Raymond Williams’ sense – of gradually shifting those power indices around knowledge, by disengaging knowledge from power, insofar as that is possible. gdp: You have been involved in a number of educational initiatives outside of a formal university setting, projects that might be seen as attempts to articulate an ‘organic’ intellectual practice. Could you describe some of the educational activities you were involved in during the period of the British New Left in the 1950s and 1960s? What have those experiments taught you about the contribution that countereducational spaces and intellectuals might make to oppositional social movements? sh: Before the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, when I was editing New Left Review and just after – in that New Left period – I taught extra-mural studies in the area that Raymond Williams was responsible for. That was traditional adult education, which was outside of the mainstream university system. It was related to the university but classes were held among people who weren’t going for a qualification. I remember teaching Middlemarch in a literature class to people in the south east of England. After a good lecture, students

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would say: ‘Actually, that’s the sixteenth class on Middlemarch!’ I also taught in a place where all the students I had were active members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). We read literature, a lot of which was Russian. It was a scenario for arguing through the question of the Soviet Union, the New Left, and the rise of the social movements. Literature provided an entry point for a debate about these political transformations. This was among people who wanted to go on learning as adults. They did not want a certificate; they just wanted to go on learning. I was also associated with the teaching of film as a sort of popular movement. There was no film teaching in England in the 1950s. Through the British Film Institute’s education department we started to go to film appreciation societies that screened foreign films to talk about film. I went to prisons, too, to talk about the genre of the western, which was a wonderful experience. We talked about law and crime within the stylized frame of the western. That is where film education started in Britain. It only gradually moved into the colleges through the teaching of English and into universities. There was no explicit political content to this practice but there was an attempt at democratization. There was a new view of popular culture – that this was not just commercial rubbish. You were dismantling established cultural categories by saying that film can be taken seriously, including popular film, not just Godard and Eisenstein. These people had paid their money to see a Bergman film but now they were involved in an educational practice, in an argument around Bergman. We went into film education because we loved film and we thought it should be more widely talked about. Nevertheless, these were countercultural, we may call them protopolitical, practices. They were with audiences who were not in university settings, who did not want a qualification, but just wanted to go on learning – stretching their minds. In addition, in relation to the New Left, we set up a number of ‘New Left Clubs’ around the country. They brought together people from different countercurrents. If you went north to Manchester the club was very much existing or ex–Labour Party members looking for something else, or people involved in the Communist Party who left in 1956, or trade unionists. If you went to the southeast they were largely CND marchers, young people listening to pop music, sort of middle-class but radicalized. These clubs had an education program: talks, discussion, and debate. This was another focus within the political community that was not university-based but had an educational aspect rather than a

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simply mobilizing purpose. The best of the clubs became self-generating, showing their own films, some making films themselves. Each club went in different directions. We were unable to sustain that program very much. Of the groups that affiliated around the New Left, I increasingly associated with CND. I would have seen my role as much pedagogic as activist. Many people would say: ‘I know about politics at home but I can’t understand what’s happening in the world.’ My function was to make understandable the dynamics of the Cold War, for example, what new weaponry was about, its dangers, and the ideological struggle between East and West – as much as to say, ‘Join us in a march.’ CND itself had a pedagogic function in relation to nuclear weapons. I’m talking here more loosely about the pedagogic function in political work, which I think is always there. There is a pedagogic emphasis on dialogue, to make what knowledge you have available to publics outside the framework of formal educational opportunities and the social class structure. I was involved in a lot of those sorts of activities until I went to Birmingham. In Birmingham I suppose I did the same thing among black groups, as by then, in the Midlands of Britain, the race issue was much more to the fore. When the black groups began to organize themselves I had more of that pedagogic role. What most of these groups imagined was that you wanted to be a leader, to be the secretary of some group. I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in selflearning, in the liberatory possibilities of the fact that you could be knowledgeable about, say, foreign affairs, a particular area that is wrapped up in ‘expertise.’ I don’t have the experience of living and functioning in this way in a local community. I worked a lot with students in the centre who were doing that. By then, I was a lecturer, head of the centre, and living outside of that area. One of the things I promised myself was that I would never pretend to be a ‘street boy,’ if I am not one. People sniff out the inauthenticity in two minutes flat. This returns to what I said earlier: there is a pretence that the social and class divisions do not exist, as if you can just jump them. I saw it in many of the left groups of that period – including at the centre. ‘I’m just one of the “boys.” You are not one of the “boys.” You had a privileged education from the time you opened your eyes, from the second you opened your mouth. Especially in England where the class registers are so unmistakable, to pretend that you just came out of the ghetto …’ There is a certain amount of self-

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deception. You can’t be deceptive with yourself, and you can’t be deceptive with the people you are working with. I think you can only work through the social divisions: you can work through to dismantle them and make them less effective, less inhibitive, but you cannot just pretend to jump them. I think that is the difference between a realistutopian and a utopian-utopian practice. Nodal Power, Multitudes, and Utopia gdp: Contemporary social movements – and many older ones, of course – indicate a move away from a desire to win hegemony over the state, shifting towards more micropolitical counterinitiatives, and towards contesting centralized power as such. These oppositional tendencies are uninterested in propping up a party apparatus and are challenging the notion of representative politics. What consequences might those aspects of the new social movements have on the Gramscian conception of the political party? sh: Gramsci believed in the party but he emphasized that the party brought together workers, intellectuals, women – people from different conditions of life. The purpose of the party was not to make everyone the same but to unite these differences and bring them into the cores of social transformation. Social transformation requires intellectuals who know something about the social structure, industrial workers who are at the heart of what drives society, women who are very involved in domestic life and parenting, and so forth. These are different skills. A party is not a suppression of difference but rather a space in which the differences do not vie with each other but begin to cooperate. We don’t have a party like that, but this notion of a party – in the small ‘p’ sense – is how I think people have to work in the same context. They have to work acknowledging their differences, not having unspoken areas where others are not permitted to say: ‘You’re a middle-class kid. How do you think you’re coming down here to help us?’ Maintaining openness towards that is part of building knowledge of how a class system has divided us and dislocated us precisely in those places. You can only work out of those locations. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s notion of the party has this old ring to it. I do not want to suggest that things have not changed profoundly. The suspicion of party organizations has deepened. Political party organizations in the representative sense are much more superficial to how politics actually work, even in liberal democracies. There has been a

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hollowing out of parties, and I don’t think we can go back. I am not suggesting that everything could be submerged within or condensed within even this complex notion of the party any longer. I am using the party as a metaphor for the relationships that occur when people go into a community and try to work. That is not to say that what they should do is create a Gramscian party. I don’t think that’s true. There has been this move away from organized politics and away from the state. That reflects something of the fact that the state itself has been weakened in relation to the market. This is neoliberalism. Oppositional movements are smart to see that power does not lie only in the state power but lies in civil society, in economic relations, in the market, and in culture – as much as in the state. This is not to say that the nationstate has disappeared or that the state is unimportant, but it is relatively weaker in relation to global forces and international capital than it was before. The social movements show us that there is not just an intellectual movement away from the party but there are changes in the circumstances and the structures within which resistance has to operate: this is a world where power is decentred. Each of the social movements – feminism in particular – has come to the point where it has explored this movement towards differentiation, towards autonomy, and encountered what the women’s movement calls the problem of structurelessness. I think the antiglobalization movement is now close to this question. The social forums are a kind of response. There is no move to form a ‘single party’ or a ‘single line,’ but rather, there is a search for the points of condensation, the points of overlap, the points of overdetermination that would allow people from many different traditions not to give up their differences but nevertheless coalesce at critical points. This seems to me to point to an acknowledgment that although power is decentralized it is not without its nodes. In a global world the technical infrastructure of capital is connected from one node to another. These happen to be not from one nation to another, but from one capital city to another, from Tokyo to Malaysia to New York to London. This pattern is not one of structurelessness but of a new kind of power: nodal power, the power of networks. I suppose that until we understand better than we do how these decentred powers operate we will not quite know what exact strategy will effectively dismantle them or oppose them. Nodal power presents certain difficulties when we ask what the right strategy is. The right strategy is to transform a structure. You have got to understand how the structure works in order to transform it. I am

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convinced that the forms of transformation will be much more plural, much more locally driven, much more adapted to local conditions. My suspicion is that the idea of ‘act locally, think globally’ is one part of that strategy. It is a movement towards the local community, towards particularity, towards concreteness. That is the play of difference that has entered the world, in how both capital and countercapital organizes itself. But whatever has come in the place of state power, which is the driving force in the nature of global capital – and I mean that in the widest sense, including cultural industries and how they are organized, the flow of information, technology – we cannot leave that alone. That would be to settle for improvements here and there, without looking at the broader division. That division is now palpable in the wake of the Iraq war.2 This is the developed–underdeveloped divide, however you mark that. It is not a simple North–South question, as critical to network power is the collusion of elites in the underdeveloped world with the elites in the developed world. You may not be able to draw it spatially any longer, but however you draw it, there is a line that cuts between those who are designed to benefit from the global organization of the economy and those who are not. I do not see how opposition can work without some network connection between poor farmers in India, rice farmers in Indonesia, people in logging communities in the Amazon, and the working poor in developed cities, and so on. This poses questions about alliance, negotiation, and combination. The combinations may be strategic for this purpose or that purpose, but behind them there has to be some general sense that these kinds of interests and those kinds of interests are different. I believe that any politic requires the symbolic drawing of the boundary; there has to be some symbolic divide. It may not be permanent and it does not mean that all the ‘goodies’ are on one side and all the ‘baddies’ are on the other side. But there has to be a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ No politics is possible without a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ gdp: This emphasis on combination and on alliance is a dimension of many of the experiments in radical pedagogy that are documented in this collection. Elsewhere in this book we have used the concept of ‘affinity’ to conceptualize that dimension. Part of affinity-based politics entails the creation of alliances that may be temporary and contingent, and also the identification of common goals and ethico-political commitments among different groups so as to enable a being-in-common.

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Central to the coming together of different oppositional communities is, however, an awareness of the non-equivalential status of their differences. sh: I am very interested in that argument. I am interested in this moment because it seems to be exactly when the necessary decentralization of power – which follows in the wake of all the things that we have been talking about – comes up against certain inhibiting points, certain points at which we see the requirements of speaking across those differences to others. I think we are in a moment of exploring the nature of those alliances – which are not permanent, which are not formal, which are always contingent, and which may change. But you cannot operate without them. This connects with my work in cultural studies over the last twenty years, which has been about difference. I began as a kind of Marxist. I was never a traditional Marxist but a Marxist in the sense that I thought the axis of capital was really the most important thing. I always understood Marx’s class analysis as more historically specific, so I am not surprised that the position of classes and the nature of the struggle have changed. One of the things one liked about Marxism was the notion of a complex totality, of an account that totalized. But I think one of the most important impacts of both the events and the theoretical developments of the 1970s and 1980s has been to wean me off of a totality of that kind. The question that interests me now is how to think about contingent totalities in the wake of difference, and crucially, how to prevent difference from simply fragmenting into atomic particles. This historical conjuncture is an opening for a kind of coming together of theory and strategy, with one reinforcing the other. I think the answer to these questions, conceptually, will teach us a lot about what is really possible. gdp: We’ve already talked about the Gramscian organic intellectual. Given your remarks about the turn to particularity in oppositional politics, I’m wondering if there are not more parallels to be drawn today to Foucault’s concept of the ‘specific intellectual.’ There seem to be tensions, productive ones, between these two conceptions of intellectual practice. What in your view are the possibilities and limitations of the specific intellectual? sh: The movement that we were talking about – towards greater contingency, greater pluralism, more differentiation, away from organized parties, and coherent wholes, cultures, and uniform scripts – is one to which Foucault contributed, about which he wrote himself, and which

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is one of the kinds of politics that emerges from his work. The ‘specific intellectual’ was a particular critique of an earlier style of leadership and of intellectual work that was very much associated with a more totalizing organic conception. However, I do not myself buy entirely the notion of the specific intellectual as a contemporary intellectual strategy, precisely because you cannot then attend, from this differentiation, to the point of overdetermination, connection, and overlap. To do that I think you do need the public intellectual. You need the intellectual who speaks across different sites – at the intersections. This is related to the necessity of the pedagogic function as an element in oppositional strategy – that is, a figure that is not confined to the particular knowledge of a particular site. There is specific intellectual work to be done in each of these sites, but there is public intellectual work to be done as well. In the United States, the work of some of the public intellectuals there has been crucial in keeping a struggle going. I think that is true in relation to the opposition to the Iraq war. We could not have had the demonstrations that we had without somebody looking for what is common in different positions. Just as someone has to articulate why the situation feels different in Italy than in the United States or in London. I think there are other elements in Foucault’s writings that bear on this moment. I think the question of the ethical moment is of crucial importance at a point where structural determination has ceased to work, when we cannot depend on the ‘law of necessity’ moving us in the ‘right’ direction. This has always been a real problem in Marxism: if the law of necessity is moving us in that direction, then why bother with this struggle? Once that certainty dissolves we are into something else and the ethical investment, the ethical point, is where you are required to intervene – to establish a position, even if a position is itself contingent on something else. The taking of positionalities with an ethical dimension is a mode of working that overrides the specificity of the contexts of location and their appropriate knowledges. We are more in that moment than we were at any time in the past. gdp: The title of this book is Utopian Pedagogy. Engagement with the concept of utopia is one of the lines we see running across the various intellectual traditions brought together in this collection. Rejecting the version of scientific socialism you just criticized, utopia here is an impulse oriented towards the production of new ways of living, of new social relations, in the here and now. To what degree, if at all, does a

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concept of utopia have currency for you in our historical moment? sh: I have never thought that radical change could do without its utopian dimension. This is because change presupposes the movement from what is towards something else. It is dependent on becoming as well as being. Becoming will always have to have a certain utopian dimension to it, because it is always configuring something that doesn’t yet exist. On the other hand, what I would call a ‘bad’ utopianism configures a future-becoming as a complete break from what already is. I don’t think that is a very useful way of thinking about the future, because the future is always made in part out of who you are and where you are. I think the possibilities of utopian thinking arise from the fact that we are that hybrid thing: already attached, already embedded, and already embodied but alongside a desire, a longing, for things to be what they are not. Utopian thinking has to operate on the basis of the tensions between those two unreconciled arms within individuals, within groups, within communities. In some ways this is why I have never been, in the absolute sense, a revolutionary. I do not believe in Year One. I don’t think there is any pure break of that kind. Insofar as a future-becoming is not just an empty projection but is grounded in experiences that we can already have, and is seen as an incubation of prototypical relationships – trying to embed them as alternatives within an existing structure – that has an enormous amount to teach us. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was not, of course, going to lead the revolution. But I will never think about the future, about knowledge, or about intellectual work ever again outside of what was, well, a utopian experience, in the sense of being able to work with others in a new way. It leaves some trace, which means that thinking about the future is grounded. So when people say, ‘It can’t work,’ you can reply, ‘It can kind of work.’ Yet I could not generalize it or build an entire university system on that basis. Indeed, to convert a local centre of resistance into a system is itself the pull toward the past, to slow it down, and so on. The very institutionalization of cultural studies has represented a certain loss of freedom, a loss of experimentation, a loss of its political impetus. I am not sure if that is not built into the institutionalization process itself. Institutionalization always awaits or lies in the path of too rosy a picture of alternative communities. But if you view them correctly – as laboratories for how to build relationships which are not entirely governed by existing hegemonic ones – then they have a tremendous amount to teach us. They are sort of black holes inside the existing universe. We can go

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through them into a sort of concrete utopianism. They function as glimpses, which reinforces one’s sense that one is not just building pies in the sky. gdp: I’d like to close by asking you about your more recent work, which addresses questions of cultural identity, difference, and migration in the context of the visual arts. In what ways, if it all, do you conceive of this work on cultural politics as a transformational pedagogical practice? How do you see this work in relation to some of the themes of pedagogy and politics that we have been talking about? sh: I go into this domain only because I am concerned with moments of closure. I think the moment of war and of a superpower ruling the world in the conditions of globalization is a threat of a moment of closure. In a moment of closure many languages are required to maintain the impetus for change and to keep cultural politics going. One of the places where one finds this is in contemporary visual art practice. In art everything that is of the serious kind is now around questions of migration, borders, peripheries, boundaries, and decentred barriers, and of the multiple experiences on the different sites of the world and the people who thread their way through it. Because one finds them vividly captured and expressed in a lot of the work of creative artists, that domain provides an access for me to talk about the reality of migration as a world event. I think migration is the undecide, the joker, in the path of globalization. The one thing that should not move is people: messages can move, technologies can move, industries can move, capital can certainly move – but people always stay where they are, because capital cannot take advantage of differential conditions unless there are poor workers in Indonesia, and so on. There is no point in, say, all of Pakistan moving to Los Angeles and requiring West Coast wages. That disrupts the whole thing. Capital needs the periphery. Migration distills all of these questions of difference and overdetermination that we have been talking about. This is the only point at which I can give concreteness to the notion of the multitude. These multitudes are slightly suspicious about the way in which Spinoza has been imported too abstractly by Hardt and Negri into Empire. But when I think about migration I know who the multitudes are: they are not organized for anything, and they are not, I am afraid, often in productive labour. These people are doing the shit work of global capital: they are servicing it, feeding it, washing its windows late at night, cleaning its offices, and looking after the children of the global entrepreneurs.

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But they are everywhere: they refuse to be tied down; they refuse to lose their language; they refuse to lose their religion; they refuse to be only migrants. Migration, the refusal to stay in one place, is often at the cost of horrendous poverty, civil war, ethnic cleansing, and religious and political persecution. Yet whatever it is at the cost of, people move. This is now just a disruptive force. It is not yet an organized force. This is globalization-from-below rather than globalization-from-above. These are counterinstances, counterlives. Du Bois once said, ‘The color line will be the central problem of the twentieth century.’ I think migration will be the central issue of the twenty-first century – something around the capacity to move, to be not rooted, to maintain an identity while it is plural. Migration is a politics of contingency. The migrant always lacks something, as it is always a loss to move; and yet it is, in some ways, a gain because it opens new perspectives and points of connection that have to be made, that are not given in some lawlike way. There is no political guarantee: it can wind up fundamentalist, it can wind up as a cultural bunker – as much as it can wind up as a kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism. This is a site of contestation that we have got to work on. I think this is a crucial moment. This is not any longer an ethnic politics. It is a cultural politics of difference, which is what globalization is about. The thesis of Empire is an open question. Our contention is really whether the current cultural politics of difference across the world will be monopolized and hegemonized by global capital, or whether it will be allowed to find some more plural, multifocal world as a sort of utopia of the future.

NOTES 1 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978). 2 This interview was conducted in London on 17 February 2003, two days after more than one million people marched in that city against the U.S.– British invasion of Iraq.

PART II: Rethinking the Intellectual Introduction enda brophy and sebastián touza

For most of the twentieth century, emancipatory movements maintained a pedagogical relation to the intellectual subject of modernity, as the trusted bearer of critical discourse. This figure – referred to by Michel Foucault as the universal intellectual – was a self-appointed carrier of truths and assumed the task of representing abstract majorities (‘the working class,’ ‘the proletariat,’ ‘the people’).1 The universal intellectual embodied pedagogical theory as a moment prior to and separate from practice, and relegated emancipatory struggles to a secondary realm of concrete application. Whether his platform was the party, the union, the academy, or the press, this almost invariably male modern intellectual was an unrivalled explicator in matters such as rights and true consciousness. The articles in Part II confront the crisis this relationship has endured at the hands of the radical subjectivities that have been confronting capitalism and other forms of domination since the 1960s. Instead of unidirectional pedagogies, the authors offer us radical toolkits (Mariarosa Dalla Costa), strategies of counterformation and resubjectification (Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero), antipedagogies (Colectivo Situaciones), and recombinant strains of knowledge and practice (Bifo). The authors are well positioned to do so; they are all militant intellectuals in the grassroots movements of Italy and Argentina, two spaces that have resonated in the imaginary of social movements as laboratories for experimenting with new organizational forms and with emerging radical subjectivities. The intervention of the modern intellectual was pedagogical because it assumed a privileged access to universal truths and values. Research confirmed his values and founded new truths that represented everyone. In opposition to this, the radical intellectual figure introduced in

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the articles by Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero, and Colectivo Situaciones carries out research because she knows that she does not know. Research is a militant quest without an object (Situaciones), in which the classical idealized relation between subject and object disappears in the practice of coresearch (Borio et al.). This practice does not produce knowledge about, processed according to the rules of academic institutions (which focus on the production of utilitarian classifications, collections, and descriptions of preconstituted identities). Rather, the production of knowledge is a form of intervention that presupposes constant experimentation, that ‘develop[s] practices in all possible directions’ (Situaciones), and that seeks subversive paths ‘to virtuously fuse theory and practice’ (Borio et al.). A counterformation or antipedagogy emerges as part of an open project that seeks to reconstruct antagonistic subjectivities. It begins with the ambivalent values of workers, immigrants, the unemployed, and other groups that are confronting capital and other practices of domination. Indeed, research-militancy and conricerca are without end. Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero approach the process of pedagogical counterformation as part of the ongoing concern that operaismo (workerism) has with the issue of organization. They write from the broad and heterogeneous space of the Italian radical left, especially operaismo, which is generally known as ‘autonomist marxism’ outside Italy. Their article offers a valuable account of the emergence and practice of conricerca (coresearch), which materialized in Italy as a method of ‘worker inquiry.’ In this context, conricerca was a radically democratic practice bent on understanding the ‘composition’ of a radical subject (the mass worker of Italian Fordism), so as to construct rankand-file forms of struggle rather than the formulaic varieties imposed by the Italian Communist Party and the major trade unions. The ‘coresearcher’ they describe accompanies the formation of subjectivities that struggle to establish the levels of commonality subtracted from capitalist forms of socialization through the provision of conceptual tools. As Colectivo Situaciones reminds us, the politics of an intervention that is pursued as research necessarily adopts an ethical stance. The collective has positioned itself in a non-representational conception of knowledge, and thus does not describe specific practices and research tools; instead, each situation demands its own particular practices and tools. In its chapter, the collective writes from the specificity of a proliferation of resistance in Argentina and engages in a critique of the values involved in the different subject positions in research and militancy.

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Bifo’s article illustrates a different strand of the richly diverse operaismo movement by providing a cartography of the terrain that gave birth to ‘the cognitariat,’ a social subject whose intellectual capacity is integral to the production processes of high-tech capitalism. According to Bifo, as capital reaches the phase of ‘general intellect,’ the working class, because of its very composition, dissolves the external relation between intellectuals and workers; this has the effect of removing the foundations that supported the Leninist pedagogical function of the party. Intervention, or the question of ‘what is to be done,’ becomes immanent to the cognitariat, who is saturated by her immaterial labour and awash in a world where – in Paolo Virno’s formulation – language has been ‘put to work.’2 The current task, Bifo argues, is to explore how the elements of the sociality of productive labour recombine; this will make possible an assemblage whereby knowledge would be organized ‘according to criteria other than those of profit and the accumulation of value.’ Bifo examines the subjective impoverishment induced by the way in which cyberspace colonizes the experience of time, and suggests that a precondition for any recombinant self-organization of knowledge is to map the space and time of socialization of intellectual workers – a process that necessarily involves the cognitive and emotional dimensions. In her interview, Mariarosa Dalla Costa acknowledges this historical shift by suggesting that ‘the “intellectuality” of the movement today is an extremely widespread condition,’ and offers a compelling parallel account of her own life as a radical feminist intellectual working both inside and outside the academy. Her encounter with modernist radical movements and their pedagogies provoked a lifelong concern for how we constitute ourselves intellectually and politically within movements as well as how we array ourselves against the external forces we struggle against. Her time as a member of the Italian radical group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) was key to her development as a militant; even so, she suggests that ‘intellectual power itself was used against women as it reinforced cohesion among men.’ In this sense, her decision to form Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) and to break away from Potere Operaio – which was refusing to engage in non-class struggles – is instructive insofar as it reveals the heterogeneity of terrains on which a truly multivalent radical pedagogy must learn to operate. Her experiment, and those of others who participated in the formation of a materialist critique of unwaged domestic labour within patriarchal capitalism, was thus an anticipatory foray into the terrain of affinities and the broader microphysics of power. From the perspective of the unavoidable problem of political organi-

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zation, two discernible expressions of intellectual intervention come into view in the following chapters. Bifo and Colectivo Situaciones urge us to think about the complete disappearance of modernist notions of the intellectual; this disappearance has brought in its wake a radical elimination of hierarchies within a number of social movements that are fighting to change the existing state of things. Theirs is an act of rupture with past models, an act that is reflected in their own experiments, whether they are conducted in piquetero neighbourhoods in Argentina3 or through the antennae of the telestreet movement in Italy.4 In the work of Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero, and Dalla Costa, there seems to be a greater willingness to continue embracing facets of slightly stratified models of radical pedagogy. This is no crude vanguardism – make no mistake. Rather, the approaches are the result of a certain tendency in operaismo: organization may be spontaneous but nonetheless is always ‘organized’ (as Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero remind us in their chapter through the words of Romano Alquati). In this process there is still room for people to intervene, create, and even direct struggles. In these struggles the intellectual maintains a distinguishable role, having – as Dalla Costa says – a greater set of ‘tools’ at her disposal that can then be placed at the disposal of others. Networks are established in which, instead of a homogenous ‘mass intellectuality,’ affinities of competences are set in motion and skills are shared. Thus the following chapters are not the collective articulation of a single position, but rather a set of contributions confronting the inseparable problems of counterpedagogy and political organization.

NOTES 1 See Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1980); Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1964, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996). 2 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004 [2002]). 3 MTD de Solano and Colectivo Situaciones, La Hipotesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes (Buenos Aires: De Mano en Mano, 2002). 4 Franco Berardi (Bifo), Marco Jacquemet, and Giancarlo Vitali, Telestreet: Macchina Immaginativa Non Omologata (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2004).

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7 From Intellectuals to Cognitarians franco berardi (bifo) Translated by Enda Brophy

While the word ‘intellectual’ may no longer be part of the parlance of our times, throughout much of the twentieth century this term condensed key questions of ethics, of politics, and of ‘what is to be done.’ In recent decades the very nature of intellectual labour has changed completely, becoming progressively absorbed into the sphere of economic production. Once digital technologies made possible the reticular concatenation of individual fragments of cognitive labour, intellectual labour – now fractalized and cellularized – became subjected to the cycle of the production of value. In the pages that follow I discuss the roles that intellectuals have played in modernist thought and cognitive labour in the current era, and propose a strategy founded on the self-organization of what I call the ‘cognitariat’ – that is, networked cognitive labour as political subjectivity in movement. I argue that in this new context the political and ideological forms of the twentieth century Left, especially as they relate to the ‘intellectual,’ have become inoperative. This became clear with the movement that arose in Seattle in November 1999. We now see a new terrain of social struggle – against the environmental and psychic devastation of the planet, against the privatization of the products of collective knowledge, and against the commodification of the genome. These movements show us how we can oppose the failed ideology of neoliberal capitalist globalization with a new alternative globalization – the globalization of networked cognitive labour. But, as I argue at the end of this essay, the radical potentiality of the cognitariat is today facing a new kind of counterattack by capitalism in its high-tech form: excessive speed, information, and the anxiety of ‘cybertime.’

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From the Enlightenment Intellectual to the Revolutionary Intellectual It was during the Enlightenment that the twentieth-century concept of the intellectual was formed. The Enlightenment intellectual is defined not by social condition but rather by a universal system of values. The role the Enlightenment attributes to the intellectual is that of founding and guaranteeing, through the exercise of rationality, universal principles such as respect for the rights of man, equality before the law, and the universality of law itself; and guaranteeing the realization of these. This modern figure of the intellectual – one that incarnates an ideology – finds its philosophical legitimation in Kantian thought. In the context of Kantian thought, the intellectual is a transcendent figure, one whose activity is independent of social experience, or in any case whose activity is not socially determined in its cognitive or ethical decisions. The intellectual appears in the Enlightenment era as the bearer of a universal rationality, abstractly human; in this sense, one can view him as the subjective determination of the Kantian ‘I think.’ The role of the intellectual is closely tied to the elaboration of that system of values which constitutes modern universalism. The intellectual is the guarantor of thought free from any belonging, the expression of a universally human rationality. In this sense, the intellectual is the guarantor of democracy. Such a democracy cannot emerge from the social sphere, from a belonging, but only from the desert, from the unlimited horizon of choices and possibilities, from the possibility of access and of citizenship for every person as a semiotic agent (that is, as a subject that exchanges signs in order to access universal rationality). This detached, universal intellectual is established in opposition to the romantic figure of ‘the people,’ or rather withdraws itself from it. Universal thought, from which the modern adventure of democracy is born, evades the territoriality of culture. Democracy cannot carry the imprint of a culture, of a people, of a tradition; it must be a game without foundation, invention, and convention, not the affirmation of a belonging. Significantly different is the perspective of the revolutionary intellectual, who is linked to, and affirms himself by way of, historical-dialectical thought. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx refers to the role knowledge must play in the historical process: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ The marxist intellectual is an instrument of the historical process of

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achieving a classless society. For Marx, thought becomes historically effective only once it recognizes in the working class the horizon of action. The communist project makes of theory a material power [potenza], and of knowledge an instrument for changing the world. Only inasmuch as he participates in the struggle to abolish class and waged labour does the intellectual become the bearer of a universal mission. In this vision the intellectual has nothing to do with the Volk (people), because the Volk is the territorialized figure of belonging, the predominance of Kultur with respect to reason, the pre-eminence of the root with respect to the finality. Actually, the working class does not belong to any territory, culture, or lineage, and its mental horizon is that of a universally exploited class that is striving for a universal of liberation from exploitation. Organic Intellectual to General Intellect The role of intellectuals is central in the political philosophy of the twentieth century, especially in communist revolutionary thought, beginning with Lenin. In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin asks himself how it is possible to organize collective action and how the activity of intellectuals can become effective. For Lenin, intellectuals are not a social class; they have no specific social interests to uphold. They are generally an expression of parasitic profit but can make ‘purely intellectual’ choices to turn themselves into organizers of a revolutionary consciousness descending from philosophical thought. In this sense intellectuals are very similar to the pure becoming of the ‘spirit,’ to the Hegelian unfolding of self-consciousness. For their part, the workers – who are still bearers of social interests – can only pass from a purely economic phase (the Hegelian ‘in itself’ of the social being) to a politically conscious phase (the ‘for itself’ of self-consciousness) through the political form of the Party, which incarnates a philosophical legacy and transmits it. Marx speaks of the proletariat as the heir to German classical philosophy: thanks to workers’ struggles, a historical realization of the dialectical horizon becomes possible – the arrival of the end point of German philosophical development from Kantian Enlightenment to romantic idealism. Gramsci’s reflections on intellectuals constituted a social analysis and approached a materialist formulation of the ‘organic’ relationship between intellectuals and the working class. Nonetheless, the collective dimension of intellectual activity remained within the party, defined as

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the collective intellectual (see Hall, in this volume). The Gramscian intellectual (who had yet to be put to work by the digital network) therefore could not access the collective and political dimension except through the party. But in the second half of the twentieth century, following mass education and the techno-scientific transformation of production that came about through the direct integration of different knowledges, the role of intellectuals 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. The birth of the student movement in the 1960s was the sign of the mutation of the social scenario out of which emerged the new figure of mass intellectuality. The student movement became a decisive actor in modern history when, in 1968, the social effects of mass schooling came to maturity. For the first time in history, the intellectual function recognized itself as a mass political subject. The student movement was only partly aware of the social mutation it was signalling. In Europe at least, large numbers of student activists tried to interpret their role according to the categories of Marxism–Leninism; they saw themselves as a political vanguard, an army of intellectuals at the service of the people. But in the very same movement of intellectual labour in formation, there emerged the prospect of the social organization of mass intellectuality. Shortly before his untimely death in a car accident, Hans Jurgen Krahl, a leader of the German student movement, wrote his Theses on TechnoScientific Intelligence which were published in the journal Sozialistische Korrespondenz-Info 25 in 1969, and then as the book Konstitution und Klassenkampf.1 In his thesis, Krahl stated for the first time that the new social composition of intellectualized labour cannot be organized according to the political and organizational categories of the traditional worker’s movement. In the late 1960s, in parallel with the movements of 1968, Italian operaismo (‘workerism’) brought to light, in a highly original analysis, this necessary inversion of perspective (Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri, Toni Negri, Romano Alquati). I prefer to speak of this stream of thought as ‘compositionism,’ because its essential theoretical contribution consists in its reformulation of the problem of political organization in

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terms of social composition (see Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero, in this volume). Compositionism abandons Leninist notions of the Party as collective intellectual while leaving open the notion of the intellectual itself, by proposing a re-examination of the Marxian concept of ‘general intellect’ (see Dyer-Witheford, in this volume) Marx spoke of the general intellect in a section of the Grundrisse known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’: But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of science to production … Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into the organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.2

During the century of communist revolutions, the Marxist–Leninist tradition disregarded and relegated to the background the notion of the general intellect, even though in the postindustrial productive transformation it emerged as a central productive force. By the end of the century, thanks to digital technologies and the creation of the global telematic network, the general social process had been redefined by the general intellect and the Leninist conception of the Party definitively abandons the stage. Even the Gramscian notion of the organic intellec-

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tual lost coherence, based as it was on the adherence of intellectuals to an ideology. What counts now is the formation of a new social concatenation (which we can call the cognitariat) that represents the social subjectivity of the general intellect. Cognitariat and Recombination If we want to define the ‘what is to be done’ of our times, we need to focus on the social function of cognitive labour. It is no longer a case of constructing a vanguard-subjectivity – the organic intellectual – to organize the collective intellectual in the Party; rather, it is a matter of creating movements capable of organizing cognitive labourers as a factor of transformation for the entire cycle of social labour. The problem of our time is how to create recombinant function, a function of subjectivity that is capable of spanning the various domains of social production and then recombining them within a paradigmatic frame that does not depend on profit but rather on social utility. Intellectual labour is no longer a social function separated from general labour. It has now become a function that extends across the entire social process. It in fact involves creating techno-linguistic interfaces that allow for the fluidity of the process and its recombinant power [potere]. Recombining does not mean subverting or overthrowing, nor does it mean bringing to the surface a hidden social authenticity; rather, it means assembling elements of knowledge according to criteria other than those of profit and the accumulation of value. It is no longer a case of constructing forms of political representation but of giving form to processes of knowledge, and of technical and productive concatenation based on epistemological models that are autonomous of profit and that are based instead on social utility. Intellectuals no longer perceive the realm of political action as external to their daily practices; they now see such action as embedded in the transversal connections between knowledge and social practices. Production must not be considered a purely economic process, one that is governed exclusively by laws of exchange; into that process there enter extra-economic factors which reveal themselves to be all the more decisive when the labour cycle is intellectualized. Social culture, contrasting imaginations, expectations, and disappointments, loathing and solitude, all enter to modify the rhythm and pace of the productive process. Social productivity is conditioned by the emotional, ideological, and linguistic spheres. And this becomes all the more clear as

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emotional, linguistic, and planning spheres become involved to a greater and greater degree in the production of value. Krahl states: Social combination gives production an ever-greater scientific character, and, in this way, makes of it a totality, a general labourer, but at the same time it reduces the single capacity for labour to a simple moment of production … The application of science and technique to the productive process has reached a stage of development such that it threatens to unravel the system. It therefore has induced a new quality of the socialization of productive labour which no longer tolerates the form of objectification imposed on labour by capital.3

On the basis of these premises, he then critiques the political planning of the twentieth-century labour movement: ‘The absence of reflection on the professional constitution [Verfassung] of class-consciousness as a non-empirical category has brought within the socialist movement a tacit reduction of class consciousness in a Leninist sense that is inadequate to the metropolis.’4 With respect to the metropolitan condition, Leninism, then, is inadequate both as an organizational model and as a conception of the relationship between social consciousness and the broader labour process. We might add that Leninism is completely inadequate once the social composition of labour assumes the form of a network. The Leninist view was founded on a separation between the labour process and cognitive activity of a superior kind (let us call it consciousness). This separation has a basis in the proto-industrial form of labour, in which the worker possesses knowledge of his or her trade but does not possess any knowledge of the system of knowledge that structures society. The basis of that separation becomes increasingly fragile the moment the mass-worker, forced into an ever more fragmented and repetitive labour activity, develops his sociality in a dimension that is immediately subversive and anticapitalist. That separation loses its entire basis when we find ourselves before a mentalized form of social labour, when single intellectualized workers become the bearers of a specific consciousness and of an awareness – albeit tormented, uneven, and fragmentary – of the social system of knowledge that spans the entirety of its productive cycles. All of this was made abundantly clear during the dot.com boom of the 1990s, which made possible a vast process of self-organization of cognitive producers. These people were able to invest their competencies, knowledge, and creativity, and found in the stock market the

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means to finance their desire for achievement. Dot.com-mania was dominated by a somewhat fanatic ideology of liberal optimism that made cognitive labourers subaltern and dependent on the domain of finance capital. Yet the process as it actually unfolded during the dot.com years contained elements of social as well as technological innovation. In the second half of the 1990s there took place what amounted to a class struggle within the productive circuits of high technology. The emergence of the network was marked by this struggle. The monopolies in software, telecommunications, entertainment, and advertising took advantage of the labour of collective intelligence, and now are attempting to take away its self-organizational tools in order to force it into a condition of flexible, precarious, and cellularized subjection. The dot.coms were a laboratory for the formation of a productive model, and of a market. In the end, the market was captured and suffocated by monopolies, and the legions of entrepreneurs and venture microcapitalists were robbed and dissolved. In this way a new phase has opened: the monopolistic groups that had gained the upper hand during the cycle of the ’Net economy have allied themselves with the dominant group from the old economy (the Bush clan, representatives of the oil industry and the military industrial complex), and this is impeding a particular project of globalization. Neoliberalism has produced its own negation: monopolistic domination and state-military dictatorship. Cognitive labourers had been enthusiastic supporters of liberal ideology; they have become its marginalized victims. The promise implicit in the new-economy ideology was of getting rich quick and participating in the economic fortunes of the system. But by 2000, the house of cards had collapsed, and there emerged a crisis of the virtual class. The psychic energy invested in the economy dissipated. The possibilities of obtaining high compensation, or even meaningful employment, have diminished in the innovative sectors, and this insecurity could soon generate a panic. All of this is eventually going to transform the recombinant prospects of the cycle of cognitive labour. The virtual class, so sure of itself, so embedded in the circuits of an economy that believed itself to be safe from material adversities and sheltered from cyclical crises, has now been forced to recognize itself as a cognitariat, a proletariat endowed with extraordinary intellectual means, a repository of the knowledge on which capitalist society now depends. The happy yuppie has discovered that he is an exploited worker, and it is in this discovery that there lies the condition for a process of self-organization of cognitive labour.

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The figure of the intellectual has emerged completely redefined by the evolutions that have manifested themselves in production in recent decades. The Cognitariat against Capitalist Cybertime Rosa Luxemburg believed that capitalism is inextricably linked to a process of constant expansion. Imperialism is the political, economic, and military expression of this need for constant expansion that brings capital to relentlessly extend its domain. But what happens when every space of the planetary territory has been subjected to the power (potere) of the capitalist economy, and when every object of daily life has been transformed into a commodity? In late modernity, capitalism seems to have exhausted every possibility for further expansion. For a time, the conquest of extraterrestrial space seemed to be a new direction for capitalist expansion. Subsequently we saw that the direction of development is above all the conquest of internal space, the interior world, the space of the mind, of the soul, of time. The colonization of time has been a fundamental objective of capitalism in the modern era: the anthropological mutation that capitalism has produced in the human mind and in daily life has been above all a transformation in how we perceive time. Yet with the spread of digital technologies, which allow absolute acceleration, something new is occurring. Time is becoming the main battlefield, because it is the space of the mind: mind-time, cybertime. Thus we must introduce a distinction between the concept of cyberspace and the concept of cybertime. This distinction is key to the contemporary techno-subjective arrangement of struggle. The power [potenza] of this new figure of intellectuality of the ‘cognitariat’ is being reterritorialized by way of the tyrannical operations of capitalist cybertime. Cyberspace is the sphere of connection of innumerable human and machinic sources of enunciation, the sphere of connection between minds and machines in unlimited expansion. This sphere can grow indefinitely, because it is the point of intersection between the organic body and the inorganic body of the electronic machine. But cyberspace is not the only dimension possible for the development of this interconnection: the other side of the process is cybertime. This is the organic side of the process, and its expansion is limited by organic factors. The human brain’s capacity to elaborate can be expanded

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with drugs, and with training and attention, thanks to the expansion of intellectual capacity, but it faces limits of time, which are connected to the emotional, sensitive dimension of the conscious organism. Generally we call cyberspace the global universe of the infinite possible relations of a rhizomatic system that virtually connects every human terminal with every other human terminal, and that simultaneously connects human and machinic terminals. Cyberspace is a neurotelematic rhizome, and therefore a non-hierarchical and nonlinear network that connects human minds and electronic devices. Cybertime, in contrast, is not a purely extendable dimension, because it is connected with the intensity of experience that the conscious organism dedicates to information coming from cyberspace. The objective sphere of cyberspace expands at the speed of digital replication; in contrast, the subjective nucleus of cybertime evolves at a slower rhythm, the rhythm of ‘corporeality’ – that of pleasure and suffering. Thus as the technical composition of the world changes, cognitive appropriation and psychic responsiveness do not follow in a linear manner. The mutation of the technological environment is much more rapid than changes in cultural habits and cognitive models. As the stratum of the infosphere becomes progressively denser, informational stimuli invade every atom of human attention. Cyberspace grows in an unlimited fashion; mental time, however, is not infinite. The subjective nucleus of cybertime follows the slow rhythms of organic matter. We can increase the time of exposure of the organism to information, but experience cannot be intensified beyond certain limits. Beyond these limits, the acceleration of experience provokes a reduced consciousness of stimulus, a loss of intensity as it relates to the aesthetic sphere and also (importantly) the sphere of ethics. The experience of the other is rendered banal; the other becomes part of an uninterrupted and frenetic stimulus, and loses its singularity and intensity – it loses its beauty. Thus we have less curiosity, less surprise; more stress, aggressiveness, anxiety, and fear. The acceleration produces an impoverishment of experience, because we are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that we cannot elaborate upon, according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge. Again, we have more information, less meaning; more information, less pleasure. Sensibility is within time. Sensuality lies in slowness. The space of

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information is too vast and quick-moving to elaborate on sensuality intensively, deeply. At the point of intersection between electronic cyberspace and organic cybertime is found the crux of the present mutation. The great majority of humanity is being subjected to an invasion of the video-electronic flux, and suffers the superimposition of digital code over the codes of recognition and of identification of reality that permeate organic cultures. The psychopathic epidemic that appears to be spreading in social behaviours also depends on this gap, on this asymmetry between the format of emission (the techno-communicative system) and the format of reception (the social mind). The acceleration produced by network technologies, and the precarious condition of cognitive labour, forced as it is to subject itself to the pace of the productive network, has produced a saturation of human attention that has reached pathological levels. In the labour process we no longer have availability of time; attention is supersaturated. First, we have no time for attention within work, and second, we have no time for affect, for that kind of spatial attention that is eroticism, the attention to our body and to those of others. Sensibility tends to become obtuse. So, what happens when we no longer have time to pay attention? What happens is that we perceive things badly, what happens is that we are no longer able to make decisions in a rational manner. This is producing an effect that psychiatrists define as panic. Society risks being propelled into a condition of panic, of diffuse psychopathy, of desensitization and disaffection. Annoyance in the face of the other, aggressive reactions, are the roots of the new climate of war into which the West has fallen. To understand the origin of this social psychopathy, we must first look at the relationship between cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberspace is the infinite productivity of the general intelligence, of the general intellect, of the Net. When an immense number of points enter into a non-centric and non-hierarchical connection, we have the infinite production of signs, of intellectual commodities, of semiocommodities, of information. Yet cybertime is by no means infinite. Cybertime is the organic, physical, finite capacity to elaborate information. This ability is found in our mind, and our mind needs slowness, it needs to be able to affectively singularize information. Once this ‘elaboration time’ disappears, the human mind is forced to follow the rhythm of the machinic network, and this

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brings about a pathology that manifests itself as panic and as depression on an individual level, and as generalized aggressiveness at the collective scale. One answer to ‘what is to be done’ is that the intellectual and thus radical pedagogy must learn from this gap between cyberspace and cybertime. Only by freeing the cognitariat from subordination to its virtual dimension, only by reactivating a dynamic of slow affectivity, of freedom from work, will the collective organism be able to regain its sensibility and rationality, its ability to live in peace.

NOTES 1 2 3 4

Hans Jürgen Krahl, Costituzione e Lotta di Classe (Milan: Jaka Books, 1969). Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin, 1973), 704–6. Krahl, Costituzione, 365. Ibid., 367.

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8 The Diffused Intellectual: Women’s Autonomy and the Labour of Reproduction: An Interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa interviewed by enda brophy, mark coté, and jennifer pybus Translated by Enda Brophy EB, MC, JP: One of the constant concerns emerging from within the history of the Italian radical left, from Antonio Gramsci’s vision of the organic intellectual to operaismo’s tormented relationship with the party form, is the relationship between intellectuals and movements pushing for radical social change. We would like to begin by asking you to speak to the notion and role of the intellectual, as it was when you began your militancy, and as it is now. MDC: With regard to this question of what an intellectual is, I think that a person who plays this role within a movement is someone who, having had the possibility to study, to build for herself a set of critical analytical tools, and above all being animated by the will to build something good, a different and better world, poses to herself not so much the problem of her own situation, ignoring that of others, but the problem of the overall conditions of humanity, trying to discover which might be the most crucial matters from where to begin and the paths to be followed in order to transform those conditions. Today, more than ever, we are in a context in which great tragedies and great suffering are plainly evident. In my opinion, therefore, the intellectual is somebody who poses to herself these questions: what is the root cause of all of this, which are the most urgent issues, of which are the most significant subjects to follow and to connect with – and there are many of these – in order to construct opposition, refusal, struggles, and alternative paths. Therefore I would say very simply that the function of the intellectual is this: to put at the disposal of others, to put in common, this greater set of critical analytical tools, to make those tools freely available, and this naturally demands being rooted in a reality that is in movement, a

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reality within which the researcher herself puts certain choices into practice, in which she can deem some matters to be more crucial than others. And the hope is, depending on the choices made by all of those who are today committed to transforming that which exists, that there effectively comes about the wide-ranging social transformation of which we are in need. I would like to add that while in the 1970s this broader set of critical analytical tools was accessible to few of us, today, thanks also to newer communication technologies, there is within the movement as a whole a very great and diffuse capacity for analysis, for attaining knowledge of the issues that matter in the world, of the mechanisms that provoke these and of the forces that activate themselves as a result. It is not a coincidence that the movement has had to equip itself in regard to this with a fresh set of analytical tools and new organizational dimensions, ad hoc groups and associations that follow the various issues by computer, radio, or video, in order to sustain a relationship with such a vast and promptly available amount of information, obviously constituted not only by the facts but also by all the analyses and communiqués that circulate. So the ‘intellectuality’ of the movement is therefore today an extremely widespread condition. EB, MC, JP: Let’s go back in this respect, to the era of operaismo and Potere Operaio (PO), which you were a part of. Can you discuss your position as a woman within a group, a movement such as PO? What kinds of tensions and affinities were there for you as a feminist within the group, which was so heavily dominated by men? What were the strategies you developed that emerged out of those tensions? MDC: I should point out that when I began my feminist activity, founding and promoting Lotta Femminista – which at the beginning, in June of 1971 in Padova, was called Movimento di Lotta Femminile – I left PO. Therefore there was not the problem of how I would operate as a feminist within PO. The militant activity which I carried out as a feminist was a full-time activity that did not permit a double militancy, an issue other women confronted when militating in different organizations. For them, evidently the feminist commitment was of a different kind than ours was, because for us there remained neither the time nor the mental space for any other militancy. But above all, the militancy which we were expressing was intended to offer a radically different viewpoint on the world which, starting from the crucial nature of the labour of reproduction (broadly understood), was bent on reformulating the political discourse and project, and therefore was intended as an

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approach that had a general validity. When I became a part of PO in 1967, a feminist movement did not exist and therefore the issue of whether I should enter PO or work in the feminist movement never arose. In Italy at that time there were only the realities of the extraparliamentary groups, and for me, seeking out PO was related – as I said in Rome1 – to a profound need to find justice. I was conscious of the fact that there was injustice in the world. I wanted to do something, both to understand its origins – to have therefore the set of analytical tools which would permit me to understand where the injustice that I was seeing in society during that period originated – and to seek to remedy it. I therefore had this double need: to understand, but also to act, a need for militancy. PO answered this need, which was very significant. It was very important to be introduced to the study of Capital, to the study of Marx’s other works, and to those of Marxist scholars. The first work I read was The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850. It was a very important work. Therefore, simply being introduced to and studying this theoretical legacy was, I believe, something fundamental, such that I continue to offer extracts of Marx’s work to my students. The other great discovery was that of the factory. I remember that once I went to Marghera,2 at that time [Toni] Negri was there also, probably it was the first time, and he said to me ironically, ‘witness the beauty of industry’! For me discovering the factory, such a brutal dimension of life, with that fixity of a condition of labour, being in the same place in order to carry out the same tasks every day of the year, to discover the noxiousness of the factory, the degradation of working-class neighbourhoods ... all of this exposed me not only to an extremely weighty reality from a human point of view, which very many individuals had to confront every day to survive, but it exposed me to that which was the mechanism of capitalistic production. I therefore saw represented that mode of production that was at the origin of human suffering and misery in the time in which I myself lived, the era of capitalist production which had begun approximately five centuries previously. I therefore recognize that this education at PO answered my need, answered my research, and gave me a formidable set of critical tools. On the other hand in the Italy of the day the relationship between man and woman was still quite barbaric ... And this was even more so within militant circles, where intellectual power itself was used against women even as it reinforced cohesion among men. Let us call it ill-employed pride. From this condition of excessive male intellectual power on one side, and of

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the non-visibility of women as subjects on the other, there emerged the ‘explosion of contradiction’ and therefore the emergence within the span of the movements of the time of the feminist movement which, as far as the Lotta Femminista offshoot is concerned, without a doubt grew out of the extraparliamentary group Potere Operaio. But a quite analogous process came about in Lotta Continua as well.3 In any case the image of a woman during the period immediately prior to the emergence of the women’s movement was significantly out of focus: a woman oppressed and conditioned by domestic labour, which had yet to be posed as an issue deserving of attention. Her position within the capitalist organization of labour as a subject destined to the labour of reproduction, which was unwaged and therefore not counted as such, had yet to be analysed. Rather, it was perceived as an expression of love or as a mission. This condition was suffered by women largely because there was no adequate interpretative framework, either one that could serve them or one that they could confront men with, a framework that could explain their hardships. There remained unexplained all of the greater labour incurred by the woman who, even when she worked outside the home, retained the domestic responsibilities regardless, and this meant that she had to apply herself in the workplace (as in any other context) in a condition of heavy disparity with respect to that of men. As the reason for this had not been ‘brought out,’ the woman could not say what the cause of her hardship was and often there flowed from this an abuse of power on the part of men, because of whom – as I said in Rome – many women told me they ran the risk of going insane. At the same time the women’s movement, having offered an explanation for their condition, saved them from this fate. Let us keep in mind the social context of Italy as it stood then. In 1971, when we organized the first feminist meeting, the advertising of birth control products was still illegal. There was therefore a prohibitionism regarding a woman’s sexuality, a non-recognition of her right to express a sexuality that was not purely a function of procreation, a social expectation that a woman would be married a virgin and after nine months would have her first child, without any right to a period of life in which she could know her own sexuality, not even in marriage. Not only were we living in a time when if a woman was not married she was socially wayward, and therefore, in a certain sense, she was obliged to marry. But also it was assumed that, whoever this husband was, even if he used violence against her (even though the issue of violence had not yet been raised), she had to keep him. I have clear memories of certain dramatic cases in which, when the woman consulted a priest, the priest’s

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response was: ‘Oh no, a wife must stay with the husband in any case, even if he hits her. If you leave your house you must remember that you may be charged with abandonment of the conjugal home.’4 Therefore, women having to get married regardless, and having to keep their husband no matter what kind of man he was, women never having been owners of their own sexuality, because a woman had to be married a virgin and there was no availability or ownership of birth control products which were strictly prohibited, this was the general female condition in the Italy of the time that PO was formed. As a rebellion against this condition, thanks to which woman was never the owner of her own body and of her own life choices, there emerges the Feminist Movement. And even before this there was the composite movement at the end of the 1960s, the movement of ’68 with its libertarian inclination even in sexual life. At this time there matures also the great conquest that encompassed mass access to university. This allowed many women to have a completely different life condition during the period of time in which they attended university. Because they met their fellow students, they could begin to have a social life on more equal terms, incomparable to that of their mothers, who had faced the problem of how to meet a possible future husband since encounters then had been rare, very few in the life of a woman. Instead, mass access to university allowed many women the possibility of a more open relationship with fellow students of their own age and therefore the possibility of having relationships of sociality and sexuality that the preceding generation absolutely did not have. This was, therefore, a very important fact. In any case, given the substantial power difference between men and women (of whom there were very few) that existed within the PO group, similar to that in other groups, at a certain point the relationship between female and male comrades began to fray. Increasingly there was the sense that there was a problem as far as our condition went, and we began to realize that, as militants, we were fighting for everybody, for workers, for technicians, for students, but not for ourselves because that which we were living, our condition as women, was not represented in the struggles we were engaged in. We thus realized that there was a problem that was not represented even in the vast activity of militancy that we were sustaining. Due to this I felt the need to stop for a moment, to separate myself from these struggles, to begin to analyse this condition in order to understand where the problem lay. In the spring of ’71 I produced, also thanks to my encounter and confrontation with Selma James, a text that I presented as a draft in June of the same year to a group of female comrades whom I assembled for what

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would be our first meeting. That text, which was revised somewhat in the months that followed, would become a small book entitled Potere femminile e sovversione sociale [The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community], published in March 1972 in Venice with a vanguard publishing house, Marsilio. This book was immediately adopted by the international feminist movement as a useful tool for militancy, translated into six different languages, and as a classic feminist text, included as course reading in numerous American universities. With the draft presented at our first meeting I was bringing attention to the renowned analysis of domestic labour and its attendant implications, and my convened female comrades declared their agreement and from that point there originated our debate, our action, the desire to struggle taking our own condition as a departure point. That analysis posited that domestic labour was the primary labour of all women and therefore the issue from which, as women, we had to begin. We discussed among ourselves why as subjects we had disappeared and lacked the power to become visible, why we were the object of this abuse of power, why the struggles that we carried forward on a daily basis were invisible. They were invisible because nobody paid attention insofar as they were connected to a form of labour that was itself invisible due to the fact that it was unwaged, the labour of reproduction. EB, MC, JP: This break with a certain kind of militancy and criticism, in favour of a radical feminism that placed the labour of reproduction at the centre of a new critique, was a critical one. How did this unfold? MDC: This [issue of unwaged labour] was the great question to which no answer was given. Not only was no answer given, but subsequent to the great repression against all of the movements in the 1970s, this matter, in the terms in which we had raised it, became taboo in Italy together with the very feminism that had brought it up. It is telling that at the European Social Forum in Florence in 2002 (which I participated in as part of the workshop put on by the activist intellectuals from the Internet journal The Commoner), some of the female presenters at the Forum of the World March of Women referred to the feminism of the 1970s as a ‘feminism of self-consciousness.’ But what of that other feminism? That of the great struggles carried forward? Evidently that taboo still functions to this day. In the 1970s we promoted quite a wide debate on domestic labour in various countries. I myself was in the United States and in Canada many times, I had brought the debate and the consciousness of the struggles we were engaged in from the Atlantic

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coast to the Pacific. We had built in 1972 a Feminist International around domestic labour, on the labour of reproduction, on all of the issues that derived from this, and in this way we had built with our female comrades from other countries the International Feminist Collective in order to promote coordinated action. In the United States as well there were Wages for Housework groups, as there were in England, in Germany, in Switzerland. Less so in France, because at that time the group Psychanalyse et Politique was prevalent. There were Wages for Housework groups in Canada as well, where we held many meetings to coordinate our actions. All of this work allowed for the sedimentation in the world of a great tradition of the analysis of domestic labour that was extremely well articulated, and our action and struggles made themselves heard. Yet what happened at the end of the 1970s and above all in the 1980s impressed on us yet again that history is always written by the victors. The repression also meant the erasure of our history and our struggles, and the debate on domestic labour moved ahead in terms that were themselves domesticated, the object of measurement and investigation, even of the recognition of value, so long as it was not a matter of economic value. Any expectation of economic remuneration became unspeakable. The discussion of domestic labour continued as if it had never had an origin in all that which we had written and done, and thus was deprived of its demand to represent a moment of struggle for a different world, for a different organization of production and reproduction. Our mobilization and example was always attached to the demand for a drastic lowering of working time for all, both women and men: we wanted a twenty-hour work week, precisely so that women and men could have time for reproduction and this did not remain the responsibility solely of women. We disappeared, we were banned as authors because of our own activist lives and the kind of discussion that we had promoted, and this above all at the hands of female historians and sociologists on the left. For those of us who worked at universities, all of this hostility and eagerness to erase was instrumental in facilitating the work of other women researchers of the female condition who, rather than profoundly placing in question the existing political system, proposed and continue to propose the advancement of a few within that given context. This was the case in Italy. I don’t believe there was anything comparable faced by feminism in the United States, even taking into account streams that had roots in marxian studies. There, feminism, even in its activism, was not part of a history of militancy with the characteristics of the Italian situation. We had carried forward a militant feminism that not only had engaged in great struggles, but

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had constituted part of a context of rebellion within which various other subjects moved during those years – workers, students, technicians, women. For this reason, within the project of the normalization of society and its discourse, this feminism was erased. There began a feminism that I refer to as ‘discourses against discourses,’ words against words that in a certain sense essentialize the positions of the other solely as a pretext for debate. To us, who were used to thinking in order to act, it all seemed extremely dull and depressing, to the point where neither those who were my closest comrades nor I participated in the ‘debates’ of the 1980s. Many of us continued to search for issues that might seem like crucial ones and within which one could envision a chance to achieve something. If one could not pick up again from here then there must be another place, not only geographic, from which to begin once more. It is no coincidence that many of us directed our attention to the Third World. Silvia Federici went to Nigeria, I myself made many trips to Africa, Indonesia, Central America. We did this on the one hand as part of a search for issues that could bring us back to the fundamental nature of certain problems, ones that were no longer up for debate in Italy, and to the urgent need for action. On the other there was the search for life, that life which was no longer possible here, so dismal and depressing was the context and so lacking in significance the very horizon of discourse around women. EB, MC, JP: In this period your work opened up to an outside, a world with which your immediate struggles did not allow you to engage during the 1970s. This seems like a natural enough choice when faced with what in Rome you referred to as ‘state feminism.’ MDC: There was indeed a good deal of state feminism. Let us say that the effect of smothering, of the concealing of our feminism, came about also as a result of the great abundance of resources that were offered to this other feminism, large financing efforts, the structuring of academic-feminist networks of study. Through this, much attention was given to circuits of academic discourse, a discourse that was its own end, or even better, one that was intended to reproduce the university apparatus. But above all it was intended to rationalize feminist discourse. As I was just saying, the demand for the remuneration of domestic labour that was internal to a drastic reduction of the working day, all connected to a more extended and articulated system of services so that both men and women could have more free time, was no longer discussed. We had reached the point where, when some women,

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within a sociological or political context, were discussing some irrelevant measure of retribution of some aspect of domestic labour, they took pains to point out and clarify that in any case this measure had nothing to do with wages for housework ... EB, MC, JP: From this stems your increasing interest in the notion of the earth, of the relations between the earth and human body as vitally linked to social reproduction. This was what we referred to previously, when we mentioned the opening of your perspective towards an exterior – you began to look at other places in the world. Not that PO was bereft of what was here and there a global perspective, but your work began to deal with these themes in other parts of the world, particularly in developing countries. MDC: I would like to make a few concluding remarks on what became of the labour of reproduction, and part of my considerations reconnect to your question. This work that began in the 1980s and continued through the 1990s until today collided with – both in advanced nations and in developing countries (I know the term is an unhappy one, but so is the ‘Third World,’ so one may as well use one or the other with the knowledge that they are purely conventions) – a great project of the underdevelopment of reproduction. Therefore 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. This is the great problem from which to begin. Not only has there been no solution but there has been a worsening of the conditions, with two effects: on the one hand it has jeopardized the path towards autonomy for women, on the other it has intensified the workload which women dedicate to the well-being of the family or of the community of the village. This is the process that collided with the labour of reproduction and that heavily affected the life of the subjects who are primarily responsible for it – women both in advanced countries and in developing ones. Discovering the issue of the earth as a crucial one is tied to the fact that in those years I visited the countries of the Third World many times, and therefore had a chance to directly observe how the populations in those countries reproduce themselves. Our analysis of the labour of reproduction in advanced countries had to first of all assume that this labour involved the administration of a paycheque that in Fordist society was primarily brought home by the man. Instead, under postFordism the woman had to administer two incomes, his and her own precarious one, because nowadays in any family both must work and

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the problem is that this work is very precarious. Yet in advanced countries the labour of reproduction fundamentally passed and still passes through the administration of money, it is combined with the administration of this money that enters the house. This is a discussion we had shed some light on in the 1970s. It is not true that the male worker brings home a paycheque and consumes it by sitting down at the table (this is obviously a simplified example). The male worker comes home and there is the woman who undertakes the labour of spending this paycheque, going to the supermarket, buying goods, bringing them home, transforming them, making meals, and serving meals that the worker, she, and the children eat. This is called productive consumption, because the male worker, but not only he, must eat in order to replenish his labour power. We had shed light on the whole course of this work undertaken by women, a course that was previously invisible, but this labour nonetheless had to pass first of all through the spending of money. Subsequently, in a book on the New Deal,5 I would retrace these themes, analysing some cues offered by the debate engaged in by American economists around the role of women in the decades from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Great Depression. In the early 1970s, when in Italy we were analysing this problem, the woman had to spend the money brought home primarily by the man, even if shortly thereafter, between 1972 and 1979, in our country there was an increase in female employment of roughly one and a half million, an increment which already gave us a glimpse of a new profile for women and a new structure for the family. This dynamic, as I had yet to confirm, was not true of the Third World: there, at least back then it was the case, the reproduction of individuals passed centrally through agricultural labour destined for self-consumption ... The conclusion of this discussion is that the issue of land, as soon as one leaves advanced regions, becomes immediately apparent as a crucial one regarding whether or not individuals can sustain themselves or (as often is the case) barely survive. In the 1980s when structural adjustment policies demanded by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) were applied in a drastic manner in almost all [developing] countries, strong pressure was placed on governments to privatize land that remained free, setting a price for its purchase. So no more access for agricultural use without having a deed for the property, the price of which was set so that whoever wanted to cultivate it needed to have the money to buy it. This move was particularly dramatic in its effects for many populations, as often the only ones who had enough money to purchase pieces of land were state bureaucrats, so they had an interest

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in passing laws that set prices for the land and thus were on exactly the same political wavelength as IMF representatives who were prescribing these kinds of measures. I believe that many of the struggles that have broken out in Africa and that are often dismissed as ethnic struggles, ethnic warfare, are due to the extreme scarcity of land, land which is constantly diminished and is thus no longer sufficient to sustain those it had sustained before. So here the issue of land becomes dramatic inasmuch as these privatization policies involve expropriation, because those who buy the land take it away from those who were previously able to cultivate it communally. This facet is accompanied by other measures typical of structural adjustment, which often include the removal of subsidies for small-scale agriculture destined for local consumption (meanwhile the infrastructures and a great deal of the water used in the production of crops for export are financed with public money), the elimination of subsidies for the most vital foodstuffs, the privatization of various state-owned enterprises, the privatization of water, the transformation of stable jobs into precarious ones, frequent layoffs because the public sector must be streamlined, the devaluation of currency, and other measures. All of this has caused levels of poverty never witnessed before in the Third World. So when we see these multitudes of migrants around the world, who are pointed to as examples of overpopulation, these are above all the result of the expropriation of land that has taken place from the Philippines to Africa to Latin America in order to make room for the large agribusiness plantations, for enormous dam projects, or for capitalistic projects of various types. In my estimation, then, the huge problem of hunger in the world has above all as its origin the privatization of land. This obliges one to pose to oneself the centrality of such an issue, of how it is emerging once more similar to what happened five centuries ago in Europe. The very first multitudes expelled by this mode of production were in England, where capitalism began its course by expelling free producers from their land, creating a mass of individuals with no land, with no means with which to produce and reproduce themselves, who to survive had no other option than to sell their own labour power without being able to bargain for the conditions of this sale. Marx speaks of the so-called merchants of human flesh who packaged contingents of the population in order to send them to the manufacturing districts – a practice that is very similar to what is taking place today at a planetary level, where often the destination is not even the factory. Therefore it was a great project of expropriation of land, described by Marx in Chapters 26, 27, and 28 of Capital – Volume I,6 that sent contin-

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gents of individuals to colonize the new world, America. But there would follow the expropriation of Africa, in the sense that there enormous swathes of the population were carried away from their land by violent means while on the other side of the Atlantic the Native peoples would be expropriated from the land in an equally violent manner. The latter would never have accepted capitalist work discipline, and so they were exterminated and replaced with Africans brought in chains as slaves. There was delineated in this manner the triangle of suffering constituted by Port Calabar or Port Harcourt, where the slaves departed from, the American plantations, where slaves were forced to work in order to produce cotton, and Manchester, where the factories were located for processing cotton. Therefore the ship cycle was to take the slaves from Africa, bring them to the plantations in America, bring the product of their labour, cotton, to Manchester for the British factories, and set off again for Africa. This is the circuit of capitalist production that even today reproduces itself by proposing once again the expropriation of land, brutal labour conditions, and slavery. The expropriation of land is proceeding across the planet in an increasingly extended manner and is producing this population that appears as overpopulation but is not. So the whole debate on overpopulation is compromised at its very foundation, because it ignores the first cause of this excess, the expropriation of land. The population, just like five centuries ago, appears to be in excess because it has been deprived of its means of production and reproduction, above all the soil, and together with this it is deprived of the resources and individual and collective rights that contribute towards guaranteeing survival. Together with the expropriation of land as it took place five centuries ago, there is reproduced labour under brutal and slave-like conditions. This phenomenon, too is growing in dimension. It is estimated that 200 million people work in these conditions, of whom roughly half are children. One only has to think of the making of carpets, or the production of saris, or of the plantations and mines in Brazil. With respect to the different role that the land has in human reproduction in contexts as different from ours as the African one, I would like to go back to what I was able to ascertain during my stay in Nigeria. The figure we would refer to as the student worker, in Calabar, that old slave port, was a student who cultivated the land between university buildings where cows also grazed. This is a very different version of a student worker; one who, to support himself, does not necessarily go off to engage in waged labour, but who instead cultivates a bit of land

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that the university gives him the possibility to utilize, which helps him maintain himself. I say this to point out how much difference there is in the world as far as modalities of reproduction go. So if it is true that the land is crucial for the subsistence of populations it is equally important that we ask ourselves what has become of these populations once they have been expelled from their land. As I have stated in various pieces I have written, they are mainly destined to die, which is a different way to solve overpopulation than those officially espoused. Death by starvation, death due to economic difficulties, death due to the constant wars that also take away land by rendering it unusable, death due to military and police repression, death due to the conditions in which the expelled live in refugee camps, or death due to the spread of illnesses brought on by the collapse of sanitary-hygiene systems. Only a small portion of the survivors will be able to find underpaid labour in the advanced world. So if I reflect on the labour of reproduction and on the world today, I either consider such an enormous issue, that of the function that the expropriation of land has, and therefore I question myself as to where I should begin so that populations rather than being destined for extermination have at least the possibility to nourish themselves, to first survive and then to live, I either pose this question to myself or all of the other ones seem secondary. The issue of the land is not only one of expropriation, however, and it is not only one of expropriation within the countries that make up the Third World. In the recent counter-summit set up in opposition to the one put on by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) in June of 2002 in Rome, there were smaller farmers from the United States, something I refer to in my essay ‘The Native in Us, the Land We Belong To.’8 In fact, this agricultural politics based on large-scale expropriations and on the technologies from the Green Revolution provokes an ongoing crisis not only in the Third World, but also in the First, and for that reason, as I was saying, American farmers were there with farmers from the Third World at the counter-summit. But the rediscovery of land as the fundamental element, the only element from which we can derive the possibility of sustenance and life, and I would add also of inspiration and the senses, which is not a secondary aspect, emerged in the new modalities of organization and the construction of networks that individuals thrown out on the street by the unpredictable swerves of the global economy have come up with not only to survive but also in order to guarantee for themselves a certain quality of life. I have heard that in the recent movements that have arisen in the crisis in Argentina,

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groups of unemployed people have occupied land in order to guarantee for themselves the possibility of sustenance and have introduced new modalities of exchange such as bartering, without the intermediary of money. They also have instituted modalities of alternative production and the possibility of minting and using alternative money. This reality, which took many activists by surprise, did not surprise me, because for some time now I had been paying attention to this phenomenon. As I discussed in the book on the New Deal, the United States has a long tradition in this respect. The Seattle League and the Unemployed Citizens’ League as far back as the 1930s had constructed large networks of alternative production, as well as bartering, and they used as currency their own money vouchers. And in recent decades, the Lets (or ‘green dollars’), valid for spending within a system of the supply of services connected to it, has been the most famous form of alternative money. Another example is the Ithaca Hours, which mints an alternative currency that is valid locally and can circulate. And there are other forms. This practice of minting alternative money, as I was saying, is part of an old American tradition. Yet it is one that is particularly relevant in the context of the construction of ever-larger alternative networks that are also related to land and labour. This means that people in the most diverse contexts across the planet are rebelling against the death sentence imposed on them because the global economy has decided there is no space for them, and they are determined not only to find a way to continue to sustain themselves, but also to avoid a degraded standard of food. If at one time in the United States social assistance was conceived of as having coupons so as to be able to go to the supermarket and access processed food that is not fresh, people have now decided to leave this conception behind and are demanding fresh and healthy food. I think this is a great shift; it means that the question of the land is important not only with respect to the process of expropriation with the consequence of then having to accept whatever product of the Green Revolution, but also in terms of the devastation of the land’s reproductive powers wrought by these agricultural techniques. There is a rebellion in progress on this terrain – carried forward by ever increasing swathes of the population in developed countries as well as developing ones – that is representative of people’s increasing determination to guarantee for themselves health as well as survival. EB, MC, JP: You speak of the devastation of the earth’s reproductive powers, which seems like a good transition point for us to ask you to

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speak of the body, of your most recent focus on the medical establishment. Perhaps you could begin by giving us your thoughts on the present state of discourse surrounding the body as an entry point for your own activism surrounding the practice of hysterectomy. MDC: ... I would never have been able to discover the tremendous abuse that is inflicted on the female body, that is, hysterectomy – something I will return to later – if I had not had a very strong sense of identity that I built for myself along my feminist path, if I had not had the exceptionally strong sense that I had to defend my body as organism and as an intact body, and if I had not had in mind the importance and the richness of the abundance of resources that an integral body presents ... Yet the abuse of this operation8 is not only a contemporary issue. It has obviously gone on for some time, because I have memories even from when I was very young of many women being subjected to it, although then it was almost impossible to find a figure for the number of operations that were carried out. Since the reform of the Italian health system at the beginning of the 1990s it has at least been possible to access such data ... In 1994, in Italy, 38,000 hysterectomies were recorded, in 1997 that figure grew to 68,000, and in 1998 and 1999 the numbers fell just short of 70,000 recorded operations a year; this meant that at a national level, for one woman out of every five there was the likelihood of having to undergo this operation, while in some regions, such as the Veneto, it was one out of four women. This was the mass castration of women. It was exactly a case of mass castration and disablement, because one must remember that this operation as a rule, in half of all cases, is accompanied by ovariectomy, the removal of the ovaries even if these are healthy. Preventative ovariectomy, as they refer to it. It is the only case in medicine in which a healthy organ is removed as a preventative measure ... I have also concluded that regarding this operation some horrendous abuses of disabled people have taken place. One woman wrote to me from Australia, giving me all of the details in her case and permission to speak of it, and asking me whom she could contact in order to publicize what had happened to herself and also to others, so as to do something about it, so that it will not happen to others. When she had not yet menstruated and was still a child with mobility problems – she was in a wheelchair as she could not move her legs – yet with a perfectly capable mind, doctors subjected her to a hysterectomy so that she would not be faced with the problem of menstruation while in the wheelchair ... Another abuse which I wrote about in the Rome article [La Porta dell’Orto…], even though there I did not have enough time to discuss it,

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is that now for breast cancer a preventative measure has been developed that is inconceivable to me. For women who are the bearers of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 chromosome, which it has been suggested indicates a high risk for developing breast and/or ovarian cancer, one measure consists of removing both breasts and ovaries in order to protect them from this risk. This is referred to as preventative surgery. However, as doctors themselves say, it is not certain that the woman who undergoes the operation would have gotten breast or ovarian cancer, and it is not certain that even after such mutilation she will not get cancer in such locations ... This seems to me to be genetic terrorism. EB, MC, JP: We want to end by asking you to discuss your role as a female professor and the pedagogical strategies you employ in that space. MDC: I believe I have basically maintained great continuity with the 1970s in terms of my teaching methods. This is because I always try to start the discussion by getting students to begin with a problem. All you need to do is turn on the television: misery is being multiplied, starvation is being extended, deaths are being constantly multiplied. Why is this? We are in the mode of production that is considered the most productive of all, which ought to have guaranteed more resources compared with other ways of organizing, and yet this is simply not the case, all it produces is more misery, more death, more hunger. Why does it not produce a more generalized well-being? This is the point from which I generally begin in my teaching. This I follow up with some explanations as to the fundamental laws of capitalist development, that typically this mode of production produces accumulations of wealth in the form of capital on one side and the expansion of misery on the other: the concentration of wealth and the extension of hunger. My students read chapters 27, 28, and 33 of Capital, Volume I, quite closely. Thus we cover expropriation of the land and the theory of systemic colonization, because there they can find the roots of the phenomena, the results of which appear as soon as they turn on the television but the true origins of which are always kept hidden. When I was able to teach longer courses, in the years previous to the reform of the universities, I also had my students study the chapter on the working day in the same volume very closely. Currently, the course offerings have been halved and I have to work around this. What I cover are the Marxist tools of analysis that I think cannot be set aside, as well as writings, texts, and videos by researchers of capitalist development, of international debt, of globalization and its new subjects, of the issues of the land and of

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women. Here obviously I employ the older and more current works that belong to our tradition and the ways in which these have been fruitfully crossed with eco-feminism. I offer the students a choice between the numerous texts produced by the protagonists of current movements against neoliberal globalization and against war, therefore, those by Vandana Shiva, José Bové, Marcos, Rigoberta Menchù, and others, so that they can capture the manner in which reality is in movement. Thus there is starvation, but it is not a starvation that remains immobile, it is a hunger that contains people who on the one hand struggle, rebel, and on the other propose an alternative view, who have other demands and who propose alternative solutions. It is not true that there aren’t solutions ... at the same time I try to bring the students to the understanding of paths by which another knowledge can be constructed ... I also maintain something that might sound somewhat heretical for those who are committed to the view 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. This means that if I want to have genuine food it has to be produced nearby, it has to be produced at a local level for it to be fresh. This implies that every country must have its own diversified agricultural production. In the agricultural and nutritional sphere this means that encouraging specialization by geographic areas within the neoliberal internationalization of markets and the industrial production of food is a strategy that ought to be refused. The aspiration of populations, that of having a local and diversified agriculture that offers them fresh and genuine food which does not arrive on an airplane after having been polluted in order to be preserved, is a fundamental demand. Therefore, these issues, the expropriation of the land, local cultivation, the local diversification of crops, avoiding a situation in which one country produces x crop exclusively and another, y crop ... they are in all of our interests even in developed countries, not only in the Third World. These are issues on which can be built a political recomposition, because our freedom and our quality of life depend on it. In Rome I said that even if we took for granted that one day there would be a guaranteed social wage for all, what would we do with it if we could only buy poison and with it our own extinction? Therefore it is time that the debates around the money-form and technology were united, in a very strong and important manner, with those of the land and of agriculture. I consider them to be the primary issues facing us today. Interview transcribed by Silvia Carriciolo

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NOTES The following interview was carried out on a splendid day in June of 2002 amidst the blooming oleanders on the terrace of Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s house in Padova, Italy. While the entire interview was filmed as an intended resource for women’s centres across North American universities, Mariarosa kindly allowed us to publish a shorter version for this collection. 1 Dalla Costa is referring to a talk given at the Operaismo a Convegno conference organized in Rome in June of 2002. For a report on the conference, see Enda Brophy, ‘Italian Operaismo Face to Face,’ in Historical Materialism 12.1 no. 1. For a partial translation of Dalla Costa’s talk, see Arianna Bove’s translation at: http://www.generation-online.org/p/pdallacosta.htm. This talk with the title ‘La porta dell’orto e del giardino,’ has been partially published in Italian in G. Borio, F. Pozzi, and G. Roggero (eds.), Gli operaisti (Roma: Derive Approdi, 2005) and in its entirety as ‘La puerta del huerto y del jardin’ in Noesis 15, no. 28 (julio–diciembre 2005): 79–100 (http:// www.uacj.mx). 2 Trans. note: Porto Marghera was a site of petrochemical production during the 1960s, where workerist militants such as the Veneto-Emiliano section of Potere Operaio engaged in struggles. See Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 3 Lotta Continua, or ‘Unceasing Struggle,’ was another strong tendency within the Italian extraparliamentarian left of the 1960s and 1970s. 4 Trans. note: In Italy at the time the abandonment of the conjugal home or ‘abbandono del tetto coniugale’ was a punishable by law. 5 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Famiglia Welfare e Stato tra Progressismo e New Deal, 3rd ed. (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1997). 6 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977). 7 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, ‘The Native in Us, the Land We Belong To,’ in Common Sense 23 (1998); and in The Commoner 6 (2002), at http:// www.thecommoner.org. 8 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, ed., Isterectomia. Il problema sociale di un abuso contro le donne (Hysterectomy: The Social Problem of an Abuse against Women) (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2002), forthcoming from New York: Autonomedia.

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9 Conricerca as Political Action guido borio, francesca pozzi, and gigi roggero Translated by Enda Brophy

‘Knowledge is only knowledge. But the control of knowledge – that is politics.’ This dazzling insight offered by Bruce Sterling in Distraction could be usefully employed to sum up the practice of conricerca.1 As an activity transforming the existing state of things, as the site of education and counter-cooperation, conricerca is – constituently – a production of knowledge that is ‘other than,’ an experiment in organizational practices, and a space of resubjectification. In fewer words: a lot of ‘ricerca’ without ‘con’ is a precariously founded sociological account; a lot of ‘con’ without ‘ricerca’ leads to sterile ideological production. Recently in Italy, the evocativeness of the word inquiry2 has prevailed over its actual utilization as a practice. In short, ‘inquiry’ has occasionally been used as a shortcut to self-legitimation with respect to the difficulties inherent in political action. Perhaps today we have entered a different phase. The bursting forth of new movements onto a global scene until recently considered at peace augurs well. As always, the subjective push of struggles places in question not only the present state of things, but also the reassuring preconstituted identities of those engaged in that contestation. In this new space there is re-emerging a predisposition towards research, without which the political militant would be nothing more than an ideological megaphone detached from real dynamics, or a dispassionate conserver of his own role and of that which already exists, be it a party or another organization. When does one engage in research? Research is carried out when one has no certainties, when that which is made an object of knowledge, and how to intervene within it, is not known. This knowledge and intervention is often impeded by a tendency towards seeking refuge in static and frozen identities – something that was especially widespread in the political subjectivity formed during the long winter of the 1980s

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and early 1990s, amidst the stagnation (at least in Italy) of social conflict. Conricerca is in contrast, always critique and problematization. It does not allow us to stand idly by on mummified certainties. Conricerca has it that certainties must be acquired in the field, so that we can constantly question them and formulate new hypotheses. The slippery question of identity must be confronted from a similar perspective. We form our identities by critiquing and opposing ourselves to that which exists, and by activating processes that construct alternatives. In this way, identity enables us to recognize ourselves and make ourselves recognized: it is a process, and we cannot allow it to survive unchanged by the dynamics that nourished it, lest it become a deadweight. We should state at the beginning that we do not intend to talk about inquiry and research from the perspective of an academic scientism: rather, the lens through which we intend to look at reality is political and irrevocably partisan. That is, it is on the side of that which has been stripped of its own capacity for autonomous cooperation; on the side of that ambivalent group which through labour is today power [potenza]3 for the system, but which can also become a force for itself, for a parting of ways with capitalism. At the same time, though, we will not be limiting ourselves to an abstract theoretical discourse on conricerca. Conricerca as a category can only be empty unless it is understood as a tool for fostering a new and different form of political action, the growth of which is central to processes of struggle. From this perspective, science, scientificity, and a method for the construction of knowledges and of capacities must be considered in their potential ambivalence. They are decisive for every form of social cooperation, and can be deviated towards a goal other than the systematic one: towards a goal of transformation. So, conricerca must involve experimenting with subversive paths that are capable of virtuously fusing theory and practice; if it did not, it would risk falling into disciplinary specialization, and fail to live up to its declared intent, which is to transform the world. We hope this chapter will contribute towards the construction of experiences of conricerca, ones that do not begin from misleading premises of unity, but that encounter – in experiments in different contexts – the common elements of confrontation and of a dynamic subjective recomposition. If this chapter offers individual militants or collectives some ideas on which to reflect, some potentially useful tools, or simply some good questions – if, in short, it becomes theory for and within the praxis of those who dream and struggle for ‘another possible world’ – it will have achieved its key objective.

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Historical Contextualization of Conricerca The idea of conricerca4 emerged in the context of American sociology, but it was strongly politicized in its first transposition to Italy in the 1950s by Roberto Guiducci and above all by Alessandro Pizzorno (both socialist sociologists). Their reference points in North America were not so much an identifiable sociological school or an exhaustive set of theoretical currents: it was more a matter of cues, elaborations, and insights derived from various sources. These included fields as diverse as literature and industrial sociology (where one could find analyses of human relations and critiques of Taylorism and Fordism), as well as the work of important figures such as David Riesman, who studied and described, through participatory methods, various cultural and individual changes as American social classes were reconfigured.5 Based on these currents, as early as 1956 Pizzorno described conricerca as a method that proposed not only to know in order to inspire action, which can only be integral to historical knowledge, but indeed to know in order to lay the foundations for action. Knowledge does not at a certain moment pass the baton to action, even if the latter is enlightened; rather, it must determine action; in the same manner that the necessity of action explicitly brought about certain ways of knowing and not others. Organized action involves organized knowledge, not in the sense of having a catalogue or a timetable, or a good work plan, but rather to force problems to emerge, the themes of the research, the objects to be grasped within that same organizational situation.6

Owing to the open hostility of the Italian socialist-communist world towards anything ‘American’ – not to mention towards the muchreviled bourgeois discipline of sociology – conricerca was fated to arouse the curiosity of people who either were outside the official Worker’s Movement or openly dissented within it.7 One particular form of conricerca – though it was not explicitly defined as such – was carried out by Danilo Montaldi. His own politics – which he developed amidst the so-called ‘minority’ tendencies (Internationalists, Bordighists, Trotskyites), and which were steeped in a profound anti-Stalinism – were marked by efforts to build new relationships among intellectuals, militants, and classes, and to imagine forms of proletarian organization that were different from those in countries where actually existing socialism had turned cancerous. From here, he came into contact with

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the important journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, which was among the most fertile spaces for discussions centring around the need for a new political creed uncontaminated by the swampy waters of marxism and of socialist communism, the pitfalls of which were even more evident after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. 8 Also, from France there arrived Diario di un Operaio9 (Diary of a Worker) by Daniel Mothé (himself a contributor to Socialisme ou Barbarie), translated by Montaldi and launched by Romano Alquati in Turin, the factory city that was then central to Italian automobile production. In his account of the daily struggles of Renault workers, Mothé bitterly criticized leftist intellectuals for glorifying workers. Such glorification served only to justify the hegemony of the party over a class, which was thus reduced to an abstract unitary icon. Workers were more than strong arms with hungry stomachs; they had their own values, everyday qualities, sufferings, imaginaries, desires, pleasures, and material and spiritual satisfactions. In short, they had their own subjectivity, both singular and collective. From North America there came yet another stream of thought that the Italians could draw from when elaborating their own experiences of conricerca: the diaries of Taylorized workers (which included the essay ‘The American Worker’ by Paul Romano and the analyses of James Boggs).10 Through research and rank-and-file political action, Montaldi tried to allow elements of autonomy and protagonism to emerge from below, freed of both marxist objectivism and socialist–communist bureaucracy. He did this mainly by focusing on an atypical proletarian subjectivity, often at the margins rather than at the centre of the class. This subjectivity was characterized by moments of alterity and potential antagonism.11 To this end, he employed sociology without ever reducing the theory of Marx to mere sociological theory. In this synthetic cartography of Italian conricerca of the 1950s, we can place Romano Alquati as the third point of the triangle, next to Pizzorno and Montaldi.12 After working for a time with Montaldi, Alquati began his own political trajectory, first in Milan and then in Turin, where he breathed life (in theory but above all in practice) into a distinctively political conricerca. His legacy passed through the defeats of the 1970s and the deafening silence of the 1980s and 1990s, and is still alive today. In the late 1950s, soon joined by Pierluigi Gasparotto, Emilio Soave, and Romolo Gobbi, Alquati began exploring individual and collective worker subjectivity as it changed through time, as the old figure of the professional worker, derived from factory artisans, gave way to the new figure of the ‘mass worker,’ composed primarily of migrant peasants from southern Italy.

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In the 1950s, Italy made its late entry into Taylorism and Fordism, and worker struggles soon resurfaced. At the forefront was the mass worker, a product of the new factory systems. This figure had some links with the proletarian and peasant cultures of conflict, which still retained a degree of autonomy. The mass worker was viewed with suspicion or outright hostility by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and by large segments of the trade union movement, the political culture of which was steeped in the work ethic and the productivist scientism of the professional worker. The political potential of this new figure was understood only by small groups based outside the Workers’ Movement. These groups constituted the seedbeds of Italian political workerism, which found expression in journals such as Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, and later in the experiences of Potere Operaio and the various groups of Autonomia.13 Stimulated by a general ferment that was not only Italian but also international, coresearchers smashed the mythical icon that had been passed down by the socialist–communist tradition – the heroic working class, lover of work, that sacrificed itself for everyone, that was made up of pure angels of goodness. Instead they investigated what exactly that new working class was, not only from a theoretical perspective but in the materiality of struggles and power relations and in its quotidian behaviour – in its subjectivity. Coresearchers saw the mass worker as a leading figure in that cycle of struggles, not only because he was central to the renewed capitalist productive cycle, but also because his objective position united subjective behaviours that were potentially in conflict. This subjectivity was not completely self-antagonistic; that said, it offered spaces for resubjectification that could presage processes of transformation. Thus, conricerca was an instrument not only for the knowledge of subjectivity, but also for the construction of processes of counterformation and for experimenting with organizational forms. These forms were not parachuted in from the outside; rather, they were constructed internally, in the relations among vanguards, militants, and workers. In Ricordi sul secondo operaismo politico, Alquati maintained that the thing that in those years was most irksome to the historico-communists was catching the bolshevik contrast between spontaneity and organization off-balance by throwing down these two words: ‘spontaneous organization!’ If a subterranean or submerged spontaneity managed to come to light in an open struggle it meant that it had built that which we called the rhizome of a spontaneous organization, similar in nature to the old

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mole in Marx: a network of little moles, which however almost always included militants that were in some way also interconnected with ‘external’ subjective and political forces ... At times the new strikes were strongest where there were fewer comrades. The organization started from below ... but then in order to grow qualitatively it needed something else. 14

Thus, conricerca developed as communication and cooperation, as a process of resubjectification and counterformation, and as a forum for the autonomous political representation of the ‘organized spontaneity’ of the workers.15 In the 1970s and (albeit without the benefit of struggles) the 1980s, small groups of militant social scientists practised embryonic conricerca. In the 1990s, well-intentioned paths of inquiry met with the various objective difficulties and subjective limits that were discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Today, perhaps, a new phase is emerging. Today, conricerca needs to be rethought, in a context that at certain levels has been profoundly transformed. It must be filled with new content and practices, it must in part be reinvented. Inquiry and Conricerca Let us take a step back and consider what conricerca is. First of all, we must distinguish between the method of conricerca and the method of cooperation underlying its activities. In other words, we must distinguish between the construction of research tools and experimentation with forms of political organization. At the same time, we must consider how we can counterutilize the tools of capitalism – including those forged by the social sciences – in order to empower our own actions. Tools are not neutral: they need to be problematized, combined in peculiar ways, bent, overturned, and transformed. So, it is a matter of elaborating and constantly testing experimental methodologies that are open and flexible; of counterutilizing even science in order to empower the non-scientific action that is politics. And we must use those tools to detect tendencies and transformative actions amidst the unpredictability and contingency of the event. On this basis, we can say that inquiry and conricerca are not the same thing. There are at least three major differences between the two. Inquiry, first of all, is extemporaneous – that is, it lasts for a predetermined time and then stops. This locates it in a medium- to shortrange perspective. Its articulation results more than anything else

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in the rooting of a militant figure who is capable of expressing and allowing for the growth of a knowledge of political intervention. Inquiry gathers data about the political elements of social reality and behaviours; about specific processes of struggle; about the composition of conflict; and about the site where it has located itself. Conricerca, in contrast, configures itself as an open process, a ‘spiral becoming’ that constructs new levels of knowledge and practices, from which one can always start again in order to build others. Second, inquiry is mainly cognitive in its dimensions, whereas conricerca is the concrete activity of transformation of that which exists. It locates itself in a mediumrange perspective and has a planning horizon.16 Third and finally, inquiry presupposes a separation between the production of knowledge and the construction of a political path, whereas in conricerca, elaborations of strategy and choices of practices are internal rather than external to the field of cooperation of the coresearchers, in terms of flexible goals, purposes, and trajectories. Often, conricerca is important as a space for the political counterformation of militants more than for the results it offers. In this way it provides a system for efficient political action. Yet inquiry and conricerca are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, inquiry amounts to a specific phase of conricerca. For example, questionnaires can be distributed in order to better understand the particular reality one wants to investigate and intervene in. This can often be useful, as a means for exploring the chosen environment and for building a communication network to advance one’s political and coresearch actions. Constructing and Experimenting: Open and Flexible Models of Conricerca So far, it should be clear that conricerca rejects the myth of scientific objectivity. What is important instead is the methodological confrontation: to begin from well-defined hypotheses in order to question them, and from a sketch of a project in order to test one’s own practice varying or enriching it along the way. A kind of ‘counterlearning by doing’! Schematizing in a highly reductive manner, the first phase of a program of conricerca (which, as a process, is much more complex, stratified, and articulated) can be subdivided methodologically into three parts:

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1 Formulate initial hypotheses and choose the particular composition on which it will begin to move. 2 Contact the prechosen subjects and conduct interviews, then contact new subjects and conduct new interviews. 3 Collectively verify the hypotheses, critique and/or enrich them, elaborate on the results, and produce new knowledge, while experimenting with new practices for coresearching political cooperation. The chosen instruments (the questionnaire, focused interviews, video interviews, and so on) will vary according to specific requirements, and more than one technique can be used at a time. What is important is to never lose sight of the hypotheses, intentions, and aims of the project. The hypotheses connect the research to the theory, which is always undergoing critical re-elaboration. It can be useful for the group conducting the project to compile a document that describes every phase, from its starting hypotheses to the dissemination of findings. If placed in communication with one another, made to interact, and inserted into a circularity of comparison, such varied experiences can give rise to experimental models, which in turn can be circulated, while concomitantly autonomously producing new languages. In sum, conricerca, as an unending production of knowledge that is other than an open source practice, is truly unpatentable and against any copyright! Coresearching New Paths of Transformation inside the Movement Within the movement of movements it has been evident for some time – at least in the Italian context – that there are widespread difficulties in comprehending its potentialities and emergences. This movement has amply demonstrated that it cannot be reduced to the sum of its organized components, which are regularly surpassed and shattered. On the other side, militants have increasingly had to confront a generalized difficulty in reading its real composition. All of this is at once a great advantage and an evident problem. The plurality of practices and active subjects has in fact exposed various interpretative grids as inadequate, putting into practice – in the materiality of processes rather than in the domain of ideologies – a radical critique of political representation. This, however, has yet to bring to the production of autonomous political representation, in the form of the elaboration of planning, a sedimentation of relations of force, and processes of experimentation in organizational forms – flexible and transitory – that go beyond those already

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definitively thrown into crisis. This is the problem, one that is not (fortunately) resolvable by a simple substitution of political representation. It is an open question, and hurried attempts to resolve it are not helpful. Stated more simply, what is the situation, what are the forms of action, and what are the thoughts of the hundreds of thousands of people who since 1999 have filled the global streets from Seattle to Genoa, from Quebec City to Johannesburg, from Melbourne to Florence, all the way up to the 110 million antiwar protesters who mobilized on 15 February 2003? These actions have repeatedly denied the arguments of those who at every possible turn hurriedly celebrated the movement’s ‘funeral’! What subjectivities, at both individual and collective levels, have emerged in the interweaving of collective processes and singularities? It is a matter of reading and rereading the great open questions of the present through the lens of struggle, rather than the lens of capitalist processes and their own self-legitimations. What is ‘work’ today, when all human action becomes subjected to labour, when capital is valorized and accumulated above all through consumption – as Naomi Klein has documented in No Logo – and through one’s self-reproduction?17 What are the new centralities? What ambivalences do they have? What forms of conflict are adequate to such transformations? How is it possible to think about a surpassing of the nation-state – a surpassing that is constructed and directed by movements and not streamlined for systemic processes? The urgent need is to rename and rethink processes from a point of view that takes sides, after years of risky subalternity to capitalistic interpretative categories. Above all, therefore, there is the choice of where to conduct coresearch. In its discriminating course, conricerca does not move only with those who (as in The Matrix) seem to have swallowed the red pill (already politicized subjects) or the blue pill (the happy and contented homogenized subjects, who have been ground up in the machinery of obedience and consent). What interests us is the grey zone in between, the zone of fleeting and constantly shifting borders, the zone of those who do not accept and who are politically active, who desire something else but have yet to socialize their desires of transformation. This is the zone of potenza (power), the space of what is possible, the place of strong ambivalence, the fuel of the movement. Thus it is necessary to acquire the capacity to move within a vertically stratified system. Even in a phase of relative de- or re-spatialization of forms of labour, places and social circles are not equivalent: there

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exist new strategic sites to investigate, to interpret, on which to wager. That said, political centrality is assigned not only by objective positions of production and reproduction, but also by an interweaving with those subjective potentialities which are actually operant. In short, 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. One’s coresearching actions must as much as possible root themselves in the ambivalence of processes, knowing how to seize within them a double-sided genealogy: one must know not only how to read the side of capitalist command, but also the sign of conflict and refusal, of that otherness of behaviours. That is the unmistakable negative of capital, the side which has a potential to be activated in a process of self-transformation. Conricerca begins from a project and from hypotheses, tests them, modifies and implements them, and then constructs more advanced levels of knowledge and strength. To sum up: it is a matter of coresearching to try to understand which forces are fighting for what kind of transformation with what kind of organization. Constructing New Forms of Counter-cooperation In this context, there are at least two unresolved matters that today should be considered. (1) Social conflict, which both causes and expresses itself in social movements, does not yet have the strength to substantially alter the direction of global capitalism; and (2) some organized forces are attempting to intercept and condition these movements, but these forces are often unable either to comprehend the specificities of these movements or to construct the preconditions for their alternative development. So a first goal might well be to understand and confront these two open questions, by constructing some hypotheses and in this way charting a path for research and intervention. The method of conricerca is therefore fundamental, as is the placement of those who carry it out. This method provides, above all, the ability to recognize the difficult parts and levels of social reality present in the system, and from this to construct a praxis that connects in a new way the struggles with the subjects who constitute themselves as the antagonistic side. As we have already seen, conricerca works in the medium range (and at the levels included therein); it is a ‘hinge’ level

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that connects the higher systemic levels, characterized by relative invariance, with the movements below, which are in rapid flux. Its effectiveness lies in the militant’s movement upwards and downwards as he or she engages in continuous interrelations and constructs relationships between different levels of reality. It is necessary to deepen knowledge and to comprehend the systemic complexities, and concurrently to synthesize, select, and simplify adaptation to a precise goal, and then to propose intermediate objectives and paths so that knowledges [conoscenze] are transformed into know-how [saperi], which can then be formatted and constituted so as to be partisan and therefore useful in strengthing and lending incisiveness to political intervention. The process of subjectification which proceeds both in constructing for and negating oneself as a functionally constituent part of the system, must traverse all levels of reality. It must move from the highest level of abstraction in order to get to the lowest level of concrete factuality, and then begin to rise again in a process of constant exchange and transformation that empowers political action. 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. Conricerca is the construction of a particular kind of force that becomes the capacity for cooperation as well for effective power [potere]. Both are able to confront capitalist Power and cooperation. Conricerca is, therefore, above all a constitutive process, one that is flexible and clearly defined and that is implemented by giving life to a collective dimension of accumulation, or rather, to the counter-accumulation of know-how [saperi] and particular abilities directed towards the achievement of precise antisystemic goals. Countersubjectification is constructed on a path of mutual growth, through collectivities cooperating among themselves. In this way they are plurally empowered. Therefore, there is or should be a class subjectivity (which remains almost completely to be investigated or invented), within which there moves and acts also an intermediate subjectivity that guides, attempts to stabilize processes of struggle, of conflict, of alternative socialization, building within this a conscious organizational presence that aims to root itself and extend a project of counter-organization in order to achieve processes of recomposition. In this way strength is given to the intrinsically political character of the class, making emerge from am-

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bivalences the conflict and the negation of oneself as a part of capital. This strength, in turn, is composed of multiple single subjectivities that are formed only through confrontation and through the encounter with reality, which constitutes itself transversally in processes of action, of reflection, of comprehension, of study, of elaboration of knowledges [conoscenze], know-how [saperi], and theory. Such a subjectivity would test itself and draw strength by transforming and acting within the social reality, by opposing and denying the role imposed on it by the capitalist system. This would deny a particular relation of atomization and separation of individuals, who would then be forced by the system to cooperate as long as they are organized towards the ends of capitalist accumulation, which in accumulating surplus value and Power [potere] consolidates and increase dominance, transforming the social system and the individuals that comprise and develop it. This denial could occur even in the absence of broader alternative goals, which have yet to be proposed through experimentation. Conricerca is therefore also and above all a particular form of alternative organization that consolidates itself socially and that assumes a precise political dimension. It must offer itself as the capacity to organize – and thus to keep together and allow to behave in a focused manner – the collective and individual countersubjectivities in a specific form of social cooperation that is able to empower the anticapitalist dimension. In constituting itself as a counterorganization, it constructs a recompositional procedure; it explores and measures itself against the spontaneity of the class, encouraging models of comprehension of reality and of specific political action. It promotes events that are unrepeatable, such as the breakage of certain equilibriums and the overturning of relations of force. It is, in this sense, a precarious process that is constantly changing and redefining itself. It involves the construction of something that was not there before: a constant action of self-empowerment and of destructuring the adversary. It is a re/search for/of a strategy. Where one carries out conricerca (because conricerca, intervention, and presence are not separate dimensions), with whom, and under what pretext, is as important as the method. Conricerca makes it possible to identify the social, productive, and reproductive spaces where the power relationship between resistance and capitalist development and the resulting forms of mutability has become central. From such spaces can emerge processes of aggregation, recomposition, and subjectification across classes. Location is thus the result of a political choice, one that is allowed by paths of inquiry into the direction of capital and of class

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composition during a particular period. Those compositions are already the fruit of a particular form of action and of a manner of reflecting and constructing synthesis. Putting Experiments onto the Network Small experiments in inquiry are already in progress, other promising hypotheses are in the pipeline. Surrounding us there is a general need to build forms of communication and confrontation, a strong demand to place oneself on the ’net.18 The spaces and questions within which experimentation is taking place suggest, in nuce, some conjecturable strategic sites: schools and universities; migrants and migrant labour; communication; and precarious labour, new forms of employment, and of labour more generally. Amongst the different paths there are differences in localization, of scope, of perspective. Nonetheless, while avoiding ill-auguring unitary icons, we need to pose ourselves the problem of co-researching not only the multiplicity in what is shared, but also what is shared in the multiplicity, if we do not want to risk jumping on the bandwagon of the apologists of ‘weak thought’ who, not disposing of a commanding knowledge of complexity, break it up into many smaller fragments, laying claim to the properties of a specific part of the whole. The taking of sides and the critique of universality that are our starting points have nothing to do with democratic multiculturalism, an instrumental exaltation of diversity (amongst equals …) employed in order to justify the cultural and political hegemony of the Western bourgeoisie. As Christian Marazzi keenly points out, the exaltation of a plurality of differences has resulted in the appearance of some real monsters. The fact that a [Pim] Fortuyn is a subject of multiple differences, and that he paid for this, developing a position of a refusal of the other, of a refusal of Islamic culture (much like Huntington, with whom he frequently aligned himself), seems to me to demonstrate how ambiguous the question of the multiple and that of multiple differences are, when these are not brought back to the original problem, that is, the problem of difference: certainly of gender difference, but also of the difference between capital and labour, of the difference that gives substance to the conflict internal to and against capital.19

The difficult question is how to build a syncretic practice that, beginning from one’s own irreducible and inalienable pluralities, can give form and substance to the common goal of transformation. In other

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words, how to tend towards that synthesis-within-complexity that is one of the great strengths of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire20: the ability to name one’s side and one’s enemy. An analogous reasoning can be done with the concept of multitude. The theories that interpret multitude as an already given subject, or as a category that can be substituted for that of class, raise many questions. The discussion of the multitude is interesting instead where it is configured as a space for reflecting on the dynamic relationship between the singularity and the collective, as a plural setting of a potential resubjectification. 21 The emphasis here is on an irreducible partiality, on the material critique of universalism forced into being by collective and individual social behaviours (by the ‘right to flee’ practised by migrants, for example). This points to the intrinsically political nature of autonomous subjectifications that have always been concealed by objectivist analyses. A space that does not exclude the category of class, but on the contrary indicates the need to rethink it; not in its sociological or economic objectivity, but as a potentially antagonistic entity subjectively redetermining itself. A space that, to conclude, problematizes and redefines the relationship between intrinsically political nature – hence material potentiality – and autonomous political representation, or an organized transformation of systemic relationships. The bet that today we find ourselves making consists in redefining and in some aspects reinventing the practice of conricerca. One of the most glaring problems (as we mentioned above) is the spatialization of new forms of labour. In the 1950s and 1960s the industrial districts concentrated and spatialized workers – at that point the segment of the class leading the struggles – according to a well-defined temporality. Today the situation is quite different. There is no social figure that is central nowadays, and likely there will not be in the future, at least not as there were in the past. At the same time, at least at first blush, there are no longer circumscribed spaces in which are aggregated great quantities of subjects put to work. From this perspective, we are witnessing a despatialization of forms of labour and workers. On closer imspection, it is perhaps better to speak of a relative despatialization, whereby processes of despatialization accompany processes of respatialization. For example, in Milan (the Italian capital of the ’Net economy), the old industrial structures that fell into disuse are now occupied mainly by the factories of communication, of the Internet, and of entertainment and education (such as universities). The production of heavy tangible commodities has left the stage, and been replaced by the production of

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lighter intangible goods. The old workers have been replaced by the new ’Net workers, the new reproducers of themselves. Discontinuities and continuities mix. There remain, though, commodities, the slavery of labour, capitalist command, profit as an objective, and the factory as the mode of organizing production. Since the crisis of the new economy, ’Net workers have begun perceiving themselves subjectively and recognizing themselves as ‘knowledge workers’ (see Berardi, this volume). Nonetheless, within this frame, new figures and new colours are beginning to make up the painting – and thus new ambivalences. Yet today we can turn the problem of spatiality upside down; in other words, it is a matter of first constructing the spaces and then giving life to paths of aggregation. Of rooting oneself in spaces that act as strategic sites, and at the same time constructing spaces (mobile and even virtual) in which dispersed subjects can root themselves. For example, an academic publisher, a radio station, a newspaper, a website, and an independent television station can be instruments for politically spatializing diffuse subjects. Through these, one can begin and strengthen the processes of conricerca. The important thing is to find ways to utilize the plurality of means, to traverse them critically and transform them, without thinking that one in particular can in itself be the bearer of a new form of political action or of immediate liberation. Decolonizing Subjectivity: Conricerca as Subversive Pedagogy One of the most important results of conricerca is the construction of a space for the political counter-formation of militants and of subjects that manages to involve others in its own actions. During the decades of ideologically triumphant capitalism, there was formed a social subjectivity colonized largely by capital, by its models of life and consumption, of culture and beliefs, of needs and desires.22 As the practices of the ‘movement of movements’ have demonstrated, it is possible to begin denting this colonization, to spread practices of disobedience. It is now a matter of enlarging the crevices opened in ‘capitalist totalitarianism,’ and of consolidating and branching out in various parts of society with the strength accumulated. This cannot happen spontaneously, nor can it happen through some enlightened leadership that has descended from above. Conricerca is, from this perspective, an experiment in subversive pedagogy, in radical critiques of knowledge and culture in the decolonization of subjectivity of the construction of counter-subjectivity.

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For such experimentation to work, it is necessary to position one’s perspective beginning from the ambivalence of processes. Upsetting one’s perspective can become a path to interpretative keys that pose themselves as alternatives with respect to that which exists. For example, the mass workers who in the 1950s and 1960s migrated from the south towards the factory city of Turin, have been depicted by the Left as dispossessed masses pushed northwards by misery. Actually, as the coresearchers have demonstrated, these migrants were generally more educated young people, bearers of conflictual cultures forged in the struggles of the southern countryside, pushed by conditions of deprivation, but also pulled by the search for a better life in another world, one embodied in the siren call of mass consumption. Sandro Mezzadra gives the same attention to subjective expectations when he speaks of the migrant’s ‘right to flee.’ This is certainly not to negate the suffering that pushes people to migrate, but rather to point out the activities of refusal, which constantly exceed the self-proclaimed global order. 23 This brings to light the material critique of existing borders and the international division of labour as put into practice by the migrants. Again, think of the interpretation given to the flexibility of workers. This flexibility today has certainly become a hammer for rendering certain conditions of life precarious; yet how can we not see in this a strong sign of the refusal of labour, of the worker’s struggles to flee the chains of dependency? If we forget one side – that of conflict and subjective expectations – we end up weeping endlessly about the ‘evil’ of capitalism, which unilaterally attacks an inert and disembodied ‘martyr’ proletariat. If we forget the other side – that of domination – we can find ourselves mistaking processes of systemic innovation for the chosen path of liberation. Once again, it is a matter of changing course – of not limiting ourselves to a condemnation of exploitation, and of leveraging the subjective needs, expectations, and aspirations of a possible liberation.24 To move politically within ambivalence is to know to analyse the two sides of processes in order to build a third perspective: that which is not there. This is the perspective of radical transformation. The movement of movements, having forced the world to pay attention to it during the battle in the streets of Seattle, is currently completing an important passage. Inaccurately referred to as an ‘antiglobalization’ movement, it is becoming the active subject of another globalization, within and against that of markets. There can be no nostalgia for what we are leaving behind, beginning with the parochial

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borders of the nation-state. The new movements can of course also accumulate force by re-elaborating that force which is found in the legacies of anticapitalist struggles – the capacity to recognize oneself within a history, to use it critically and to further it. At the same time, though, we must point out some evident discontinuities with respect to the short-circuits and failures of the past, so as to bury that which is dead, shake off bothersome ideological encrustations, and defeat useless reductive ghosts. It is necessary to know how to die in order to be born different. This is all the while accompanied by only one certainty: counterglobalization can realize itself only through the materiality of conflicts and the functionality of certain (mobile) planning goals, not beginning from the precautionary elaboration of institutional orderings that are actually its own posthumous mediation, or from anticipated attempts at normalization. With great lucidity, Franco Berardi (Bifo) states the open question that the movement of movements must confront: How are we to pass from the pervasiveness of means of communication (such as the Internet) to the invasiveness of means of communication (from the flyer to television, says Bifo)? Reflecting on the complexity of the system is a completely different thing from becoming complacent about complexity understood as an infinite and never-synthesizable sum of many parts. The alleged end of grand narratives has opened the ideological field to capitalism as the only narrative possible. The movement, with the still embryonic force of its own struggle, took care of cleaning the slate of such illusory ideas of pacification. To say ‘another world is possible’ is to open a great new collective narration, one that is not univocal but rather is made up of many irreducible singular narrations. The problem, then, is how to hold together the command of complexity with the capacity to act afforded by simplification, while at the same time moving between different levels of reality. That is, how are we to pass from the pervasiveness of intrinsic political character and of the microphysics of power, to the invasiveness of the political as the planned subversion of the present, the construction of counterpower, and the injection into the systemic relationships of power and domination? In other words, how are we to plant within material processes those instances of transformation that the movements make emerge during large events? How are we to verticalize the proliferation of struggles, and from there redescend to contribute towards their further spreading, in a dynamic circularity that is constant and endless? Philip K. Dick, analysing the evident difference between his Do An-

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droids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the cinematographic version of Blade Runner, noted that the book and the film do not get in each other’s way, but instead mutually reinforce each other. This is because, said Dick, the difference lies in the fact that where a book speaks, a film moves; a book has to do with words, a film with events. This is exactly the point: to recombine in dynamic fashion the power [potenza] of words with the force of the event, the film of a revolution without end with the book of another world to be invented, against and beyond capitalism. Which is to say: the decolonization of individual and collective subjectivity, the decommodification of connections and relations, the delabouring of human activity.25 To organize energies in order to transform them into a plural and mobile strategy: this is the challenge that the movement of movements can take on, if it wants to pass from the red zone of the countersummits to the ambivalent ‘grey zone’ potentially activatable in paths of conflictual rootedness, capillary transformation, and sedimentation of planning skills. Let us not begin with the pretence of giving answers: it would already be a lot to begin to pose to others and to ourselves questions that open perspectives: this is conricerca.

NOTES 1 The Italian term conricerca is roughly translatable as ‘coresearch,’ or ‘research with.’ The original term has been preserved wherever possible. Where it is used as a verb (as in ‘conricercando’), the word has been translated into its rough English equivalent and conjugated accordingly (thus, for the previous example, ‘co-researching’ would be used). (Translator’s note.) 2 In the present essay the analysis of concrete experiences – both of inquiries and of movements – begins with the Italian context. Not as much because or at least not only because (as more than one commentator has suggested) this country is an important political laboratory for the practices of the movement; but above all because it is the situation in which we are located and of which we can most appropriately speak. We begin with the ‘Italian province,’ therefore, so as not to remain spatially ensnared in it. This is in fact the prospect with which every political reality must reckon: either we direct our territorial rootedness towards a tendentially global scenario, or we run the risk of imposing heavy and nostalgic limits on our perspectives. Above all, during a phase in which struggles have demolished the old radical model according to which the most advanced point of the struggle reveals the

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future to those further behind. We find ourselves within a mode of production that offers analogous characteristics at a global level; what vary are the gradations and the local specificities – in other words, the non-homogenization of the productive and reproductive dynamics. On the untranslatability from Italian to English of potenza and potere, see Michael Hardt’s introduction to one of Negri’s books on Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). There the problem is solved by translating potenza as ‘power’ and potere as ‘Power.’ I have maintained this distinction for the purposes of this translation. (Translator’s note) A clarification and a premise. First, we will not deal with the genesis and diverse practices of conricerca, or better, the multiple conricercas, in a historiographically or analytically complete manner. Such a task would demand a good deal more space and different objectives. Some will proceed by offering highlights. Second, the experience from which the authors of this essay begin is a conricerca on operaismo (workerism) and political subjectivity, the point of reference for which is Romano Alquati. A first phase was concretized in a work titled Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni Rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (Rome: Deriveapprodi, 2002). Through qualitative in-depth interviews with almost sixty of the political protagonists of the various experiences that are a part of the composite galaxy of Italian political workerism, a critical analysis was attempted of the experiences in question, and of the subjective paths taken, in order to grapple with questions that currently remain unresolved. The modus operandi of conricerca, adopted from the beginning as a perspective and a project, took form in the successive debates and above all in a conference held in Rome at the beginning of June 2002, during which intellectuals and political militants engaged with diverse research groups presently active in Italy and (to a lesser extent) Europe. In this way there was launched that reticular process of engagement and elaboration, of interrelation and cooperation, which is the essence of conricerca. One might refer to texts such as The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950); and Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952). Alessandro Pizzorno, ‘Abbandonare la sociologia-letteratura per una sociologia-scienza,’ in Opinione – mensile di politica e cultura 1 (May 1956): 25. In accordance with the cult of the organic intellectual, it was held that marxist theory was a completely self-sufficient science.

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8 Among others, the journal featured the work of Claude Léfort, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Edgar Morin, all of whom – via different routes, sometimes less political and more academic – became well known in the European intellectual landscape of the following decades. 9 Daniel Mothe, Diario di un operaio (1956–1959), trans. D. Montaldi (Turin: Einaudi, 1960). 10 Paul Romano’s work, which had already appeared in Socialisme ou Barbarie, was translated in 1954 by Montaldi and published in instalments by the newspaper Battaglia Comunista, a political organ of the PCI. 11 See for example Montaldi’s Autobiografie della leggera (Turin: Einaudi, 1961), an important piece of research on atypical proletarian figures in the industrialization phase of the Valle Padana in northern Italy. Another excellent example of his work is to be found in Militanti politici di base (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), a collection of biographies of militants living in the Cremonese and Bassa Padana districts. Finally, the study on immigrants carried out with F. Alasia, Milano corea (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960) should be noted. 12 Some of the conricerca projects carried out by Romano Alquati are discussed in Sulla Fiat e altri scritti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975); Università di ceto medio e proletariato intellettuale (Turin: Stampatori, 1978) is an anticipatory and lucid analysis of the processes of transformation of the figure of the student; the latter is already in practice a knowledge worker. Also on the theme of university and training there should be noted ‘L’università e la formazione l’incorporamento del sapere sociale nel lavoro vivo,’ in Aut Aut (Florence: Luglio-agosto, 1976), 154; Introduzione a un modello sulla formazione (Turin: Segnalibro, 1992); and Cultura, formazione e ricerca. Industrializzazione di produzione immateriale (Turin: Velleità Alternative, 1994). Even in recent years Alquati has put into circulation valuable theorizations and instruments with which conricerca experiences can be put into practice. The fruits of this are Per fare conricerca (Turin: Velleità Alternative, 1993); and Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune (Turin: Velleità Alternative, 1993). 13 For a critical analysis of such experiences, see Futuro anteriore. 14 The text is forthcoming. A first version is contained in the CD-ROM enclosed with Futuro anteriore. 15 Soon enough, however, within the Quaderni Rossi journal there developed a split between those who saw conricerca as an instrument of political action, and those who instead attempted to recuperate more classical forms of worker inquiry, preferring to keep themselves at the margins of a

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production of knowledge that did not imply direct intervention in the mounting worker struggles. The former gave life to Classe Operaia, the latter put out three more issues of Quaderni Rossi. The medium range is a position that acts as a hinge between a higher dimension of elaboration and production of a political synthesis aimed at hypothesizing larger goals and transitional passages, and a lower dimension of the movement, where the massification of behaviour and the articulations of struggle and conflict act also on the quantitative diffusion as an element with which to invest existent power relations. There is therefore also a specificity of figures of militancy in recognizing the necessity to consider and move oneself with a praxis that must flow from the diversity of systemic levels. While few lines are dedicated to this strategic question in this essay, Romano Alquati’s forthcoming Sulla riproduzione della capacità-umanavivente oggi (Rome: Manifestolibri) is fundamental in this respect. The text places itself in continuity with the elaboration begun in the preceding volume, Lavoro e attività. per una analisi della schiavitù neomoderna (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1997). In order to facilitate communication, a mailing list has been established as a useful instrument for an embryonic and open network between different experiences of inquiry and, basically, of conricerca. The address is: [email protected]. Christian Marazzi, speaking at the Operaismo a convegno seminar, Rome, 1–2 June 2002. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). In this respect, the approach taken by Sandro Mezzadra and M. Ricciardi is a valuable one: ‘Individuo e politica: uno spartito marxiano,’ in Derive approdi (Rome: Primavera 2002), 21. Let us make one thing clear: the term colonization has nothing to do with the Marxist vicious circle in which there is presented a capital that inevitably shapes the proletariat into thinking according to its own categories. There is no escape according to this reasoning! And let us also go beyond the Gramscian notion of hegemony that aims at a simple cultural and political guidance from above that appropriates and gives direction to the diffuse popular sensibility. With Slavoj ~iíek we should provocatively ask: ‘Why are the dominant ideas not the ideas of the dominant?’ (See ~iíek, Difesa dell’intolleranza (Troina: Città aperta edizioni, English edition, 2003, 17). Colonization is the (temporary and reversible) streamlining for capitalist goals of behaviours and languages – genealogically ambivalent

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ones – that do not necessarily come from above, but instead often go beyond or are actually from the beginning explicitly opposed to the logic of domination. One has only to think of the capitalist subsumption of the political lexicon of struggles: the instances of worker’s autonomy from work have been distorted and mystified so that they are now presented as autonomous labour; the demand for flexibility in the control over life-time has become precariousness; the only revolution spoken of is the one brought by information technologies or by the new economy; and so on. Or one might reflect on how activities borne in the setting of certain cultures and social practices become styles to be fed to mass hyperconsumption (the success of ‘ethnic’ products, for example). This reveals to us how the nature of language is never neutral. The well-thought-out slogan ‘Don’t hate the media, become the media’ is important, but on its own is not enough: if the autonomous production of signs and meaning manages to disrupt the order of dominant discourse, it will risk remaining trapped by rapid processes of subsumption. The problem is that of going beyond the order of given discourse, of breaking through it, transforming it: to construct alternative discourses as fields of battle for new signs and senses. 23 Sandro Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002). 24 From this perspective, especially significant cues are offered by the research being done around ‘Subaltern Studies.’ Here, Indian historians are rereading the history of colonialism according to a perspective that is completely different from the one offered by various traditional literatures. It is capable, therefore, of bringing to the fore the complex relationships between domination and resistances, between colonial violence and insubordination that constituted its material dynamics. The ‘subaltern’ therefore cease to be empty categories or mythical icons, depicted as criminals by official historiography, or by the paternal rhetoric of national elites, by marxist historiography’s abstract call of history as the struggle for socialism. Put differently, subaltern studies theorists have been able to bring to the fore the living flesh of the processes of subjectivation, configuring the autonomous, plural, and contradictory space in which there played itself out a politics of the rebels, the true subjects of the revolts, of the insurrections, and of the proletarian struggles. It is a matter of a methodological perspective that seems to recall, in another context and with its own specificities, that revolutionary inversion of perspective condensed in the heuristic formula of Mario Tronti’s ‘first class, then capital’: in other words, it is the struggles that are the motor of processes, it is worker insubordination that forces capitalism to take the initiative.

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25 Labour is a specific activity that yields capital, and therefore a source of exploitation and alienation, which is opposed to free human activity. This counts – in different ways and with different ambivalent perspectives – both for the production of tangible commodities as for the production and reproduction of intangible commodities, both for the old workers of the assembly line and (in different objective and subjective forms) for the new reproductive and cognitive workers. And there is no mistaking of labour for employment: all of human life is tendentially subjected to labour.

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10 On the Researcher-Militant colectivo situaciones Translated by Sebastián Touza

At long last we have learned that power – the state, understood as a privileged locus of change – is not the site par excellence of the political. As Spinoza stated long ago, such power is the place of sadness and of the most absolute impotence. Thus we turn to counterpower. For us, emancipatory thought does not look to seize the state apparatus to implement change; rather, it looks to flee those sites, to renounce instituting any centre or centrality. Struggles for dignity and justice continue: the world, in its entirety, is being questioned and reinvented again. It is this activation of struggle – a true counteroffensive – that encourages the production and diffusion of the hypotheses of counterpower. Popular struggle has recently re-emerged in Argentina. The piquetes1 and the insurrection of December 20012 have accelerated the pace of radicalization.3 Commitment to and questions about concrete forms of intervention are once again crucial. This counteroffensive works in multiple ways and confronts not only visible enemies, but also those activists and intellectuals who intend to encapsulate the social practices of counterpower in pre-established schemes. According to James Scott, the point of departure of radicality is physical, practical, social resistance.4 Any power relation of subordination produces encounters between the dominant and the dominated. In these spaces of encounter, the dominated display a public discourse that consists in saying that which the powerful would like to hear. This reinforces the appearance of their own subordination, while – silently, in a space invisible to power – a world of clandestine knowledge [saber] is being produced that belongs to the experience of microresistance and insubordination.

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This happens on a continuous basis except in times of rebellion, when the world of the oppressed comes to public light, surprising both friends and strangers. Thus, the universe of the dominated exists as a scission: as active servility and voluntary subordination, but also as a silent language that allows the circulation of jokes, rituals, and knowledges that form the codes of resistance. It is this precedence of resistances that grounds the figure of the researcher-militant, whose journey is to carry out theoretical and practical work oriented towards coproducing the knowledges and modes of an alternative sociability, beginning with the potencia (power)5 of those subaltern knowledges.6 Militant research works neither from its own set of knowledges about the world nor from how things ought to be. On the contrary, the only requirement for researcher-militants is a difficult one: to remain faithful to their ‘not knowing.’ In this sense, such research is an authentic antipedagogy – which is what Joseph Jacotot wanted.7 Thus, the researcher-militant is as far from institutional procedures as from ideological certainties; and is distinct from both the academic researcher and the political militant, not to mention the NGO humanitarian, the alternative activist, or the simply well-intentioned person. The question the researcher-militant faces is, rather, how to organize life according to a series of hypotheses (practical and theoretical) on the ways to (self)emancipation. To work in autonomous collectives that do not obey rules imposed by academia requires the forging of positive links with subaltern, dispersed, and hidden knowledges, and the production of a body of practical knowledges of counterpower. This is quite the opposite of using social practices as a source of confirmation for laboratory hypotheses. Research-militancy, then, is also the art of establishing compositions that will endow with potencia the projects and elements of alternative sociability. Academic researchers are subjected to an entire set of alienating mechanisms that separate them from the very meaning of their activity: they must accommodate their work to predetermined rules, topics, and conclusions. Funding, supervision, terminology, red tape, empty conferences, and useless protocols determine the parameters within which official research unfolds. Research-militancy distances itself from circuits of academic production – without, of course, opposing or ignoring them. Far from disavowing or negating university research, it is a question of encouraging

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another relationship with popular knowledges. Knowledges produced by academia are usually linked to the market and to scientific discourse, scorning any other forms; what characterizes research militancy is the quest for sites where those same knowledges can be composed with popular ones. Research-militancy attempts to work under alternative conditions, created by the collective itself and by its ties to counterpower; it pursues its own efficacy in producing knowledges useful to the struggles. Research-militancy thus modifies its position: it tries to generate a capacity for struggles to read themselves, and to capture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices. Unlike the political militant, for whom politics always takes place in its own separate sphere, the researcher-militant is a character composed of questions and is not saturated by ideological meanings and models of the world. Nor is research-militancy a practice of ‘committed intellectuals’ or of a group of ‘advisors’ to social movements. The goal is neither to politicize nor 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.’ The trail of multiplicity is the opposite to these images of the leap and of seriousness: it is not about teaching, nor is it about disseminating key texts; rather, it is about looking into practices for emerging traces of a new sociability. When separated from practices, the language of research-militancy becomes reduced to jargon, mere fashion, or a new pseudo-academic ideology deprived of situational8 anchoring. In more practical terms, research-militancy develops through workshops and collective reading. Together, these produce the conditions for thinking about and disseminating productive texts. By these processes, researcher-militants generate networks linked by concrete experiences of struggle. Since 2000, we have followed a specific path within the magma of social practices, encounters, and discoveries that have come to be called the ‘Argentine laboratory.’ This laboratory is most famous for the insurrection of a new type that took place on 19 and 20 December 2001. To disseminate the findings to which this path has led us, we have created our own publishing house, De Mano en Mano,9 through which we have published a series of dossiers, drafts, and books that have nourished research with their effects. In the following section we discuss a series of hypotheses about the concept of the researcher-militant, as they have emerged at different points along this path. These hypotheses are still being developed and need to be understood as provisional.

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1. Research-Militancy Does Not Have an Object We are aware of the paradoxical character of the above statement – if there is research, it must follow that something is being researched; if there is nothing to do research on, how can we talk about research? But at the same time, we are certain that this conundrum is precisely what lends potencia to the inquiry. In fact, to do research without objectualizing10 already implies abandoning the usual image of the researcher, which is what the researcher-militant actually strives to do. Research can be a path to objectualization (we are not being original when we confirm this old knowledge; still, it is worth recalling that this is one of the most serious limits to the researcher’s typical subjectivity). As Nietzsche reminds us, the theoretical man (or woman) – who is somewhat more complex than ‘the reading man (or woman)’ – is the one who perceives action from an entirely external point of view (that is, his/her subjectivity is constituted in a way that is completely independent with respect to that action). Thus, the theoretician works by attributing an intention to the subject of the action. Let’s be clear: any attribution of this type supposes, with respect to the protagonist of the action that is being observed, an author and an intention; it confers values and objectives, and in the end it produces ‘knowledges’ about the action (and the one who acts). Thus, criticism remains blind in two important ways. First of all, with respect to the (external) subject that exercises the criticism. Researchers are not required to investigate themselves. They can construct consistent knowledges on the situation as long as, and precisely thanks to, their being outside, at a prudent distance, which supposedly guarantees a certain objectivity. This objectivity is authentic and effective to the extent that it is nothing more than the converse of the violent objectualization of the situation they are working with. But criticism remains blind in a second way: researchers, in the process of attributing, are merely adapting the available resources of their own research situation to the unknowns their object presents to them. In this way, they set themselves up as machines that confer meanings, values, interests, affiliations, causes, influences, rationalities, intentions, and unconscious motives to their object. Both blindnesses – which are in fact the same blindness, but affecting two different points (that of the subject that attributes, and that of the resources of the attribution) – converge in a single mechanism for judging good and evil according to a set of available values. This modality of knowledge production presents us with a clear

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dilemma. Traditional university research, with its object, its method of attribution, and its conclusions, generates valuable knowledges – above all descriptive ones – regarding the objects on which it does research. But these descriptive operations are in no way subsequent to the formation of the object, because the form of the object itself is already the result of objectualization. This is so to the extent that university research is much more effective the more it uses those objectualizing powers. Science – and especially ‘social’ science – operates more as separator, and reifier, of the situations in which it participates than as an internal element in the creation of possible experiences (be they practical or theoretical). Researchers offer themselves as subjects of a synthesis of experience. It is they who explain why things happen. And they are preserved as such: as necessary blind spots of such synthesis. They themselves, as meaning-giving subjects, remain exempt from any self-examination. They and their resources – their values, their notions, their gaze – are constituted in the machine that classifies, coheres, inscribes, judges, discards, and excommunicates. In the end, the intellectuals are the ones who ‘do justice’ to the matters of truth, as administrators – and adaptors – of that which exists regarding the horizons of rationality of the present. 2. The ‘Militant’ Character of Research We have talked about commitment and militancy. Are we suggesting that the political militant is superior to the university researcher? No, we are not. Political militancy is also a practice with an object. As such, it has remained tied to a mode of instrumentality: one that connects itself to other experiences of a subjectivity that is always already constituted, with prior knowledges – of strategy – equipped with universally valid statements that are purely ideological. Its form of being with others is utilitarian: there is never affinity, always ‘agreement.’ There is never encounter, always ‘tactics.’ In sum, political militancy – especially that of the ‘party’ – cannot constitute itself as an experience of authenticity. From the start it gets trapped in transitivity: what interests it about a social practice is always ‘something other’ than the actual social practice itself. From this perspective, political militancy – including left militancy – is as external, judgmental and objectifying as university research. Nor do humanitarian militants – that is, people who work within

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NGOs – escape from these manipulative mechanisms. The now-globalized humanitarian ideology constitutes itself from an idealized image of the world already made, a world that cannot be modified. Faced with such a world, we can only dedicate efforts to those places, more or less exceptional, where misery and irrationality reign. The mechanisms unleashed by solidarity humanitarianism foreclose any possible creation; they also naturalize – through their charitable resources and language of exclusion – the victimizing objectifying that separates individuals from their subjectifying and productive possibilities. When we refer to commitment and to the ‘militant’ character of research, we do so in a precise sense, one that is connected to four conditions: (a) the motives behind the research; (b) its practical character (its elaboration of situated practical hypotheses); (c) the value of what is being researched – the product of research can only be fully grasped when it shares, with the problematic being investigated, the same constellation of conditions and preoccupations; and (d) its procedures – its development is already itself a result, and this result leads to an immediate intensification of the procedures that are being employed. 3. A Radical Criticism of Current Values Idealization always strengthens the mechanism of objectification. This is a serious concern for research militancy. The mechanism of attribution always leads to idealization (even if that mechanism is not given under the modality of scientific or political pretensions). Idealization – as with any ideologization – expels from the constructed image anything that could make it fail as an ideal of coherence and plenitude. Whatever the idealists think, any ideal is more on the side of death than on the side of life. The ideal amputates reality from life. The concrete – life itself – is partial and irremediably incoherent, and contradictory. As long as it persists in its capacities and potencias, life has no need to adjust itself to any image that would give it meaning or justify it. Quite the opposite: life itself is the creative source – not the object or depositary – of the values of justice. In fact, any idea of a pure or full subject amounts to nothing but the preservation of that ideal. This mechanism of idealization is clearly at work in the figure of the excluded as it has been used to define the unemployed in Argentina; as we have pointed out: ‘Exclusion is the place that our biopolitical societies produce to be able to include people, groups, and social classes in a subordinate way.’11

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Thus, idealization conceals an inadvertently conservative operation: once again, behind the purity and the vocation for justice that seem to give it origin, we find dominant values lurking. Hence the righteous appearance of idealists: they want to do justice – that is to say, they want to materialize and bring into effect those values they hold as good. Idealists merely project those values onto the idealized (at the moment when that which was multiple and complex turns into an object, an ideal), and they do so without interrogating themselves about their own values – that is to say, without having a subjective experience that transforms them. This mechanism reveals itself as the most serious obstacle for the researcher-militant. Idealization originates in subtle and almost imperceptible forms, and gradually produces an unbridgeable distance. This is so to the extent that researcher-militants only see what they have projected onto what is already a plenitude. That is why research-militancy cannot be carried out unless serious work is done on the research collective itself; in other words, the latter cannot exist without seriously investigating itself, without modifying itself, without reconfiguring itself in the social practices in which it takes part, without reviewing the ideals and values it holds dear, without permanently criticizing its ideas and readings – in the end, without developing practices in all the possible directions.12 This ethical dimension points to the very complexity of researchmilitancy – to the subjective work of deconstructing any inclination towards objectualization. In other words, of doing research without an object. As in genealogy, it is a question of working at the level of the ‘criticism of values.’ It is about penetrating those values and destroying ‘their statues,’ as Nietzsche affirms. But this work, which is oriented by and towards the creation of values, cannot be done through mere ‘contemplation.’ It requires a radical critique of current values. That is why it implies an effort to deconstruct the dominant forms of perception (interpretation, valorization). There can be no creation of values without the production of a subjectivity that is capable of submitting itself to a radical criticism. 4. Producing Non-utilitarian Ties Another question arises: Is it possible to engage in such research without at the same time setting in motion a process of falling in love? How can there be a tie between two social practices without strong feelings of love or friendship?

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Certainly, the experience of research-militancy resembles that of the person in love, with the proviso that love is what a long philosophical tradition – the materialist one – understands by it: it is not something that just happens to one with respect to another, but a process that requires two or more.13 This sort of love relation participates without the mediation of an intellectual decision; instead, the existence of two or more finds itself pierced by this shared experience. This is not an illusion, but an authentic experience of antiutilitarianism, which converts the ‘one’s own’ into the ‘common.’ In love, and in friendship, in contrast to the mechanisms we have described so far, there is neither objectification nor instrumentalism. Nobody restrains himself or herself from what that tie can do, nor is it possible to leave that tie uncontaminated. We do not experience friendship or love in an innocent way: all of us emerge from the experience reconstituted. These potencias – love and friendship – have the power to constitute, qualify, and remake the subjects they catch. This love – or friendship – constitutes itself as a relation that renders undefined what until that moment was kept as individuality, composing a figure comprising more than one body. And individual bodies, as they participate in this relationship, cause all the mechanisms of abstraction – deployments that turn the bodies into quantified exchangeable objects that are just as characteristic of the capitalist market as the other objectualizing mechanisms we have mentioned. That is why we consider such love to be a condition of researchmilitancy. We usually refer to this process of friendship or falling in love by a less compromising term – composition. Unlike articulation, composition is not merely intellectual.14 It is based neither in interests nor in criteria of convenience (political or other). Unlike ‘accords’ and ‘alliances’ (strategic or tactic ones, partial or total), which are founded in textual agreements, composition is more or less inexplicable and goes beyond anything that can be said about it. In fact, while it lasts, it is much more intense than any merely political or ideological compromise. Love and friendship tell us about the value of quality over quantity: the collective body composed of other bodies does not increase its potencia according to the mere quantity of its individual components, but in relation to the intensity of the tie that unites those bodies. 5. Research-Militancy Does Not Intend to Be a New Party Line It works – necessarily – on another plane.

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If we maintain the distinction between ‘politics’ (understood as struggles for power) and the social practices in which processes of production of sociability or values come into play, we can begin to distinguish the political militant (who founds his/her discourse in some set of certainties) from the researcher-militant (who organizes his/her perspective beginning with critical questions about those certainties). This distinction is often lost when a social practice is presented as a model and carelessly turned into the source of a party line. This is how some come to believe they have seen the birth of a ‘situationist’ line, as the idealized product of language or even the jargon of the publication and image (which, apparently, the notebook15 transmits, at least among some readers). Detractors and supporters of this new line have turned it into a source of disputes and conspiracies. In this regard, we can’t help but admit that, of all the possible outcomes of this research, these are the ones that concern us least, because they are so unproductive, and because such idealizations (positive or negative) usually work against a more critical look at those who make them. As a consequence, a too-tidy position is rapidly adopted in the face of what is meant to be an opening exercise. 6. The Immanence of Research-Militancy Let us take one more step in the construction of the concept of research without an object, of thought that resists becoming ‘knowledge.’ Interiority and immanence are not necessarily identical processes. Inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, are – if we are allowed such an expression – categories of the dominant ideology: they usually hide much more than they reveal. Research-militancy is not about being inside a social practice, but about working in immanence. The difference can be presented in the following terms: The inside (and so the outside) defines a position organized within a certain limit that we consider relevant. Inside and outside refer to the site of a body or element in relation to a disjunction or a boundary. To be inside is also – accordingly – to share a common property, one that makes us belong to the same set. This system of references raises questions about where we are situated – about nationality, social class, and even the position in which we choose to situate ourselves with regard to, say, the next elections, the military invasion of Colombia, or cable television programming.

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In the extreme, ‘objective’ belonging (that which derives from the observation of a common property) and ‘subjective’ belonging (that which derives from choosing with regard to) come together for the benefit of the social sciences. Thus, if we are unemployed workers, we can choose to enter a piquetero movement; if we belong to the middle class, we can choose to be part of a neighbourhood assembly. Through determination – common belonging to the same group, in this case social class – choice becomes both possible – and desirable. In both cases, being inside implies respecting pre-existing limits that distribute places and belonging in more or less involuntary ways. It is not so much a question of disavowing the possibilities that derive from the moment of choice – which can be, as in this example, highly subjectivating – as it is about distinguishing the mere ‘being’ and its ‘inside’ (or ‘outside,’ it doesn’t matter) from the mechanisms of subjective production that arise when we disobey these destinies. In the end, it is not so much a question of reacting when faced with already codified options as it is about producing the terms of the situation ourselves. In this sense, it is worth presenting the image of immanence as something other than merely being inside. Immanence refers to a mode of inhabiting the situation. It operates from composition – from love or friendship – in order to bring about new possible materials. Immanence, then, is a constitutive co-belonging that transverses representations of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ As such, it does not derive from being there; rather, it requires an operation of inhabiting, of composing. To sum up: the concepts of immanence, situation, and composition are internal to the experience of research-militancy. They are terms that are useful for operations that organize a common and above all constitutive becoming. If in another social practice they become the jargon of a new party line or the categories of a fashionable philosophy – something that does not interest us in the least – they will for certain acquire new meanings on the basis of uses that are not ours. The operational difference between the ‘inside’ of representation (foundation of belonging and identity) and the connection of immanence (constitutive becoming) has to do with the greater disposition this last form confers on us to participate in new social practices. 7. What Research-Militancy Produces Is beyond Confrontation It seems as if we have produced a difference between love/friend-

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ship and the forms of objectification against which the figure of the researcher-militant rises up, however precariously. Nevertheless, we have not yet touched on the fundamental issue of the ideologization of confrontation. Struggle activates capacities, resources, ideals, and solidarities. As such, it tells us about a vital disposition, about dignity. In struggle, death is neither pursued nor desired. That is why the meaning of dead comrades is never clear, and always painful. When confrontation is ideologized, this dramatic character of struggle is banalized to the point of being postulated as exclusionary. When this happens, there is no room for research. As is generally acknowledged, ideology and research have opposite structures: the first is constituted from a set of certainties, the second only on the basis of a grammar of questions. Nevertheless, struggle – the necessary and noble struggle – does not in itself lead towards the exaltation of confrontation as the dominant meaning of life. There is no doubt that the limits may appear somewhat narrow in the case of an organization in permanent struggle, such as a piquetero organization. Yet to take this point for granted would be to prejudge. Unlike the militant subjectivity that is usually sustained by the extreme polarization of life – by the ideologization of confrontation16 – the social practices that seek to construct another sociability are highly active in trying not to fall into the logic of confrontation, according to which the multiplicity of experience is reduced to this dominant signifier. Confrontation by itself does not create values. It does not go beyond the distribution of the dominant values. The results of a war show who will appropriate existence – that is, who will have the property rights as they relate to existing goods and values. If struggle does not alter the ‘structure of meanings and values,’ we are only in the presence of a change of roles, which is a guarantee of survival for the structure itself. 8. A New Image of Justice We have arrived at the point where two completely different images of justice are sketched for us, and in the end that is what it is about. On one side, the struggle is for the ability to use the judging machine. To do justice is to attribute to oneself what is considered just. It is to interpret

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in a different way the distribution of existing values. The other side suggests that it is a question of becoming a creator of values, of experiences, of worlds. That is why any struggle that is not idealized has these two directions, which start from self-affirmation: towards ‘inside’ and towards ‘outside.’ Research-militancy does not look for a model social practice. In fact, it affirms itself against the existence of such ideals. Let it be said with good reason that it is one thing to declaim this principle and something very different to achieve it in practice. One could also conclude – and here is where our doubts start – that in order for this noble purpose to become reality it would be necessary to make ‘our criticism’ explicit. When we consider this demand carefully, we can see that we are being asked to keep the model – now in a negative way – in order to compare real social practices with an ideal model, a mechanism that the social sciences use to extract their ‘critical judgments.’ As can be seen, to develop a new image of thought from a practical experience of knowledge production is no small task, since it concerns forms of justice (and judgment is nothing but the judicial form of justice). Research-militancy cannot offer anything that resembles a juridical event, nor does it provide resources to pass judgment on other social practices. Rather, the opposite is true: if we as ‘authors’ have pretended anything at all, it has been to offer a diametrically opposite image of justice, one founded in composition. What is this good for? There are no preliminary answers. Till always, September 2003

NOTES This article is composed, at the request of the editors of this book, of fragments of two different articles that address the mode of intervention we intend to create: research militancy. We reproduce parts of ‘For a Politics beyond Politics,’ an essay published in Contrapoder: una introducción, edited by our collective (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Mano en Mano, 2001). We also pick up a good deal of the text of ‘On Method’ which prefaces the book La Hipótesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes, cowritten by our collective and the Movement of Un-employed Workers of Solano (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Mano en Mano, 2002). 1 La Hipótesis 891, the book cited above, deals with what has been opened by

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this experience of struggle and thought known as piqueteros. 2 See our book 19 y 20. Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Mano en Mano, 2002). 3 On the night of 19 December 2001, thousands of Argentineans occupied the streets, squares, and public places of the country’s main cities. The following day, after three dozen died in street battles with the police, president Fernando de la Rúa resigned. The revolt launched a period of intense social creativity, which began with the founding of the unemployed workers movement – also known as piqueteros for their practice of blocking roads – in the second half of the 1990s. In the month following the revolt, hundreds of popular assemblies sprang up in neighbourhoods across the country. Many factories and businesses that had gone bankrupt were taken over by their workers and began to operate under their control. Several of these initiatives came together, forming circuits of trade based on solidarity principles; these helped provide the necessities of life for millions who had been marginalized from an economy crippled by its acquiescence to the IMF’s recommendations and those of other trans-national ‘development’ agencies. (Translator’s note.) 4 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 5 In Spanish there are two words for power: poder and potencia, which derive from the Latin words potestas and potentia. Colectivo Situaciones’ understanding of power is rooted in this distinction, which they take from Spinoza. Potencia is a dynamic, constituent dimension, whereas poder is static, constituted. Potencia defines our power to do, to affect, and be affected, whereas the mechanism of representation that constitutes poder separates potencia from the bodies that are being represented. To preserve the emphasis of this distinction, I use the Spanish word potencia, where appropriate, throughout this chapter. See above, page 181, note 3, for parallel Italian usage. (Translator’s note.) 6 The figure of the ‘researcher-militant’ was presented for the first time in Miguel Benasayag and Diego Sztulwark, Política y situación. De la potencia al contrapoder (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Mano en Mano, 2002). 7 See in particular the beautiful pages of the book by Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). For Jacotot, all pedagogies are founded in an explication of something given by someone from a superiority of intelligence, and produces, above all, explicated kids. In contrast, ignorant schoolmasters teach without explicating. They can teach what they do not know because they organize their experiences according to a radically different principle: the equality of intelligence.

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8 Each situation is part of a system of relations, networks, connections, transmissions, and distributions of power. See Colectivo Situaciones, 19 y 20. Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social. Situation refers to a capacity to cut off the space-time that is ‘both condition and product of the emergence of sense’ (19). ‘Situation does not mean local. The situation consists in the practical affirmation that the whole does not exist separate from the part, but in the part’ (26). ‘The situation can be thought of as a “concrete universal.”’ We can only ‘know and intervene in the universal through a subjective operation of interiorizaton from which it is possible to encounter the world as a concrete element of the situation. Any other form of thinking the world – as external to the situation – condemns us to an abstract perception and practical impotence’ (30n). (Translator’s note.) 9 Literally, ‘de mano en mano’ means ‘from hand to hand.’ The publishing house was created by the student group El Mate, to which the members of Colectivo Situaciones originally belonged. Mate is a South American infusion that is usually sipped through a straw (bombilla) from a gourd that is passed from hand to hand. (Translator’s note.) 10 The authors use objetualizar in the double sense of ‘transformation into an object of research’ and ‘to be transformed into an object’ (i.e., as opposed to becoming a subject). (Translator’s note.) 11 Cf. 19 y 20: Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social, 100–1. The excluded are constructed as subjects of needs, incapable of creative self-activity. Their actions always have an a priori interpretation. The concepts of unemployed and excluded, which come from the external gaze of the government, the media, NGOs, and most academics, have the effect of reducing the intensity and power of the real people who have been impoverished by neoliberalism. In contrast, the unemployed workers movements call themselves piqueteros – a subjectivity that is not limited to the confrontations which are part of the roadblocks the word refers to but that designate a struggle for dignity which goes beyond a request of incorporation into the society of wage-labour. (Translator’s note.) 12 These multidirectional practices, each of which has constituted a significant moment in the development of Colectivo Situaciones, include joining in processes of collective reflection on some of the most creative expressions of Argentina’s new protagonism, including the unemployed workers’ movement of the district of Solano in Greater Buenos Aires; the peasants’ movement of the northern province of Santiago del Estero; HIJOS, the organization of the children of the disappeared during the dictatorship; Creciendo Juntos, an alternative school run by militant teachers; several neighbourhood assemblies and the now dismantled barter network; and a number of other groups, including alternative

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Colectivo Situaciones media and art collectives such as Grupo de Arte Callejero. Colectivo Situaciones’ practices have also involved encounters with intellectuals both in Argentina – including Horacio González, León Rozitchner, and the editors of the journal La Escena Contemporánea – and abroad – including Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, John Holloway, the past leaders of Uruguay’s legendary MLN Tupamaros, and several collectives, including the Italian DeriveApprodi and the Spanish Precarias a la deriva. Many of these encounters have resulted in published interviews. (Translator’s note.) This materialist tradition of the concept of love includes Spinoza and the recent readings of his philosophy by Negri and Deleuze. Negri points out that love constitutes the exuberance of being in Spinoza’s ethical materialism. See The Savage Anomaly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 152. For Deleuze and Guattari, love and friendship define the relation of immanence between the philosopher and the concept he or she creates. See What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1–12. (Translator’s note.) The critique of articulation is developed in full by Colectivo Situaciones in the last chapter of 19 y 20: Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social. Articulation is the type of relation established by hegemony, in which the different parts of a network are ordered around a centre. In this relation, being part of the network constitutes a norm and dispersion appears as a deficiency of the parts. In contrast, relations of composition lead to the formation of multiple counterpowers, which form diffuse and eccentric networks. (Translator’s note.) This refers to the five research notebooks, each titled Situaciones (Buenos Aires: De Mano en Mano, 2000–2). Each of these notebooks summarizes the research-militancy activities of Colectivo Situaciones with a different grassroots movement. (Translator’s note.) The movements that comprise what Colectivo Situaciones defines as Argentina’s new protagonism – those with which the collective has been practising research-militancy – are characterized by a refusal to constitute themselves as frontal opponents. Like the Zapatistas, they reject the logic of confrontation, and instead carefully invest in the creation of experiences, practices, and projects that affirm the desire to expand life. ‘Between the power that destroys and the practices of counterpower there is a fundamentally asymmetric relation’ (Colectivo Situaciones, ‘El silencio de los caracoles,’ www.situaciones.org, accessed 11 January 2004). (Translator’s note.)

PART III: Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy Introduction mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter

The contributors to this section primarily discuss educational projects in which they have been involved as organizers and as participants. The concrete experiments they describe breathe further life into the critical themes and radical impulses introduced in earlier chapters of the book: utopian imagination; linking universities, academics, and social movements; autonomously mobilizing people’s intellectual capacities; and creating educational spaces outside the state form and market imperatives. Among other things, the following chapters discuss free schools, supplementary schools, workshops, education societies, publishing, theatre, media labs, and, in one instance, a potential alternative economic system. Each project was a response to an urgent need to critically analyse relations of power around nodal points of domination. These experiments are necessarily partial in their scope, and are never outside of the operations of power; indeed, they are often components of larger struggles transversally linked on a global scale. Despite the variations on utopian pedagogy documented here, these projects reflect a common desire to produce circumstances, spaces, and subjectivities that, within and against the present, strive towards antiuthoritarian, autonomous, radically democratic modes of organizing intellectuality and learning. Part III begins with Brian Alleyne’s analysis of the ‘activist pedagogy’ of the New Beacon Circle in London. Alleyne suggests that liberal multiculturalist strategies for antiracist change are insufficient, and argues that any real progress in combating racism in Britain has been due to struggles organized by racialized communities themselves. Brought to London by way of Trinidad as part of the Black Diaspora, the New Beacon Circle is a well-established network of individuals,

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groups, and institutions devoted to developing socialist and antiracist cultural politics in Britain. The circle has long emphasized educational initiatives, from supplementary schools to book fairs, within and outside mainstream institutions. Alleyne’s narrative looks at New Beacon as cultural politics in action; it describes an antiracist activist pedagogy that is committed to making ‘direct interventions into actually existing social and cultural spaces with the aim of effecting change and creating alternatives.’ Written in phenomenological-poetic style, Shveta Sarda’s chapter discusses Cybermohalla, an ongoing experiment that involves working across divisions of class, race, and caste in working-class districts in India. She describes Cybermohalla’s open media labs, which have been set up to provide young people with access to computer technology. Well aware of the double edge of the high-tech sword, organizers and participants open up questions about how local neighbourhoods are tied up with the global knowledge economy, and seek to discover how, through practical experience in creative multi-media production in local settings, it is possible to develop a ‘transformative relationship with technology … not just be addressed by it.’ Giving extensive space in the chapter to texts written by the young Cybermohalla participants themselves, Sarda’s contribution pivots on what she calls ‘ambivalent pedagogy’ and on what one participant calls ‘speech without fear’ – a necessary component of any experiment in utopian pedagogy that is respectful of singularity. Carlos Alberto Torres returns to a source that has long been considered foundational to utopian pedagogy: the thought of Paulo Freire. While few of our contributors explicitly address Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed,’ there can be no doubt that he is at least a spectral figure throughout this book. Torres emphasizes that ‘transformative social justice learning’ by necessity must be mobile and experimental, and must traverse all social and economic spaces where ‘domination, aggression, and violence’ occur. Torres makes this forthright call: ‘A model of transformative social justice learning should be based on unveiling the conditions of alienation and exploitation in society. That is, creating the basis for the understanding of the roots of social systems and behaviours and their implications in culture and nature.’ Allan Antliff sees such understanding emanating from independent educational spaces. Writing from an anarchist perspective, he discusses a number of projects that he considers part of a necessary practice of

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anarchist institution-building. He argues that ‘just as anarchists have created their own press, Internet sites, communes, bookstores, and other cooperative ventures, so they need to create their own educational institutions.’ Those whose opinions about anarchism have been formed by stereotypes of disorganization and nihilistic destruction may be surprised to hear how widespread ‘anarchist pedagogy’ is. Antliff provides numerous examples of it, from the ‘Anarchist U’ free school in Toronto to a reading circle organized by a fifteen-year-old high school student in West Virginia. Efforts in anarchist pedagogy persist, despite what Antliff shows to be strong state repression. Multiple lines of affinity are at play in Kelly Harris-Martin and Richard Toews’s article on an experiment in antiracist, postcolonial pedagogy undertaken by the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society (SCES/ SFU). This chapters gives us a sense of the daily life of a vibrant initiative in utopian pedagogy happening in Kamloops, British Columbia, as seen by an instructor and various students, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. SCES/SFU was created by and for the people of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) nation. This may have something to do with its success. Although it is open to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students, this collaborative project of a local university and the Secwepemc nation is not a space where Aboriginal people feel they are on the outside looking in, or must fight hard just to be seen and heard. While it centres on indigenous knowledge systems, it remains very much an in-between space, a deliberate attempt to raise for discussion various unequal power relations that permeate interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Imran Munir’s chapter, ‘The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles and Pedagogy in Pakistan,’ answers Gayatri Spivak’s pressing question – ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ – not in the affirmative of signification but in the recognition of action. For Munir, pedagogy is not something to be considered in and of itself; indeed, it can only signify meaningfully within its specific struggle. In short, when considering radical pedagogy we must try to understand the context in which it takes place; furthermore, learning about such resistance fulfils the pedagogical function implicit in the circulation of struggles. Much that is unexpected is described in this article. In a region ruled by repressive religious orthodoxy, women militants are leading the fight against a state–military apparatus that is intent on expropriating their land; Christian and Muslim communities are banding together in that struggle; and there is an

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unlikely alliance of autonomous peasant movements, orthodox Marxists, NGOs, and educated urban elites. Finally, there is an intriguing pedagogical movement based on participatory and interactive street theatre, which has long been at the forefront of social movements and resistance, ‘especially in the rural areas, to educate people about democracy, women’s education and empowerment, feudalism, sectarianism, election procedures, minority rights, corporate farming and other forms of oppression.’ Creating alternative spaces of education involves much more than avoiding state repression and corporate colonization. Inequities, tensions, and oppressions that permeate mainstream society appear in ‘alternative’ spaces as well. This is central to Sarita Srivastava’s chapter, which focuses on attempts to use the pedagogical tool of antiracism workshops to address the problem of ‘divisive conflicts over racism that have been some of the strongest challenges facing social movement organizations.’ Despite a large amount of this kind of activity in the 1980s and 1990s, many of those working for antiracist change have been disheartened by the lack of tangible results. Formal, facilitated discussions have often failed to achieve their goals; more importantly, they can be extremely painful and discouraging for the non-white participants, who become wary of repeating the experience. This situation, coupled with the decline in support for any kind of equity work under neoliberal regimes, leads Srivastava to ask: ‘What are the possibilities for a pedagogical practice that might offer local challenges to global inequities of race and nation, that might offer genuine alternatives to neoliberal multiculturalism?’ She suggests that if the antiracist workshop is to be redeemed, we must move away from what she calls the ‘Let’s Talk’ model, which leads too easily to the reinforcement of stereotypes and becomes a stage for expressions of white guilt that get stuck at an individualistic level of analysis. In the book’s introduction we spoke of the limits of affinity. The tensions inherent in determining such limits are revealed in Michael Albert’s article, ‘Present and Future Education: A Tale of Two Economies,’ in the response by Nick Dyer-Witheford, and in Albert’s subsequent reply. For many years, Albert has been committed to conceptualizing and imagining alternative socio-economic futures – a project that has evolved alongside his involvement in various alternative media and education projects such as Z Magazine, Z Media Institute, and Znet. Albert’s chapter outlines, in summary fashion, a possible future economy, one that he has called ‘participatory economics’ or ‘parecon.’ He argues that if we really

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want to create alternatives in the specific context of education, we also need to elaborate ideas about an alternative economic system, because the latter is an important part of the broader context of education. DyerWitheford responds that while he respects Albert’s commitment to opening a discussion on alternative modes of economic organization, parecon is insufficient because it retains much that is problematic about capitalism – in particular, a relentless emphasis on work and an already developed model for determining remuneration. Albert remains open, however, with respect to specific questions of pedagogy in a parecon: ‘Are there implications for the actual structure and procedures of schooling and education that are implicit in the logic and structures of parecon? I would guess that the answer is yes, not least but not confined to the fact that of course educational institutions would be self-managing, would interface with participatory planning, would incorporate balanced job complexes, and so on.’ The chapter by Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter discusses ‘Critical U,’ arguing therein for an alternative modality of academic subjectivity and an expanded concept of ‘community education.’ Operating out of Vancouver, Critical U is a community-based ‘free’ school – ‘free’ in that it operates autonomously from the state education system and does not charge tuition fees. This project is a modest experiment in building a dialogic learning space that is not subject to the instrumental logic of states and corporations, and indeed, is explicitly in struggle against neoliberal hegemony. To situate this project, the authors offer a brief genealogy of the intellectual, and then describe the various Critical U courses, which have ranged from globalization to food production to media literacy. The guiding ethos of the experiment is that ‘it is precisely what we do not know about how our communities live – and how they might want to live – that demands such experiments in community education, in the hope of producing something unknown and unknowable – something that is valuable precisely because it “doesn’t yet exist.”’ There are many connections between these chapters, but also profound differences – in political, practical, and conceptual orientation. While this variability presents readers with important questions about the limits of affinity, these chapters also bring into view differences which remind us that what one activist or academic sees as the ‘fractured’ state of ‘the movement,’ another might see as the exciting plurality of coexisting paths to other worlds, of multiple manifestations of educational alternatives happening in the here-and-now.

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11 The Making of an Antiracist Cultural Politics in Post-Imperial Britain: The New Beacon Circle brian w. alleyne

The British liberal elite has come to recognize the complexity of the racial and ethnic composition of Britain, which manifests itself in often fervent and self-congratulatory pronouncements that contemporary Britain is a foremost ‘multicultural society.’ For many on the liberal Left, multiculturalism is that ‘judicious’ mixture of ethnic communities and identities. It is my view that the discourse of multiculturalism tends to obscure more than it reveals. In particular, it glosses over the long, complex, and contradictory history of antiracist struggles, radical intellectual work, and autonomous cultural initiatives that Britain’s non-white populations have undertaken, and through which these populations have forged potent and often insurgent forms of ‘cultural capital,’ shaping and reshaping the spaces they occupy in the British social formation and in the national imaginary. In other words, the multicultural reality of Britain has come about not as a gift of the British nation-state but through decades of political and cultural work, central to which has been a struggle over meaning – in short, ‘cultural politics.’ For many of these struggles, education has been both a recurring element and a historic condition of possibility. This chapter explores the activist-pedagogy of one group that sought to negotiate an inclusive place in Britain for the descendants of Black and Brown migrants: the New Beacon Circle, based in North London.1 Many of the contributors to this book have addressed contemporary alternative educational initiatives; I consider one that started in the mid-1960s and is still active today. In this way, I emphasize the continuity in radical experimentation in utopian pedagogy. In the case of the New Beacon Circle, such experimentation has been a component of contestatory responses to specific situations of class and ‘race’ domina-

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tion – responses that have been, simultaneously, attempts to build progressive educational alternatives that might endure into the future. Bringing a particular reading of anticolonialism in the British West Indies to their activist work in London, the New Beacon Circle is centred around the New Beacon publishing house and bookshop, which was established in 1966. Over the next four decades, the circle’s activities wove together Black cultural production, antiracist organizing, and community education. This chapter explores a number of initiatives of the New Beacon Circle and concludes by analysing them through the lens of cultural politics. To guide this discussion I must first provide some historical context with respect to education and the colonial British West Indies. Education and Colonialism in the British West Indies Bourgeois-liberal conceptions of education have had profoundly paradoxical outcomes. In the industrialized North, expanded schooling at the secondary and postsecondary levels was largely intended to equip individuals for the various economic roles required in such societies, and also to instil in them the civic virtues of liberal democracy, respect for person and property, and law and order. In many respects, the liberal-humanist ideal of the ‘cultured’ person was what drove the expansion of schooling, where reading and debate were seen as ‘culture’ in its ‘nurturing’ sense.2 This notion of ‘culture’ as nurturing the ‘good citizen’ was, of course, differentially available to those who were differentially situated in the social structure by class, ‘race,’ and gender. Nonetheless, the ‘cultured citizens’ who were produced did not always extend to the status quo the loyalty expected by the ruling order. Therein lies the conundrum of literacy and schooling: on the one hand, they could and did produce citizens committed to a dominant ideological project; on the other, they produced literate, critical dissidents with the means to disseminate radical ideas through the printed word to an increasingly literate public. Examples of this antagonistic dynamic abound. In the plantation societies of the Atlantic, un-free persons were prevented from acquiring literacy, often by law, and always by custom;3 in the Atlantic world, some of the earliest instances of activism that combined cultural and political issues saw literate radicals bringing reading skills to those who were socially subordinate.4 Indeed, the imaginations of progressives all over the world have long been gripped by the possibility of infiltrating

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the apparatus of schooling and turning it towards the end of revolutionary change, and have long sensed the importance of building educational processes into the machinery of radical movements. Here we might note just four examples: the place of alternative media and reading circles in early-nineteenth-century British radical culture, as described by E.P. Thompson;5 Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and literacy campaigns, which originally centred on Latin America but eventually circulated around the globe;6 the workers’ education aspects of the International Working Men’s Association, with which Marx and Engels were closely associated;7 and the call by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci for the making of working-class ‘organic intellectuals.’8 As these examples suggest, one result of expanding literacy and general schooling has been to create spaces for oppositional education outside the control of the state. Another result has been a heightened interplay of education, politics, and cultural production. This was visible in the United States when education was treated as a strategic front in the battle against entrenched racial segregation after slavery was abolished. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, insisted that Black intellectuals must set to work disseminating ideas beyond the academy and throughout the wider society. For Du Bois, Black intellectuals were obligated to get involved in activism – to take their hard-won knowledge to the mass of oppressed Blacks in the United States prior to the Civil Rights era. Du Bois also held that exposure to so-called ‘high’ culture was a necessary element in the education of the oppressed. While conceding that Blacks needed technical and vocational education, Du Bois argued that Black Americans also needed to spawn their own subgroup of intellectuals, who would constitute a relatively autonomous field of social and cultural production that could confront White supremacy on the terrain of culture.9 In the colonial and postcolonial British West Indies, too, education was a pivotal but at the same time paradoxical site of anticolonialist struggle. There, as elsewhere, capitalist modernity entailed forms of dissent wherein the class structuring of society was contested by people who employed tactics from inside, as well as outside, the established institutional arrangements and terms of bourgeois liberal democracy.10 Many key figures in the independence movement began with the assumption that a schooled population is the soil out of which civil society emerges and expands, that education empowers people to become active agents in knowledge creation and full participants in poli-

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tics.11 The transition from colonialism to independence saw attempts to implement Western-style modernization; the expansion of mass secondary and postsecondary schooling was seen as a key element in this. Opportunities to form new nations and new political subjects were in the air, so great efforts were made to expand primary schooling for children, and literacy for adults as well. Mass education was also seen as a way to encourage people to defend the postcolonial public sphere from authoritarian and neocolonial tendencies.12 This reconfiguring of the role of education reveals just one of the ways in which expanded schooling, at whatever level, had political and cultural consequences that the developmentalist states, and the individuals who launched these programs, did not intend. We can take as an example the Trinidadian intellectual-politician (and, for a time, subversive pedagogue), Eric Williams, whose teachings and writings offered a trenchant critique of colonialism while also being oriented towards promoting popular participation in postcolonial government. Williams’s ‘People’s University’ in 1950s Trinidad was an educational counterinitiative. Remembered for his slogan ‘the future of the nation is in the school bags of its children,’ Williams – a renowned historian of Atlantic slavery – delivered a program of public lectures on economic history and politics to audiences of thousands at a square in the heart of Trinidad’s capital.13 These lectures made critical ideas on colonialism available to the wider Trinidadian public, most of whom had been denied access to any education beyond basic literacy, in a social formation where most Black and Brown people were destined to join the labouring masses in the service of colonial power. The lectures were part of a series of public meetings that saw Williams crisscrossing the island, bypassing the conservative media in an attempt to prepare the populace for postcolonial citizenship. Williams became the elected leader of an internally self-governing Trinidad in 1956, and again when full independence from Britain was achieved in 1962. His postcolonial governments would find that expanded education could produce enemies as well as supporters of the status quo. Ultimately, the great promise of Williams’s People’s University was unfulfilled: he did not appear to trust Trinidadians to be the agents of their own history. He could not imagine popular participation beyond the limits of a bourgeois democracy that carried over many of the authoritarian elements of colonial rule. By 1970, Williams found himself the Black leader of a country populated mainly by non-Whites, in the paradoxical position of being opposed by a wave of Black power activism. He was unable to

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deal with the militant Black cultural politics that came out of the turbulent 1960s. Formal education in the colonial British West Indies was also interwoven – in contradictory ways – with the cultivation of anticolonial thought and politics. At the turn of the twentieth century in Trinidad there was a close correlation between ‘race’ – marked off by skin colour – and social class: the middle and upper classes were occupied by a crosssection of people, albeit disproportionately Whites, while the lower strata were overwhelmingly peopled by those of African or South Asian (Indian) descent. For the mass of Blacks and Indians at the time, the chief route to social mobility was secondary education, followed by some kind of career in the civil service, commerce, or – if they managed to acquire higher education – the professions.14 Such schooling often had the unintended consequence of fostering a Creole intelligentsia, many of whom eventually became radicals in Britain itself. The paradoxes of this process were especially visible in the competitive ‘scholarship’ contests that were held across the British West Indies. A lower-class Black or Indian boy (the avenues at the time were open mainly to males), through grinding study, might win a scholarship to one of the island’s secondary schools. There, over five to seven years, he would be exposed to a British-style grammar school education, which, if he went no further in terms of formal education, would qualify him for a clerical position in the colonial civil service. From the initial thousands of young boys in primary school, a few hundred would gain places in secondary schools (for which they had to pay fees that only the middle class could normally afford); and of these few hundred, only two or three would emerge as scholarship winners. And there were yet more hurdles to come: if the student was very ‘bright,’ he might win one of two or three island scholarships and proceed to England to study at a university for a profession. What has been called the ‘cult of the Island Scholar’ was more highly developed in Trinidad than elsewhere in the colonial West Indies.15 According to Ivar Oxaal, ‘of the greatest importance in accounting for the high level of competitive scholarship in Trinidad was the fact that the colony’s secondary schools were the first colonial institutions to participate in the external examinations of Oxford and Cambridge.’16 Many of the critical artists, radical intellectuals, and activists who would later gather in and around the New Beacon Circle made their passage to Britain through this highly competitive selection process. It was on these margins of the modern Western world system, and

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especially in the elite colonial classrooms, that we can see the formative context for an Anglo-Caribbean radical consciousness that was schooled (in the sense of acculturated to ruling cultural capital) and at the same time rebellious. Educated in the English version of the Western highculture canon, in schools set up in the West Indies but emulating the British grammar school, some of the ‘bright boys,’ by virtue of being Black or Brown, colonial, and marked for future greatness through triumph in the scholarship contests, came to feel that strictures were being imposed on their personal development by a social system which boasted ideals of humanity that were seldom realized. The schooled radicalism that sometimes ensued was a decisive influence on the formation of the New Beacon Circle. New Beacon Circle: Beginnings New Beacon Books (est. 1966) is a North London-based Black and Third World publisher and bookseller. People who have remained in close association with the house’s founders, and who have been involved in some or all of its various projects, constitute what I call ‘the New Beacon Circle.’ This is my term, not theirs: I use ‘New Beacon’ because the New Beacon bookshop was the locus around which I came to learn about these activists and their projects. I suggest that the people engaged in these various initiatives constitute a ‘circle’ because they are linked through friendship, kinship, and comradeship. Central to my account in what follows is Trinidadian immigrant John La Rose and his close associates, as each of New Beacon Circle’s projects had or have in common their heavy involvement.17 The New Beacon Circle has engaged in more traditional forms of political organizing over the past four decades, from coordinating legal defence campaigns for Black youth to supporting dissidents imprisoned by repressive regimes. Most of its activism, however, has focused on culture: cultural forms, cultural production, and the struggle over meaning. Its projects bring oppositional political awareness to areas perceived as ‘cultural’ in bourgeois discourse, such as artistic creation and publishing. Distinctively, New Beacon’s cultural activities are bound up with a set of discernible political commitments: socialist, antiracist, and popular-democratic. Education has been both a central element of and a recurring thematic object in its activities; self- and community education are at the core of its work. In what follows I briefly describe five of the New Beacon Circle’s activist-pedagogic contributions to the

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making of an antiracist cultural politics in postimperial Britain: promoting Caribbean art and anticolonial literature and politics; publishing and selling books; launching supplementary schools; organizing struggles against racism in Britain’s state schools; and participating in international radical book fairs. But first let me situate myself in relation to New Beacon. I learned of New Beacon as a publisher when I became interested in the radical writings of C.L.R. James. I met John La Rose in Trinidad in 1994, at a pan-Caribbean Assembly of Caribbean Peoples, which brought together creative people, activists, and other elements of civil society from the French, English, Spanish, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. One of the main organizers was the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) – the most influential trade union in Trinidad and one of the key workers’ organizations in the English-speaking Caribbean. At that event I was working as a volunteer for the organizers, having previously met the OWTU’s education officer, David Abdulah. La Rose was the European representative of the OWTU, and he was introduced to me by Abdulah. I was at the time about to begin graduate studies in sociology at the City University of New York. I intended to write a study of C.L.R. James. In New York I met Jim Murray, who ran the C.L.R. James Institute, an open and radically democratic project in the autonomous spirit of James himself.18 From his Upper West Side flat, Murray collected James’s papers, built up a small but comprehensive library of the Black Atlantic, and, together with his colleague Ralph Dumain, assembled an exhaustive catalogue of works by and on James and his political milieu. At the C.L.R. James Institute, Murray provided resources and support for people engaged in any kind of creative work. The institute was in turn connected to Keith Hart, who had played a major role in bringing James’s American Civilization to posthumous publication.19 Hart supervised my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge after I moved to Britain in 1995. After my first London interview with La Rose in 1996, I felt that I had to rethink completely my research project. When he agreed to begin a series of life history interviews with me, I quickly came to realize that I was gaining privileged access to a space where politics met intellect and action. In the six years since that first meeting I have come to focus much of my intellectual and political interest on La Rose and his closest associates. More than being research correspondents, the New Beacon activists have in some cases become friends. They have provided me with a political home in Britain, and I have become involved in a

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number of their ongoing projects. I have come to share their political imagination; in the old ethnographic term, I’ve ‘gone native.’ In learning about activists as a sociologist, I have become a part-time activist myself, even though my main occupation is that of a conventional university teacher. Early Pedagogical Struggles The origins of the New Beacon Circle lie in the early 1960s, by which time a number of writers, artists, and graduate students from the Caribbean – many of whom had travelled to Britain on scholarship – were well established in Britain, especially in London. Among them was John La Rose, a Trinidadian who came to Britain in 1961 to study law but who soon got involved in activism. After his arrival, La Rose met Edward Brathwaite, a poet and student in West Indian history from Barbados, and Andrew Salkey, a BBC journalist from Jamaica.20 Perceiving a lull after the initial impact in the 1950s of the first works of George Lamming, Roger Mais, Samuel Selvon, and V.S. Naipaul, the three men felt that something needed to be done to bring Caribbean arts and letters back into the cultural spotlight in Britain. In 1967, the three immigrant Caribbean intellectuals and artists decided to start a forum – the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) – where Caribbean-descent students, artists, and writers in Britain could meet. Concerned with the history, politics, and culture of the Caribbean and its growing diaspora, CAM was a discussion space where works were presented and critiqued and public meetings were held. It also launched an arts journal. The events organized by CAM, which was active until 1972, helped expand interest in Caribbean and other Third World literature. In many important ways, it contributed to the growth of the New Beacon publishing house and bookshop. La Rose started New Beacon Books in 1966, with the support of British-born Sarah White. He positioned its publishing and bookselling activities in relation to a radical intellectual tradition in colonial Trinidad that extended back to the late 1700s. ‘New Beacon’ was meant to invoke the Trinidadian ‘Beacon’ literary and critical circle of the late 1920s, and early 1930s, which was a high point of sorts in the development of a relatively autonomous (in the sense of ‘native’) intellectual tradition in Trinidad.21 For example, a group of intellectuals started two pioneering cultural journals: The Beacon and Trinidad.22 These intellectuals, one of whom was C.L.R. James, were not, as some have suggested, merely

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‘non-whites seeking their way in a white literary world.’23 In fact, they were descendants of and contributors to a history of struggle against colonial domination going back to the early 1800s. From a liberalhumanist standpoint, these critical intellectuals attacked the arrogance, Eurocentricism, and anti-intellectualism of the Trinidadian middle and upper classes. Although their positions were often contradictory, they were unrelenting in their efforts to contest White supremacist and colonialist thought and practices in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Black Atlantic.24 Theirs was an enlightened, humanist vision, informed – if not always critically – by ideas on ‘race.’ When Trinidad and The Beacon were founded in the 1920s, the intellectual space in Trinidad was actually fairly complex; there was a network of literary and debating societies, and there had been several attempts to produce literary journals. Further development was constrained by limited access to secondary schooling, to local universities, and to an established publishing house. Republishing works from Trinidad’s intellectual tradition was central to New Beacon’s early publishing program in Britain. La Rose recalled: ‘I saw publishing as a vehicle which gave an independent validation of one’s own culture, history, politics – a sense of one’s self – to break the discontinuity [caused by a lack of information in colonial society].’25 In 1969, for example, New Beacon republished a book written by a nineteenth-century Trinidadian autodidact, John Jacob Thomas, a black rural schoolteacher who was perhaps the most important Trinidadian intellectual of the nineteenth century. Thomas had published a foundational text of the radical tradition in Trinidadian literature, Froudacity (1889).26 This was a response to James Anthony Froude’s The English in The West Indies, which was highly critical of the capacities of the formerly enslaved to govern themselves.27 Froude was an Oxford professor of history and a defender of the British Empire and its ideology of White supremacy. Thomas countered Froude’s reactionary work by demonstrating the great advances made by Blacks in the decades following emancipation in 1838, and he documented the many obstacles raised by the British colonists to prevent Blacks from acquiring land and education. One of the strengths of Thomas’s work was that it established that there was a tradition of scholarly writing by Black people in the colonies. The recovery of Thomas’s work made a vital contribution to late1960s antiracist struggles in Britain by providing a kind of cultural capital for those engaged in the struggle against the dominant view that

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Black children in Britain were intellectually inferior to their White counterparts owing to their origins in the Caribbean or Africa. Both were seen in racist discourse as places where literary culture was virtually non-existent. Thomas’s work was also seen by New Beacon as having great potential to encourage Black Britons to recognize positive constructions of Black intellectual subjects. Other early New Beacon publications, all of which were aimed at bringing Caribbean history and letters to a reading public in Britain, were Caribbean Writers: Critical Essays, by Ivan Van Sertima; Marcus Garvey, 1887–1940, by Adolph Edwards; and Foundations, a volume of poetry by La Rose himself. Since its founding in the mid-1960s, New Beacon has grown into one of Britain’s biggest suppliers of Black and Third World literature. Its publishing arm has not grown at the same rate as its bookselling operation (which has nearly 20,000 titles in stock at present); even so, New Beacon had published more than sixty-five titles by 2004. Its lists include fiction by established and new Caribbean authors as well as reprints of classic Caribbean fictional works. The house has also published contemporary Black British fiction, criticism, history, and politics. The geographic scope of its publishing and bookselling encompasses the Caribbean, the United States, Africa, and Britain. Mainstream booksellers have recently allocated more space to Black literature, but this space is occupied largely by better-known, usually American, authors. New Beacon sources it books from across the majority world, and thus occupies a specialist space. From this position, it has made a unique contribution to the spread of Black writing and anticolonialist critique. In addition to bookselling and cultural production, New Beacon has involved itself in struggles against class and ‘race’ domination in Britain’s state schools.28 By the late 1960s, the schooling of Black children was becoming a highly politicized issue in London and in other British cities that had seen Black settlement, as a generation of Black children brought to or born in Britain was entering the school system. The children of West Indian immigrants faced a number of challenges in British classrooms. As noted earlier, in the colonial West Indies, education had been the main route to social mobility for non-Whites, who were lower in the class hierarchy; even though only a handful of students made it through the hyperselective system to finish with a secondary school diploma, the possibility was tangible enough to lend the manifestly unjust system some stability and legitimacy. In Britain, most Caribbean migrants found even that narrow route to mobility blocked: it was overdetermined by the class base of schooling, where working-class young people were

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intended for working-class jobs – but Black working-class school leavers were not programmed for any jobs at all.29 Education seemed to serve different functions for British working-class people than for those from the West Indies and Africa. One specific practice in British schools – ‘streaming’ or ‘banding’ – was a locus of struggle, and here New Beacon made important contributions. Like many Black parents, La Rose was outraged when he became aware that British schools tended to direct Caribbean-heritage children into ‘educationally sub-normal’ (ESN) streams, or ‘bands.’ La Rose was a member of the North London West Indian Association, a group whose member-parents vigorously opposed ESN policy in the London borough of Haringey. Proposals in 1969 for banding in Haringey were the impetus behind the founding of the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association. Caribbean-descent as well as British schoolteachers who were opposed to banding joined to challenge the education authority’s reliance on IQ testing and the assumptions on which these evaluative mechanisms and their interpretations were based.30 New Beacon mobilized its publishing capacities in support of this struggle. The then fledgling publisher organized meetings of activists, teachers, and parents to help formulate a collective response to banding. Then, in 1971, it published How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System.31 This work, by Grenadian-born Bernard Coard, documented the racist underpinnings of ESN policies and made it clear that the self-image of Black Caribbean children was being damaged by the low expectations of teachers, which only compounded an already hostile social environment. Coard also exposed the racist tone of many of the teaching materials used in British schools. Besides being obviously related to the antiracist struggles that were being waged at the time around schooling and in the wider society, Coard’s work may be read as a contribution to the radical sociology of education, a field that was expanding at the time, produced by teachers and academics who had been radicalized by the social movements of the 1960s.32 New Beacon also contributed to the response to the banding proposal by supplying published materials to oppositional groups in support of a broadening of the cultural range of what was taught in British schools. Another response to the racial bias of British state schools involved setting up local community schools for Black children, which sought to supplement formal schooling with extra lessons. In 1969, La Rose and a number of other parents started the George Padmore School to provide

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supplementary education for their children, in the hope of combating the negative stereotyping these children were likely to face in classrooms. The school’s founders introduced cultural products and influences from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa, thereby enhancing the ‘cultural capital’ of Black children. A key objective of the Padmore School was to foster a sense of the cultural and historical value of African societies: The first time I gave a talk on African history and civilisation to the children at the Padmore school, some of them laughed loudly when I mentioned ‘Africa.’ I think it was partly a nervous, embarrassed reaction, because they, as black kids in Britain, were used to hearing Africa dismissed as a primitive place, and Africans as primitive people. Africa was something they were a bit ashamed of. So we had to change that. We had to teach them about the civilisations of Africa ... I don’t mean we neglected the history of Europe, of classical Greece and Rome; that too was part of our history; it was part of my own education at St Mary’s College in Trinidad. We did not neglect European culture – after all, the kids were growing up here in Europe – but we wanted them to learn about and develop pride in the African parts of their heritage.33

The curriculum at the Padmore School included world geography, Caribbean cuisine and music, and talks by African and Caribbeanheritage adults about their lives in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Britain. All of this prefigured the slow and contested rise of ‘multicultural’ awareness in British education. Since the early 1970s, there has been a steady growth in supplementary schools organized by ethnic minorities in Britain.34 From this perspective, the Padmore School was among the pioneers in multicultural education, which, although now accepted by many in the British education establishment, has long been the target of a backlash from those on the Right who see multiculturalism as an attack on the integrity of ‘British’/or ‘English’ culture.35 The New Beacon Circle initiated other projects in Britain that injected radical critiques of ‘race’ and class hierarchy into the field of education. For example, in 1975 it helped establish the Black Parents’ Movement (BPM), which organized a range of campaigns and activities in and around issues facing Black youth and their families in Britain; many of these related to the problems they faced in the school system. BPM’s 1979 pamphlet, Independent Parent Power, Independent Student Power: The Key to Change in Education and Schooling, put forward a set of critical

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assumptions and strategies that, they argued, would have to guide Black communities in their efforts to transform British schools. Its perspective was highly critical of the instrumentalism that in many ways differentiates ‘schooling’ from ‘education.’ ‘The B.P.M. sees schooling as the preparation and selection of workers for the labour market. Some for better paid factory jobs, some for professional or middle class jobs, others for the low paid jobs or unemployment. The exam system is the means by which this selection is made.’36 For BPM, then, the bureaucratic requirements of school management sometimes conflicted with the needs of students and parents. Though these parents were concerned about their children’s (un)employment, they also wanted to bring about change in the content that was being taught. This led the New Beacon Circle to pursue educational projects outside the existing structural boundaries of education. One result was the George Padmore School. This does not mean that the New Beacon Circle activists gave up on the challenge of transforming mass educational institutions. But to do that, argued BPM, Black families and students would have to mobilize opposition to various British education policies. As the title of the pamphlet suggested, autonomous organization would be vital to overcome the conflicts of interest that too often arose among students, parents, and teachers: 1 Parents and students, unlike teachers and ancillary workers, are generally either unorganized or badly organised to protect or advance their own independent interests in schools or with education authorities. This is particularly true of Black and White working class parents. 2 Teachers and education authorities have been against the idea that parents and students should actively influence what happens in schools or with the education authority. 3 Certainly, teachers will appeal to parents to help fight against the cuts; but naturally the main concern of teachers will be to protect their own jobs and working conditions. BPM emphasized that parents and students cannot assume that teachers are their natural allies in struggles against racist school environments and curricula. Such struggles require that Black parents and students organize independently. So whereas the liberal sees a partnership of parents and teachers working together towards fitting the stu-

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dent out for citizenship, the New Beacon Circle’s activist praxis brings social conflict to the heart of education. It rejects liberal constructions of the classroom as a neutral space, as well as the assumption that parents and teachers have interests in common. Circulating Radical Culture The various threads of activism I have discussed so far come together in the final initiative of the New Beacon Circle that I want to describe: the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. These large gatherings of radicals, Black writers, Third World intellectuals, and activists were held twelve times between 1982 and 1995 in London, with satellite fairs in other British cities and in Trinidad. The fair was founded by New Beacon, Bogle L’Ouverture Books, and the Race Today Collective. Bogle L’Ouverture was founded in London in 1967 by Guyanese-born Eric and Jessica Huntley, and published mainly AfroCaribbean and African literature. Based in Brixton in south London, the Race Today Collective emerged as a splinter from the Institute of Race Relations. Its members wanted to confront racism in Britain more directly, instead of working within existing state structures, which was the institute’s approach.37 The Race Today Collective published the journal Race Today and involved itself in a wide range of Black political activities in Britain. Members of these three organizations were all heavily involved in publishing, bookselling, and education as sites of political action and social transformation, and it was they who inaugurated the Book Fair. The first International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books was held in April 1982 at the Islington Town Hall in North London and was attended by some six thousand people over one week. The fair gathered momentum from the previous two decades of struggles against racism, classism, and social and cultural exclusion that had been waged by Black and White progressive activists, as well as by many ordinary people whose main concern was fair treatment in the housing market, in schools, and in workplaces. The first fair was planned during 1981, which was a year of enormous racial tension in London. As Sarah White recalled, [1981] was the year of the New Cross massacre and also the Brixton Riots, and [the Book Fair] really arose out of the work that had been done by the

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three organizations – Race Today, New Beacon and Bogle L’Ouverture – and we had worked together in the alliance. So it was a kind of cultural manifestation of the politics that had been going on at the time. That is one way of looking at it. Plus the fact that all three organizations were involved in publishing.

The three organizers of the fair each had concrete links with struggles and activists in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe. These connections facilitated broad international participation in the fairs, and were themselves sustained and strengthened by the gatherings in Britain. The fair opened up a space where the respective transnational constituencies of New Beacon, Race Today, and Bogle L’Ouverture could be brought together, thus deepening and broadening the networks on which the success of their (often non-waged) activities depended. In this sense, New Beacon was one node in an extensive network of radical Black cultural-activist organizations. For many of those attending the book fairs – and I have in mind especially progressive teachers, small publishers, writers, and artists – their most important resource was networks of human relationships, through which work and ideas were produced, circulated, and fed back into the struggle. Many relied on these networks for their financial autonomy from the political and cultural establishments in their respective countries. A number of independent publishing ventures drew inspiration from the politics of these fairs. Jeremy Poynting, for example, of Peepal Tree Press, one of the largest publishers of Caribbean fiction in English, remembers receiving significant encouragement and technical advice from New Beacon in the early stages of his venture.38 The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books was a counterhegemonic site in relation to a Eurocentric literary, cultural, and political establishment. Such events can be understood as strategic campaigns aimed at gaining, extending, and securing relative autonomy for radical Black and Third World writers and artists. The political thinking behind the fairs was classically Gramscian: the organizers waged battles against ‘race’ and class oppression in cultural spaces, and thereby politicized and so challenged settled bourgeois conceptions of culture as individual accomplishments. By shifting literary culture into a public space, the fairs encouraged a rude democratization of the written word.

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Conclusion: Cultural Politics, Antiracist Education, and Transformation The type of political activity that is today captured by the term ‘activism’ is connected mainly to the new social movements. These movements have had a strong impact on Western societies, especially in the areas of gender, ethnicity, ‘race,’ environment, education, and sexuality. These movements engage in struggles over and against power, a crucial dimension of which is meaning.39 In this regard, new social movements share much in common with the forms of cultural politics that came into public awareness when the student, women’s, and Black power movements came to the fore in the 1960s. Cultural politics can be imagined as a kind of politics that attacks the exclusionary distinction of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture; that foregrounds the ways in which elites value their own cultural capital while devaluing that of those who are subordinate to them in a given social formation; and that seeks to politicize how cultural forms are consumed and how culture is produced.40 I hope this chapter has shown that the modes of struggles associated with cultural politics extend further back in time and wider across space than is often acknowledged, and that elements of this kind of politics can be seen in action throughout the history of capitalist modernity, in both the colonial and the postcolonial parts of the world system. That education has played a pivotal and paradoxical role in the emergence, shape, and trajectory of cultural politics is clear in the case of the New Beacon Circle. For the New Beacon Circle, education is perhaps the single most important process for bringing about the kinds of social transformation they desire. These transformations are best understood in terms of a transcendent vision, one that combines the internationalism of the classical Left with the anticolonialism of the radicalized British ex-colonial. Imagine Rosa Luxemburg in a political chat room with C.L.R. James. You get my point. Much of what passes lately for informed discussion of multiculturalism in Britain is actually a crude essentialism dressed up in the designer garb of ‘culture.’ Where once there was talk of ‘race,’ there is now talk of ‘culture.’ Since 11 September 2001, talk of multiculturalism in official circles has begun to slide into talk of averting a ‘clash of civilizations.’ From the top-down perspective of the British state, protestations against a multicultural Britain constitute the latest in a long line of strategies that the state has developed for controlling the overseas colonial population. These strategies have always involved constructing the colonized as fundamentally different from and other than the English – a strategy first

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employed in subjugating Ireland, one of Britain’s first colonies. This otherness has been both the means and the justification for the surveillance of the colonials. Especially suited for surveillance were (and still are) those elements perceived as troublemakers or as potentially threats to ‘British values’ of honesty, civility, and democracy. For many of the ruled – especially those who are Black or Brown – retreat into cultural identity is often a defence against an increasingly right-wing political culture in which White + Might = Right. An uncompromising antiracist pedagogy drawing on Black, radical, and Third World currents, of the sort developed by New Beacon, poses a potent challenge to Britain’s postimperial xenophobia and racism. That pedagogy can help dismantle the racialized patriotism that remains so central to dominant representations of Britishness. All of the New Beacon projects I have discussed have intervened directly in already existing social and cultural spaces with the aim of effecting change and creating alternatives. The projects are distinguished by an orientation towards planning and building structures that will endure into the future; these projects are imagined and implemented with a transcendent orientation. The setting up of an educational trust and archive, bearing the name of the Pan-African Marxist George Padmore, supported by an expanding Web presence,41 is an indication that the key figures in the New Beacon Circle have an eye to the future. Of course, transcendence is never guaranteed. Still, the New Beacon Circle chose to act, not in a naive or voluntarist manner, but rather with an acute awareness that some of their projects are bound to fail. Their collective life’s work is a timely reminder to a younger generation now being politicized in the anticapitalist, antiglobalization, and other oppositional movements that social change must be not only struggled for but also organized toward; and organized struggle grows out of struggles to organize. The New Beacon Circle’s radical pedagogical ventures into publishing, bookselling, and activist organizing have helped constitute the multicultural society that Britain is not yet, but might yet become.

NOTES In memory of Jim Murray (1949–2003), activist, friend, and comrade. La lotta continua. 1 I use colour-‘race’ terms in capitalized form and always with implicit quotation marks. I reject both ‘race’ as ontology and racial ways of seeing/

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2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10

11 12

13

Brian W. Alleyne knowing. Race and its attendant colour lexicons are undeniably part of an apparatus of organizing social life, but to accord them near-ontological status is to lose sight of their instrumentality and contingency. I treat race as a sociological object, not as an epistemological standpoint. That I feel the need to make these almost banal points here is an indication of the renewed fascination, both popular and scholarly, with ‘race.’ Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981). Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Pelican, 1968). Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1987). Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London: Bookmarks, 1983). Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Rutledge M. Dennis, ‘Introduction: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Tradition of Radical Intellectual Thought,’ in Research in Race and Ethnic Relations: The Black Intellectuals, ed. Rutledge M. Dennis (London: JAI Press, 1997); W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968). Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Ellen Meiksens Wood, The Retreat from Class: The New True Socialism (London: Verso, 1986). David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). O. Nigel Bolland, ‘Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History,’ in Intellectuals in the TwentiethCentury Caribbean, ed. A. Hennessey (London: Heinemann, 1992); C.L.R. James, ‘A New View of West Indian History,’ Caribbean History 35:4 (December 1989): 49–70; Eric Williams, Education in the British West Indies (New York: University Place Book Shop, 1968). Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964); Eric Williams, Williams Speaks: Essays on Colonialism and Independence (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1964).

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14 Carl Campbell, Colony and Nation: A Short History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1992). 15 Ibid. 16 Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power: The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1968), 62. 17 For an extended discussion of the New Beacon Circle see Brian W. Alleyne, Radicals against Race: Black Activism and Cultural Politics (London: Berg, 2002). 18 See www.clrjamesinstitute.org. Jim Murray died on 21 July 2003, after a short illness. 19 C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 20 Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London: New Beacon Books, 1992). 21 Selwyn Cudjoe and Paget Henry, ‘The Audacity of It All: C.L.R. James’s Trinidadian Background,’ in C.L.R. James’s Caribbean, ed. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 39–55. 22 Reinhard Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen Thirties (New York: Greenwood, 1988). 23 Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1988), 26. 24 Brain W. Alleyne, ‘Classical Marxism, Caribbean Radicalism and the Black Atlantic Intellectual Tradition,’ Small Axe 3 (1998): 157–69; Anthony Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (London: Pluto Press, 1997). 25 Barbara Beese, ‘Race Today Interviews New Beacon,’ Race Today 9 (1977): 7. 26 John Jacob Thomas, Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude (London: New Beacon, 1969 [1889]). 27 James Anthony Froude, The English in The West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1888). 28 State school here includes both comprehensive (all ability and all subject areas) and selective (‘grammar’ schools, which are oriented towards the traditional scholastic curriculum). The New Beacon activists and their associates were engaged mainly with schooling in England. 29 A. Cambridge, ‘Education and the West Indian Child – A Criticism of the ESN School System.’ Black Liberator 1 (1971): 9–19; Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Farukh Dhondy, ‘Teaching Young Blacks,’ Race Today 10 (1978): 81–6. 30 Trevor Carter, Shattering Illusions: West Indians in British Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986).

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31 Bernard Coard, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System (London: New Beacon, 1971). 32 Michael F.D. Young, Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education, Open University Set Book (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971). 33 Personal Interview. London, 15 January 1997. 34 Carter, Shattering Illusions; Gus John, The Black Working-Class Movement in Education and Schooling and the 1985–86 Teachers Dispute (London: Black Parents Movement, 1986); Heidi S. Mirza and Diane Reay, ‘Spaces and Places of Black Educational Desire: Rethinking Black Supplementary Schools as a New Social Movement,’ Sociology 34:3 (2000): 521–44. 35 Stephan May, ‘Critical Multiculturalism and Cultural Difference: Avoiding Essentialism,’ in Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education, ed. Stephan May (London: Falmer Press, 1999). 36 Black Parents Movement, Independent Parent Power, Independent Student Power: The Key to Change in Education and Schooling (London: Black Parents Movement, 1980). Emphasis in original. 37 Jenny Bourne and A. Sivanandan, ‘Cheerleaders and Ombudsmen: The Sociology of Race Relations in Britain,’ Race and Class 21 (1980): 331–52. 38 Personal Interview. Leeds, n.d., 1998. 39 Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989). 40 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 41 www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org

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12 ‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?’: Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience1 shveta sarda

A formal definition of a pedagogue in a working-class locality could be as follows: a figure who, through interactions, brings into the students’ consciousness a reality beyond their immediate reach; a figure who brings into their lifeworld skills from other locations that will place them in a more advantageous position in society. The frame of the lifeworld of the pedagogue is visible and articulate. It is in a position from which to propose a vision for the other world – a vision of empowerment through intervention. The inner world of the ‘student’ is of anticipation, anger, and restlessness. It lives with different intensities of indignity and humiliation born of the derision felt at the perception that it must, and can be, ‘transformed.’ It lives in the troubled terrain of entitlement to, gratitude for, and suspicion of intervention. Reverberations of the question, ‘Before coming here, had you thought of a place like this?’ offset the stability of this figure.2 The idea of young people in working-class settlements as tabulae rasae is displaced. What replaces it? This question calls for a realignment of positions, a redrawing of assumptions and protocols of interactions. What emerges? ‘The Edges of Thought’ Eighteen-year-old Raju Malyal lives in Dakshinpuri Resettlement Colony in South Delhi.3 A student of class tenth (a critical year in the Indian system both for future studies or employment), he attends afternoon school on weekdays, and on weekends he helps out at the small neighbourhood eatery run by his father. Raju, in a public reading before 250 friends, acquaintances, and strangers, reads: ‘I wanted to think about what Shamsher Ali had written in his text, “The Edges of Thought.”

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I read the text thrice, and in doing that, felt as if Shamsher Ali was sitting in front of me all this while, talking to me about it.’4 Eighteen-year-old Shamsher dropped out of school before completing class ten. ‘No one cares what you do in afternoon school. I wasn’t learning anything, anyway.’ Shamsher lives in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Colony in Central Delhi.5 The intimacy, desire, and searching quality of Raju’s narration indicate that the dominant coordinates through which young people’s lives are mapped – the home, the school, and the workspace – far from fill all existing spaces for engaging with their subjectivities. Lately, Shamsher has started spending his early mornings at a workshop in the colony that produces cardboard boxes. Reflecting on his routine, he writes: ‘I like to hang around there and chat. The time I spend there are the only moments of respite I get from thinking. Thought is my enemy.’6 There is a rawness to this recognition of living with the incomprehensibility of certain conditions of social realities, and a capacity to live with that vulnerability. Within the unyielding structures of institutions, frameworks, and discourses is a search for the edges of thought – the whispering, agile peripheries of the mind that imagine, flow, combat, seek, assert, and create. This needs a space that can support and allow for this search.7 It craves and ferrets out challenging friendships that nurture thought in a manner that does not read the rawness and vulnerability of a stutter as defeat or helplessness, but as pregnant with possibilities of new discoveries.8 Raju reads on: ‘Sometimes, we create boundaries in our thoughts, stopping ourselves from thinking, stopping ourselves from finding the edges of our thoughts, from where we can plunge into newer depths. Why do we do that? Why do we create shores of the ocean of thinking, or disallow ourselves from moving towards horizons by being swept away by waves?’ ‘A Thought Full Stop’ Reading her text to her peers at the lab about a visit to the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, not far from the neighbourhood, twenty-two-year-old Azra described how she drifted through the city, first on foot, and then on a cycle-rickshaw.9 Her passing description of the rickshaw driver caught the attention of a practitioner from Sarai who was also present at

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the lab. The description was shy, as if Azra had found something disturbing about the rickshaw driver. She had written: ‘He was a young man. He was wearing pants and shirt and looked like he had been through some years of formal schooling. Fair and handsome, he seemed to be a Kashmiri. I thought, “Bechara [Poor thing]! Surely he can get himself a better job than driving a cycle rickshaw.”’ Sensing that Azra had perhaps unconsciously adopted a popular critical stance considered necessary in talking about education and unemployment among city youth, the practitioner probed further than the description carried him. He asked: ‘Azra, can you tell me a little more about the rickshaw driver? Why did you call him bechara?’ Surprised at how little she remembered about him, and that bechara was a conjunction she had used in her text to move on to a description of the street by shifting her gaze from him, Azra, her eyes on the text, reflected: ‘By calling him bechara, I created a distance between him and my thought. Bechara is not a conjunction of different thoughts here. It’s a thought full stop!’ Bechara is the singular, the figure pushed out of our imagination by our metanarratives. A voice muffled, a story silenced, a trajectory of thought left unmapped and unexplored, save as evidence for, or an affirmation of, our dominant thought – another statistic. These full stops are like barricades, creating boundaries around our thought, a closed community of ideas. Helping conduct a survey to gauge perceptions about caste and religion among children in his colony, Lakhmi found the methodology very troubling. Each time the children were reticent to answer ‘objective’ questions, the interviewer was expected to guess the child’s response and fill in the answers. ‘I simply couldn’t understand,’ he said, ‘How am I supposed to decide whether the child’s silence means “yes” or “no”?’ It is perhaps through the silencing of many that knowledge is created. A pedagogue working within realities marked by inequality, conflict, and contestation cannot be innocent of the intimate relationship between knowledge and the politics of silence. A couple with a newborn child refuses to discuss with the family their acute desire to move out of the close-knit, protective neighbourhood they have lived in for years. A student drops out of school for fear of the indignity of being called a failure. A young man labouring at a construction site quietly daydreams through the spray

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of invectives from his supervisor during cycles of carrying bricks to the eleventh floor. These absences in life – the inadequacies of biographies – are the inadequacies of speech. Silences reside in the recognition of the politics of these lingering inadequacies. Crowds carry silences with them. The singular, distanced figure devoid of its biography, multiplies to become a mass, indistinguishable in its features, so remote. Azra says: ‘Sometimes it seems like a beehive, sometimes like insects crawling on the ground …. There are many sounds, but none reach our ears properly.’10 In the stinging relations of full stops and silences, silencing and knowledge, what can be a knowledge producer’s methods of engagement? ‘The Gaps’ On a dark winter evening in early January 2002, during the LNJP Compughar’s trip to Bombay, we reached the Dadar metro station, which was bustling with commuters hurrying into and pouring out of local trains. Falling into step with a stream of commuters heading for the exit, we reached the footbridge to the vegetable market. Swinging batons of policemen attempted to control and bring to order the hodgepodge of bodies – some halting for breath, others finding their own rhythms and directions. Underneath, the market was bright with halogen lamps lit in different stalls. Crowds thronged the stalls, the market was flooded with bodies packed together – a sea of heads that could allow no one admittance. Nonetheless, the crowd seemed to be swelling by the minute. We decided to walk through the crowd in pairs. Reaching the other side, we were surprised at the ease with which we had moved through the crowd. Someone from the group said: ‘There were gaps in the crowd which we could not see from above. Once we entered the crowd, we could walk through these intervening spaces.’ Later, in a text from the experience, Azra wrote: The crowd from in front –You see faces, different features and appearances that could not be seen from above, expressions on faces. Some faces seem to be searching something. Sometimes, the search seems to be for a glimpse of the unknown, and on other occasions, it is a somewhat intimate search.

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Standing on the footbridge presented a distanced view from afar. The frame of the visual field, removed from the experience of the market and created from a height, produced anxiety, fear. This was a particular vantage point. But knowledge, as our movement towards and into the crowd suggested, is a question of different perspectives, not specific positions. The tensions between differences of perspective were productive. A crowd demands to be entered, experienced. The gaps – ruptures, disjunctions, joints – present themselves as possibilities, points of entry. It is in bringing near, in moving through the gaps that an engagement is sought. ‘Speech without Fear and Fearless Listening’ Knowledge is about the bold and simultaneous existence of a multiplicity of voices that fragment our conception of reality, decentre the very act of the production of knowledge, the translation of lifeworlds; this is where the edges of our worlds are in conversation with one another, not muted and silenced. The speech of millions is essential in this. What witholds and prevents speech is the fear of listening to too many voices, the fear of a resultant cacophony. But there is a richness in the multiplicity of a band when it plays myriad instruments, when there is improvisation, and more than one sound can be heard. Azra says: ‘The simultaneous existence of multiple, diverse voices means there is speech without fear, with freedom and dignity. And that, in turn, implies that there be responsible and fearless listening.’ Being in the network of knowledge production is as much about being a server, as a host or a client. Speech is imbricated in the politics of space, and played out in our everyday lives. When the young people at the LNJP lab decided to circulate their writings in the colony through the public form of a ‘wall magazine,’ they were faced with a peculiar problem.11 As young people, they had till now been addressed by elders in the colony. They now confronted the matter of finding a way to address the colony. The fear was that even if they could initially skirt topics they knew would earn the disapproval of their elders, what about issues for which norms were not specified? Three issues of the wall magazine, named Ibarat (Inscription), were brought out in quick succession. But following these, questions of what terrain to choose, what topics to select, what issues to

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discuss, what mode of writing to adopt, superseded, and there was a long pause before the fourth Ibarat. Narration is halted because it does not find a context. Narration is a function of desire. Desire is not person-centric; rather, it is a constellation – of people, settings, memories, preferences – in relations with one another that originate and extend beyond the individual. Narration flows between these elements, and this flow is made possible by a curiosity to hear. To narrate is to relive an experience through the act of telling, through speech. This reliving requires a nurturing context of friendship, a challenging and compassionate listening, which evokes and is receptive to a narration. To listen, then, is to wrestle with your desire, to be vulnerable in a search for a means to look at yourself anew, to question how another has been imagined. There must be so many narrations that are never made because they do not find gradients they can flow towards. Narrations seek this terrain of hospitality, this context created by thirst and difference, this desire. A pedagogue is not a library of known and catalogued books that can be issued out. And a narration is not a requisition for a title or an author. In what is the desire that the pedagogue – the guest of the young people of the host locality– imbricated? ‘To Think You Are Alone Would Be Gross Injustice’ The formidable discourse of labouring rides over social inequality. Here, the question of earning a livelihood, of entering the labour market, is very important. This discourse of livelihood can be one of computer literacy, of speed – it requires skills in typing, preparing Excel sheets, making database entries, writing letters, designing pamphlets, cards, etc. In short, these are the lower-level skills required for the labour force in growing computer-based economic activities. The emphasis is on efficiency, dexterity, and software training. Such vocational training is offered by a number of IT institutes mushrooming in and around working-class settlements. It presents the familiar and troubling disjunction between two imaginaries – the discourse on livelihood for the working-class, and knowledge production. The tussle between these two imaginaries once arose in a dialogue at the labs around the meaning of working with computers, implying the necessity to learn to type at a good speed.12 The question that arose was of the relation between the flow of the keyboard and the flow of thought.

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The labouring discourse overpowers here because it blocks the possibility of thinking of people outside the language of productivity or as cultural producers. Thus it is extremely difficult for the young people to suggest to themselves that technology can be entered through creativity in the technological space.13 The dialogue at the lab continued by drawing out the difference between a ‘hobby’ and a ‘line’ (career choice). ‘Hobby’ is the sphere of the creative, of playfulness and inventiveness. A ‘line’ is what one pursues in life to earn a living, to secure an income, and this is at the cost of creative instincts. With a rejection of folk forms and public cultures of storytelling, or other modes associated with these rich traditions of creative resources, which erupt sporadically on the urban scape during religious festivals and organized showcase events, the sphere of the everyday expressions of creativity searches for outlets and forms. In this loss of language around creativity, training to work in beauty parlours (learning bridal make-up, applying mehandi, etc.) is the most popular career choice for girls in working-class settlements. Men may become part of local dance or theatre troupes, or paint billboards, signs, etc. These become modes for bringing the ‘hobby’ and the ‘line’ together. These micropractices are an assertion by the young people of their creative urges. ‘Unlikely encounters’14 with free software programmers have opened up another dimension: the most interesting conversations happen when programmers visiting the labs talk about their experiences of sharing skills in a creative community that has participants from different backgrounds, and in different geographical locations.15 This creates a fascinating context, in which you imagine yourself, and also the locality, as part of a matrix of other spaces. It shows the possibility of a conversational and practice-based universe where there are people who will find excitement in your quirkiness, play, interests, and ideas. Yashoda, who came to the lab two years ago with a turbulent personal background, and so a mistrust for all forms of determinate aggregates, writes: ‘To think you are alone would be gross injustice.’ She is a prolific writer, and one of the strongest votaries of ensembles formed around the relationship of thought and creativity. What these interactions and dialogues gesture towards is the reality that one can have a transformative relationship with technology – and not just be addressed by it. This is a critical shift in register. This is a universe where your thought is of consequence in a larger framework of knowledge production.

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‘What Do Words Contain?’ Word is. a memory: which gives the word its recognition. a story: an incident that keeps the memory of the word alive. time: every word carries with it the shadow of time. image: an image is associated with every word. thought: different people think differently of the same word. sound: a sound follows every word.16

This textural world of the word lies beyond the realm of judgments. It is not bound by the binaries of ordinary and special, valuable and useless, good and bad, ugly and beautiful. Fertile and mutable, it evokes and invites more narrations, linking with other experiences. Nisha Kaushal from Dakshinpuri says: ‘Utterances are suggestions for others to open up. You don’t define a boundary of the conversation and it flows through suggestion upon suggestion.’ In this mode of excavation of perspectives and meanings in an ensemble of producers, a universe of hyperlinked experiences emerges, rhizomatic in its growth, inclusive in its spread, and open in its propensity to encounters. This accretive relay of experiences as texts and conversations creates an interdependence and densification of ideas – ideas collide and mingle, open out and jostle. This is practice-based, and it flows from everyday experiences. Nasreen at LNJP narrated her experience of witnessing an accident: Because the bus was crowded, the driver was speeding, halting at the stops very briefly. One man, who was trying to get on, was clutching on to the handle on the door. He was trying to put one foot on the steps of the bus. But unfortunately, he slipped, and along with that, his hand also lost its grip on the handle. He fell. The driver drove on.

Her peers Neelofar and Shamsher responded: Neelofar: When I was listening to Nasreen’s story I was remembering scenes when people, specially boys, run to get on moving buses. Some do this because the bus doesn’t stop long enough, while others get off the bus and then get on again when the bus starts to move. Bus conductors do this

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often ... I like it when people first let the woman, or family members they are traveling with, board the bus, and then get on. Shamsher: Listening to the story, I feel like I am the driver and am driving the vehicle, looking at either side. I am glancing at the rear view mirror, and looking at the road as well, which will take the travelers in the bus to their destination. But my attention is not on the passengers at all. I am waiting for the destination.17

Unstable and mobile links between experiences, thoughts, and ideas emerge. Conceptual connections between ideas and different producers make possible a networked thickening of the emergent concepts. The diversity and richness of experiences and ways of thinking creates the possibility of the emergence of a relational knowledge field. Yashoda Singh, at the LNJP lab, writes about her body, and how she perceives her room through it: The wind has entered with such force from the chinks in our walls, that a shiver has run down my whole body. The upper part of my body is outside the quilt, and wind is entering from the sides as well. The wind comes and makes me aware of its coldness ... My back is really hurting now. So I should lie down. But what’s this? The whitewash on the walls of our house is just like the pair of lips of a woman who has put lipstick on one of the lips, but not on the other. Because the walls are whitewashed, but not the roof ...18

The intimacy of the narration, its searching quality and metaphorical evocations, is striking. Yashoda thinks through the lived experience of space through claims and withdrawals, through her own body. The body is inscribed in different ways in different narratives. Lakhmi writes about Ashoki, who cleans sewers in his colony by going inside them. He has written the text in an autobiographical mode, imagining himself to be Ashoki, and his encounter with Lakhmi Chand’s gaze in the crowd of bystanders (residents of the colony) as he enters a sewer: The boy who had come to file the complaint was also there. He was looking at me with surprised eyes. Maybe he was thinking that when he had come to the office, I was wearing clean clothes and talking to him like an officer. But today he was surprised at seeing me in dirty clothes. I was

236 Shveta Sarda laughing within. In his eyes, I was first an officer, a sahib. He had called me sir. But what would he call me now? Maybe he was also thinking of the same thing.19

The text raises the question of how the body is socially perceived, problematizing the fixedness of the representational frame around filth, cleanliness, and notions of waste and disposal. What emerges through these is a complex narrative of the body – as imagined, narrated, socialized. This rich, layered, contradictory terrain of experience and body and social dignity allows for a networked thickening of ideas. This practice-based universe produces a contingent, unstable, and relational knowledge field. The ‘pedagogue’ is a node in this network, searching the emergent with producers/practitioners. ‘What Is It That Flows Between Us?’ This practice of producing and building in a network resonates with and draws from other practices and philosophies – for instance, the free software modes of production. Virtual technological practices inform, further complicate, and deepen the imagination and the everyday at the labs. Sharing resources through peer-to-peer networks, a class of applications that takes advantage of available resources – like storage, cycles, human presence – along the links between routers of data packages, presents an actual and realizable technological juncture as well as a metaphorical resonance with the peer-based practice at the labs. The agility and improvisation of tactical media provide a larger context of multiauthored production and a network to link with as producers and creators. Practices like hyperlinking, lists, and weblogs provide tools and practices for cultural producers. All of these have made possible the creation of and search for new forms of knowledge, communities, and practices at Cybermohalla.20 Ambivalent Pedagogy Ambivalence is an affirmation of contradictory perspectives, vantage points, positionings, and feelings. Ambivalent pedagogic processes gesture towards the porosity of the boundaries between the nodes of a server and a learner, realized through thinking about and practising in networked relations of knowledge production. Different nodes produce

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knowledge, and through the contingent and specific relations formed between ideas, experiences, and practices, together search the emergent. Critical to the engagement is an acute consciousness of and constant reflection on the relations between friendship and knowledge, knowledge and conditionalities of speech, knowledge and silences, knowledge and sharing. It is from these that an ethics of the interaction in each site-specific unlikely encounter evolve. The encounters multiply over time. Seeking unlikely encounters, as guests in another locality, Yashoda, Azra, Lakhmi, Neelofar, Raju, Nasreen, and Suraj will carry with them and receive anew the reverberations of the question, ‘Before coming here, had you thought of a place like this?’ The question would be differently inflected, every time, at each site, layering and thickening its experience and meanings.

NOTES 1 Mohalla in Hindi and Urdu means neighbourhood. Ankur-Sarai’s Cybermohalla project takes on the meaning of the word mohalla, its sense of alleys and corners, of relatedness and concreteness, as a means of talking about one’s place in the city and in cyberspace. In its broadest imagination, it is a desire for a broad, horizontal network (both real and virtual) of voices, sounds, and images in dialogue and debate. A step towards the realization of this desire is the generating of self-regulated media labs in working-class settlements in Delhi, which can facilitate the development of researcher-practitioners from the locality. The young people who come to the labs are between fifteen and twenty-four. 2 The practitioners at the labs often ask visitors this question. Is it a question of suspicion of a stranger? Or is it an assiduous search for a relationship of dignity? There is a strong realization at the labs that their life world is perceived as curios in a ‘waiting room.’ To Yashoda, a practitioner at the LNJP lab, a khaas nazar – a special look cast at her – is a gaze that produces a feeling of suffocation. She writes: ‘What can be said of the looks that are not from strangers, but well-wishers? They seem unfamiliar sometimes. What are these looks? They leave a trace of suffocation in my life, which otherwise seems to be going on just fine. Even if I want to tell others about these looks, I can’t. Because I don’t understand them myself. Because in the courthouse of glances, there are no eyewitnesses.’ 3 Between 1975 and 1979, during the state of emergency, Delhi saw the violent clearing away of irregular settlements under the aegis of

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Jagmohan, vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority. The dislocated inhabitants were to be moved to undeveloped plots on the fringes of the city earmarked for resettlement colonies. This was the beginning of the official history of Dakshinpuri, which is now bustling with life and not as weak infrastructurally. The public reading was at the launch of the 2003 Cybermohalla publication Book Box, which consisted of ten booklets of texts from the labs, five postcards, a CD with animation, a sound-and-text film, and free software for Windows. For the Book Box and the full text of Raju’s reading, see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/book_box/launch.htm (accessed 5 October 2004). LNJP is officially a slum settlement. The irregular dwellings started appearing in the early 1960s, when people began settling unoccupied land beside the LNJP hospital. Over the years, many more people made homes here and the density of the colony increased. LNJP lives with the daily threat of demolition. In its neighbourhood is Turkhman Gate – a settlement with a predominantly Muslim population, which saw massive demolition between 1975 and 1977. After the demolition, residents were sent to different resettlement colonies. For Shamsher’s full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/ book_box/english/questionsbetray.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004). Compughar, or the Abode of Computers – as the Cybermohalla media labs are called by the young practitioners – is one such liminal space. The young adults practising at the labs meet on a daily basis, and grapple with ideas and stutter into concepts through a sustained practice of sharing through conversation. The LNJP Compughar was set up in May 2001, the Compughar at Dakshinpuri in August 2002. It is vital for the pedagogue to have a deeper understanding of the peripheral realities of any such space. Individuals are not discrete, separate units; rather, they are experientially imbricated in a social network that extends beyond them. An understanding of the implications of this vis-à-vis an institution like the school – which dissects both the experiential and the network from which a student emerges – is extremely significant for an experiment like Cybermohalla. Prabhat Jha, one of the Cybermohalla project coordinators, writes: ‘The question we must constantly ask ourselves is whether we see ourselves working among the 30 or 40 young people immediately in front of us, or among the locality which they have emerged from and are a part of. As soon as we bring this into view, the entire scene changes. If we see ourselves as working in a community, it is not possible for us to forget that along with the practitioners are their

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families, and along with the families, the neighbourhood. That is, the sense that your work has reverberations in spaces outside of the immediately visible context of the labs, and is constantly a receiver of reverberations from other spaces, is a very important one.’ Over the past two years at the labs, a sustained and regular practice of writing has emerged. Everyone writes in diaries – small notebooks with ruled paper. These writings, some of which are in the biographical register, some in the register of space, others an engagement with another biography, are a rich database of narrative, comment, word play, and reflection. For the full text of ‘Crowds from Afar, from in Front and from Within,’ see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/book_box/english/ eyescrowd.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004). The wall magazine is a primary ‘public form’ at the labs. Texts are written and selected for a twelve-page wall magazine designed and produced at the lab. They are then photocopied and circulated in the locality by being posted on public walls. The first three wall magazines were on names of the lanes in the colony, on work, and on the trip to Bombay. Translated versions of these issues can be found at www.sarai.net/ projects/cybermohalla/media/wall_mag/ibarat01/english.htm; www.sarai.net/projects/cybermohalla/media/wall_mag/ibarat02/ english.htm; and www.sarai.net/projects/cybermohalla/media/ wall_mag/ibarat03/english.htm. The labs are equipped with three computers each, a scanner, a printer, a sound booth, portable sound recording units, and digital and analogue cameras. The computers run on free software. Image Manipulation software, GIMP and Text Editor, Open Office are the applications used for making animations and typing in and formatting texts. The practices of taking photographs, recording sounds, and creating animations seem to have an archival impetus, rather than being object-oriented, or with an output in mind. They are constantly reworked, catalogued, and logged. This archive then will create a centrifugal force; instead of being worked with to be presented to a public, it may create a pull – that is, the ‘public’ will have to come to see it. An interesting phenomenon is that although there is so much pressure from the labour market for people who are familiar with proprietary software, a brilliantly dynamic and productive culture of copying (for example, MP3s) is part of this very environment. It is in the alleys and small rooms right here that the nodes of production that sustain the greymarket economies thrive. These nodes, through which the locality enters

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the larger politics of economic transactions as a producer, are part of the everyday reality of these practitioners. It is in this context that cassettes with assorted favourite tracks and CDs with the latest film (burned before its release) are freely circulated among peers, and copied for them. I would like to thank Park Fiction (www.parkfiction.org) for its rich concept of Unlikely Encounters: groups that develop tools, attitudes, courage, practices, and programs, and that make unlikely encounters, meetings, and connections more likely, search for them, jump over cultural and class barriers, go where no one goes, look where no one’s looking. They do not allow their activities to be reduced to symbolic action, mirroring, critique, negation, or analysis of their powerlessness, nor do they muddle along in their assigned corner. See www.parkfiction.org/ unlikelyencounters/begriffe.php (accessed 5 October 2004) Among many other programmers, Arish Zaini of the GNU/Linux Users’ Group in Iran visited Delhi in early 2002. He has been working with a small group to develop a Persian-language KDE desktop. During his visit he spent a day at the Compughar in LNJP, where he shared his work with young women who were proficient in Urdu and in working with the English-language desktop. In the convivial atmosphere of a mutual exchange of personal stories and interests in technology and language, a small promise of a CD to install the Persian desktop at the lab was made and sealed. Now, from the Persian desktop, an Urdu language desktop can be developed and shared at the lab. For the full text of ‘A Word,’ written by Suraj Rai after a discussion among the practitioners at the LNJP Lab, see www.sarai.net/community/ cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/wordscontain.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004). For texts from Nasreen’s other peers at LNJP, see www.sarai.net/ publications/cyber_pub/book_box/english/eyescrowd.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004). For Yashoda’s full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/ book_box/english/beforecoming.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004). For Lakhmi’s full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/ book_box/english/inversion.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004). From the Technological Imagination of Cybermohalla, version 01: ’Is there a significance in interaction and collaboration with peers? What does it mean when edges, margins and in-between spaces become alive, pulsating, interacting? When clients are also servers? When users are also producers; browsers are also editors? When centers are dislocated and resources are dispersed? When diversity and multiplicity thrive? When

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ideas are not static or owned, but shared and developed collaboratively? When unpredictable addresses and routes with unstable connectivity are generators of knowledge, sites of narration, and nodes and zones of communication?’ For the full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/ cyber_pub/by_lanes/194-215.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004).

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13 Transformative Social Justice Learning: The Legacy of Paulo Freire carlos alberto torres

The intellectual and political work of Paulo Freire haunts a number of the theoretical discussions and practical experiments addressed in the present book. Renowned as pioneer of ‘popular education’ theory and practice, particularly in the Latin American context, Freire addressed a serious dilemma of democracy: the constitution of a democratic citizenship. He also advanced in the 1960s – quite early, compared with the postmodernist preoccupations of the 1980s – questions of diversity and border crossing as central tenets of transformative social justice learning. Freire taught us that domination, aggression, and violence are intrinsic to human and social life, and argued that few human encounters are exempt from one type of oppression or another; by virtue of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, people tend to be victims or perpetrators of oppression. Thus, for Freire, sexism, racism, and class exploitation are the most salient forms of domination. Yet exploitation and domination exist on other grounds besides, including religious beliefs, political affiliation, national origin, age, size, and physical and intellectual abilities, to name just a few. 1 Starting from a psychology of oppression influenced by psychotherapists like Freud, Jung, Adler, Fanon, and Fromm, Freire developed a pedagogy of the oppressed. With the spirit of the Enlightenment, he believed in education as a means to improve the human condition, to confront the effects of a psychology and a sociology of oppression, to contribute ultimately to what he considered the ontological vocation of the human race: humanization. In the introduction to his highly acclaimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire stated: ‘In these pages I hope I have made clear my trust in the people, my faith in men and women, and my faith in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.’2

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Freire was known as a philosopher and a theoretician of education in the critical perspective, and as an intellectual who never separated theory from practice. In Politics and Education he forcefully stated that ‘authoritarianism is like necrophilia, while a coherent democratic project is biophilia.’3 It is from this epistemological standpoint that Freire’s contribution resonates as the basic foundation for transformative social justice learning. The notion of democracy entails the notion of a democratic citizenship in which agents are active participants in the democratic process, able to choose their representatives as well as to monitor their performance. These are not only political but also pedagogical practices because the construction of the democratic citizen implies the construction of a pedagogic subject. Individuals are not, by nature, ready to participate in politics. They have to be educated in democratic politics in a number of ways, including normative grounding, ethical behaviour, knowledge of the democratic process, and technical performance. The construction of the pedagogic subject is a central conceptual problem, a dilemma of democracy. To put it simply: democracy implies a process of participation in which all are considered equal. However, education involves a process whereby the ‘immature’ are brought to identify with the principles and life forms of the ‘mature’ members of society. Thus, the process of construction of the democratic pedagogic subject is a process of cultural nurturing, involving cultivating principles of pedagogic and democratic socialization in subjects who are neither tabulae rasae in cognitive or ethical terms, nor fully equipped for the exercise of their democratic rights and obligations.4 Yet in the construction of modern polities, the constitution of a pedagogical democratic subject is predicated on grounds that are, paradoxically, a precondition but also the result of past experiences and policies of national solidarity (including citizenship, competence-building, and collaboration).5 A second major contribution of Freire is his thesis advanced in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and reiterated in countless writings, that the pedagogical subjects of the educational process are not homogeneous citizens but culturally diverse individuals. From his notion of cultural diversity, he identified the notion of crossing borders in education, suggesting that there is an ethical imperative to cross borders if we hope to educate for empowerment and not for oppression. Crossing the lines of difference is, indeed, a central dilemma of transformative social justice learning. How can we define transformative social justice learning from a Freirean perspective? As a social, political, and pedagogical practice,

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transformative social justice learning will take place when people reach a deeper, richer, and more textured and nuanced understanding of themselves and their world. Not in vain, Freire always advocated the simultaneous reading of the world and of the word. Based on a key assumption of critical theory that all social relationships involve relations of domination – and that language constitutes identities – transformative social justice learning, from a meaning-making or symbolic perspective, is an attempt to recreate various theoretical contexts for the examination of rituals, myths, icons, totems, symbols, and taboos in education and society, an examination of the uneasy dialectic between agency and structure, which begins a process of transformation. Language constitutes identities. However, language works through narratives and narrations, themselves the products of social constructions of individuals and institutions. And these social constructions need to be carefully inspected, both at their normative and at their conceptual and analytical levels. From a sociological perspective, transformative social justice learning entails an examination of systems, organizational processes, institutional dynamics, rules, mores, and regulations, including prevailing traditions and customs – that is to say, key structures which by definition reflect human interests. These structures represent the core of human interests, expressing the dynamics of wealth, power, prestige, and privilege in society. They constrain – but also enable – human agency. It follows that a model of transformative social justice learning should be based on unveiling the conditions of alienation and exploitation in society. That is, on creating the basis for the understanding and comprehension of the roots of social behaviour and its implications in culture and nature. One can enhance one’s understanding of this by considering the theoretical contributions of Pierre Bourdieu on habitat and habitus, and how social capital affects and is affected by the construction of ideology in education.6 Likewise, one can resort to Basil Berstein’s analysis of class, codes, and controls, which offer – especially in relation to class analysis – a horizontal and a vertical modelling of social interactions in education.7 Transformative social justice learning is a teaching and learning model that calls on people to develop a process of social and individual awareness. This process is encapsulated in the famous term concientização, popularized in the 1960s in Brazil by the Bishop of Olinda and Recife, Helder Camara. Freire himself adopted the notion of conscientização, at one point in his work calling for a comprehensive challenge to authoritarian and banking education. But he later stopped using it when he

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saw that it was being employed as a ruse to mask the implementation of instrumental rationality under the guise of radical education.8 Reclaiming conscientização as a method and as a substantive proposal for transformative social justice learning entails a model of social analysis and social change that challenges most of the basic articulating principles of capitalism, including frivolous hierarchies, inequalities, and inequities. This poses an interesting contradiction in teacher training. It can be argued that a principle of social organization of schooling in capitalist society reproduces the conditions of production of such a society. If so, how is it possible to advocate and produce social change from within existing structures?9 Conscientização is not simply a process of social transformation. It is also an invitation to self-learning and self-transformation in their most spiritual and psychoanalytical meanings. It is a process in which our past need not wholly condition our present. And it is a dynamic process which assumes that by rethinking our past, we can fundamentally gain an understanding of the formation of our own self, the roots of our present condition, and the limits as well as the possibilities of our being a self-in-the-world, reaching the ‘inedito viable,’ that powerful concept elaborated by Freire in the 1960s.10 Thus conscientização as a process of social introspection and selfreflectivity of researchers, practitioners, and activists invites us to develop a permanent ethical attitude of epistemological and ethical self-vigilance. Concientização invites us to be agents of social transformation facing potentially transformable structures. To this extent the notion of dialogue – so well developed in the Freirean opus – becomes an agonic tool of social agency, critically emblematic of its limits and possibilities. Dialogue appears not only as a pedagogical tool, but also as a method for deconstructing pedagogical and political discourses.11 More than thirty years after Freire’s most important books were published,12 the concept of a dialogical education that challenges the positivistic value judgment/empirical judgment distinction has appeared as a democratic tool for dealing with complex cultural conflicts in the context of unequal and combined development in Latin American education – although its applicability in industrial advanced societies can also be documented by many experiences. In summary, Freire’s contributions have provided us with a pedagogy that has expanded our perception of the world, nurtured our commitment to social transformation, illuminated our understanding

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of the causes and consequences of human suffering, and inspired as well an enlivened ethical and utopic pedagogy for social change. Freire’s death has left us with the memory of his gestures, his passionate voice, and his prophet’s face with its long white beard – and with his marvellous books of Socratic dialogue. As an appreciation and celebration of his work, and of his contributions to transformative social justice learning, I would like to quote Paulo Freire himself. In 1996, when he spoke at the University of San Luis, Argentina, he remarked: ‘As an educator, a politician, and a man who constantly rethinks his educational praxis, I remain profoundly hopeful. I reject immobilization, apathy, and silence. I said in my last book, which is now being translated in Mexico, that I am not merely hopeful out of capriciousness, but because hope is an imperative of human nature. It is not possible to live in plenitude without hope. Conserve the hope.’13 A mystique of hope is another fundamental principle of transformative social justice learning.

NOTES 1 In this paper I focus on transformative social justice learning, but I am aware that this construct needs to be enriched to reflect the diversity of oppressive situations. 2 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Montevideo: Editorial Tierra Nueva, 1972), 19. 3 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy and Politics (Los Angeles: Latin American Center, 1998), 56. 4 I thank Walter Feinberg for this suggestion in a personal communication to the author. 5 M.P. O’Cadiz and C.A. Torres, ‘Literacy, Social Movements, and Class Consciousness: Paths from Freire and the São Paulo Experience,’ Anthropology and Education Quarterly 25:3 (1994): 1–18); C.A. Torres, Pedagogia da luta. De la pedagogia do oprimido a la educação publica popular (São Paulo: Cortes Editores and Institute Paulo Freire, 1998); Pilar O’Cadiz, Pía Linquist Wong, and Carlos Alberto Torres, Democracy and Education. Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). 6 See Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction, critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979). See also the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Michael Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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7 Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 1970–3). 8 See Carlos Alberto Torres, Education, Power and Personal Biography: Dialogues with Critical Educators (New York: Routledge, 1998). 9 Carlos Alberto Torres, ‘Schooling in Capitalist America: Theater of the Oppressor or the Oppressed?’ in Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life, ed. Dennis Carlson and Greg Dimitriadis (New York: Routledge, 2002), 263–75. 10 Jose Eustaquio Romão aptly distinguished three sociological categories associated with Freire’s notion of the ‘inédito viable’: incompletude (incompleteness), inclonclusão (inconclusiveness), and inacabamento (unfinishness). ‘Pedagogia Sociológica ou Sociología Pedagógica.’ Paper presented to the Mid-Term Conference of the Research Committee of Sociology of Education, International Sociological Association, Lisbon, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 18–20 September 2003. See also Isabel Bohorquez, ‘Lo inédito viable en Paulo Freire. Tras el perfil de un sueño,’ Cordoba, Argentina, unpublished paper. 11 See Carlos Alberto Torres and Adriana Puiggrós, eds, Education in Latin America: Comparative Perspectives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 12 Paulo Freire, La educación como práctica de la libertad (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1978); Pedagogía del Oprimido (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1978); Carlos Alberto Torres, Estudios freireanos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Quirquincho, 1994). 13 Varios, El grito manso, Paulo Freire en la Universidad de San Luis, unpublished manuscript, 1996.

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14 Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy allan antliff

Before I begin, I should say something about my own politics. I’ve been involved in the anarchist movement for some time and have participated in a wide range of anarchist educational projects. My academic life and my political life run parallel to each other, and intersections are frequent. This essay is an instance of it. Anarchist pedagogy breaks free from authoritarian modes of education and the regulatory mechanisms of the state. It actualizes its politics by functioning immanently, in the here and now. This is the sense in which anarchist pedagogy is utopian. It is a gesture towards the future, akin to spraying a circle-A on a bank window before the bricks go in. ‘In anarchist theory,’ writes Paul Goodman, ‘the word revolution means the process by which the grip of authority is loosed, so that the functions of life can regulate themselves, without top-down direction and coordination. The idea is that, except for emergencies and a few special cases, free functioning will find its own right structures and coordination.’1 Here we have the foundation of anarchist pedagogy: an open, cooperative social structure. Take, for example, the Survival Gathering held in Toronto, Canada, from 1 to 4 July 1988. I was unable to attend this event, but I can draw on extensive documentation, including first-hand accounts, to outline its key features. The first thing to note is that the gathering was decentralized, non-hierarchical, and social in the most profound sense. On the first day a general meeting was held at the gathering’s ‘convergence centre’ to make operational decisions concerning issues such as media relations, food, and housing.2 This orientation process introduced those unfamiliar with anarchism to the movement’s consensus method of decision-making (discussions continue until collective agreement is reached or until those opposed to the majority position agree to sus-

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pend their objections). Also, a schedule booklet was distributed outlining the purpose of the gathering. The booklet included a map of the various downtown locations – the convergence centre, community halls, cafes, parks – where, for the next two days, workshops would be held. At these workshops, topics such as capitalism, indigenous struggles, and anarchist feminism were discussed with the help of facilitators, who ensured that no single voice was privileged over others.3 In addition to the workshops, a Networking Day was scheduled where members of federated organizations, including the Anarchist Black Cross and the Animal Liberation Front, could meet to discuss their respective projects.4 Throughout the four days, at the gathering’s convergence centre, groups set up tables where they distributed journals, books, leaflets, and pamphlets. Musical performances, an exhibition of anarchist posters, and poetry readings rounded out the events.5 In short, those at the Survival Gathering experienced learning in all its infinite variety. They not only attended, they organized. They not only learned, they taught. Indeed, the gathering itself was an instance of education by example. It was an anticapitalist social structure in microcosm, providing free housing, entertainment, education, and food to everyone. But there was one more aspect that merits mention. A Day of Action (DOA) was scheduled for the final day of the event. For this, the participants planned a ‘general protest’ against select ‘state institutions [and] corporations.’6 However, the day before the DOA – 3 July 1988 – a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf shot down a civilian Iranian aircraft, killing 290 people.7 Survival Gathering participants decided to start their demonstration at the U.S. Consulate, on University Avenue in the downtown core. Despite a heavy police presence, they converged on the building the following afternoon. From there they marched down the avenue, covering sidewalks, streets, and buildings with anticapitalist graffiti. At a Canadian war memorial, Nazi and U.S. flags were burned. Then the crowd ‘took to the streets, laughing and yelling, “No War, No KKK, No Fascist USA!”’ The police attacked, people fought back, some damage to targeted businesses ensued, and eventually the protesters dispersed.8 ‘How much positive affect the DOA had is hard to say,’ wrote one participant. ‘In a sense it’s much like any anarchist paper, leaflet, book, etc. as it is in itself a criticism of the state, an attack against its institutions, a loud voice raised in protest.’9 From an educational standpoint, the DOA was a textbook instance of parrhesia – the articulation of truths that threaten, hurt, or anger a more powerful opponent.10 This form of speech does not attempt to convince: the purpose is to challenge.11 Those who take such action do so because

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they believe that for society to change for the better, truth-telling is necessary. ‘In parrhesia,’ writes Michel Foucault, ‘the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.’12 Similarly, anarchists transformed Toronto’s streets into a forum for parrhesia by directly challenging the legitimacy of the American killing spree, using every means – speeches, flags, graffiti, chants, and rioting – at their disposal. Which brings me to desire, and its role in anarchist pedagogy. In 1910 Emma Goldman wrote: ‘Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.’13 And more recently, in The Education of Desire, Clifford Harper has observed that ‘anarchism promises and provides choice and autonomy, it demands independence and responsibility, and at its heart lies subjectivity and rebellion ... The only way to live is with these as the cornerstones of day-to-day practice.’14 ‘Disarm authority – arm your desires!’ – that is the ethos.15 Thus anarchist pedagogy is more than confrontational: it is a pleasurable activity in which self-realization develops hand in hand with social change. A good illustration of this mode of learning is Ambience of a Future City, an urban-focused project initiated by Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell in 2001. Ambience of a Future City was a collaborative exercise involving local community groups in Toronto that are self-run, nonhierarchical, and critical of capitalist urban development. In a series of meetings, each group discussed specific spaces in the city and how they could be transformed along anticapitalist, communitarian lines. Thorne and Blackwell then created plans that represented these visions and put them on display in the spaces concerned.16 The first group to be contacted was a self-run activist organization for youth based in Regent Park, one of Canada’s oldest public housing developments. The Focus Media Arts Program, as it is officially called, runs a community radio program called Catch da Flava and produces an online newspaper of the same name (www.catchdaflava.com). Its activities encompass photography, film making, and journalism – all with a community-based, critical edge. Catch da Flava chose their own office, located in the basement of a Regent Park housing block, as their project. During two hours of taped

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interviews they discussed their situation, moving from general issues to specific ones. Thorne and Blackwell then developed a plan to renovate the group’s offices based on these ideas. They presented the plan to the group and displayed it on a billboard outside the building. Inspired by the process, Catch da Flava went on to substantially renovate the space. The second group to be contacted were anarchists who lived in or near Kensington Market, one of the liveliest areas of the downtown core. Their focus was a parking lot on a Kensington side street that was connected to a busier shopping street by an alley. The participants imagined replacing the parking lot with a cooperatively run, communally owned building that would provide a home for anarchist projects as well as affordable housing (see figure 14.1a). The complex would feature a publicly accessible courtyard and a walkthrough between two streets. Activist organizations, a bike shop, a film space, and an area for people to relax and enjoy themselves would be located on the ground level; the upper stories would have apartments. The project addressed the need for a building that anarchists could call their own, where they would be free to develop long-term projects without fear of eviction at the whim of a landlord. Here a real, living countercommunity could be nurtured. Again, a billboard displaying the plan was erected on the site to show the contrast between the anarchists’ vision and the present reality. The third plan (and billboard) posited new uses for a former industrial area – the ‘Portlands’ – along the Toronto waterfront. Toronto city planners have long coveted this location as a potential site for an Olympic Games, so Thorne and Blackwell contacted Bread Not Circuses, an activist group that in the 1990s played a pivotal role in mobilizing people to oppose two Olympic bids. Bread Not Circuses proposed using already existing examples of social land use to revitalize the Portlands. They imagined combining public housing with sites where ‘communities of anticapitalist resistance’ would be fostered and an extensive commons of wild spaces. Discussions focused on creating a matrix of possibilities for people to ‘self-define their lives outside the constraints of private property, without the constraints of bureaucratic organization.’17 The Ambience project is compelling not only because it brought the visions of three collectives into focus through a non-hierarchical learning process, but also because to varying degrees these visions dovetailed with anarchist values. Thorne and Blackwell did not seek out capitalist developers to envisage schemes for maximizing profits. They

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14.1a Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell, Ambience of a Future City: Anarchist Cooperative in Kensington Market, 2001.

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an anarchist cooperative in kensington market ambience of a future city — kika thorne + adrian blackwell This proposal for the design of an anarchist cooperative in Kensington Market was based on a conversation between Suzanne Alexanian, Danielle Allen, Adrian Blackwell, Allan Graham, Sandra Jeppesen, Bernie Munich, Kika Thorne and Dan Young, August 2001.

A complex of buildings create a public square surrounded by an info shop, gallery, vegan restaurant, an all ages performance space, organic food cooperative, and a raked cinema with cafè for radical films, videos and lectures. The bike share co-op and the metal/wood fabrication workshop are entered from Bellevue Avenue. There is a rooftop garden above the double-height workshop. TVAC, the Toronto Video Activist Collective and Tao Communications, a radical information network, will occupy the 2nd floor of the complex, along with internet access, a darkroom, rehearsal spaces, a sound engineering studio and office space. The 3rd, 4th and 5th stories are apartment/studios, which can accommodate anything from a single person to collective living. Thirty percent of the units in both buildings are dedicated to housing transient or homeless activists, musicians, writers and artists. The 6th floor of the east wing is a writer's colony. A seasonally enclosed corridor connects all buildings. The passenger and freight elevator provides barrier free access to all floors. These buildings are constructed out of a concrete structure with wood balconies and removable greenhouse glazing panels in the corridors. The basic living unit is 500 sq. ft. Inhabitants receive raw space with plumbing and electrical and are expected to build the interior with salvaged materials. The grey water is purified through a rooftop living machine and employed for irrigation. Rainwater is filtered by means of organic systems, stored and used for drinking, cooking and washing. Human waste is transformed in composting toilets. Photovoltaic solar panels on the south roof power the complex. There is an organic greenhouse and food composting system on the roof of the north building. The building is heated primarily through passive solar energy, augmented by hot water solar panels on the east wing of the north-east building. Ground floor/site plan, a detail from the ambience of a future city poster by Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell; drawings made with Michael Bartosik.

14.1b Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell, with Michael Bartosik (drawing and communication), Mark Lindquist and Dan Young (graphic support), and Allan Graham (sound mastering).

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sought to nurture countercultures that would be qualitatively different from the existing system.18 Which is to say that anarchists would never confine pedagogy to theoretical critiques in the halls of academe. Their pedagogy is always already engaged because it encourages tension between the restrictions imposed by the forces of repression and anarchism’s libertarian aspirations.19 As David writes in the Black Bloc Papers: To find dignity and affirmation through the creation of an alternative community despite the dominant opposition is truly dynamic. Such limitations impel the human mind to expand its cognitive ability, and in this consciousness is sharpened. Furthermore, the limitations to its full actualization is the impetus to its destructive aspect. It must necessarily seek the eradication of that opposing force as the condition of its coming into full being. It is more than a decision to organize in a particular manner. It is a revolutionary force.20

In sum, anarchist pedagogy fosters communities of learning that mitigate against everything that capitalized education stands for. And here I can draw on personal experience. In the summer of 1998 I was living in Toronto, where I attended an anarchist gathering called Active Resistance (modelled on the 1988 Survival Gathering). Towards the end of the event, I was asked if I would be interested in helping found a Free School.21 This project was an outgrowth of discussions held during one of the gathering’s workshops, and seven people were already committed to it. And so we set to work. At weekly meetings held over two months, we discussed everything from our name to where we might hold classes. Early on we resolved to call the project an Anarchist Free School (AFS) to make our politics explicit. This also ensured that people seeking to promote antithetical political beliefs (Nazis, Marxists, and so on) under the umbrella of an ‘alternative’ educational organization wouldn’t join us. After settling on the name, we drew up a statement of purpose, an operational structure, decided on the first round of courses, and engaged in publicity and outreach. By mid-September we were ready. We blanketed the downtown with a flyer announcing that the AFS would be launched at an open meeting on 4 October 1998.22 The flyer listed the courses to be offered, with times and locations. And it included an AFS identity statement with a short outline of ‘How We Operate’:

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The Anarchist Free School is a volunteer-run, autonomous collective offering free courses, workshops, and lectures that cover a wide range of topics. Education is a political act. By deepening our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us, sharing skills, and exchanging experiences in an egalitarian, non-hierarchical setting free of prejudice, we challenge dis-empowering habits and broaden our awareness of alternatives to the inequalities of capitalist society. The Free School is a counter-community dedicated to effecting social change through the application of anarchist principles in every sphere of life. How We Operate: Participation in the Free School is a commitment. The school’s ‘governing body’ is a general meeting, open to all, which convenes once a month. At this meeting problems and proposals are brought to the attention of Free School participants, who arrive at solutions by consensus. ‘Participants’ are those attending workshops/courses; facilitators of workshops/courses; working committee members; and people who, having served as participants in the past, continue to support our efforts in some capacity. Day-to-day logistics at the School are dealt with by working committees (answerable to the general meeting) which are self-organized and run by consensus. Working committees keep the School up and running by dealing with finances, time and venue scheduling, publications, and other matters. Committees report every month to the general meeting, where their needs and concerns are addressed.

I should add that the AFS really was free – a policy that ensured the participation of low-income people who were intimately familiar with capitalism’s shortcomings: impoverished activists, single mothers, people living with AIDS, struggling university students, and so on. In this way the AFS found its natural constituency among the oppressed. The first round of courses, which ran from October to mid-December, included Intermediate Spanish Conversation; Wild Plants of Toronto; The Conflict in Chiapas (Mexico); and Radical Parenting. In February, courses were augmented by an Anarchist Free School Lecture Series held at the University of Toronto. Attendance was good, and one of the talks was published in Kick It Over magazine and later issued as a pamphlet.23 By the fall of 1999, when I left Toronto, the AFS was operating out of an Anarchist Free Space.24 The flyer for that fall (see figure 14.2) suggests the dynamism of the project, which was now branching out into film making, book launches, and so on. The project ended in late 2000, but this turned out to be only a hiatus. In the summer of 2003

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14.2a Toronto Anarchist Free School Flyer, fall 1999. Courtesy of Anarchist Archive, University of Victoria.

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14.2b AFS Flyer

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I attended one of the founding meetings for Toronto’s Anarchist U (AU), successor of the AFS. A number of former AFS members lent their experience to the project, which was launched that fall. The AU has taken advantage of internet technology by posting a web page, www.anarchistu.org, which is fully interactive so that members of the AU collective can change their course postings as they wish. Anarchist U operates on an all-volunteer basis, with no fees or infrastructure costs to undermine accessibility. And like its predecessor, it offers a wide range of courses, such as Chaos Theory, Queer History, Art and Collaborative Processes, and Politics Through the Media. The only requirement is that the subject not violate anarchist principles.25 How many people have participated in these projects? I counted about eighty at the opening of the AFS, and hundreds more took part over the next few years. By all accounts, AU has been equally successful.26 In fact, an anarchist structure encourages growth. The participatory mandate lets any student become a teacher by proposing a course and facilitating it. A class with twenty-five students might nurture five future teachers, who might in turn draw in more students, and so on. These are ‘open’ institutions. An article in the Toronto Star (21 October 2003) highlighted other strengths. The author, Daphnie Gordon, found that student life at Anarchist U made for quite a contrast to the hierarchy-ridden, stateadjudicated, capitalized Canadian university system: Sick of overcrowded university classes, boring lectures, high tuition and less-than-spectacular grades? No problem. Now there’s a school in town run by educated volunteers who ‘facilitate discussion’ rather than lecture, argue that grades create a negative learning environment, and limit class sizes to about 25. Plus, the whole thing is free. Yep, free.27

Anarchist U was sweeping away the impediments that hamper status quo institutions of higher learning, thus making it possible to combat a more generalized psychic oppression. In an interview with Gordon, course facilitator Luis Jacob observed: ‘Our society strives for hierarchy. It happens at work, in schools, even in some homes [and] it leads to alienation. We all know what alienation feels like and it’s awful. In a sense, all of society suffers because everyone’s potential isn’t realized in that system.’28 In other words, the ‘normal’ learning experience from grade school to university is alienating because it naturalizes the authoritarian values that repress the creative potential of the majority by

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14.3 ‘Hey Kids ... Tell Us What You Learned in School Today!’ 2004. Courtesy of Terry Everton.

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perpetuating social and material inequalities (see Terry Everton’s Christian Angst: ‘Hey Kids ... Tell Us What You Learned in School Today!’).29 In contrast, the pedagogy at Anarchist U was liberating students and teachers alike. Once education was made free and grading and other assorted punitive measures (degree denial) were set aside, people could learn without competing with one another or striving to satisfy authority figures in their midst. As one Anarchist U student related: ‘I’ve been learning a lot. The people at Anarchist University are there because they want to be there. They’re there to learn and everyone has something interesting to contribute.’30 One might well wonder, then, how anarchists negotiate nonanarchist learning environments. A few cases from the United States are instructive. In the winter semester of 2004, at Fort Lewis State College in Colorado, Professor Mark Seiss undertook an anarchist pedagogical experiment.31 Working under the auspices of a general-studies course option, he offered a class on Deconstructing Systems in the Pursuit of Anarchy in which students learned the basics of anarchism and then turned a critical eye on existing social systems.32 In the process, the class decided, by consensus, to ‘deconstruct’ Colorado’s postsecondary system. The students refused to allow five of their papers to be selected randomly for final evaluation by the General Education Council, which oversees the statewide general-studies curriculum, on the basis that the council members were not qualified to judge the worth of the course.33 The evaluators hadn’t participated in discussions or read the materials, and they certainly weren’t as well versed in the subject matter as Seiss or the students themselves. One student related: ‘We learned all semester that we didn’t need that kind of patriarchal force overlooking everything in society, so why would we let them overlook what we were doing in class?’34 In this instance, anarchist pedagogy generated an institutional crisis in Colorado – a crisis that as of April 2004 had yet to be resolved. In the fall of 2001, Katie Sierra, a fifteen-year-old high-school student in Sissonville, West Virginia, began handing out flyers promoting a planned anarchist club while wearing a T-shirt protesting the recent American invasion of Afghanistan. Sierra’s T-shirt read: ‘When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God bless America.’35 The manifesto for the club read: ‘This anarchist club will not tolerate hate or violence. It is our final goal to dispel myths about anarchism, especially the belief that

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anarchy is chaos and destruction.’36 Fifteen to twenty students were already interested in joining, and a ’Zine was in the works. They had already discussed forming a Food Not Bombs group (FNB distributes free food to people in need). Sierra was proposing self-managed learning with a circle-A, learning that would call the Bush administration’s ‘war against terrorism’ into question and much more besides. Alarmed by her activities, the principal of the high school suspended Sierra for three days and forbade her from wearing political T-shirts or founding an anarchist club, on the grounds that she was ‘disrupting school activity.’37 On the evening of the last day of her suspension, Sierra decided to defend herself at a local Board of Education meeting, where her case was being discussed. The response was less than welcoming. As reported in the press, one board member shouted: ‘This isn’t something funny or cute. You’re talking about overthrowing the government!’ Another accused her of being a traitor, yelling: ‘[It’s] people like you who stood up and waved a Japanese flag on Pearl Harbor day.’ The president of the school board asked: ‘What the hell is wrong with a kid like that?’ False statements at the meeting to the effect that Sierra was wearing T-shirts that read ‘I hope Afghanistan wins’ and ‘America should burn’ were published the following day in the local newspaper. This set the stage for her return to school. During her first week back, students spat on her car, and a group told the school’s Reserve Officer Training Cadet instructor (the U.S. military recruits directly from high schools through its ROTC program) that they were going to subject Sierra to ‘West Virginia justice.’ In the face of these and other threats, Sierra was forced, for reasons of personal safety, to transfer to another school. Subsequently, the district school board forbade her to return to her home institution. In 2002, aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, she took her former school principal and the Board of Education to court for violating her civil rights. The jury ruled that the decision to disallow an anarchist club was wrong but that the banning of her T-shirts was legal, as was the suspension.38 Thus Sierra’s attempt to introduce anarchism to her high school met ‘death by a thousand cuts’ through a drawn-out process of administrative and media harassment, vigilantism, and legalized censorship. Others don’t even get their foot in the door. In 2004 the producers of Big Tea Party (BTP), a Philadelphia-based cable TV program, were denied the right to present a made-for-public school video titled ‘Green Tea Party’ at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo Confer-

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14.4 Big Tea Party: Gretjen Clausing, Elizabeth Fiend, Valerie Keller, Philadelphia, 2001. Courtesy Big Tea Party.

ence (see figure 14.4). They had been invited to participate in the conference by a professor of education who was familiar with their success at reaching inner-city children. The video in question was about kids ‘riding bikes, visiting farms in search of better food choices, donating old clothes to charities, and composting at home.’39 However, at a meeting of the conference’s organizing board, an official of the Pennsylvania Department of Education raised BTP’s promotion of anarchism on their web site as a potentially ‘controversial’ issue. After much debate, a majority on the board voted to cancel the invitation.40 Incidents such as these underline that anarchist pedagogy embodies values that are antithetical to the existing social system. These are not frustrated attempts at reform, they are encounters on the terrain of education between irreconcilable social forces. The anarchist movement may not be powerful enough yet to overthrow educational authoritarianism, but it is powerful enough to inspire revolts against it. And each event gives rise to tensions that raise a larger question: What do anarchist educators need to do to change society as a whole? I would

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argue that cultural–political autonomy is the key issue here. Just as anarchists have created their own press, internet sites, communes, bookstores, and other cooperative ventures, so they need to create their own educational institutions. In this way they will ‘realize (make real) the moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual.’41 Liberate learning, and the rest will follow.

NOTES 1 Paul Goodman, Drawing the Line: The Political Essays of Paul Goodman, ed. Taylor Stoehr (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 215. 2 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering: An Anarchist Unconvention,’ Endless Struggle 8 (1989), reprint in Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology, ed. Allan Antliff (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), 350–2. 3 Jean Weir, ‘Survival Gathering, Toronto, July 1–4, 1988,’ Insurrection 5 (1988), reprint in Only a Beginning, 347–49. 4 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering,’ 350–2. 5 Interview with Rocky Dobey, 25 October 2002. 6 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering,’ 350. 7 Ibid. In 1987, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq began losing its war with Iran, the United States deployed warships in the Persian Gulf to back up the Iraqis. The downing of the Iranian aircraft in 1988 was not the Americans’ first act of war – its forces had sunk an Iranian ship the year before. See William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), 30. 8 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering,’ 351–2. 9 Ibid. 10 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents, 2001), 17. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 20. 13 Emma Goldman, ‘Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,’ in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 62. 14 Clifford Harper, The Education of Desire: The Anarchist Graphics of Clifford Harper (London: Aldgate, 1984), 61. 15 I am quoting the subtitle of the North American magazine Anarchy: A Journal of Desire, Armed. 16 Interview with Adrian Blackwell, 21 September 2003.

264 Allan Antliff 17 Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell, ‘Portlands People’s Zone – A Toolbox of Possibilities,’ Fuse 36:2 (2003): 14. 18 David, ‘The Emergence of the Black Bloc and the Movement Towards Anarchism,’ in The Black Bloc Papers, compiled by David and x of the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective (Baltimore: Black Cover Editions, 2002), 37. 19 It is important to underline that this tension arises from anarchism’s aspirations and carries the qualitative stamp of its origins. For more on this issue see Alfredo Bonano, The Anarchist Tension (London: Elephant Editions, 1998). 20 David, ‘The Emergence of the Black Bloc,’ 36. 21 On Active Resistance, see Antliff, Only a Beginning, 353–6. 22 Anarchist Free School (flyer), Toronto, 1998, Toronto Anarchist Free School Collection, Anarchist Archive, Special Collections, University of Victoria. 23 Jim Campbell, ‘From Protest to Resistance: The Vancouver 5 Remembered,’ Kick it Over 37 (2002), reprint in Only a Beginning, 152–6. 24 Jeff Shantz, ‘Anarchist Free Space,’ in Only a Beginning, 338. 25 I am citing courses posted on the Anarchist U website www.anarchistu.org (accessed 2 April 2004). 26 The numbers related to the AFS are my personal recollection. There is also documentation of participation in the Toronto Anarchist Free School Collection, Anarchist Archive, Special Collections, University of Victoria. For information on the AU, see Daphne Gordon, ‘Anarchy Enters the Classroom,’ Toronto Star, 21 October 2003, C.2. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Terry Everton, ‘Hey Kids … Tell Us What You Learned in School Today!’ Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 57 (Spring–Summer 2004): 47–9. 30 Gordon, ‘Anarchy Enters the Classroom,’ 2. 31 C.D. Durango, ‘Anarchy Class Refuses to Hand Over Papers,’ www.colorado.indymedia.org/feature/display/7513/index.php (accessed 2 April 2004). 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 ‘Infoshop.org Interviews: Katie Sierra,’ www.infoshop.org/interviews/ katie_sierra.html (accessed 2 April 2004). 36 ‘Katie Sierra sued her high school principal, Forrest Mann, for the right to start an anarchy club and express her political views at school.’ Visit www.courttv.com/graphics/news/topnews_content/insertbox_bg_bot.gif (accessed 2 April 2004).

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Ibid. Ibid. Elizabeth Fiend to Allan Antliff, 18 February 2004. Fiend to Antliff, 6 April 2004. Fiend to Antliff, 18 February 2004. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 132.

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15 An Enigma in the Education System: Simon Fraser University and the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society richard toews and kelly harris-martin

Not long ago, Connie,1 an Aboriginal student in Simon Fraser University’s First Nations Educational Institute in Kamloops, British Columbia (better known as SCES/SFU),2 was called to her son’s nonAboriginal primary school for a teacher/parent conference. Her son, it seemed, was having trouble socializing; instead of ‘playing’ with the other children, he chose to be on his own during recess and lunch and to sit alone in class, away from the other students, who preferred to sit in groups. The teacher concluded that Connie’s son was educationally challenged. As Connie noted, His teacher is afraid that my son will not fit in as he continues in school because he likes to be on his own, and they’re worried that he will need counselling. They’re afraid that when he gets older he will not have any social skills and will eventually drop out. To make sure this doesn’t happen, they say my son will need remedial help. I don’t understand the teacher. I told her that my son has always preferred to be on his own, but we aren’t afraid that he doesn’t know that he is a member of our family.3

From the point of view of the non-Aboriginal world, dropping out has consequences – consequences that have already been ascribed to Connie’s son in perpetuity. ‘They think,’ she noted poignantly, ‘that because he doesn’t fit into the white mold and act like all the rest of the white kids, he will naturally be a drop-out and become a welfare case.’ In this collection of essays, we are asked to consider the idea that education can be a utopic pedagogical event. Is there an inherent contradiction between Connie’s experience and what we are asked to consider? To answer this question, we need to address two further questions:

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Is there such a thing as a utopian pedagogy? And if there is, what does it look like? Utopian Pedagogy Defined For Fredric Jameson, utopia is eminently social and radically political; the space of a past and future utopia is a social world that is collectively cooperative and dramatically embedded in a corrupt and Westernized money economy.4 In the absence of utopia, says Jameson, things remain as they are, contingent on a conspiracy of totality.5 It is only in hope, says Jameson – leaning on Ernst Bloch for his inspiration – that the conspiracy of totality can be turned around. It is here that Bloch’s vision has something concrete and productive to offer us. For Bloch’s work suggests that even a cultural product whose social function is that of distracting us can only realize that aim by fastening and harnessing our attention and our imaginative energies in some positive way and by some type of genuine, albeit disguised and distorted, content. Such content is called ‘Hope’ or in other words the permanent tension of human reality towards a radical transformation of itself and everything about it, towards a Utopian transformation of its own existence as well as of its social context. To maintain that everything is a ‘figure of Hope’ is to offer an analytical tool for detecting the presence of some Utopian content even within the most degraded and degrading type of commercial product.6

From this perspective, sources of utopian hope are everywhere latent. But in the twenty-first century, utopian pedagogy is an unauthorized concept subdued in a theoretical womb, unable to emerge into a world unprepared for sweeping changes to an archaic educational system. The SCES/SFU Experiment: The Historical Context ‘Post-secondary education,’ says Shuswap Nation chief Ron Ignace, ‘is taking place against the background of our situation as a colonized people. In order to improve our lives and educate ourselves, we have to struggle hard to attain even a portion of the material support that nonNative urban post-secondary students take for granted.’7 The struggle Ignace speaks of is answered by an experiment. This experiment gives us some indication of what a utopian pedagogy might look like. The

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Secwepemc Cultural Education Society (SCES) program, located in Kamloops, British Columbia, is an educational partnership between the Kamloops Indian Band and Simon Fraser University, located in Vancouver. In 1990, Chief Ignace wrote: Native Peoples in general and the Shuswap Nation in particular have been struggling for many years to regain control of the training and education of their people. A testament to this is the long-standing slogan, ‘Indian control of Indian Education.’ Education outside Indian control does not work; history has clearly demonstrated that education under the control of governing non-Native authorities has been oppressive, as is witnessed by the Indian Residential Schools. The public education system has had an equally dismal track record. Historically, Native peoples have been blamed for the failure of nonNative authorities. As victims, Native people have been blamed for the faulty political and educational agendas of those in charge. The chiefs of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council said, ‘we will not accept the blame, but we will take on the challenge of building our own post-secondary institution – an Interior Indian Federated College.’8

For Chief Ignace, this challenge is significant in a fundamental way: It is important that our own people learn to tell our own history and culture from the point of view of our elders and within the context of our own philosophies and traditions, or else future generations will simply re-tell those versions of our past that were once appropriated by EuroCanadian society. The latter all too often do not truly reflect who we are and how we once lived our lives and impacted on history. It is for this reason that research on our own societies, and with it the research component of the SCES/SFU Program, is of utmost importance and integral to our endeavours.9

Reflecting these concerns, the SCES program was established ‘following the signing of the 1982 Shuswap Declaration by the seventeen Bands of the Shuswap (Secwepemc) Nation.’10 The declaration was an agreement to collaborate with the seventeen bands for the purposes of promoting and preserving the Secwepemc language, culture, and his-

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tory. The motto of this new program was and remains knucwentsutce me knucwentwecw-ep – ‘help yourself and help one another.’11 In order to reflect this motto, the SCES program, from its very beginning, would have to be, in the words of the academic coordinator, Marianne Ignace, ‘an institution with a difference, one that does not de-personalize but that speaks to students because of their open access to everyone in it.’12 But access had to be grounded in a mission. For the SCES/SFU program, the mission was to provide ‘high quality education to aboriginal people, relevant for the needs of aboriginal people of the B.C. Interior and beyond, as controlled and mandated by the Secwepemc host Nation in collaboration with the First Nations [being] served and with [their] public partner institutions.’13 Accompanying this mission was a vision that remains to this day, which is ‘the collective and individual empowerment of aboriginal people through education, as our peoples are developing a capacity to become self-governing and self-sufficient, while staying rooted in our languages, cultures and histories.’14 Have this mission and this vision been realized? From its inception, the SCES/SFU ran an adult education program to bring early drop-outs back into the educational fold, as well as a Native University and College Entrance Program to upgrade students to secondary school graduation level. They knew that the Native students didn’t fit easily into the Canadian postsecondary education system. Rates of failure, attrition, and withdrawal were very high. Also, those who did succeed in these distant, urban-based institutions were lost to the communities; they seldom came back. The Shuswap leaders wanted university education for their people, but they wanted the university to come to them, on their terms. The SCES/SFU partnership program began modestly in the fall of 1988 and winter of 1989, as a one-year pilot project, with nineteen Aboriginal students taking introductory sociology and anthropology courses. Two large, sparsely furnished rooms in the girls’ dormitory of the old residential school provided the physical setting – an irony that was not lost on any of the participants. Indeed, as Ignace points out: ‘[On] the part of our 1st generation of students, it took courage to take courses in a brand new institute that was in this all-too-familiar place where they themselves or their mothers had slept.’15 Within five years, the old Residential School proved inadequate in terms of space and facilities. New arrangements had to be made. While not much of an improvement, the SCES/SFU program is now located

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on a campus of six mobile trailers. These house administrative and faculty offices, class and seminar rooms, archaeology and computer labs, a student lounge, and a resource library/reading room. Despite its limitations, this upgraded campus is providing an education for a growing number of First Nations students. Of these students, several have continued on to master’s degrees in anthropology, archaeology or education. A Teacher’s Story (Richard Toews) Clearly, the SCES/SFU experiment has made a number of advances in terms of providing access to postsecondary institutions for Aboriginal people, and is changing the way we think about the form and content of ‘higher’ education. But does this program represent a utopian pedagogy in the Blochian sense of a source of hope? And more importantly, is it a prefiguration of what is to come? How is it unlike the controlled educational environment we find on most university campuses today? I am a white male and a product of the educational imperatives of our present system. Many years ago, as an elementary teacher trainee, I was taught the ‘right way’ in terms of teaching methods. I learned that to be an ‘effective educator,’ I had to have a model and religiously hold myself accountable to that model. But would this model hold true in all cases, in all social and cultural contexts? Could I, with impunity, apply, for instance, the ‘audio-tutorial approach,’ the ‘personalized system of instruction’ approach, or the ‘goal-based scenario model?’ All of these are top-down methods of teaching that achieve the desired results. The question is, should one resort to top-down methods in all contexts? Do top-down approaches inspire the critical thinking that should be the hallmark of all education? The answer is clearly no. Fortunately, though the SCES/SFU program is not wholly without those who feel most comfortable with a top-down approach, it does provide a space for experimentation. When I was contracted to teach at the Kamloops campus, my first concern was of a political nature. I was told that teaching anthropology and sociology in the SCES/SFU program would require knowledge of First Nations issues. But how, I wondered, does one teach about tribal groups in Africa, marriage ceremonies throughout the world, funeral rituals, rites of passage, the nature of community, of work, of play, and so on, from a First Nations perspective? How are these practices understood and articulated differently? Clearly, cultural context provides a

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way of thinking about these issues. But a more pressing concern led me to ask a different question: What would happen if I abandoned my role as an authority figure for that of a fellow student who wanted to understand something of how the First Nations people viewed their world in a context of difference? What would happen if education were both critical and participatory, if all the participants were both teacher and student? The participatory aspect of learning revealed to me the idea that teaching has little to do with prescribed methods that ostensibly ‘work.’ Teaching, rather, is about a relationship predicated on critical friendship and deep respect, one that graciously observes alterity. Teaching in the SCES/SFU program allowed me to understand how education can be about ruptures, lines of flight and fancy that take one into a wonderfully mysterious world of creatively ordered chaos. For a teacher who needs a methodology, working in the SCES/SFU program could easily lead to a sense of angst. The SCES/SFU program succeeds because it is the students who set the educational agenda rather than the instructor. It is based on a teaching strategy that may involve no method at all, or where the ‘method’ requires embarking on a journey of mystery, with no discernable path or trajectory. Still, the SCES program retains vestiges of the hierarchical structures so evident in mainstream educational institutions. There are teachers who draw a salary and who are responsible for drawing up course outlines; there is the system of grading for success, and we all know who the ‘successful’ students are. But there is also evidence that the students in the SCES/SFU program use what Deleuze and Guattari would call an arboreal system in rhizomatic ways: ‘In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the “tracing,” that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language – a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power.’16 In this sense, SCES/SFU stands as an example of a utopian pedagogy within and against mainstream education. An Experiment Come Alive In the following account from one of the students, Julia Bennett, we can begin to get a stronger sense of an educational approach that emerges from a lived reality of colonial domination. For Julia, an Aboriginal student and the mother of a grown family:

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The small integrated campus known as SCES/SFU is so much more than its bare portables and small classes. There is a caring atmosphere filled with trust and respect, an enigma in the education system. The staff and professors take an active interest in each student. Their approachability puts new students at ease and builds the atmosphere that is so conducive to learning, which is what we do here so much better than being taught. As in any social setting there is some conflict but it is minimal. The curriculum is approached from the aboriginal perspective and includes studies of the aboriginal peoples of the world and their cultures. [It was] my first opportunity to study the changes brought about by colonial domination. Having been so heavily influenced by the colonial regime, it is important that people learn why the events of history unfolded as they did. How these events have had an impact not only on aboriginal cultures but the dominant cultures as well is of great importance to me. Simply because these events created subservience and racism. Through its curriculum, this university campus promotes an understanding of this for all students who attend classes here as well as a true understanding of aboriginal cultures. True equality is not possible without the absence of subservience and racism. This campus is a giant in its endeavors to promote the understanding that will eventually achieve this.

The SCES/SFU program is geared mainly towards First Nations students and First Nations concerns. But it also strives to be a place where non-Aboriginal people can participate. Donna Sedeger is one such student. She returned to school at thirty-two after several years raising a family as a single parent. She first enrolled in the mainstream education system, at Thompson Rivers University, but soon found that it did not meet her needs, and switched over to SCES/SFU. The staff at SCES/SFU are not staid, scholarly types with only their own opinions to propagate. My transfer was painless and prompt. SCES/SFU had the major that I wanted, and the faculty thoroughly encouraged me to expand my goals and delve into another field I had not even considered, anthropology. In the two years since I transferred, there have been many personal eruptions in my life. My counsellor and BA adviser have helped me through these times without batting an eyelash. The staff, including the receptionist, have become like family to me. This interpersonal relationship has helped me to overcome such obstacles as the test anxiety I used to suffer from. The anthropology instructors encourage open discussion in class, and value different ideas and thoughts. My grades have

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improved dramatically since transferring to this facility. The small, close classes are more personal, and the instructors are able to give more time to individual students, as needed. In my time at SCES/SFU, I have participated in an archaeological excavation, I have learned so much of First Nations’ history, and have done an anthropological study of my own. This facility has made dreams come true for me. I am in my final year of my BA program, with a joint major in archaeology and anthropology. The first of my goals is near at hand. My enthusiasm in education has not wavered; it has encouraged my eldest child to enrol in this facility as well. My daughter and I are currently in the same criminology class. She is still in her first year of her BA, but this is her second year at SCES/SFU. Although we are non-Aboriginal, the Aboriginal students at this facility have welcomed us without prejudice. The multicultural ideals propagated at UCC are all well and good, but they are unable to disguise the undercurrent of prejudice inherent in the education system, and that of individuals attending that institution. The fact that the First Nations Society is separate from the general student council of UCC bears witness to this fact; this is not the case at SCES/SFU. All students are equal, and there is no separation of societies at this facility. To say that SCES/SFU is the ‘best kept secret of Kamloops’ is an understatement at best. The community does itself a great disservice by not encouraging more of the population to ‘check us out.’

Utopia and Utopian Pedagogy As noted above, a utopian pedagogy is far from a sure thing wherever it is practised. Dangers lurk at every turn, so that any undertaking of this nature must proceed with caution to avoid becoming its own victim. Indeed, the notion of utopian pedagogy we have used in this chapter is predicated on a concept of utopia that has the potential to become problematic. We need, therefore, to spend a few minutes unravelling this notion of utopia so that we can see its link to utopian pedagogy. As Gramsci notes in his Pre-Prison Writings (1994): ‘A utopia envisages a future status quo, which is already established and tidy, thus removing any impression of a leap into the darkness.’17 But for Bloch a utopia is precisely about the leap into the dark, or at least an embracing of hope. It is oriented towards the not-yet consciousness, ‘the psychological birthplace of the New,’18 which he refers to as the ‘utopian field.’19 For Bloch the very idea of the utopian is absolutely essential and is designated in the ‘horizon of the consciousness that is the becoming,’ in the rising of the horizon of ‘expectation, hope, [and the] intention

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towards the possibility that has still not come: this is not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole.’20 Moreover, Bloch wants us to see how utopia is signified in a consciousness that is open to dangers as well as to potential victories. Both are addressed in Kelly Harris-Martin’s account of her experience as a student in the SCES/SFU program. A Student’s Story (Kelly Harris-Martin) To participate in what can be seen as an experimental model for a utopian pedagogy is a rare experience. The leap of faith into the unknown darkness in pursuit of a system that supports the needs of a ‘whole person,’ and not merely of a glassy-eyed drone in a lecture theatre, is intoxicating and in many ways irresistible to me as an undergraduate student. To say that the SCES/SFU campus is merely the Kamloops branch of Simon Fraser University is hardly accurate. It does not encompass the many unique aspects of the campus. When we examine these diverse elements, a definitive pattern emerges, that highlights important aspects not only of the SCES/SFU experiment, but of more traditional campuses as well. Learning institutions tend to compartmentalize all aspects of a student’s life. There are outside interests, and there are scholastic interests, and never the twain shall meet. When we study biology, we study only biology. To recognize that students are in fact multifaceted creatures with unique hopes, dreams, and fears is simply beyond the scope of a traditional educational institution. Those who are able to learn by rote and take shorthand notes are the most likely to succeed. Learners who are more tactile are often left behind or left out entirely, herded towards vocational training rather than cerebral pursuits. To attend SCES/SFU is to embrace not only a mandate for First Nations content, but also a new way to learn. The need ‘for precision and certainty is a typical Eurocentric strategy.’21 ‘From the Indigenous vantage point, the process of understanding is more important than the process of classification.’22 When students come from the linear, topdown teaching environment found in most public schools, this can be more difficult to understand than the content of the courses themselves. Being required to think critically and to assume the role of subject of the act, as Friere suggests, will, most likely, force students to think critically. This is in direct opposition to the conformist mainstream system where

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I began my education. Yet only through this abrupt change can a student hope to observe and participate in the pursuit of a utopian pedagogy. The SCES/SFU campus has a First Nations mandate, so it is not surprising that the subject matter taught here is flavoured with indigenous perspectives. However, the differences between this campus and more traditional ones go far deeper than course content. To embrace this education as a vehicle of cultural transmission, social change, and personal examination would perhaps be more appropriate. A lofty aspiration, no? So how do we pursue these goals on a daily basis? I have found diverse teaching styles to be the norm rather than the exception. Field trips and unusual projects are common – in some courses they are routine. In one course, I participated in a traditional pit cook of indigenous plants; in another, we held several classes inside the pit houses in the nearby heritage park. I have attended celebrations for linguistics classes; I have watched demonstrations of dyeing moose hair; I have learned the importance of baby baskets to Lil’wat culture. At first glance, these subjects have little place in the world of academia, yet we must ‘regard all products of the human mind and heart as interrelated ... knowledge.’23 Continuing the theme of exceptions to the norm, I have had the good fortune to be assigned some extraordinary texts that I doubt I would have encountered otherwise. Some modern educational institutions seem very proud of their interpretations of facts; but to me, those interpretations often seem narrow and somehow cold. In mainstream education, required readings seem to change little from year to year, at least until a publisher sees fit to release a new edition. Unfortunately, new editions – in this student’s opinion – have more to do with book sales than with new information. Perhaps that is why my required reading materials here at SCES/SFU strike me as such challenging exceptions. The materials I have encountered so far have reinforced in my mind Freire’s contention that the selection of texts is central to helping both learners and educators overcome a focalist vision of reality and gain an understanding of the totality. It is essential that students experience this totality and integrate all aspects of life into their university experience. For some, this entails balancing motherhood, fatherhood, or other familial responsibilities with their studies. For others, it means learning how to be supportive of these mothers and fathers as fellow students. I have always been im-

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pressed that at various times children have been present in the classroom. I often see children talking to their parents between classes or at breaks. They are a part of our community here, and rightly so. Children are often found in the student lounge while their parents attend class in the next room. It is one more example of how life at this campus embraces the totality of the human experience and strives to not compartmentalize life into narrow categories, based on an outdated belief in the conditions under which higher learning should occur. SCES/SFU is on the Kamloops Indian Reserve, but all students are encouraged to share their perspectives regardless of where they come from. Many of the students are elders in their own right, with a wealth of personal knowledge to share, which most freely do. It is a unique experience to observe the elders being treated with so much respect – something I was not used to seeing when I began my studies here. It seems only fitting that these elders should be teachers. The result is a place where often the teacher becomes as much a student as the pupils themselves, enabling ‘a dialogical praxis in which the teachers and learners together, in the act of analyzing a dehumanizing reality, denounce it while announcing its transformation in the name of the liberation of man.’24 Those who know me often ask why I choose to go to school 125 kilometres from home and commute several times a week. I could have gone to SFU in Burnaby, or to OUC in Vernon, where I live. The answer is simple, yet rarely easy to convey: I choose to go here because it is the only school I know that fulfils all my needs as a student and as a person. I am working towards a BA with an archeology major, and I feel that an understanding of First Nations issues beyond books and classrooms is only appropriate. I want to understand the culture and its diverse peoples as fellow travellers down the road of life, and as fellow students, and not as an afterthought in some dry academic text. My personal experiences at SCES/SFU have been truly remarkable. The laughter that can be heard on campus at any time more than makes up for the second-hand portables, which are an inferno in the summer and unpleasantly cool in the winter. I like having the odd kitten wander through and make itself comfortable near my books. Our library consists of older books mostly cast off from other libraries, yet it is clean and tidy, and it contains some materials I doubt could be found anywhere else. This campus is a community, and has all the elements of one, both good and bad. Perhaps a campus is better this way than perfect and well funded – after all, these conditions probably prepare

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students more thoroughly for real life, and give them better problemsolving skills than a better-equipped facility could ever provide. I have been blessed to encounter several individuals whom I am proud to call friends, and many more who will always have a special place in my heart. Yet I was not completely comfortable in writing this paper, as I do not feel that I can speak for any experience here but my own. I have been treated with respect and consideration, and have achieved far more academically than I ever believed I could. This is largely due to the diverse teaching approaches, the fascinating readings, and the holistic environment in which I am fortunate enough to study. So far, my education here has changed me on many levels, and I find myself viewing the world with new eyes. To embrace a new viewpoint is challenging, not only academically but also personally. I am lucky to have been given the opportunity to express myself not only as a student but also as an individual with my own point of view, which has value not only to me, but also to others as they define and redefine their own. This dynamic environment is helping me to become a better person and, I hope, one who will be able to make a greater contribution to my community. Besides a degree, I will leave here with life skills and perspectives that will never appear on any test or be reflected in my GPA; yet it is those things which I believe will serve me most often as I continue my personal journey into the future. All of the above having been said, we return to the questions posed earlier in this chapter, ‘Is there such a thing as a utopian pedagogy? And if there is, what does it look like?’ ‘Eminently social and radically political’ certainly applies to this campus, and to say that it is not ‘collectively cooperative’ is to have missed its intentions entirely. Yet it continues to be affected by the ‘corrupt and Westernized money economy’ into which it has been thrust and which it strives to keep at arm’s length. However, it is only by embracing all of these diverse factors that one can truly see that hope, as defined by Bloch, is very much alive and that indeed, the pursuit of a vision of utopian pedagogy is being done one semester at time, in Kamloops.

NOTES 1 Name has been changed. 2 At the time of writing, Simon Fraser University was in involved in an

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3 4 5

6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

Richard Toews and Kelly Harris-Martin educational partnership with the Shuswap Nation (SCES). This partnership has since terminated. Nevertheless, references to SCES herein should still reflect the philosophy behind the education program administered in Kamloops by the Aboriginal community and SFU. While the relationship between SFU and SCES has terminated, SFU is still committed to partnering with Aboriginal peoples with respect to delivering high-quality education, with the proviso that Aboriginal peoples take a leadership role in terms of administering programs and ensuring an Aboriginal perspective. Personal communication. Fredric Jameson, The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 331. See Richard Toews, ‘Politics and the Historical Eutopos: A Critical Encounter with the Jubilee Group in the Context of Justice, Law and Community’ (PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, Department of Sociology, 2000). Jameson, The Jameson Reader, 366. Chief Ron Ignace, The Third Year: A Year of Consolidation, Annual Report, Secwepemc Cultural Education Society and Simon Fraser University, 1990–1. Ron Ignace, The Second Year, Annual Report, Secwepemc Cultural Education Society and Simon Fraser University, 1989-90. Chief Ron Ignace, The Fourth Year: A Year of Consolidation, Annual Report, Secwepemc Cultural Education Society and Simon Fraser University, 1991–2. Secwepemc Education Institute, 2002/2003 SCES/SFU Calendar, 13. Ibid., 13. Marianne Ignace, Seventh Report: A Quantum Leap, 10th Anniversary of the SCES/SFU Program, 1998, 1. Secwepemc Education Institute, 2002/2003 SCES/SFU Calendar, 13. Ibid. Marianne Ignace, Seventh Report: A Quantum Leap, 1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15. Antonio Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy, trans. Virginia Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 116. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 7.

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21 Marie Battiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage (Saskatoon: Purich, 2000), n.p. 22 Ibid., n.p. 23 Battiste and Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage, n.p. 24 Cited in John L. Elias, Paulo Friere: Pedagogue of Liberation (Malabar, FL: Kreiger Publishing, 1999), 49.

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16 The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles and Pedagogy in Pakistan imran munir

Pakistan offers an unexpected perspective on the relays between resistance and pedagogy. Unexpected, because the popular image associated with Pakistan is that of a nuclear-armed, fundamentalist breeding ground of terrorism, a country locked in an armed confrontation with neighbouring India, and a client state serving America’s regional interests. What is mostly unacknowledged is that Pakistan is a hub of various movements, struggles for democracy, peasant revolts, and workers’ struggles. Also often forgotten is the constituent role of pedagogy therein. The general level of ignorance regarding these struggles reflects the ongoing difficulties faced by the subaltern when they try to speak. Yet their capacity to act is not only uncontainable, but also already pedagogical for those who look. To understand the interplay between struggle and pedagogy in Pakistan, some historical, political, and economic context is necessary. Pakistan offers an exceptional challenge for any analysis, because before it achieved independence in 1947, it had two hundred years of exploitation and experimentation under colonial rule. Colonialism and religion have been the two strongest influences on modern Pakistani society and its sociopolitical discourses, particularly in the rural areas, where most Pakistanis reside. Before colonialism, rural areas operated under the village system. Villagers were, in effect, units of brotherhood cultivators; for each of these, an elder, who had no land inheritance rights, collected state taxes and performed minor judicial and administrative duties.1 Under the Mughal feudal system in India, all lands belonged to the rulers. Landlords had no inheritable rights, and this prevented them from gathering political power.2 In 1871, the British imposed a new administrative regime through its Settlement Act. Un-

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der this act, land titles were allotted to select loyalists, thus creating a new ‘parasitic landlord class’; under this new system, cultivators became serfs.3 With the help of this new class, the empire plundered the vast agricultural resources of India. Later, in 1900, the British introduced the Punjab Land Alienation Act to protect Muslim landlords in northern India by prohibiting any land transfers to non-agriculturists. The main beneficiaries of this new system were the landlords and the tribal chiefs. When Pakistan won independence on the slogan of a separate homeland for Muslims, it inherited this politically dominant and legally protected landlord class. The situation became more complex in post-independence Pakistan when the military officers and bureaucrats started receiving lands as gifts. The landlords joined hands with the military and the bureaucracy to block any progressive land reform. At the same time, the state’s approach to economic and industrial development introduced compradore capitalism and multinational corporations to Pakistan. Also, Pakistan’s state ideology is based on religion. Today, when the mullahs declare, ‘Islam is in danger,’ the misery and poverty of the workers and farmers is quickly forgotten. The result of all this is that Pakistan’s rulers brook little dissent, let alone political or cultural pluralism or autonomous economic activity. All of this accounts for the authoritarian or totalitarian underpinnings of modern Pakistan. As Hassan Gardezi has rightly pointed out: ‘This is a deadly combination of forces that sustains the praetorian role of the Pakistani state and retards the process of democratization in the country. Each of these forces thrives on the other.’4 All of this has also made Pakistan a breeding ground for peasant struggle and pedagogy. Historically, with the state’s support, Pakistan’s landlords have blocked the peasantry from organizing themselves and from exercising their right to vote. They have done so by running for elections themselves or by supporting their preferred candidates. As a result, elections have failed to change the status quo or to devolve power to rural areas. Hence, electoral politics alone has failed to bring about a change or devolution of power in the rural areas. Yet a failure of representational politics in practice demands theoretical adjustment. Historian Ayesha Jalal notes that political processes do much to determine how the state interacts with society. When such processes have obvious gaps, ‘then this relationship can only be understood at the cultural and ideological level.’5 Some Western scholars have studied South Asian Muslim societies in

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terms of two categories: the fundamentalists, and the Western modernists. However, one American-based Pakistani anthropologist, Akbar S. Ahmad, rejects that ‘two category’ classification, and offers instead a more nuanced cultural analysis, one that addresses the complex interactions of history, ethnicity, religion, class, and culture in Muslim societies.6 For him, ‘culture’ never splits from the past completely. Rather, it resides in time and space; it absorbs alterations gradually and undergoes minor modifications. Culture is not limited to customs and sects. As cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains, it is a ‘structure of meaning through which people give shape to their experiences.’ Similarly, politics is not limited to legislation and intrigue, but is ‘one of the principal arenas in which such structure publicly unfolds.’7 Thus, culture and politics overlap and are mutually constitutive. And culture, in its broader sense, provides a sort of ‘record of a number of important and continuing reactions to changes in our social, economic and political life, and may be seen, in itself, as a special kind of map by means of which the nature of the changes can be explored.’8 Below, I approach pedagogy as a cultural and political activity. In an Islamic ideological state, ‘culture’ is viewed as subordinate to religion, as based in the fixed laws and universal principals of the Quran and in the teachings of prophet Muhammad. It is a problem when the state interprets religion and culture according to universal fixed laws, not least because in practice, religion is embedded in specific cultural contexts. For instance, Islam manifests itself differently in Indonesia than in Pakistan or the Arab states. To better understand all of this, we can view religion, politics, and media reports as cultural products that are key to Pakistan’s broader ideological discourse. This discourse, I suggest, comprises two fundamentally different world views: the dominant, and the subordinate. The first is grounded in traditionalism and conservatism, whereas the second challenges the status quo and struggles for change. This perspective will help us understand the ongoing conflict in Pakistan as one that involves elements of power, leadership, and ideology in both the dominant and subordinate segments of the society. Since I focus largely on agricultural workers, I consider it central to my analyses that ‘human work on the land is a social practice with a long history’ and that ‘to do social life is to do discourse.’9 Thus I apply this contestory sense of discourse to explicate pedagogical experiments within particular peasant struggles in Pakistan. My account draws on Pakistani newspaper archives and personal interviews with peasants and left-wing political

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parties. I treat these sources as interpretations set in a discursive context in a process of struggle. The Peasants’ Revolt Today, the peasants and tenant farmers of two provinces, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), and the Punjab, are engaged in an unprecedented conflict with the Pakistani state. These movements differ in political and strategic terms, but their goal is the same – to protect peasant rights. In NWFP, the peasant movement is led by the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP – Communist Workers Peasant Party). In the Punjab, the peasants have united under the banner of an autonomous movement, Anjuman Mozareen Punjab (AMP – Tenants Association of Punjab), and are supported by leftist political parties, by Kutchi Abadi (Squatters Movement), and by civil-society groups, including human rights organizations, progressive theatre groups, NGOs, teachers’ associations, and labour organizations. These relations of affinity constitute a network in which struggle and pedagogy both circulate. The NWFP and Punjab movements are taking different approaches in their struggles to acquire political clout and change the exploitative status quo. At the same time, civil society activists are serving as catalysts in these struggles. I will discuss all of this, and then examine the role of pedagogy in these various struggles. The NWFP and Punjab peasants, led by leftists, have a long history of rebelling, first against colonialism and later against the feudal rulers and landlords. A historical overview of the revolutionary struggle in Pakistan is necessary in order to understand the current subaltern revolt as historical experience ‘which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, but [is] nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue – culture as well as social – of some previous social formation.’10 In the early twentieth century, Marxist-inspired Indian revolutionaries engineered powerful revolts against British colonialism, especially in the Punjab and Bengal provinces. These revolts were crushed, and their leaders ended up in exile in North America. In 1911, these exiled revolutionaries – most of them peasant Sikhs from Punjab – formed the ‘Hindi Association of Pacific Coast’ in Portland, Oregon, with the help of North American revolutionaries. The Punjabi-speaking cadre called this group Ghadar, or ‘revolt.’11 They provided much-needed support to the revolutionary movement in India. In 1920 they helped found the

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Communist Party of India (CPI) as a mean to wage a revolutionary struggle against British Imperialism. The communists played a key role in the freedom movement; but in 1946, at the height of the revolution, the CPI chose to embrace the Stalinist ‘two-stage’ theory, which decreed that India first had to go through a bourgeois democratic revolution. The CPI thus threw its support to the British imperialists. This was a terrible blunder, in that it alienated the CPI from the workers and peasants; it also weakened the struggle against feudalism and capitalism in India, paving the way for the Congress and Muslim League to steer the revolution towards a national independence movement. In 1947, Pakistan inherited the party cadre and pro-Stalinist party line from the CPI. The Sino-Soviet rift divided the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) into two camps – one pro-Soviet (CPP), the other proPeking (Mazdoor Kissan Party – MKP). In 1958 a working-class movement spread across Pakistan that strongly influenced the peasantry; this resulted in the founding of the All Pakistan Peasants Association. A working-class movement paralysed the country, and to crush it, General Ayub Khan imposed ten years of martial law. By the 1970s, leftistbacked peasant movements were surfacing across Pakistan, the most successful of which was in Hashtnagar, in NWFP near the Afghan border. These peasants, organized by the then Maoist faction of the MKP (now the CMKP), liberated the land from feudal rule through an armed insurrection.12 The feudal rulers, with the state’s help, attempted several times to remove the peasants from the land. Over the past thirty years, three hundred peasants have died in conflicts over land possession. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military rulers found themselves fully supported and financially backed by the U.S. government, and had a golden opportunity to eject these peasants without fear of any sanctions relating to democracy or human rights. Pakistan’s military regime was providing air and ground bases for the Americans’ attack on Afghanistan, which shares a 1,600-mile border with Pakistan. In January 2002, about 3,500 paramilitary troops and police in armoured vehicles attacked a Hashtnagar village. In the first attack, tractors were brought in to destroy the crops, but the peasants fought back and burned the tractors. The police opened fire and wounded several people. Soon after, students from local colleges and schools joined their peasant families in the fighting. After an intense battle that lasted several hours, many senior police officers had been wounded. The uniformed attackers retreated, only to launch a surprise attack on another village nearby,

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whose men had gone out to celebrate the earlier victory. However, this village’s women defended their homes and fields and even launched a counterattack. Under heavy fire, the women threw burning blankets on the armoured cars and tractors, once again driving back the police, who abandoned their burning vehicles.13 The following day, besides arresting a local peasant leader, the police laid charges against the leaders of the CMKP and several dozen others under the Terrorism Act. This act calls for the accused to be tried in a special court, which has the power to convict and sentence death within seven days. The peasants retaliated by surrounding the police station. After negotiations, the police released the arrested leader but laid several dozen more charges against the CMKP leaders and peasants.14 The most striking feature of these events was the role played by women, who in traditional Pashtun society are not even allowed to leave their homes without a male escort. They defied patriarchal cultural barriers by taking up arms and fighting bravely on their own to protect their land. This surprisingly strong resistance by women is especially significant when we remember that NWFP is ruled by religious fundamentalists, who are working furiously to introduce Islamic legislation to segregate women from the mainstream society and impose a Taliban brand of Islam. Hashtnagar’s peasant women demonstrated autonomous resistance. There are also organized political militants, such as the CMKP membership, who believe that such peasant gains are crucial not only for Pakistan’s revolutionary struggles but also for those in neighbouring Afghanistan. In the latter country, two Maoist organizations – the Afghan Liberation Organization (ALO) and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) – have decades-old ties with the CMKP. The ALO, the RAWA, and the Hashtnagar CMPK are all Pashtun organizations, and are at the forefront of the anti-imperialist struggle against the American occupation in Afghanistan. The CMKP fears that the next target of American imperialism in the region will be the progressive forces that oppose the U.S.-imposed Afghan interim government. Peasants Revolt in the Punjab A war rages here. On one side, thousands of police, rangers, and the military; on the other, thousands of men and women armed with nothing more than ‘thappas,’ wooden sticks that women use to wash clothes. The

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women, thappa in hand, are in the front-line; the men, unarmed, are behind them. Confrontation of this sort is unprecedented in our country.15

One million tenants across the Punjab are demanding ownership rights of over 68,000 acres of state land that they have tilled for one hundred years. The government wants to cancel their tenancy rights. In 2000 the military government introduced changes that demoted the farmers from sharecroppers to renters. It also asked the 150,000 tenants of Okara Military Farm, a large farm near Lahore, to sign the new contract that could lead to their eviction. The plight of these farmers began one hundred years ago, when the British government forced poor Christian and Muslim families to clear the forest for agricultural production to meet the increasing demands of the British army in India. The farmers were promised land rights in return – a promise never fulfilled. This land came under the ownership of the Punjab government. After independence in 1947, it was leased to the military and to the Agriculture Department. These leases had expired decades earlier, yet the military and the Agriculture Department were continuing to demand payments even though they now lacked legal title. They were seeking to abrogate the farmers’ tenancy rights and the status those farmers had enjoyed for almost a century. These farmers could simply be evicted without any legal recourse, so in 2000, they organized a movement to demand land ownership rights, under the slogan ‘malki ya maut’ (ownership rights or death.) This resistance quickly gained momentum. At the time, the state authorities were announcing plans for corporate farming initiatives, which would involve replacing tenants with contract workers with only minimal rights, and this only heightened the tenants’ resistance. The AMP, a million strong now, emerged to protect the farmers’ rights. The most distinctive feature of this peasant movement is that it has mobilized women, who have led several demonstrations and fought bravely against police and rangers. The AMP’s struggle has also challenged the social taboo that restricts women’s mobility: in districts where the AMP’s struggle has taken root, women are now moving freely and participating in the struggle. Indeed, women have been more active than men in this struggle; the women activists have created a thappa force, a first line of defence against police actions. The moment police or paramilitary vehicles enter any village, almost all men, women, and children emerge from their homes to defend themselves. A large proportion of the tenants in these villages are Christian, and in a coun-

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try in the grip of Islamic fundamentalism and sectarian tensions, it is amazing that the Christian and Muslim communities have bonded so closely in a movement of such magnitude. Many AMP leaders are women and Christians. The movement is now negotiating with the government – something almost unheard of in the Pakistani sociopolitical context. Poor peasants with no social status are seated at the same bargaining table with the elite. In 2002, the military regime announced a referendum on whether to give General Musharraf a five-year extension as President of Pakistan.16 The AMP leaders saw the referendum as an opportunity to bargain with the government and to press for land ownership rights. As a first step, they announced that they would be urging peasants to stop all future payments – a call that was heeded unanimously across the province.17 The military government was desperate for AMP support in the referendum, so it took no action against the peasants, instead promising them ownership rights in exchange for support in the referendum. Several left-wing and human rights activists who were supporting the peasants’ struggles advised the AMP leaders not to support the president in the referendum, contending that his offer was merly an election ploy. However, the AMP’s leaders were inexperienced, and trusted the general’s promise. They offered him their support as part of a broader strategy to increase their political influence. This strategy worked for a short time: they were allowed to discuss the plight of the peasants during election rallies, which were covered by the governmentcontrolled media, and they succeeded in forcing the junta to announce ownership rights for the farmers. However, a week after the referendum, the military junta launched a massive countercampaign, with the intent of forcing tenants to share half their crops. To this end, it cordoned off their villages and cut off their electricity and water supplies. In addition, thousands of peasants were charged with antistate activities, and hundreds of others were declared terrorists. Seven people were shot dead. Villages were virtually sealed off, with no exit or entry allowed.18 The tenants’ leaders allege that the government has threatened to kill them if the protests continue, and have disseminated a list of government officials who have sexually abused their women. AMP chairman Anwar Dogar has stated that all the women who were sexually abused by government functionaries reported their experiences of barbarity to him in person: ‘It has now almost become an established ritual. Farm owners and

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officials even invite their friends to take part in this ugly abuse of poor farm women.’19 Dogar also alleges that the Punjab Seed Corporation destroyed huge sections of tenants’ crops by blocking flows of canal water; in the process, it actually damaged 70 per cent of the land it cultivated itself. Tenants took their case to the Lahore High Court, which ordered the authorities to unblock the water supplies; however, this order was flouted by the irrigation authorities, who were under pressure from army officials.20 At a press conference, the AMP leaders accused a Ranger brigadier general of summoning them to his headquarters and telling them that if they did not disband their movement, he would kill them all after dragging them to the Indian border. The peasants’ struggle is now in its fourth year, and the AMP leaders are threatening armed resistance: ‘So far we are involved in a peaceful and non-violent struggle but if the army continues its atrocities we will take up arms and resort to suicide attacks. We want ownership or death.’21 Dogar adds: ‘The Army will have either to end its illegal occupation of our land or kill all of us. I foresee our youth clashing with the Army ... We are in millions and the Army is in thousands. It will not be difficult for us to overpower the Army.’22 Tariq Ali, a historian and political commentator who was involved in the Marxist-led revolt in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province in the 1970s, notes: The de facto merger of Army and state on virtually every level has meant that the generals act here as a collective landlord, the largest in the country, determining the living conditions of just under a million tenants. The functionaries of the khaki state regularly bullied and cheated their tenants: they were denied permission to build brick homes; the women were molested; and management approval had to be obtained – and paid for – to get electrification for the villages or build schools and roads. Bribery was institutionalized, and the tenants suffered growing debt burdens. The unconcealed purpose of this ruthless exploitation was to drive the tenants off the land so it could be divided into private landholdings for serving and retired generals and brigadiers. The rationale of the prospective new owners was that, when the time came, they would re-employ the evicted tenants as farm-serfs.23

Revealingly, the media have been forbidden to report on any part of the government’s reactionary activities. The press – a potentially impor-

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tant force in the circulation of this struggle – has been directly suppressed by the state. For example, Sarwar Mujahid, a journalist covering the conflict between tenants and the military in Okara for an Urdu newspaper in Lahore, was arrested on charges of terrorism and inciting public resistance against the military.24 However, several human rights and women’s rights activists and some noted scholars succeeded in dodging the government blockade and taking up the cause. These activists are professionally well established in Islamabad and Lahore, and have been using their local and international connections to expose the military government’s actions against the peasants. Their role is crucial to the peasants’ struggle: they are not only providing coverage of the struggle through NGO publications but also raising the issue in a wider political discourse. Several of them are regular contributors to the English press in Pakistan and abroad. They are also helping Western journalists and diplomats visit the besieged villages, and encouraging them to pressure the government to halt its violence against its own people. Unexpected Alliances, Unexpected Pedagogy The military government has thrown the leaders of two main political parties into exile and has silenced all its opponents in Pakistan. It views the AMP movement as a dangerous threat to its unbridled power. The defence minister has said that the government cannot give the land to tenants because it would open a Pandora’s box in the sense of encouraging similar demands across the country. The AMP resistance is a nightmare for the state: over vast tracts of land, peasants are refusing to either pay cash rent or give up harvest shares. However, the leftist CMKP and the Labour Party, both of which are involved in the AMP’s struggle, say they have learned to work with a wide array of unexpected allies. ‘We have already learnt how to work with neo-liberals and the anti-imperialist right when we formed an alliance with them to start peace rallies against the U.S. invasion in Iraq.’25 The AMP’s heroic defiance of the state’s brutality has made it a favourite among those who believe in social justice, democracy, and equal rights in Pakistan. In this way, we can see a doubly articulated pedagogical function at play: peasant resistance has fortified the spirits of sympathetic observers by reminding them that there is much to learn from these subaltern acts. In turn, unexpected pedagogical experiments have been flowing out of and into the peasant struggles, and playing an important constituitive role.

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Especially in rural areas, several street theatre groups have been playing a significant role in educating people about democracy, women’s education and empowerment, feudalism, sectarianism, election procedures, minority rights, corporate farming, and myriad forms of oppression. For example, the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ is a participatory and interactive troupe whose main purpose is to train people to fight oppression. The group received training from a Brazilian, Augusto Boal. It has formed fifty-two theatre groups in Pakistan and trained more than five hundred theatre activists. Other groups, such as Ajoka and Lok Rehas, have staged many plays in rural areas to foster awareness of important political and social themes in the context of class struggle and imperialism. The street theatre movement, launched in the 1980s to oppose Ziaul Haq’s Martial Law, is consistently at the forefront of oppositional movements in Pakistan. The groups perform in remote towns and villages to educate people about social and political issues and about how they can organize to combat exploitation. Lok Rehas performs only in Punjabi so that its works are accessible to ordinary people. It has a mobile theatre built on a motorcycle to perform puppet shows for children. Ajoka has performed several plays in India to promote peace between the two neighbours. With the involvement of interactive theatre groups, the South Asia Partnership–Pakistan (SAP PK), which is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), has initiated a provincial-level farmers’ network in Punjab and Sindh provinces with the goal of empowering poor farmers at the social, political, and economic levels. In the Punjab, this initiative has evolved into the Poor Farmers Movement, out of which an independent farmers’ newspaper has emerged, the goal of which is to educate farmers on corporate farming, neoliberal globalization, and the dangers of genetically modified crops. The reach of this newspaper is extended by literate farmers, who read it aloud to their fellow villagers. This movement has succeeded so well that in several villages, for the first time, women have been able to exercise their voting rights in elections, and candidates backed by the movement have swept local elections.26 The involvement of poor farmers in the electoral process has changed the traditional dynamic between landlords and farm workers: the landlords must now approach these farmers for their vote. In the 2002 general elections, the Poor Farmers Movement forced the provincial and national assembly candidates to sign onto a ‘no to corporate farming’ platform in exchange for its support. Several hundred SAP–PK-trained village women with univer-

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sity degrees are involved in spreading awareness among rural women of the importance of the electoral process. In these cases, early successes in representational politics have demanded practical adjustments. With the help of the SAP–PK, the Poor Farmers Movement has established a ‘Kissan Baithak,’ reviving the baithak, which is a traditional space for dialogue. The baithak began by providing a space for farmers to discuss traditional and modern agriculture techniques and has since been extended to discussions of pedagogical strategies. The first baithak, established in Toba Tek Singh, was an immediate success: each farmer contributed twenty kilograms of wheat every month to run baithak affairs. The members also acquired land in several districts of the Punjab to establish more baithak to educate and mobilize still more farmers. A spokesman for the Poor Farmers Movement, Mahmood Ahmad, states that more than two hundred farmers’ committees have already been established across the Punjab to resist antifarmer policies, the WTO, and various intellectual property regulations that have been slated for implementation in Pakistan in 2005. To this end, members of the movement travel from village to village to discuss feudalism, globalization, the WTO, and women rights, and to promote baithak strategies such as boycotting the products of multinationals. The Kissan baithak has also condemned the military government’s actions in Okara and offered its support to the AMP. Conclusion In today’s Pakistan, a transformative pedagogy has emerged through deeds – in short, the subaltern teach and act. The million-strong AMP, by persistently defying state brutality, has become a nationwide symbol of resistance and is attracting the attention of political parties, the media, and other groups opposed to army rule. According to one Pakistani commentator: ‘AMP is now almost a vanguard for many struggles in the country. Should an AMP or student movement be successful in its agenda, the domino effect could be tremendous. For this and other reasons, it is important to realize that the rhetoric of human rights, freedom and democracy cannot and must not be accepted in its present form. It must be understood and challenged. It is the spectre of this challenge that haunts the elite.’27 The AMP has emerged as an important political force; it has even won a few seats in local elections. Given the extent of state repression,

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the leftist parties admit they are in no position to engineer any major changes in Pakistan’s political system. Nevertheless, they see a ray of hope in the AMP. ‘It is utopian thinking but there are visible signs that we can guide the unrest to national liberation one day,’ says one major figure in the opposition.28 Such utopian thinking does have some roots on the ground. In the 2002 national elections, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, a ‘red candidate,’ displaying Marx’s photograph on his chest, took the oath in Parliament. Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, also sees the AMP struggle as a cause for hope: ‘The peasants have demonstrated enormous courage. They are fighting the most organised and highly armed force of the country, that is, the Pakistan Army. They are fighting its repression with empty hands, peacefully. This is a rare phenomenon in the history of Pakistan. If they succeed, a revolution could come in Pakistan that will end the feudalism.’29

NOTES 1 See Hassan N. Gardazi, A Reexamination of the Socio-Political History of Pakistan, Reproduction of Class Relations and Ideology (Ceredigion, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). 2 B. Davey, The Economic Development of India: A Marxist Analysis (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975), 29. 3 Hassan N. Gardezi and Jamil Rashid, eds., Pakistan, The Roots of Dictatorship (London: Zed Publishers, 1983), 29. 4 Gardazi, A Reexamination, 139. 5 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 277. 6 See Akbar S. Ahmad, Religion and Politics in Pakistan: Order and Conflicts in Pakistan (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 7 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 312. 8 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Penguin, 1958), xvii. 9 Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates, eds., Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader (London and Delhi: Sage, 2001), 4. 10 Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,’ in Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 159.

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11 In 1915, the Ghadar Party dispatched five boatloads of arms and ammunition from California to India with the help of Germany. Hundreds of Ghadar Party cadres went to India to wage armed struggle against the British. Most were arrested. The arms shipments were seized, and the party leaders hanged by the British. For details of the Ghadar Party in Indian politics, see L.P. Mathur, Indian Revolutionary Movement in the United States of America (Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1970); Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘The Gadar Syndrome: Ethnic Anger and Nationalist Pride,’ Population Review 25:1–2 (1979): 48–58; and Khushwant Singh and Satindra Singh, Ghadar, 1915: India’s First Armed Revolution (Delhi: R&K Publishing, 1966). 12 The MKP and the Communist Party united again in 1994 to form the Communist Worker Peasant Party (CMKP). 13 ‘Pakistan Police Attack Peasants to Grab Land,’ Guardian, 27 February 2002. 14 Ibid. 15 Asha Amirali, ‘Rebellion in Pakistan,’ Znet, 5 July 2002, www.zmag.org/ content/SouthAsia/8431711874961.cfm (accessed 9 October 2004). 16 General Musharaf staged the referendum on 5 May 2002. It was declared rigged and fraudulent by many international (including EU) and by local human rights organizations. 17 Daily Jang (Lahore), 23 April 2002. 18 Daily Dawn (Lahore), 25 June 2002. 19 ‘The Ugly State Terror in Rural Punjab.’ South Asia Tribune, 10–16 August 2002. 20 Ibid. 21 ‘Peasants threaten suicide attack.’ Friday Times, 29 May 2003. 22 ‘Fighting the army, for farm land.’ Frontline 20:14, 5–18 July 2003. 23 Tariq Ali, ‘The Colour Khaki,’ New Left Review 19, January–February 2003. 24 See Human Rights Commission of Pakistan report, ‘Freedom of Media,’ 2003. 25 Interview with labour leader. 26 See SAPPK report, ‘Strengthening Poor Farmers in Pakistan.’ 27 Asim Sajjad Akhtar, ‘Mercury Rising,’ Herald (Karachi), Annual 2002. 28 Interview with a local leader of CMPK. 29 ‘Fighting the Army, for farm land.’

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17 ‘Let’s Talk’: The Pedagogy and Politics of Antiracist Change sarita srivastava

In this era of transnational resistance to globalization, the difficulties of ‘working across difference’ have become both familiar and newly important. Deeply divisive conflicts over racism have been among the strongest challenges facing social movement organizations; they have rattled the fragile notions of both ‘woman’ and ‘worker’ as grounds for solidarity. In the early 1980s, there rose a new wave of voices challenging oppressive practices within social movements and community organizations,1 voices that also reverberated in many class-rooms and workplaces, and encouraged efforts at antiracist, anti-oppression pedagogies. In the current neoliberal context, and in the context of socalled campaigns against ‘terrorism,’ these concerns have neither disappeared nor become any easier to address. Antiglobalization protests in Seattle and Quebec City, for example, saw significant tensions among the diverse groups of activists.2 Yet as new post-9/11 fears about ‘the enemy within’ continue to grow, so too do the difficulties inherent in forging links among activists and educators, at both transnational and local levels. Both transnational activism and theorizing about transnationality are increasing in scope, but both are also falling increasingly under suspicion.3 At the same time, severe cuts to progressive social programs mean that initiatives in anti-oppression education have been drastically curtailed in many places. We may lament the narrowing of space for these educational projects, but we must also ask ourselves whether they have actually brought about profound change. My focus here is on the limitations of one of the more popular pedagogical tools, the ‘workshop,’ especially as it has been used within social movements and community organizations. The ‘antiracist,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘diversity’ workshop, or facilitated formal dis-

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cussion, became quite popular in the 1990s, and has often been used in universities, schools, public agencies, and social movement organizations, both by those seeking to address inequities and by those wishing to manage diversity. In the Canadian context, the New Democratic Party was elected in the province of Ontario in 1990, and established the Ontario Anti-Racism Secretariat. This meant a flush of funding (since cut) for antiracist initiatives such as community workshops.4 In 1992 the Toronto Board of Education drafted a new equity policy that included sexual orientation, making it virtually unique in North America. Many educational initiatives followed, including equity workshops at the high school level. Like many activists and educators, I have initiated, participated in, and facilitated a number of these workshops. As a national campaigner for Greenpeace Canada in the early 1990s, I codesigned and facilitated that organization’s first antiracism workshop. Several years later I was asked to design antiracist workshops for the Aboriginal youth of the Saugeen Nation, a few hours north of Toronto. In their most hopeful and progressive incarnations, workshops like these draw on traditions of popular education and are linked to ideals of systemic antiracist change. But what successes can we actually claim for these pedagogical interventions? Despite the rapid growth in antiracism education through the 1980s and 1990s, the progress of antiracism in organizations has often been dishearteningly slow, for both activists and educators. There are by now many indications that formal, facilitated discussions and workshops often fail, and furthermore, that they can be especially discouraging, draining, and painful for non-white participants. Many people of colour have dropped out of and refused to participate in mixed antiracism workshops. Discussions have been particularly stormy in social movement organizations. As Susan Friedman remarks: ‘Such tentative progress around issues of race among different groups of feminists is still matched by ... anger, failures of dialogue, and withdrawal.’5 Most women’s and community organizations in Canada (and elsewhere) have stalled in their attempts to move towards greater equity and ‘diversity’;6 the boards of non-profit organizations in Canada have historically been almost devoid of people of colour.7 So we cannot afford to glorify antiracist workshops as a necessary step towards change. For participants, they have often been ugly and painful, and the results have been slow and uneven. Yet neither can we afford to simply dismiss these pedagogical attempts, or to resign our

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own or others’ efforts to some historical dustbin of good intentions and necessary compromises. How might we reconcile these tensions? I have found myself caught between them: I have continued to act in ways that suggest a certain optimism about the difference that pedagogy can make, not only as an activist facilitating antiracist workshops, but also as a university instructor. At the same time, in my academic Writing and teaching I have often criticized the practice and effects of antioppression pedagogies, as well as the assumption that education can be a route to progressive change. Particularly in the context of ‘working across difference,’ I have argued that a focus on education, even one anti-oppressive in its orientation, can reproduce many of the relations of power we seek to change.8 Are there any possibilities, then, for a pedagogical practice that might offer local challenges to global inequities of race and nation, that might offer genuine alternatives to neoliberal multiculturalism? I believe that alternative projects have no choice but to begin with a closer analysis of antiracist pedagogy and practice, and its allowable productions of knowledge. My own research in Toronto, a large city whose population is almost 40 per cent non-white, is based on my confidential interviews with antiracist activists working within organizations, and on my observations of, participation in, or facilitation of antiracist workshops and organizational meetings.9 I have found that despite its promise to challenge racist knowledges and practices, antiracist pedagogy is implicated in perpetuating inequities of race and representation. In particular, some antiracist workshops are characterized by the desire of some white participants for ‘better’ knowledge of the racial other. I argue that social movement techniques such as consciousness-raising, popular education, and feminist therapy, drawn from the central belief that ‘the personal is political,’ have been interpreted in individualized ways that train a spotlight on people of colour as knowledge resources. In particular, we see pedagogical practices that focus on soliciting participants’ personal experiences and feelings. I refer to this as the ‘let’s talk’ approach to antiracist pedagogy. One of my concerns with the ‘let’s talk’ pedagogical model has been that it limits how non-whites may speak about racism and act to challenge it, and can also shape representations of them and their emotional expressions. In particular, the positioning of the person of colour as an educator and expert on racism, and the stereotype of the angry or sullen woman of colour – these are reproduced through the relations of antiracist debate in organizations. Finally, these same ‘let’s talk’ techniques can encourage a

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focus on the emotions and moral deliberations of some white participants, rather than on measures for organizational change. Below I touch briefly on each of these closely linked problems, which have a unique character shaped by their social movement contexts. ‘The Personal Is Political’ For over a hundred years, ‘the personal is political’ has been a foundational principle for many social movements, one which posits that personal experiences, feelings, and ‘consciousness’ are linked to social structures, analysis, and action. In its contemporary form, ‘the personal is political’ has often led to an emphasis on the personal and emotional as a route to analysis and knowledge. Not surprisingly, the historical tenacity and breadth of ‘the personal is political’ has a number of implications for social movement organizations that are attempting to address racism. Antiracist workshops are often shaped by discussion techniques that encourage personal and emotional disclosure. While the success of ‘reality TV’ and talk shows indicates that this confessional approach is widely popular,10 it has unique form and meaning within social movement or non-profit organizations. As indicated above, in many social movements, ‘let’s talk’ techniques have been built on the foundational belief that ‘the personal is political.’ This historical foundation helps explain why, in movements that share any historical links to, for example, socialism, anarchism, or feminism, the ‘let’s talk’ approach sees personal experience as a basis for initiating social analysis, social change, or organizational change. So within progressive social movements and spaces shaped by social justice ideals, the ‘let’s talk’ approach is one in which the sharing and disclosure of personal feelings and experiences is framed as desirable, principled, and important for reform. The result is that talking about experiences and emotions is seen as a vehicle for self-disclosure, and furthermore, forms a tenacious framework for the production of knowledge – in this case, knowledge about race. Consciousness-raising and popular education, both common in the mélange of organizational and institutional attempts to manage accusations of racism, emphasize the importance of gaining ‘critical consciousness’ through the analysis of experience. Common during the early years of second-wave feminism, consciousness-raising groups were small groups of women who met regularly and spoke informally, connecting personal experience to the structures that produce those

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experiences. Popular education, widely used in many organizational and community settings, similarly advocates using the lived experiences of participants as a starting point for a collective analysis of the relations that shape those experiences11 (see Torres, this volume). However, while both consciousness-raising groups and popular education are based on Marxist definitions of consciousness as the system of ideas that both supports and is determined by the system of production, in practice many interpretations have often been far more personal. As Adamson and colleagues put it: ‘The purpose [of CR] was to understand our personal lives and experiences, not to build a mass movement.’12 In this interpretation, which has had immense appeal and tremendous success, everything personal comes to have political significance. Antiracism Workshops As a result of the broad appeal of these personalized interpretations of consciousness-raising and ‘the personal is political,’ disclosure of personal feelings and experiences has become formalized as a method of political education, analysis, and conflict resolution in many organizational settings. While not an example of antiracist discussion, Sherryl Kleinman’s step-by-step description of conflict resolution in an alternative health organization is illustrative of how these techniques are often interpreted. Kleinman found that the organization’s members were strongly encouraged to openly express their painful emotions as the most sincere and effective way to resolve a conflict.13 Whenever there was any conflict within the organization’s board meetings and retreats, the organization’s members were expected to express their feelings directly to another individual: ‘They expected the participant to talk in the first person, admit a “negative” feeling (anger or fear) and address that thought or feeling directly to the person he or she had conflicts with.’14 Models of antiracist education often reveal a common history with consciousness-raising and popular education techniques, emphasizing the diversity of ‘personal experience and lived realities as a source of knowledge.’15 Typically, non-whites are expected to disclose stories of racism, while whites share their feelings of being shocked, affronted, racist or not racist, and so on. As my interviews show, workshops and meetings then become focused on the exploration of experiences of racism and feelings about racism. In discussing her human rights course,

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for example, Razack writes that her goal was ‘to forge a politics of alliances based on this sharing of daily experiences.’16 Discussions of antiracism have also become dominated by a range of techniques for producing knowledge through expressions of experience and emotion. The very language and model of the consciousness-raising group itself have been continually used by feminist groups to explore racism.17 Gail Pheterson, for example, describes an elaborate five-month series of feminist consciousness-raising sessions on racism, anti-Semitism, and heterosexism.18 Consciousness-raising sessions were also the strategy taken by a Canadian feminist publishing collective in the late 1980s. When Maya, a woman of colour I interviewed, raised concerns about racism at the collective, her white coworkers responded by holding ‘consciousness-raising’ sessions for all the staff and collective members. In organizational attempts at antiracism, an antiracist discussion or workshop is often facilitated by a professional or informal facilitator who uses techniques of experience-sharing to elicit, discuss, and analyse personal experiences of racism, as well as to solicit feelings about those experiences and about coworkers. A toolbox of techniques drawn from consciousness-raising and popular education models shapes these ‘let’s talk’ discussions of antiracism. These techniques are explicitly aimed at shaping group dynamics and physical space, and are designed to encourage a participatory and egalitarian environment for sharing experiences. As I have documented elsewhere,19 a number of techniques are typical: small group discussions in which participants tell personal stories and share emotions; the ‘go-around,’ in which each member of the group is compelled to speak in turn about his/her experiences of racism; the flip chart, used to record stories about racism through drawings or texts; and role plays of racist incidents. This focus on personal experiences and emotional disclosure has been criticized as especially painful for many non-white participants, as of limited use for conducting useful discussions, and as unnecessary for making antiracist change.20 These tools can also produce a knowledge of racism and racial identities that supports individualized and emotional strategies for antiracism, rather than organizational ones. This framework provides white participants with a space for expressing their fear, guilt, or anger; but it demands something else from people of colour. While white participants may feel encouraged to explore their feelings and self-knowledge, people of colour are generally expected to share their experiences and knowledge concerning racism. In formal meetings, informal discussions, and workshops, people

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of colour are expected to confront, directly persuade, or ‘share’ their feelings with whites in their workplaces or organizations. In one organization I studied, a women’s drop-in centre, the staff collective had come to an impasse after two women of colour began raising concerns about racism in the centre’s programming and division of tasks. The board’s response was to hire an antiracism facilitator. Ginny, one of the women of colour, complained that discussions of racism during these regular sessions became focused on individual personalities and emotions, rather than on organizational change: ‘She [the facilitator] turned it into a therapy session. She would say, “Ginny, it sounds like you think that Denise doesn’t understand what you are trying to say.” She basically did a “personality test.” I was supposed to be a “visual person,” whereas Denise was more of an oral person.’21 Zahra, a coworker of Ginny’s, shared her frustration with the therapeutic, ‘let’s talk’ approach of the facilitator. In particular, she found that the facilitator’s focus on the emotional was overly therapeutic and irrelevant in a workplace discussion of organizational problems: ‘All she [the facilitator] talked about was, “How do you feel, and how do you feel?”’ Shalini, a young woman of colour working on short-term contract in an antiviolence advocacy group, describes a similar tactic for dealing with antiracist concerns. At a board meeting, Shalini was taken aback by the racist attitudes of a board member towards programming for black youth. In response to Shalini’s concerns, the director suggested that she should confront the offending board member directly. In other words, Shalini’s complaint was read as a supposed conflict between two individuals; the remedy was talking, rather than strengthening organizational support for antiracist programming. Not surprisingly, the responsibility for dealing with this racist incident was being assigned to the woman of colour with the most junior and precarious position, who was expected to initiate a personalized confrontation about racism. Incredulous, Shalini refused. Here we can see how this model for discussion, change, and pedagogy inexorably reverts to personality, emotions, and personal style as explanations for racism. By mining the intimate and personal field, it hopes either to discover the roots of conflict, or to smooth it over by teaching people how to talk to one another. Ginny’s organization, a small women’s drop-in centre, provides another illustration. Ginny and another coworker raised concerns about racism in the distribution of tasks, and in programming for women

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coming to the centre. Ginny hoped that an antiracist facilitator would help focus discussion on organizational change. Instead, the discussions took a personalized turn, at times attempting to resolve the conflict between individuals, at times becoming a theatre for Ginny and other women of colour to tell their stories: ‘We talked about how we experience racism in the organization and in women’s organizations. Denise never said anything except “I feel bad”... All Denise would say was, “Thank you for sharing.”’ Thus, there is a racialized dynamic between teller and listener, between spectacle and grateful guilt. While Ginny and another woman of colour spoke about their experiences of racism, their white coworker Denise alternated between expressing gratitude and sorrow for Ginny’s ‘sharing.’ Women of colour report that often the demands for knowledge are framed not only by white women’s gratitude and sorrow, but also by their anger and denial. According to many interpretations of ‘the personal is political,’ since personal experience provides an alternative way of understanding social relations, and since true emotion reveals true experience, disclosure of one’s experiences and emotions becomes an important form for resolving conflict and producing knowledge about racism. In more formal antiracist workshops, popular education techniques may focus explicitly on the production of knowledge about racism through the experiences of people of colour. Gurnah, for example, describes racism awareness training (RAT) workshops in Britain as ‘rightly concerned with people’s personal experience of racism.’22 McCaskell similarly notes that antiracist education ‘requires a particular type of pedagogy ... based on learners’ real social experience.’23 One model common to many workshops is the discussion, presentation, and analysis of personal experiences of racism. The analysis may be structured and formal, or form a minor part of the process. Early on in the workshop process, various methods such as small or large group discussions or ‘go-arounds’ (everyone speaks one by one) are used to elicit personal experiences of racism. The facilitator may record them on a flip chart, display them, or do an oral presentation. I attended one antiracist workshop for a mixed group of community members, activists, and professional antiracist workers that may demonstrate this model. We were asked to speak about our experiences in small groups, present our discussion to the larger group, and have our comments displayed on the wall. A Toronto Board of Education manual used in antiracist workshops for adolescents prescribes very similar techniques, asking

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students to ‘share personal experiences of racism.’24 Facilitators are told to use the participants’ personal experiences of racism as ‘raw material’ for social analysis. They are asked to prompt the young person of colour for details, and ‘get them to describe their experiences and feelings in the most vivid way possible.’ They then record and organize the experiences under general categories. Knowledge of Racism and Race These workshop techniques underline pervasive assumptions about the link between ignorance and racism. In particular, education and consciousness-raising techniques are being increasingly personalized, and this is supporting and being supported by liberal multiculturalist assumptions about how racism may be countered through better knowledge of others. Whether linked to official multicultural policies (as in Canada), or to conventional models of cross-cultural exchange, pedagogical models that emphasize the value of hearing about one another’s everyday lives, experiences, and cultures have been such a strong thread that, despite a number of critiques, these forms of official, practical, and academic multiculturalism continue to influence antiracist work (see also Alleyne, in this volume). In both antiracist and liberal multicultural models of education, the production of knowledge – knowledge of the experiences of people of colour, self-knowledge, or knowledge of the other’s perspective – is seen as an important goal. Because of the enduring assumption that racism can be traced to individual prejudice, debates about racism are particularly susceptible to the influence of reformist liberal pedagogical models, despite their avowed intention of using antiracist models to focus on relations of power and systemic change. As David Goldberg argues, the inevitable outcome of liberal analyses of racism is policies which assume that ‘racism can be eradicated for the most part by education.’25 Antiracist educator Enid Lee suggests, for example, that antiracist education ‘enables us to see that racism is learned, and therefore, can be unlearned.’26 The idea that there is an ‘automatic’ association between knowledge and conduct27 is influential, even in the context of more radical political efforts. Some activists’ responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center and on Afghanistan on and after 11 September 2001 reflected these closely held notions about the associations between ignorance and racism, and between knowledge and conduct. In particular, some campus and community forums supported the popular belief that a fuller knowl-

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edge of Muslim communities would lead to more fruitful strategies. For example, during a community forum on American military action in Afghanistan, held in Toronto in the autumn of 2001, organizers attempted to run an antiracist workshop. Another approach, taken by organizers at the University of Toronto around the same time, was to mount a film/lecture series about Islamic religion and culture, presumably to educate those who were ignorant about its ‘positive’ aspects. As Cynthia Wright28 wryly observes, the critical response to a terrorist attack by Christian fundamentalists would hardly be to screen The Ten Commandments – yet a screening of the History of Islam was the response of campus activists seeking critical discussion following 9/11. In the end, representational strategies of this sort merely highlight that violent actions by whites are not causally linked to ethnicity and religion. Why not examine instead how knowledge of Muslim fundamentalism is represented in the North American mass media? Instead of supporting the belief that racism – in this case against Muslims – is irrational and can be countered by greater knowledge, this strategy could instead highlight how dominant representations of Islam in the Western media provide rational support for Western foreign policy. There is an assumption, in other words, that knowledge of racism is best acquired by examining the lives of people of colour – rather than by acknowledging and challenging the multitude of racist knowledges and practices. Contrary to their intended outcomes, the pedagogical practices and philosophies in antioppression or ‘diversity’ workshops often produce people of colour, queers, and other marginalized participants as the objects of knowledge. Carmen, a lesbian of colour, works for a large women’s advocacy group. She relates how her coworkers’ demand for her personal experience became suddenly urgent only in the context of a diversity workshop: ‘I remember the facilitator just said to me, “So Carmen, why don’t you tell us what it’s like to be a lesbian in a straight office?”’ Yet, as Carmen pointed out, ‘you’ve never once before asked me about my life.’ Linda Carty writes that these expectations of knowledge from experience also shaped her experience as a Black woman teaching university students: ‘What was clearly expected of me, the Black woman instructor, was to bring to class my personal experience of the issues being discussed (I was actually told this more than once by some participants outside of class).’29 Gloria Anzaldua describes a similar scene in her ‘U.S. Women of Colour’ class: ‘Several white women stood up in class and either asked politely, pleaded or passionately demanded (one had tears streaming down her face) that

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women-of-color teach them.’30 The ‘equal’ sharing of experiences and feelings is overridden by the power relations of race. In most of the cases I have studied, the tellers – people of colour who share their experiences – are seen as primary resources, the ‘authentic’ knowers. As we have seen, techniques are aimed at having participants discuss and present, role-play and analyse their personal experiences of racism. The goal becomes knowledge about race that is produced by and about people of colour – knowledge for whites to scrutinize, reject or express gratitude. This educational approach to gaining knowledge of ‘the other’ reconfirms static associations between racial identity and lived experience. The assumption is that people of colour who speak in workshops or in discussions of race represent stable identities that reflect a global experience, and that their stories will thus provide the most truthful knowledge. Organizational discussions of antiracism may then begin to echo the ‘cultural’ celebrations of liberal multiculturalism to which they are often contrasted, as the performance of scenes from people’s lives satisfies a desire for data and drama. The focus on people of colour as the ‘authentic’ knowers means that this pedagogical project can represent a treacherous space for those who are made ‘other.’ The focus begins and can remain on these individuals, on the legitimacy of their stories, and, by implication, on the legitimacy of their identity. For example, the faith in knowledge as an antidote to racism often marks participants of colour as experts if they accept the invitation to dialogue, or as angry or indifferent if they reject that invitation. Antiracist education, and efforts to effect change, can then become bogged down by the ways that angry or indifferent responses are linked to racial identity – for example, by the ways they reinforce the stereotypical ‘angry woman of colour.’31 In Ginny’s account of a workshop at a feminist collective, an antiracist facilitator calls attention to Ginny’s anger and labels it unproductive: ‘The facilitator actually said to me, “I think you have a real fuck-you attitude.” And I said, “You’re right, I do, and I actually have one towards you right now ... I resent being portrayed as the angry woman of colour.”’ Anger about racism, and indifference or irritation at organizational efforts at antiracism, are clearly not embraced as part of the open sharing of emotion. Participants are entreated to express their feelings, yet certain expressions of emotion are considered acceptable, others pathological and dangerous. This highlights both the racialized representations of emotion and the emotional representations of race. Ironically, these techniques of knowledge production may reproduce

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the same relations they seek to ‘uncover.’ Because the ‘let’s talk’ model is influenced by trends towards individualization, discussions of experience often glide over any close examination of social relations. People’s experiences are displayed, and then they are used to produce and reinforce a collective knowledge that often denies the power relations which produce that experience. In particular, the processes by which whites might have learned racist knowledge are rarely explored, and neither are strategies for challenging racism at the organizational and systemic levels. Denial and Innocence The ‘equal’ sharing of experience is further subverted by the more direct denial, dismissal, and competition of stories – a phenomenon described in my interviews and observed in workshops. The ultimate denial arises when stories are simultaneously desired and rejected. One man at an antiracist workshop I attended proclaimed that it couldn’t really be this racist in Canada. A Toronto Board of Education manual on youth antiracist workshops alerts facilitators that ‘guilt and defensiveness’ can be a problem ‘to the process.’ The antiracist workshop can provide a space and format for this denial. Also, the inevitable dismissals and denials of their stories can place people of colour in the position of having to defend, reassert, and reinforce their identities as resources on racism. Within social movement and community organizations, passionate commitments to egalitarian visions, communities, and identities give a distinct character to discussions of racism. When activists have their moral visions challenged by accusations of racism, there is often an entrenchment of the exclusionary practices that prompted the challenge in the first place. In the feminist movement, where much of my research has been focused, a common response is to try to recuperate one’s innocence in the face of antiracist challenges. Outright denial, tears, anger, and protestations that ‘I’m not a racist’ are not uncommon. One woman involved in initiating antiracist discussions in her organization recounts: ‘There’s people who say, “I’m feeling attacked. Why am I being attacked? I’m not racist, I’m not prejudiced ... I’ve never discriminated against anybody in my life.”’ Maya tells of an antiracist workshop in her feminist collective, referred to as a ‘consciousness-raising session for white women.’ She is highly critical of the consciousnessraising technique, declaring that it provided a space ‘where women

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disclosed their experiences of internalized dominance’ – a space, in other words, for them to express their previously undisclosed racist perspectives. She recalls: ‘It was the most brutal and horrific experience, that I will never forget … I mean ... I don’t even want to repeat some of the things I heard, because it is too painful. But I ... vowed never again to ever participate.’ The following example of a workshop exercise illustrates how protestations of ignorance on the part of white participants not only constitute people of colour as the resource for better knowledge, but also relieve whites of this responsibility. The example is from an antiracist workshop at a large women’s centre that has been attempting antiracist change for a number of years. It is particularly useful because it is told by both a woman of colour and a white woman, each involved in antiracist work. The two of them have very different memories of the same incident. Yasmin, a recently hired woman of colour, describes her irritation at an exercise that involved dividing the participants into two groups: women of colour, and white women: There was an exercise – Naming the Things that You Are Proud Of’ – asking us to name the things that we were proud of having accomplished as a group. When people reported back, the white women had almost nothing. That made the women of colour really angry. By you not putting anything, it shows that you are not aware of what you have. Although you think you have an analysis, ironically that analysis is actually minimizing the power that you have.

Even when asked directly, the white women sidestepped the opportunity to examine their own histories and stories of ‘pride’ and ethnicity. Yasmin pinpoints the pervasive tendency of whites to ignore the relations of power inherent in the decision not to make oneself vulnerable, in the privilege of rejecting the notion of ethnicity. At the same time, Yasmin says, the white participants thought they were challenging racism precisely because, in refusing to participate in the exercise, they were refusing pride in whiteness. Samantha, a white manager at the same organization, felt that the discussion was fruitful, and she was taken aback by the anger expressed by the women of colour: We had a discussion about what makes us proud to be white, and a bunch of other things, which we had a very heated discussion around – and the women of colour went off and talked about what made them proud to be

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women of colour. A very loaded question. And so we decided that there was nothing that made us proud to be white, because … anyway. But, very, very, very good discussion. But women of colour were really pissed off that white women couldn’t come up with anything. And – imagine if we did come up with stuff! They would be saying, ‘How dare you take credit for stuff.’

Samantha’s description shows that some white women felt caught in the dichotomy of this exercise: How were they to express feelings of pride without reinforcing racial superiority? ‘Naming the Things You Are Proud Of’ places women in a competition of knowledge and emotion about race and ethnicity, a competition that seems destined to fail – or perhaps to be ‘won’ by the white participants who choose not to participate. The exercise was likely meant to ethnicize whites, and perhaps to counter the usual spectacle of women of colour as ethnic resources. Instead it supported that problematic construction of racial identity, in that the participants and facilitators failed to analyse the relations of power in representations of both whiteness and ethnic pride, which became visible when the white participants chose not to make themselves vulnerable. Once again, we see that the burden of being a teaching resource is placed solely on women of colour, who themselves learn nothing new about the construction of ‘white’ or European culture from the perspective of white women. This workshop discussion merely highlights that only non-white ethnicity is meant to be displayed and explored in these pedagogical efforts, and that whiteness remains the invisible ethnic norm, supposedly with no stories to ‘uncover.’ The dead end of this exercise reinforced the wishful myth that whites are ignorant when it comes to race. How could the white women have responded differently? What kinds of discussions of whiteness would avoid a facile equivalence between white and non-white ethnicity, a reduction of racial dominance to ethnic difference? Perhaps Samantha could have begun with a willingness to be vulnerable in discussions of whiteness, in that way acknowledging the vulnerability of women of colour as well as the privilege of her refusal to be vulnerable. Perhaps she could have begun with a willingness to express her critical thoughts on the notion of ‘pride.’ This line of inquiry might have led in some useful directions: Which sources of pride reflect privilege and exclusion, and which challenge dominant relations of power? What might white women’s stories of ethnicity and pride tell us about constructions

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of racial dominance and inferiority? It was the fear of revealing this knowledge that kept Samantha and her colleagues quiet, that kept them in the safer place of ‘ignorance’ and innocence. These preoccupations with morality and self are common obstacles to a fuller discussion of antiracism. My interviews have also shown that as some white feminists become involved in antiracist efforts, they may also move towards deeper self-examination, rather than towards organizational change. Interview accounts of workshops often describe how white feminists become tearful when they express the pain and hurt, and the solidarity, they feel on learning about racism. Yasmin describes how some white women reacted when they were challenged that they had not contributed to an antiracist workshop exercise. That, Yasmin says, ‘just led to tears on the part of the white women ... and blah, blah ... things like, “I’ve tried really hard to see where I’ve come from, and who I’ve oppressed as a white woman.”’ Clearly, this sharing and ‘free’ expression of emotion and personal experience, meant to build analysis and solidarity, can come to focus on the emotional needs of some white participants, can stall change efforts, and can create additional vulnerabilities for non-white participants. Conclusions and Alternatives Repeated failures of pedagogical strategies, whether labelled as antiracist or anti-oppression workshops, or as discussions on equity and diversity, have been a discouraging facet of change efforts within social movement organizations. Sarah complains that the feminist organization she works in has made several identical attempts at antiracism: ‘We have done [antiracist] training already a couple of times. And so many of us who have been here for four or five years have already done some training. And it feels like Antiracism 101.’ The continual shortcomings of many antiracist workshops can be explained in part by pedagogical practices that focus on individual experience, emotion, and morality – practices that provide space for the constitution of racist knowledges, identities, and effects. In the prevalent ‘let’s talk’ approach, the belief that ‘the personal is political’ has been recast through liberal conceptions of the individual, racism, knowledge, and social progress. The ‘let’s talk’ approach shapes pedagogical strategies so that discussions of racism often focus not on an egalitarian exchange of knowledge, but rather on correcting a supposed ‘ignorance’ of racism. One result is the use of techniques that constitute people of colour as either the produc-

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ers of that knowledge or as recalcitrant obstacles to knowledge production. These same pedagogical techniques allow a focus on the hurt, anger, and angst of some white participants – preoccupations that can deflect people from a broader analysis of racism and antiracist change. In social movement contexts, these kinds of emotional reactions – ‘I’ve never discriminated against anybody in my life’ – can be particularly intense because they are founded on implicit assumptions of egalitarianism. In these contexts, organizational change often becomes derailed; antiracism may instead be interpreted as an ethical preoccupation, accompanied by practices for producing greater self-knowledge and a better ethical white activist subject. One alternative is for workshops to analyse the knowledge and power relations of antiracism and racism. Britzman suggests that education begin by asking, ‘How do historical categories like “race,” “sex” and “gender” give meanings to narratives that compose the field of multiculturalism?’32 Such projects could also explore ‘the process of establishing others in order to know them;33 here we see an alternative to the pitfalls of the ‘Naming Things We Are Proud Of’ exercise discussed earlier. Toni Morrison’s appeal for more studies that analyse the strategic use and manipulation of the Africanist character and narrative in American literature suggests another model for antiracist education.34 All these proposals create an opportunity to explore the organizational obstacles to equity and the historical roots of inequity. In emphasizing how we know the racialized self and other, antiracist workshops may also give greater priority to how we change those knowledge and power relations. A form of antiracist workshop that treats antiracist change as a central or initial objective rather than an end point might be more appropriate in many situations. Basil Moore promotes the idea of connecting young people with the antiracist movement to help them become ‘activists for social justice.’35 McCaskell and Bellissimo describe their efforts at the Toronto Board of Education to help students gain leadership skills to become ‘advocates for systemic change.’36 I have also advocated the reconfiguring of antiracist workshops, using practical coalitions as a model.37 In this approach, workshops would be formed around particular political objectives, community or organizational projects, or tasks; they would focus on sharing the analyses, skills, and strategies required to promote and support action on racism. For example, one woman interviewed about antiracist sessions in her organization was fed up with the personalized direction these sessions were taking, and instead began gathering data

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on the racialized division of labour among collective members. In this way she was able to demonstrate that women of colour were carrying a far greater burden of administrative and behind-the-scenes work. These approaches offer some starting points for alternative antiracist projects. Still, their implementation remains a challenge; even the workshops I critique here have been made more scarce by recent economic restructuring. Since the mid-1990s, neoliberal policies have brought about a dramatic decline in government funding for equity programs. In Ontario, after the NDP was replaced by a more economically and socially conservative government, the Anti-Racism Secretariat was eliminated, and planned equity legislation was rolled back. In Toronto, there have been drastic cuts to the Board of Education equity program.38 Yet even in the face of these cuts, work on antiracist education is continuing – for example, umbrella funding agencies such as the United Way now require that the organizations they support make efforts towards diversity and equity. In other words, there has been uneven movement towards antiracism and equity – there has been energetic progress, but this progress has been limited by funding cuts, insubstantial organizational responses, and recalcitrant opposition from individuals. However, antiracist struggles are inescapable in the current context of transnational organizing. Transnational feminist activism, for example, is facing a familiar danger: a supposed global sisterhood39 that has emphasized the commonalities among all women, has also excluded the particular histories and lives of some women. Movements for liberation have always been complicated by multiple sites of difference and inequity, and by tensions between ideals of egalitarianism and practices of exclusion. This ambiguous context helps explain the unique difficulties of antiracist debates in social movements, but also presents us with the increasingly urgent need for research, pedagogy, and activism that will challenge oppressive power relations within movements and organizations.

NOTES 1 For example, the rapid evolution of antiracist challenges within the Canadian feminist community during this period is discussed in Srivastava, ‘Facing Race, Saving Face: Antiracism, Emotion, and Knowledge in Social Movement Organizations’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2002). 2 The film This Is What Democracy Looks Like (Independent Media Centre,

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May 2000) documents some of these tensions during protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. See Alissa Trotz, ‘Transnational Feminist Organizing,’ guest lecture to ‘Introduction to Women’ Studies’ class, 26 March 2002, New College, University of Toronto; Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1994). The New Democratic Party (NDP) traditionally has had strong links to labour organizations and is the most ‘left-leaning’ of the major political parties in Canada: it has governed several provinces. Susan Friedman, ‘Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse,’ Signs 21:1 (1995): 1–49. See CRIAW, Looking for Change: A Documentation of National Women’s Organizations Working towards Inclusion and Diversity (Ottawa: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, 1995); Pramilla Aggarwal, in Angela Robertson, ‘Continuing on the Ground: Feminists of Colour Discuss Organizing,’ in Scratching the Surface: Canadian Antiracist Feminist Thought, ed. Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1999). V. Murray, P. Bradshaw, and J. Wolpin, ‘Power in and around Non-profit Boards: A Neglected Dimension of Governance,’ Non-Profit Management and Leadership 3:2 (1992): 165–82. See Sarita Srivastava, ‘Song and Dance? The Performance of Antiracist Workshops,’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 33:3 (1996): 292– 315; Srivastava, ‘Tears, Fears, and Careers: Antiracism, Emotion, and Social Movement Organizations,’ Canadian Journal of Sociology 31:1 (March 2006): 55–90; and Srivastava and Francis, ‘The Problem of “Authentic Experience”: Storytelling in Anti-Racist and Anti-Homophobic Education,’ Critical Sociology, 32:2–3 (2006): 275–307. This research is based on twenty-one confidential interviews with white and non-white feminists involved in antiracist efforts in eighteen women’s organizations based in Toronto, Canada, including drop-in centres, shelters, feminist advocacy groups, and feminist publications and publishers. In order to preserve this confidentiality, neither the individuals nor the organizations are named. Pseudonyms have been used where necessary. I also draw on observations of twelve antiracist workshops or workshop series, as well as numerous organizational meetings, in a variety of sites including feminist, environmental, social justice, and popular educational organizations, and an Aboriginal youth conference. In five of these workshop series I was either a participant or a facilitator.

312 Sarita Srivastava 10 See for example Ziauddin Sardar, ‘The Rise of the Voyeur,’ New Statesman 129, 6 November (2000): 25–7, which documents the rise of the reality TV format; and Suzanne Moore, ‘On Talk Shows the Democracy of Pain Reigns Supreme: We May Not All be Famous, but We Have All Suffered,’ New Statesman 128, 12 February (1999): n.p. 11 Rick Arnold and Bev Burke, A Popular Education Handbook (Ottawa: CUSO Development Education and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1983); and Rick Arnold, Deborah Barndt, and Bev Burke, A New Weave: Popular Education in Canada and Central America (Ottawa: CUSO Development Education and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1985). 12 Nancy Adamson, Linda Briskin, and Margaret McPhail, Feminist Organizing for Change: The Contemporary Women’s Movement in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), 241. 13 Sherryl Kleinman, Opposing Ambitions: Gender and Identity in an Alternative Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 75. 14 Ibid. 15 George Dei, ‘The Challenges of Anti-Racist Education in Canada,’ Canadian Ethnic Studies 25:2 (1993): 47. 16 Sherene Razack, ‘Storytelling for Social Change,’ Gender and Education 5:1 (1993): 63. 17 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992). 18 Gail Pheterson, ‘Alliances between Women: Overcoming Internalized Oppression and Internalized Domination,’ in Reconstructing the Academy: Women’s Education and Women’s Studies, ed. Elizabeth Minnich, Jean O’Barr, and Rachel Rosenfeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 19 Srivastava, ‘Song and Dance?’ 20 Razack, ‘Storytelling for Social Change’; Akua Benjamin, ‘Critiquing AntiRacist Consultancy,’ presentation at Making the Links: Anti-Racism and Feminism, a conference of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW), Toronto, 13–15 November 1992; Elizabeth Ellsworth, ‘Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,’ Harvard Educational Review 59:3 (1989): 297–324; Sarita Srivastava, ‘Voyeurism and Vulnerability: Critiquing the Power Relations of Anti-Racist Education,’ Canadian Woman Studies 14:2 (1994): 105–9. 21 All unattributed quotations are taken from my interview transcripts. 22 Ahmed Gurnah, ‘The Politics of Racism Awareness Training,’ Critical Social Policy 10 (Summer 1984): 7. 23 Tim McCaskell, ‘Anti-Racist Education and Practice in the School System,’

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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in S. Richer and L. Weir (eds.), Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 253–72. Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, The Resource Guide for Antiracist an Ethnocultural Equity Education, JK–Grade 9 (Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, 1994), 19. David Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 117. Enid Lee, Letters to Marcia (Toronto: Cross Cultural Communication Centre, 1985), 8. Deborah Britzman, ‘The Ordeal of Knowledge: Rethinking the Possibilities of Multicultural Education,’ Review of Education 15 (1993): 126. Cynthia Wright, personal communication, November 2001. Linda Carty, ‘Women’s Studies in Canada: A Discourse and Praxis of Education,’ Resources for Feminist Research 20:3/4 (1992): 15. Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), xx. For example, the cover of Toronto Life magazine in February 1993 trumpeted an exposé of antiracist struggles at a women’s shelter with the headline, ‘Battered Woman: Why Angry Women of Colour Drove June Callwood from the Shelter She Created.’ See E. Dewar, ‘Wrongful Dismissal,’ Toronto Life, March 1993. Britzman, ‘The Ordeal of Knowledge,’ 126. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52. Ibid. Basil Moore, ‘The Prejudice Thesis and the De-politicization of Racism,’ Discourse 14:1 (1993): 64. McCaskell, and Domenic Bellissimo, ‘Exposing Young Minds to Equity,’ Orbit 25:2 (1994). Srivastava, ‘Song and Dance?’ The now amalgamated Toronto District School Board was recently considering a report regarding cost-cutting that recommends eliminating all equity programs and staffing. Robin Morgan, in her anthology of women’s organizing around the world, conceived of sisterhood as the ‘common condition’ and ‘world view’ of all women; Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (New York: Anchor Books, 1984).

18 Present and Future Education: A Tale of Two Economies michael albert

Thinking about education involves two broad frames of reference, which in turn generate two approaches of study. Part of education is intrinsic and oriented towards the individual. To think about education starting with the student, we examine the process of conveying information and skills and developing talents in students. We ask, What is the best way to educate students, given the exigencies of what is taught, the attributes of students, and the abilities of teachers? But part of education is also contextual and social. To think about education starting with society, we examine the process of transferring information and skills and developing talents from the point of view of society’s needs. We ask, What is the best way to educate students consistent with accomplishing what society seeks? Ideally, we will get the same answer from either of these angles. Ideally, society’s interests and those of each new generation of students will accord. If so, we will have a clear agenda. If not, we will have to choose between serving students and serving society’s dictates. Most readers of this book live in societies that have capitalist economies with private ownership of productive assets, corporate divisions of labour, authoritarian decision-making, and market allocation. Because of these institutions, capitalism incorporates huge disparities in wealth and income. About 2 per cent of the population, called capitalists, own productive property and accrue the benefits. What I call the ‘coordinator class’ of empowered lawyers, doctors, engineers, managers, and so on, comprises roughly 20 per cent of the population and largely monopolizes empowering work and the daily levers of control over their own and other people’s economic lives. The coordina-

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tors enjoy high incomes, privileged status, and great personal and group influence over economic outcomes. Finally, the bottom 80 per cent of the population do largely rote work, take orders from those above, barely influence economic outcomes, and receive low income. This is the working class. This threefold class division is brought into being by the key institutions of capitalism. First, private ownership of productive property demarcates the dominant capitalist class. Markets structurally impose on owners a need to accumulate profits. The corporate decisionmaking structure gives them their ultimate power to dispose over their property. Second, the small number of owners and the large requirements of control propel the creation of an intermediate coordinator class. The corporate division of labour defines the coordinator class as monopolizing empowering work and access to daily decision-making levers. The requisites of legitimation ensure that this class will also monopolize training, skills, and knowledge – as well as the confidence that accompany these. Third, all these features ensure that the largest portion of citizens are left with little or no individual bargaining power; they must work for low wages at rote, tedious, obedient jobs. These features vary in the suffering they impose and the options they permit, depending on the relative bargaining power of the three classes. But in every instance of capitalism, the broad scaffolding of the economy’s defining institutions is always the same. What are the implications for education? If an economy has 2 per cent ruling, about 18–20 per cent administering and defining, and about 80 per cent obeying, then each year’s new recruits from the educational system must be acclimated to occupy their designated slots. These recruits must be prepared to exercise their functions, to pay attention to their responsibilities, and to ignore distractions. This is true for those who will rule, for those who will have great but less than ruling power, and for those who will overwhelmingly obey. A useful word for all this is ‘channelling.’ Each new generation is channelled into its appropriate destinations. The educational system takes the incoming population and processes it so that for about 80 per cent of its members the inclination to impact events is reduced to nearly nil, confidence is nearly obliterated, knowledge is kept minimal and narrow, and the main skills learned are to obey and to endure boredom. Another 20 per cent are channelled to expect to have a say, to have

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confidence, to have a monopoly on various skills and insights, and so on. The elite learn at the major societal ‘finishing schools’ such as Harvard and Oxford how to have dinner with one another and otherwise comport themselves in accord with their lofty station. The point is simple. If a society requires its populace to have three broad patterns of hopes, expectations, and capacities, its educational system will divide its populace and provide precisely those differentiated outcomes. In that context, any effort to look at education from the perspective of each individual maximally developing his or her potentials and pursuing his or her interests will be mere rhetoric or will be limited by presuppositions that most people have no serious potentials or interests, or will try to attain outcomes against the economy’s needs. Indeed, these are precisely the attitudes regarding education we see in our societies. Is there any alternative? Will society’s hierarchies always trump pedagogy aimed at developing each student’s potentials and aspirations? Will significant gains for students only arrive as a result of struggle, and only persist while they are steadfastly defended, being periodically obliterated whenever vigilance diminishes? When the Carnegie Commission on Education considered the state of U.S. education as part of a governmental effort to understand what ‘went wrong’ in the 1960s, it decided that the problem was too much education. The population, the commission reported, expected to have too much say in society, too much income, too much job fulfilment, too much dignity and respect – and upon getting ready to enter the economy, many members of the population had their expectations dashed and they rebelled as a consequence. The solution, the commission argued, was to reduce the tendency for education to induce high expectations in most of the population. Higher education would have to be cut back and lower education made more rote and mechanical – save for those who were destined to rule, of course. If we look at education from the perspective of the person to be educated, the authors and readers of this book may have differences or open questions about exact methodologies, but I suspect we would all agree on broad aims. We should help students to discover their capacities and potentials, to explore them, and to fulfill those they wish to pursue, while they simultaneously become broadly confident and able to think and reason and argue and assess in the ways needed to be one among many

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socially equal and caring actors. Others might formulate this mandate a bit differently, but one thing is quite clear: for this type of education to happen, society must need this type of incoming adult. It must not want wage slaves who are obedient and passive, for example. To be compatible with worthy pedagogy conceived from the student’s perspective, the economy needs to call forth from all participants the fullest utilization of their capacities and inclinations. What kind of economy, in place of capitalism, could do this? The alternative I propose I call ‘participatory economics’ – ‘parecon’ for short. In summary, parecon seeks to fulfil four key values (in addition to meeting needs and fulfilling potentials) by embracing four defining institutional commitments. The values are solidarity, diversity, equity, and self-management. The institutions are workers’ and consumers’ councils with self-managed decision-making norms and methods, balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and participatory planning. The first value is solidarity. Capitalism is a system in which to get ahead one must trample others. You must ignore the horrible pain suffered by those left below or literally step on them, pushing them farther down. In capitalism, as a famous baseball manager used to say, ‘nice guys finish last.’ In contrast, participatory economics is intrinsically a solidarity economy. Its institutions for production, consumption, and allocation compel even antisocial people to address the well-being of others. To get ahead in a parecon, you have to act on the basis of solidarity. This first parecon value is entirely uncontroversial. Only a psychopath would argue that, all else being equal, an economy is better if it produces hostility and antisociality. The second value we want a good economy to advance is diversity. Capitalist markets homogenize options. They trumpet opportunity but in fact curtail most avenues of satisfaction and development by replacing everything human and caring with what is most commercial, most profitable, and most in accord with existing hierarchies of power and wealth. In contrast, parecon’s institutions for production, consumption, and allocation not only don’t reduce variety, they emphasize finding and respecting diverse solutions to problems. Parecon recognizes that we are finite beings who can benefit from enjoying what others do that we ourselves have no time to do, and also that we are fallible beings who should not vest all our hopes in single routes of advance; instead, we should insure ourselves against damage by exploring di-

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verse avenues and options. And this value, too, is entirely uncontroversial. Only a perverse individual would argue that, all things being equal, an economy is better if it reduces options. The third value we want a good economy to advance is equity. Capitalism overwhelmingly rewards property and bargaining power. It says that those who have a deed to productive property by virtue of having that piece of paper deserve profits. And it says that those who have great bargaining power based on anything from monopolizing knowledge or skills, to having better tools or organizational advantages, to being born with special talents, to being able to command by brute force, are entitled to whatever they can take. A participatory economy is, in contrast, an equity economy in that parecon’s institutions for production, consumption, and allocation not only don’t destroy or obstruct equity, but actually propel it. But what do we mean by equity? Parecon of course rejects rewarding property ownership. And it of course also rejects rewarding power. But what about output? Should people get back from the social product an amount equal to what they produce as part of the social product? It seems equitable ... but is it? Supposing in each case that they do the same work for the same length of time at the same intensity, why should someone who has better tools get more income than someone with worse tools? Why should someone who happens to produce something highly valued be rewarded more than someone who produces something less valued, but still socially desired? Why should someone who was lucky in the genetic lottery – perhaps getting genes for big size or for musical talent – get rewarded more than someone who was less lucky genetically? In a participatory economy, for those who can work, remuneration is for effort and sacrifice. If you work longer, you get more reward. If you work harder, you get more reward. If you work in worse conditions and at more onerous tasks, you get more reward. But you do not get more reward for having better tools, or for producing something that happens to be more valued, or even for having innate, highly productive talents. Rewarding only the effort and sacrifice that people expend in their work is controversial. Some anticapitalists think that people should be rewarded for output, so that a great athlete should earn a fortune, and a quality doctor should earn way more than a hard-working farmer or short-order cook. Parecon rejects that norm. In fact, rewarding according to effort and sacrifice, if one person had a nice, comfortable, pleas-

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ant, highly productive job, and another person had an onerous, debilitating, and less productive but still socially valuable job, the latter person would earn more per hour than the former. So, we have our third value, a controversial one. We want a good economy to remunerate effort and sacrifice, and, of course, when people can’t work, to provide full income anyway. The fourth and final value on which parecon is built has to do with decisions and is called self-management. In capitalism owners or capitalists have tremendous say. Managers and high-level intellectual workers who monopolize daily decision-making levers – lawyers, engineers, financial officers, doctors – have substantial say. People doing rote and obedient labour rarely even know what decisions are being made, much less impact them. In contrast, a participatory economy is a democratic economy. People control their own lives to appropriate degrees. Each person has a level of say that doesn’t impinge on other people having the same level of say. We affect decisions in proportion as we are affected by them. This is called self-management. Imagine that a worker wants to place a picture of a daughter on his or her workstation. Who should make that decision? Should some owner decide? Should a manager decide? Should all the workers decide? Obviously, none of that makes sense. The worker whose child it is should decide, alone, with full authority. He or she should be literally a dictator in this particular case. Now suppose instead that the same worker wants to put a radio on his or her desk and play it very loud, listening to blaring rock ’n’ roll. Now who should decide? We all intuitively know that the answer is that those who will hear the radio should have a say. And that those who will be more bothered – or more benefited – should have more say. And at this point, we have already arrived at a value vis-à-vis decision making. We don’t need a philosopher with a PhD. We don’t need incomprehensible language. We simply realize that we don’t want oneperson, one-vote, and 50 per cent rules all the time. Nor do we always want one-person, one-vote and some other percentage required for agreement. Nor do we always want one person to decide authoritatively, as a dictator. Nor do we always want consensus. Nor do we always want any other single approach. All these methods of making decisions make sense in some cases but are horrible in other cases. What we hope when we choose modes of decision making and a process of discussing issues, setting agendas, and so on, is that each

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actor will have an influence on decisions in proportion to the degree he or she is affected by them. Participatory economics is built on a few centrally defining institutional choices. Workers and consumers need a place to express and pursue their preferences. Historically these have been workers’ and consumers’ councils. In a parecon, within a given council, there is an additional commitment to using decision-making procedures and modes of communication that apportion to each actor, regarding each decision, a degree of say proportionate to the degree to which he or she is affected. Votes can be majority rule, three-quarters, two-thirds, consensus, or some other possibility. They are taken at different levels, with fewer or more participants, and use different procedures, depending on the particular implications of the decision at hand. Sometimes a team or individual will make a decision pretty much on its own. Sometimes a whole workplace or even an industry will be the decision body. Different voting and tallying methods will be employed as needed for different decisions. The next institutional commitment is to remunerate people for effort and sacrifice, not for property, power, or even output. Who decides how hard we have worked? Our workers’ councils decide, in context of the broad economic setting established by other institutions. If you work longer, you are entitled to more of the social product. If you work more intensely, again you are entitled to more income. If you work at more onerous or dangerous or boring tasks, again, you are entitled to more income. But you aren’t entitled to more income as a result of owning productive property, because no one owns productive property – it is all socially owned. And you aren’t entitled to more income as a result of working with better tools, or producing something more valued, or even having personal traits that make you more productive, because these involve luck or endowment, not effort or sacrifice. Greater output is appreciated, of course ... but there is no extra pay for it. Both morally and in terms of incentives, parecon does precisely what makes sense. The extra pay we get is for what we deserve to have rewarded – our sacrifice at work. And that extra pay elicits what we can in fact generate more of – our effort. All right, but suppose we have workers’ and consumers’ councils. Suppose we believe in participation, democracy, and even self-management. And also suppose our workplace has a typical corporate division of labour. What will happen? The roughly 20 per cent of workers who monopolize, through their

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positions in this corporate division of labour, the daily decision-making positions and the knowledge that is essential to understanding what is going on and to evaluating options, are going to set agendas. Their pronouncements will be authoritative. Even if other workers have voting rights, it will be to vote on plans and options put forward only by this coordinator class. It will be the will of this class that decides outcomes. In time this elite will also decide that it deserves more pay to nurture its great wisdom. It will separate itself not only in power, but also in income and status. So what is the alternative? Participatory economics utilizes balanced job complexes. Instead of combining tasks so that some jobs are highly empowering and other jobs are horribly stultifying, so that some jobs convey knowledge and have authority whereas other jobs diminish knowledge and involve obeying orders, parecon involves making each job comparable to all others in its quality-of-life effects and in its empowerment effects. Each person has a job. Each job involves many tasks. In a parecon, each job is suited to the talents and capacities and energies of the person doing it. But each job is also a mix of tasks and responsibilities such that the overall quality of life and especially the overall empowerment effects of the work are comparable for all. A parecon doesn’t have someone who does only surgery, but instead has people who do some surgery, and some cleaning of the hospital, and some other tasks – such that the sum of all that they do incorporates a fair mix of tasks. A parecon doesn’t have managers and workers. It doesn’t have lawyers and short-order cooks. It doesn’t have engineers and assembly-line workers – though all the associated tasks get done. A parecon has people who all do a mix of things in their work such that each person’s mix accords with his or her abilities and also conveys a fair share of rote and tedious and interesting and empowering conditions and responsibilities. Our work doesn’t prepare a few of us to rule and the rest of us to obey. It prepares us all to participate in self-managing workers’ and consumers’ councils. It readies all of us to engage sensibly and productively in self-managing our lives and institutions. But what if we have a new economy with workers’ and consumers’ councils, with self-managing decision-making rules, with remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and with balanced job complexes – but we combine all this with markets or central planning for allocation? Would that work?

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Markets destroy the remuneration scheme and create a competitive context in which workplaces have to cut costs and seek market share. To do this, they virtually have no choice but to insulate some people from the discomfort that cost-cutting imposes – precisely the people who are earmarked to figure out which costs to cut and how to generate more output at the expense of fulfilment – and so emerges, again, the coordinator class, located above workers, violating our preferred norms of remuneration, accruing power, and obliterating the self-management we desire. The same would hold with regard to central planning. It too would immediately elevate planners and, shortly after that, elevate planners’ managerial agents in each workplace, and then also all those actors in the economy who share the same type of credentials. Central planning would also impose a coordinator class division and coordinator rule over workers, who would be made subordinate. The problem with markets and central planning is that they subvert the values and associated structures we have deemed worthy. Suppose that, in place of top-down imposition of centrally planned choices and in place of competitive market exchange by atomized buyers and sellers, we opt for cooperative, informed, self-managed negotiation of allocation by socially entwined actors. Each of these people will have a say in proportion as choices affect them; each will be able to access accurate information and valuations; and each will have appropriate training and confidence to develop and communicate his or her preferences. That would advance council-centred participatory selfmanagement, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and balanced job complexes. It would also provide proper valuations of personal, social, and ecological impacts, and promote classlessness. Under participatory planning, workers’ and consumers’ councils would propose their work activities and their consumption preferences in light of accurate knowledge about the local and global implications and accurate valuations of the full social benefits and costs of their choices. This system utilizes a back-and-forth cooperative communication of mutually informed preferences by means of a variety of simple communicative and organizing principles and tools, including indicative prices, facilitation boards, and rounds of accommodation to new information. All of these would permit actors to express their desires and to mediate and refine them in light of feedback about others’ desires, and to arrive at compatible choices consistent with the values we have highlighted.

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Actors indicate their preferences. They learn what others have indicated. They alter their preferences in an effort to move towards a viable plan. At each new step in the cooperative negotiation, each actor is seeking well-being and development, but each can get ahead only in accord with social advance, not by exploiting others. In an essay of this length, it is impossible to describe this entire system and all its features, and to show how they are both viable and worthy.1 Participatory economics fosters classlessness. I can get better working conditions if the average job complex throughout a parecon improves. I can get a higher income if I work harder or longer with my workmates, or if the average income throughout society increases. I not only advance in solidarity with other economic actors, but also influence all economic decisions – both those in my workplace and those throughout the rest of the economy – at a level proportionate to the impact of those decisions on me. Parecon not only eliminates inequitable disparities in wealth and income, it attains just distribution. It not only refuses to force actors to violate one another’s lives, it produces solidarity. It not only resists homogeneous outcomes, it generates diversity. It not only rejects giving a small ruling class tremendous power while burdening the bulk of the population with powerlessness, it produces appropriate influence for all. And so, we arrive back at education. Eighty per cent of us are presently taught in schools to endure boredom and to take orders because that’s what capitalism requires of its workers. The other 20 per cent are made callous to the conditions of those below and ignorant of their own callousness, save for those at the very top, who are simply made cruel. In a parecon, education must be compatible with society’s broad defining institutions. Indeed, that will be true in every society, always. But in a society with a parecon – assuming that other spheres of social life are comparably just and equitable – society will need us to be as capable and creative and productive as we can be, and to participate as full citizens. A parecon is a solidarity economy, a diversity economy, an equity economy, and a self-managing economy. It is a classless economy. In this respect, its educational system would be based on and generate solidarity, diversity, equity, and self-management – as well as rich and diverse capacities for comprehension and creativity. The point is that, under capitalism, talk of desirable pedagogy has

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two possible logics. On the one hand, it may be about pedagogy that is consistent with the reproduction of social hierarchies. If so, it is more about control and channelling than about what most of us mean by education, such as edification and fulfilment. On the other hand, it may be about edification and fulfilment; if so, it is oppositional, in the sense that it is trying to establish outcomes contrary to the logic of the market, private ownership, remuneration for property and power, and corporate divisions of labour. My point in this essay is that if we ultimately want really worthy education – like really worthy health care, or art, or sports, or production, or consumption – we will need a new economy with a new logic and structure. I would argue that this new economy ought to be what I have called participatory economics. With participatory economics, good education isn’t something we win and then perpetually defend or lose because the underlying institutions of society are at odds with it. Good education is part and parcel of the logic of society. Are there implications for the actual structure and procedures of schooling and education that are implicit in the logic and structures of parecon? I would guess that the answer is yes, not least because educational institutions would be self-managing, would interface with participatory planning, would incorporate balanced job complexes, and so on. For the specific meaning of all that regarding pedagogy, though, and for related issues regarding more detailed and specific matters of actual methodology of training, learning, and so on, I am not equipped to offer even suggestions. I’d rather stop at this stage. I have made the one broad point about the economic context of education, both as we endure it now and as we might enjoy it in a better future. I feel secure in asserting that capitalism annihilates aspirations for worthy education, and that parecon would actualize them.

Ne Travaillez Jamais: Parecon or Exodus? a reply to michael albert by nick dyer-witheford No utopian pedagogy without a practical utopia! This should be a watchword for all anticapitalist educators, for it cautions against the bad faith of critique without alternative, and against the slippage from radical theory to reformist politics. Michael Albert’s account of parecon

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is a vital contribution both to the overall reconstruction of a twentyfirst-century Left, and to the specific discussion of pedagogy this book undertakes. Part of such discussion, however, involves clarifying disagreements and multiplying options, so here I will make some criticisms of parecon and outline an alternative to Albert’s alternative. Unlike many of parecon’s critics, I dissent from it not because it is too utopian, but because it isn’t utopian enough – because it fails to recognize a historic opportunity to break with ‘the society of work.’ All previous societies have, perhaps, been societies of work. They have made mandatory labour a central institution, one that is required for livelihood and that is definitive of social identity. But the capitalist revolution, by commodifying human creativity, instituted a peculiarly intense form of this regime. Indeed, we need to remember that capitalism created work as we know it today, in the form of ‘the job’ – a concept that is being projected into visions of a future, thereby laden with baggage from a capitalist past. With the necessity of ‘the job’ came the systematic smashing of subsistence practices, idleness, and carnival. Hard work became equated with moral virtue (the Protestant work ethic), a reductionist, utilitarian ideology that recognized humans only as supports for an economic system, as workers, managers, and (later) consumers. Calculative rationality and administrative bureaucracies were then developed as tools to police this order of market-compelled labour. These are the interconnected antecedents of today’s global factory. Historically, the Left has had difficulty deciding how much of this nexus to reject. State socialism replaced the market with command planning but did not break with the society of work. On the contrary, it made of Marxism a new and nightmarish economic reductionism, glorified the toil that built the so-called workers’ state, and enforced that toil with totalizing discipline. It was against the conversion of communism into a gigantic workhouse that the libertarian Left fought. All the more surprising, then, to find in parecon an anarcho-socialist version of the society of work.2 Consider the language of Albert’s account. This is a description of postcapitalism that speaks almost exclusively of humans as economic agents – as ‘workers,’ ‘consumers,’ and ‘managers’ – albeit ‘self-managers.’ This functionalist vision is as austere as Bentham’s or Bukharin’s. Perhaps parecon sounds this way because in articulating an economic system, even an alternative one, Albert has no choice but to use economists’ categories. Perhaps. But the world of parecon as described in his article is one of work and meetings. A world oriented towards balancing the ‘job complex.’ A world of toil

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and committees. Self-organized toil and committees, certainly; more fairly distributed toil and committees, probably; but toil and committees nonetheless. It is also a world that really would (once again) foster hard work: that would approve ‘remuneration for effort and sacrifice,’ giving you more reward ‘if you work longer … work harder … more intensely … in worse conditions and at more onerous tasks.’ And it would encourage such work even if it were not actually socially necessary; Albert insists that such toil should be well rewarded even if it could be done more efficiently, with better tools or organization. This, he rightly notes, is ‘controversial.’ I would call it astounding: a recipe for anarchoProtestantism, for a society of self-organized superfluous overtime, endlessly administered by councils of auto-apparatchiks who have internalized the ideology of ‘sacrifice at work.’ What is missing from this vision? Time off. Time away. Time off from work – even work in ‘balanced job complexes.’ Time away from meetings – even those wonderful meetings involving ‘cooperative, informed self-managed negotiation of allocation by socially entwined actors.’ Time off from managing the self, from obligatory social participation, from planning, and from being evaluated according to how sacrificial, intense, or onerous one’s toil is. Time for play, aesthetics, sex, mysticism, conviviality, idleness, carnival, and learning. Struggles to maximize free time – rather than to provide incentives for long, onerous labour – have historically been crucial to the Left. But there is no mention in Albert’s essay of more leisure, shorter hours, the reduction of the working day. Albert’s book, Parecon: Life after Capitalism, both clarifies and confirms this point. In parecon, people would have greater liberty to decide the labour/leisure trade-off than under capitalism – certainly a good thing – but livelihood would remain conditional on a job, as very traditionally conceived: ‘People can work less and consume less, or work more and consume more, in each case in proportion to the effort/sacrifice involved.’3 But is it not precisely this narrow equation between sacrifice and livelihood that a practical utopia should reconsider? If we are to remake so many of the habits, institutions, and ideologies formed by capitalism, why stop short at preserving that ultimate sacred cow, that possessively individualized quantum of labour – ‘the job’? Parecon is a long way from the graffiti scrawled by the students of 1968 as they battled police in the streets of Paris: ‘Ne travaillez jamais’ (never work). That slogan – hyperbolic, certainly, a bit juvenile, maybe,

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but undeniably joyous – was an expression of another sort of Left utopianism, one very different in tone from the puritanical planning of parecon – but not necessarily less practical. This approach lacks a single manifesto as eloquent as Albert’s account of parecon. It goes by a variety of names: ‘the refusal of work,’ ‘zerowork,’ ‘autonomism.’ For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call it a strategy of ‘exodus.’4 Exodus aims not to reorganize the society of work, but to defect from it. Its recurrent theme is the possibility of using the cornucopian productive capacities of capital to explode its constricted social relations. What, today, makes the strategy of exodus less of a dream and more of practicality are the potentially high levels of productivity and reproductivity enabled by computers and other new technologies, although very rarely reached in the context of hierarchical corporate organizations preoccupied with intellectual property rights. A good current example of exodus-style practice would, therefore, be the explosion of ‘dot.communist’ experiments, from peer-to-peer networks to open-source software. Other exodus examples of the free distribution of goods, independent of the recipients’ sacrifice, range from some of the educational experiments described in this volume to ‘food not bombs’ kitchens. The ‘exodus’ strategy has focused on the social wage, sometimes known as the citizen’s wage or basic income. The idea here is to break the dependence of livelihood on work by providing everyone with a guaranteed remuneration. A social wage could be inaugurated at a modest level, adequate to free people from having to sell their labour power, even if the possibility of supplementation continues for a while. Its level should rise as social productivity rises, and this should be accompanied by a generalized reduction in waged work, to a point where the social wage becomes the main form of income. The idea of universal income is to free people from mandatory labour, rather than to involve us more intensively in its organization; it is to create ‘the right to be lazy.’5 There is not space here to review the history and complexities of the concept of the social wage, or to explore whether it is antithetical to participatory planning or might in some way be combined with it. Rather, I’ll quickly and schematically compare and contrast education in hypothetical societies of parecon and exodus, not so much in terms of institutional organization, but in terms of pedagogical content. One similarity between parecon and exodus is, I think, that both would want high levels of technoscientific training and research: parecon

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because of the very sophisticated society-wide systems of computerized simulation, communication, and planning that Albert envisages; exodus because it entails developing technologies to minimize unpleasant work and maximize free time. Both, though in significantly different ways, therefore depend (to a degree that might antagonize some of our more Luddite comrades) on the high development of what used to be called ‘forces of production’ – so both require education for a socialist technoculture, pedagogy for commie cyborgs. Beyond this, however, there are real differences. Education under parecon would involve a lot of socialization for cooperation and planning, because in such a system, people would be committee-servers and self-administrators par excellence. There would also be a lot of vocational training, since everyone would be required to have, in effect, not one job but several – a sort of ultimate post-Fordist flexworker. And, of course, there would have to be a certain amount of social conditioning about the merits of preserving unnecessarily onerous and sacrificial work, because this is the sort of thing that requires serious indoctrination. There’s much about all this that might be positive; but there is also something that recapitulates the instrumental, functionalist, and cheerleading tendencies of contemporary capitalist education: like being on the inside of a vast, democratized MBA program. Education in exodus, on the other hand, would involve a lot of ‘useless’ activity. Since its emphasis would be on creating space and time for autonomous self-development, we can anticipate that people would want to learn and teach about many of the things that are more or less pointless in terms of work or administration – things like deepspace astronomy, neo-Platonism, and minor literatures, things that are non-functional from the point of view of the economy, whether organized by capitalist managers or democratic committees. Of course, ‘useless’ is in quotation marks, since it is from such non-obligatory activities that many socially valuable forms of cooperation and innovation emerge … among which we might include writing, thinking, and arguing about alternatives to the existing social order, including about how to organize education, just as we are doing now, in this book. It is only by multiplying such spaces of discussion – which is in itself a part of exodus – that transformation can be achieved. The success of Albert’s writings on parecon confirm that a strong desire exists for such a transformation. All the more reason, then, not to confine the collective imagination within the dead categories inherited from the society of work.

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Jobs Are Not the Problem a reply to nick dyer-witheford by michael albert Nick Dyer-Witheford’s idea that incorporating ‘jobs’ into a model of a future economy is somehow missing an opportunity to be more radical by doing away with work per se makes no sense to me. I guess, therefore, we have a real disagreement. An economy of the future will of course involve people grouping together to produce products from inputs, to allocate the inputs and products, and to consume the products. Of course it will involve much else as well, but that is another matter. Parecon says that work in a society ought to be decided by the selfmanaging say of its citizens, each of whom has appropriate claims on the product. To these ends, parecon proposes balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and other features noted in my original essay. Saying that work should be handled via new arrangements of the division of labour, decision-making, and allocation in no way implies ‘commodifying human creativity,’ eliminating ‘carnival,’ equating ‘hard work with moral virtue,’ adopting a view of humans as only producers, and so on. Dyer-Witheford implies but offers no reasons to believe that parecon is saddled with such failings because it has ‘jobs.’ The one claim in Dyer-Witheford’s list of debits that is almost true of parecon is that ‘it makes labour mandatory.’ But what parecon says is that if people are able to work and wish to enjoy the fruits of social labour, then they have to partake of that labour – in a socially useful manner – and, having done so, their share of the output will be governed by the duration, intensity, and onerousness of the work they do. Dyer-Witheford says nothing about why this is unwise. The fact that I described an economy means that I talked about work, the division of labour, and so on, and not about kinship relations, culture, religion, and so on. That is an artifact of the topic, not an indication of priorities. And as long as there will be work, isn’t it correct to handle it in a way that is fair, just, and in accord with our values? Dyer-Witheford writes that the language of my account – ‘workers,’ ‘consumers,’ and ‘managers’ – albeit ‘self-managers’ – is economistic and narrow. Sure it is, but the article is about economics and education, not about sex and education, or art and education, and so on. Humans

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are multifaceted and have diverse dimensions of development and involvement, but we needn’t always discuss everything. To say that ‘the world of parecon ... is one of work and meetings’ is silly – though I did talk a lot about work and decisions because the article is about how work ought to be undertaken and organized, and about how inputs and outputs ought to be allocated, and about the impact of each on education. Dyer-Witheford says, ‘More fairly distributed toil and committees, probably; but toil and committees nonetheless.’ Yes, along with pleasure and other pursuits too, of course, so the ‘more fairly’ is precisely the point. Does Dyer-Witheford really doubt there will be labour, including unpleasant and even rote and tedious labour, in a new economy? Isn’t it better to handle such labour, in whatever volume it remains, in accord with just remuneration, classlessness, and so on? Dyer-Witheford says, ‘It is also a world ... that approves “remuneration for effort and sacrifice,” giving you more reward “if you work longer ... work harder ... more intensely ... in worse conditions and at more onerous tasks.”’ That is correct. But Dyer-Witheford adds, ‘And it encourages such work even if it isn’t actually socially necessary.’ That is false. In fact, there is remuneration in a parecon only for work that is socially valued, which means it utilizes assets in accordance with needs, without waste, and so forth. Another misunderstanding is that ‘toil should be well rewarded even if it could be done more efficiently, with better tools or organization.’ No, if work can be done with better tools, then it will be or it won’t be remunerated due to being socially wasteful. However, the point actually made is that if there aren’t enough good tools to go around, then those who use better tools will not earn more than those who use worse ones. Dyer-Witheford asks, ‘What is missing from this vision? Time off. Time away. Time off from work – even work in ‘‘balanced job complexes.’’’ If Dyer-Witheford means I didn’t try to say what people will do with their non-work, non-economy time, that is correct. If he thinks he knows what they will do, fine – but I certainly don’t. But, parecon not only has time off, it places no pressure on people to work once they have met the needs they wish to meet. Individuals can work less than the social average without penalty, and there is no upward pressure on the broad social average either. Indeed, ironically, the main complaint made by mainstream economists about parecon is precisely this – that in a parecon people would choose to work many less hours.

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‘There is no mention ... of more leisure, shorter hours, the reduction of the working day.’ This may well be the case in this short essay, but in longer essays I have made it perfectly clear that in a parecon the length of the work day, week, and year are entirely a matter of people’s preferences: they can enjoy more output by doing more labour, or they can enjoy more leisure by opting for shorter work hours. Dyer-Witheford rightly says, ‘Albert’s book, Parecon: Life after Capitalism,6 both clarifies and confirms this point. In parecon, people would have greater liberty to decide the labour/leisure trade-off than under capitalism – certainly a good thing – but livelihood would remain conditional on a job, as very traditionally conceived: ‘People can work less and consume less, or work more and consume more, in each case in proportion to the effort/sacrifice involved.’ But then he adds, ‘But is it not precisely this narrow equation between sacrifice and livelihood that a practical utopia should reconsider?’ My answer is that as long as there are onerous things to do, they ought to be justly distributed. We should share the burdens and the benefits of being a member of society fairly, justly, and in ways that propel the values we aspire to. If Dyer-Witheford has a proposal he thinks would succeed better than parecon at developing potentials and meeting needs (including needs for leisure, carnival, and so on), I am eager to hear it, of course. Dyer-Witheford asks: ‘Why [preserve] that ultimate sacred cow, that possessively individualized quantum of labour – “the job”?’ I am befuddled. If he means we should get rid of alienated labour, get rid of subordinated labour, get rid of unjustly rewarded labour, and also strive to increase the average quality of labour – I very much agree. But if he means we should keep labour but let some able people not do it, I reject that on grounds of equity, solidarity, and so forth. And if he means we should get rid of labour, period, I think he is out of touch with reality – out of touch not only with reality’s material requirements, but also with the positive virtues of self-managed labour. My guess is that Dyer-Witheford has no institutional suggestions for operating an economy without work, nor, much more realistically, for operating one that seeks to reduce onerous tasks while sharing them fairly and in accordance with people’s needs and desires, which is what parecon achieves. His idea that we should ‘break the dependence of livelihood on work by providing everyone with guaranteed remuneration’ leaves open many questions. How high is this guaranteed income? Where are the products people consume to come from? With what

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division of labour is production to be undertaken? With what modes of remuneration, with what decision-making, with what allocation? Imagine a thousand people shipwrecked. We arrive on shore. We have various tools. There are children. We realize it is likely to be a year or more until we are rescued. We need signal fires, housing, food, schools, day care, ways of enjoying ourselves using produced goods, and so on. So we start to discuss how to organize the economic part of our small society ... and Dyer-Witheford says, ‘Hey, I would rather go swimming all day and play on the beach. But I want a house, food, benefits of the signal fire, day care for my kids.’ Or maybe he says everyone should have all that, automatically. Some people may think this island should morally honour such a request or even that it could function sensibly while elevating such a request as virtuous – but I don’t. I would instead work with others on this island to try to figure out how to divide up our tasks so we all had comparably empowering responsibilities and also our fair share of the less pleasant work, and how to mediate between consumption desires and production inclinations on behalf of meeting needs and developing potentials consistent with values we all celebrate. Dyer-Witheford might say, ‘But we don’t live on an island. We have modern technology.’ True, and this may mean we can have less onerous work to share, and can have more output to share, but not no onerous work and limitless output. Thus, whatever the ratios, we are back to defining economic institutions, rather than assuming them away. Dyer-Witheford says, ‘The idea of universal income is to free people from mandatory labour, rather than to involve us more intensively in its organization; it is rather to create “the right to be lazy.”’ Does he think that the content of the social wage comes into being without labour? Can we all be lazy? And if some work has to be done, who is to do it, and shouldn’t it be done without class division and rule, and, if so, how do we achieve that? Dyer-Witheford’s discussion of the difference in education between an economy without work and a parecon is based on an unreal hypothesis – that the former could exist. Furthermore, it bears little resemblance to anything I actually believe or that parecon implies about education ... such as the implication that in a parecon we would not have, or would have less, education in cosmology or art or whatever. Given that I am already over the space limits, I will let the comments about education in my original essay stand for themselves.

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NOTES 1 For more comprehensive information on parecon, see www.parecon.org. 2 Anarchists who disagree with Albert and dislike parecon would reject this description – but in an extended debate with these critics, available online at www.zmag.org/anardebate.htm, Albert describes himself as an ‘anarchist regarding the political dimensions of society’ (accessed 5 May 2004). 3 Michael Albert, Parecon: Life after Capitalism (London: Verso, 2003), 233. 4 On ‘exodus,’ see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). For accounts of the tradition out of which these writings arise, see Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1979); Midnight Notes, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992 (New York: Autonomedia, 1992); and Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 5 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies (New York: Charles Kerr and Co. 1883). 6 Albert, Parecon.

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19 Academicus Affinitatus: Academic Dissent, Community Education, and Critical U mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter

The university is a contested space. It is a site of persistent antagonisms and conflicting possibilities. As the articles in Part I of this collection attest, such dynamics of struggle are not captured in the cynical portrait of a one-dimensional institution wholly integrated into the machinery of neoliberalism. Nonetheless, increasingly the university is being restructured to conform to an instrumentalist model – witness the managerialization of academic subjectivity, budgetary pressures on critically oriented programs, and the market logic that governs so many university ‘partnerships.’ These trends seem to portend a bleak future for academic dissent, and the historical conjuncture of ‘with us or against us’ thinking in which these changes are taking place requires oppositional, university-based academics to soberly rethink strategies of dissent. Whatever strategies we adopt, it is imperative for us to continue to defend the university as a site of critical inquiry. Furthermore, in the light of the real limits on what is politically possible within that institutional space, we must extend ourselves to other communities to explore possible contributions, however modest, to the struggle against the ‘dogmatic images of thought’ that prop up power as domination.1 Inspired by our participation in the affinity group that initiated and organizes a community education project in Vancouver, British Columbia, in this chapter we address two dimensions that, we argue, are of fundamental importance to the revitalization of academic dissent: (1) the need to open a conversation about possible modes of academic subjectivity; and (2) the need to experiment in the creation of autonomous spaces of radical teaching and learning that stand apart from, but relay with, pockets of dissent in the university. The chapter has two sections. In the first, we propose the term academicus affinitatus as part of

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our attempt to unsettle the hermetic scholastic habitus of what Pierre Bourdieu termed homo academicus.2 We conjure this conceptual persona to describe how what we term a political logic of affinity might affect the production of an engaged academic–intellectual subjectivity and also guide the design of community education initiatives such that they might be stitched into the movement of movements within and against neoliberal globalization. The second section provides an account of Critical U, an experiment in the creation of a public space for critical dialogue and for the forging of relays among university-based dissenting academics, progressive community organizations, and the communities in which we live. Despite the project’s modest size and ambitions, Critical U offers valuable lessons about academic subjectivity, the relationship between universities and communities, possible alternative models of education, and finally, the contribution that conceptual tools and community education might make to a ‘long revolution’ with an ‘impulse … to make learning part of the process of social change itself.’3 Academicus Affinitatus The point of departure for the conceptual persona we want to develop is Antonio Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual,’ the figure through which discussions on the Left about the political role of the intellectual and alternative education are so often filtered4 (see chapters by Berardi and Hall in this volume). Discussion of the Gramscian model’s value for intellectual engagement today must heed the historical specificity of the Italian Marxist’s situation. In the 1920s, Gramsci was an executive member of the Italian Communist Party, persuaded by the seeming success of the Soviet model and witnessing, first-hand, Italian cities teetering on the brink of proletarian insurrection. Gramsci’s organic intellectual was drawn from the ranks of workers and/or identified with such class interests; this figure performed a ‘mediating function’ in class struggle,5 and crucial to this was its pedagogical practices, which sought to deepen class ‘homogeneity’ by raising workers’ awareness of their economic function in the capitalist system.6 The Gramscian organic intellectual is conceptually housed within and operates out of the apparatus of a political party: the party is nothing other than ‘the organic intellectuals of the proletariat,’7 an intellectual/educative/ institutional composite that assumes the ‘directive and organising’ role in the revolutionary socialist movement.8 Today, we reject an image of political engagement that has Left intel-

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lectuals assimilating the ‘masses’ into a ‘homogenous group,’ or orienting pedagogical efforts singularly towards taking power, or channelling diverse oppositional tendencies into an overarching party organization. It is important to recognize that although the organic intellectual is oriented against capitalist hegemony, this figure’s ethical commitments, pedagogic methods, and political vision remain governed by a logic that is itself hegemonic. It is a logic that endeavours ‘to assimilate and to conquer’ a ‘social group,’ and that seeks ‘dominance’ over an entire social formation.9 Even in its antiessentialist forms in various postMarxist accounts, the concept of hegemony retains a Leninist will to totalizing irradiation effects.10 From our perspective, a central task of radical theory and practice today is to explore lines of flight from this hegemonic compulsion. We must break with the idea that the only way to achieve social change is to totally remake an entire national-social order, as in classical Marxist and anarchist theories of revolution, or to partially remake an entire social order, as in classical and post-Marxist theories of liberal reform. Social movements and indigenous communities around the world have been extremely instructive in exploring the possibilities of non-hegemonic social, political, and economic alternatives, from the autonomous zones of Chiapas, to the autonomist-inspired Italian Social Centres, to the global network of Independent Media Centres.11 They show us that sustainable, radical social change can be achieved without ‘winning’ a hegemonic struggle – which by Gramsci’s definition is impossible anyway – through the construction of alternatives within and against the existing order. Despite its shortcomings, the figure of the organic intellectual contains instructive tensions that inform academicus affinitatus. Gramsci understood the importance of weaving alternative media and educational spaces into the fabric of oppositional movements as a means for fostering dissenting voices. He stressed the intellectual’s responsibility to maintain contact with the dynamics of everyday struggle: an injunction to ‘active participation in practical life.’12 Most importantly, Gramsci rooted the organic intellectual in an ethicopolitical commitment of which any community education project must be cognizant: ‘all men [sic] are intellectuals.’13 Intellectual capacity is universally distributed, though its modalities differ in kind and intensity. Thus our communities are not passive receptacles into which ‘expert’ knowledge might be poured; rather, they are made up of active, living human subjects, possessed of ways of seeing, listening, thinking, acting, and imagining. When we

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confront such capacities of ‘mass intellectuality,’ to borrow the words of Paolo Virno, ‘what comes to the fore is only (but that only is everything) the more general aspects of the mind: the faculty of language, the ability to abstract and correlate, and access to self-reflection.’14 The university was a key site that unsettled Gramsci’s organic intellectual. The late 1960s saw student revolts and rebellions draw attention away from worker struggles in the factories. Students become protagonists, and universities became sites of mobilization, while radical academics entered new combinations with oppositional movements, and numerous attempts were made to democratize relations of power within the university. One of the legacies of 1968, in the Paris context, was the creation of Centre Experimental de Vincennes, an experimental site of interdisciplinary postsecondary education. Vincennes’s philosophy program was, until 1971, run by an intellectual-activist who, like Gramsci, profoundly influenced debates about the intellectual: Michel Foucault. In its day, Vincennes – or the ‘anti-Sorbonne’ as it came to be known – was home to some of France’s most influential thinkers and militant activists. It was a place where the limits of the university as a site of radicalism were tested. Seminar topics ranged from Maoism to sexual revolution; evening classes were offered to non-traditional students; the campus was used by both faculty and students as a base for organizing external activism; and students played a lead role in university governance. The extent to which the limits were tested is exemplified by the case of Vincennes’ philosophy instructor, Judith Miller, who was known to hand out credits to students on the bus simply ‘on request.’ She proclaimed: ‘I will do [my] best to make sure [the university] functions worse and worse. The university is a state apparatus, a fragment of capitalist society, and what appears to be a haven of liberalism is not one at all.’15 Education authorities intervened, fired Miller, and refused to recognize Vincennes’s philosophy degree. The department has been described as a ‘monster’ hatched by Foucault, ‘Dr Frankenstein.’ Nonetheless, he resolutely defended the contribution that the experimental program – and the student rebels generally – were making to the fight against political, cultural, and philosophical conservatism.16 The cacophony of voices that filled Vincennes’s classrooms no doubt revealed the difficulty of squaring the ‘new politics’ with the traditional role of the intellectual, what Foucault later termed the ‘“universal” intellectual.’17 This inheritance of ‘a faded Marxism’ was an intellectual who ‘acknowledged the right of speaking, in the capacity of master of truth and justice,’ the ‘consciousness/conscience of all,’ the ‘spokesman

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of the universal.’18 This subjectivity, argued Foucault, had been eclipsed by the ‘specific intellectual’ in the postwar period. These new intellectuals had ‘become used to working not in the modality of the “universal,” the “just-and-true-for-all,” but within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations).’19 For us, the specific intellectual, as theorized, practised, and problematized by Foucault, operates according to a logic of affinity – a logic made visible in the forms of organization, in the conception of micropolitics, and in the ethicopolitical commitments with which this figure is aligned. In these aspects, we move closer towards academicus affinitatus. Elements of an affinity-based organization of academic engagement are visible in the Prison Information Group (GIP), which Foucault cofounded in 1971. The GIP, which involved prisoners, former prisoners, academics, student radicals, and prison psychiatrists, among others, was a ‘transversal’ network organized to investigate and publicly expose the conditions of life in French prisons.20 It operated under extensive lateral connections, in order to ‘bring together different social strata which the ruling class has kept apart thanks to the interplay of social hierarchies and divergent economic interests. They must bring down barriers which are indispensable to power by uniting prisoners, lawyers, or even doctors, patients and hospital personnel.’21 Certain ‘specific intellectuals’ were woven into this matrix on the premise that, in modern societies characterized by great accumulation and deployment of knowledge, intellectuals are increasingly called upon to defend power – but also are uniquely positioned to speak against it. Most importantly, the stance of ‘scholarly objectivity’ was abandoned; instead, struggle was recognized and sides were taken. In many ways paralleling the Italian practices of conricerca (see Borio et al., in this volume), the GIP utilized research tools such as questionnaires, and collected first-hand accounts by prisoners of beatings, revolts, abusive guards, and daily life in general. These accounts were then disseminated via pamphlets and press conferences. One of the group’s members, Gilles Deleuze, called the GIP an ‘experiment in thinking’ – an apt description of an attempt to invent a bottom-up, collaborative communication apparatus. The aim was not to win concessions but to make visible the operation of power as domination, with the goal of provoking a public rethinking of the very idea of punishment.22

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The GIP is relevant to our discussion in that it questioned the role of the intellectual as a representative. Foucault’s conception of the intellectual is propelled by a utopian impulse ‘to be done with spokespersons.’23 In a conversation recorded in ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ Deleuze lauds Foucault for teaching us about ‘the indignity of speaking for others.’24 Avoiding this ‘indignity’ is an ethicopolitical commitment, one that neither relegates the academic–intellectual to insularity nor sanctions her silence when power operates as domination. But ‘what does it mean to speak for oneself rather than for others?’ Deleuze suggests in a later interview: ‘It’s not of course a matter of everyone finding their moment of truth in memoirs or psychoanalysis; it’s not just a matter of speaking in the first person.’25 Instead, the injunction of the indignity of speaking for others gives expression to a problem, the resolution of which requires that questions be formulated. For example: Through what mechanisms do others claim the right to speak on your behalf? Even when one speaks for oneself, how do prevailing concepts function to condition or constrain that which one speaks and sees? Perhaps it was in the light of such questions that Foucault believed: ‘Years, decades, of work and political imagination will be necessary, work at the grass roots, with the people directly affected, restoring their right to speak.’26 Community education is just one space among many where such questions might be opened. The specific intellectual, as the term implies, intervenes in struggles in local and specific situations of power. Although Foucault used the categories of ‘specific’ and ‘general’ to conceptualize the field in which the intellectual operates, he did not so much privilege one modality over the other as propose that the intellectual must set to work in the middle of them. Operating transversally is a defining quality of academicus affinitatus. In this sense, this figure engages in a version of what Félix Guattari, like Foucault and Deleuze, called ‘micropolitics.’ This is not a simple inversion of the usual relations of value between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’; rather, micropolitics ‘concerns the relationship of large social groups to what surrounds them, to their own economic set-up, but it also concerns attitudes which run through the individual’s life, through family life, through the life of the unconscious, of artistic creation, etc.’27 Micropolitics challenges community education to pay constant attention to the ways in which local concerns and subjectivities are articulated with – but also expose possible lines of flight from – hegemonic power/knowledge formations.

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But Foucault warned of the limits of specific–intellectual activism and localized struggle: The specific intellectual encounters certain obstacles and faces certain dangers. The danger of remaining at the level of conjunctural struggles, pressing demands restricted to particular sectors. The risk of letting himself be manipulated by the political parties or trade union apparatuses that control these local struggles. Above all, the risk of being unable to develop these struggles for lack of a global strategy or outside support.28

This does not lead to an about-face or a simple reprivileging of the general. Instead, Foucault suggests that one of the ways in which the specific intellectual’s ‘position can take on a general significance, and that her local, specific struggle can have effects and implications that are not simply professional or sectoral,’ is by working within and against ‘the politics of truth in our societies … The intellectual can operate and struggle at the general level of that regime of truth so essential to the structure and functioning of our society.’29 Foucault’s remarks on the specific intellectual can be reread today in the light of a post-Fordist regime that has spectacularly captured Gramsci’s precept that ‘all men are intellectuals’ and that has exponentially increased the size of the cadre of ‘specific intellectuals.’ In the contemporary context, Foucault’s comments are prescient: intellectuals are ‘drawn closer to the proletariat and the masses … because they have often been confronted, albeit in a different form, by the same adversary as the proletariat, namely, the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, the property speculators, and so on.’30 The success of the ‘corporate campus’ shows, however, that there are no guarantees that an encroaching force of capitalism will be perceived as an adversary rather than as an opportunity. Foucault was nonetheless clear that certain criteria had to be met if manifold micropolitical struggles were to ‘enter as allies of the proletariat,’ adding that ‘power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation’: They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places where they find themselves oppressed. Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against particularized power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them. Such struggles are actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the degree that they are radical, uncom-

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promising and non-reformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters.31

In this quote, we can see the operation of an ethically driven, utopian radicalism. Notwithstanding that it has been ignored or misread by Foucault’s many detractors, it is notable more for its particular appropriation of the Enlightenment tradition than for its cynical renunciation of humanism’s highest values. Similarly, academicus affinitatus does not dismiss the dimension of universality. Indeed, this conceptual persona shares with Foucault an ethicopolitical commitment: ‘to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal.’32 As we have tried to show, Foucault and Deleuze provide valuable insights, though no clear answers, for a portrait of an engaged intellectual. At the most basic level, they suggest political engagement in which the intellectual neither assumes the mantle of leadership nor abdicates responsibility. Operating under the injunction to avoid the indignity of speaking for others, while challenging his or her own structural privilege, the affinity-based academic-intellectual seeks dialogic participation in contexts that exceed the limits of the university classroom. In such practices, academics might enter into the role of ‘exchangers,’ within networks of ‘mutual exchange and support.’33 This could entail, for example, the development of new lines of affinity that bring together critical social scientists and social movements, as called for by Bourdieu: ‘Our objective is not only to invent responses, but to invent a way of inventing responses, to invent a new form of organization of the work of contestation … of the task of activism.’34 Ultimately, we agree with Gayatri Spivak when she insists that it is ‘not a question of speaking for, but of building an infrastructure so that resistance/agency might be recognized … not to teach people how to resist.’35 The task, then, is one of inventing, of building. This creative impulse distinguishes academicus affinitatus from other modes of academicintellectual engagement – for example, the public intellectual, though that figure need not be entirely displaced. For academicus affinitatus, the infrastructures described by Bourdieu and Spivak are most valuable when they exceed the term resistance and take on the quality of prototypical but necessarily partial alternatives – what might be called nonbranded strategies and tactics, such as Food Not Bombs, Reclaim the Streets, Tent City ... In this sense, academicus affinitatus perceives academic dissent as a laboratory for experiments in non-capitalist, non-

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statist futures, and seeks to produce encounters in the name of exploring a potential politics of solidarity across all of the divisions – of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age – that are crucial to the continued functioning of the system of states and corporations. The persona of academicus affinitatus is, therefore, a style of working that responds to a transformative impulse, that accepts responsibility rather than leadership, that prefers open experimentation to rule-based procedures, that chooses the politics of the act over a politics of demand, that pursues inventions rather than reforms, that respects heteronomous systems of difference rather than universalizing hegemonic formations, and that is committed to the task of minimizing the operation of power as domination in every situation. Academicus affinitatus proceeds with patience – not, however, to justify some terminal delay in radical social transformation, but rather because she believes, with Foucault, that ‘the work of deep transformation can be done in the open and always turbulent atmosphere of a continuous criticism.’36 In the capacity of an educator working in a specific locality, academicus affinitatus aims to create spaces that, while engaging hegemonic formations, are necessarily limited, and do not seek irradiation effects across some fantasmatically constructed singular entity called ‘the community.’ It is in the name of these utopian impulses that we undertook the Critical U experiment, as our own modest contribution to the development of a community-based radical pedagogy based on the logic of affinity. Critical U Critical U is a community education project in Vancouver that started running free courses in 2000. Currently governed by a neoliberal provincial regime, East Vancouver – where Critical U operates – has long been home to a broad array of activists and creative resistance. Critical U takes place in a neighbourhood known as Commercial Drive, which was populated by Italian immigrants early in the twentieth century. It was they who initially created a strong sense of public space and engagement that has persisted, despite many changes in social and economic conditions. Today, the neighbourhood’s composition ranges from the working and unemployed poor to a gentrifying upper-middle-class. The district is home to significant numbers of Aboriginal people, migrants, students, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. It is a vibrant activist community with many commonalities and many deep divisions;

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thus it is a laboratory of sorts for testing the limits and possibilities of affinity-based politics. From the outset, the Critical U project focused on issues relevant to the Commercial Drive district, where most of the people in the affinity group live and work. In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss the organization and pedagogy of Critical U as well as some of the unexpected lessons gleaned from our participation in it over the past few years. When we became involved in the planning of Critical U in 2000, two of us were graduate students in communication at Simon Fraser University (SFU), and one was a sessional instructor in social theory there. Alongside a couple of members of the university’s student society, a few interested students, a handful of community organizations and activists, and a professor, we envisaged a space for critical thought and dialogue in our neighbourhood. This space would try to link dissenting academics and students based at SFU with critical theoretical concepts and research, and social issues and struggles that members of our neighbourhood had already defined as most relevant to their lives. We agreed that a space in which we might think collectively about the material conditions of everyday life – where analysis, concepts, and hope might be emphasized in equal measure – would make a valuable addition to the community. This would not be a recruiting ground for a specific activist project, but rather a public space where interested people from the neighbourhood could collaboratively learn, think, and talk. The project was also conceived as an attempt to explore the possibilities of a non-profit, non-state educational sector. A logic of affinity guided the organization of Critical U. It would be an alliance neither initiated nor directed by any formal academic organization. Rather, it would be the result of the collective efforts of academics at SFU and community organizations that were in touch with the everyday dynamics and concerns of people in the area.37 From its inception, the project has been coordinated by a small, loose, and shifting network of undergraduate and graduate students, professors, nonprofit community organizations, progressive community educators, university-based research institutes, and the Britannia Community Centre, out of which the courses operate. The composition of this group is both fragile and ever-changing, as people move away from and into the neighbourhood, and as desires and interests move on. Many new participants have joined in the organizing, and it has been our hope that the project will be driven increasingly by the needs of those who have come to it from diverse perspectives and locations.

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Since the pilot course was offered in 2000, Critical U has run a number of courses and workshops, lasting between eight and twenty weeks. We introduce concepts from social and political theory, political economy, and cultural studies, bringing those perspectives to bear on topics that include capitalism, globalization, food production, democracy, social movements, and mass media. An ongoing emphasis is on the points of overlap between locality (spatial, subjective, everyday life) and global configurations of power (Empire, imperialism). Here we are in agreement with Lawrence Grossberg when he writes: ‘If political struggles are won and lost in the space between people’s everyday lives and the material production and distribution of values and power ... then it is here that pedagogy must operate.’38 Participation in Critical U classes is free, and no previous postsecondary education is required. We promote the classes locally on a minimal budget, through pamphlets and various local activist websites, though, increasingly, word of mouth is the most effective. We strive to be participant-driven to the best of our abilities, but of course there are constraints. Typically, a group of organizers sketches in advance an overall course outline structured around a series of general workshop themes, with recruited volunteer professors, students, and community educators acting as facilitators for a specific evening. The general ethos is that the more specific course content is decided collectively by the participants who show up at the first meeting; in actual practice, it is a negotiated struggle between the needs and capacities of the organizers – what they are willing and able to teach – and the needs and interests of the participants. As such, we never know what to expect, and the resultant affinity or antagonism of the negotiation depends on each course’s unique composition. So far, each course has been oversubscribed, with between thirty and forty people showing up for our first session, although typically this levels off to fifteen or twenty. In every course offering to date, the challenge of forging friendship and community has always been the primary determinant of success (or lack thereof). The initial meeting of our first course was exemplary of the dynamics of Critical U: because of unexpectedly large numbers, we had been moved from a smaller room at the community centre to a large auditorium, in which the ‘instructors’ dutifully arrayed themselves at the front, and the ‘students’ took up positions in rows of seats facing us. We apologized for the layout, which couldn’t be changed because the chairs were literally bolted to the floor. Several participants wanted more than an apology, and suggested that we reassemble as a large circle on the

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floor of the stage. This was done, and throughout the evening, ideas went flying around the circle, as the participants expanded on and delimited the suggested themes. The primary space of Critical U is a classroom, which makes pedagogy an ongoing question, one that we strive to open up with participants from the outset. A central element of our approach in the classroom – and perhaps this is where Critical U’s unique contribution lies – is that we introduce theoretical concepts to practise a ‘pedagogy of the concept.’39 As Bourdieu has suggested, academic workers would be unwise to renounce their accrued intellectual capital: ‘We are dealing with opponents who are armed with theories, and I think they need to be fought with intellectual and cultural weapons. In pursuing that struggle, because of the division of labour some are better armed than others, because it is their job.’40 One of the things we try to do in each Critical U course is offer participants an ever-expanding toolkit of interlinked theoretical concepts. While no concept is beyond reproach, we introduce concepts to help us both construct and respond to the problems we face. We view concepts as ‘tools’ that, as Brian Massumi puts it, ‘pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops the energy of prying.’41 While concepts and research are raised in relation to specific problems, we are also concerned with destabilizing what Deleuze called a ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ where an ‘image of thought’ refers to ‘something deeper that’s always taken for granted, a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think, and to “orient oneself in thought.”’42 Moreover, concepts are intended not to merely recognize a situation but to aid in transformation, enhancing our sight and ultimately our capacity to enact new ways of living. Central to the Critical U courses is the process of collectively analysing how practices and spaces of everyday life are sites for reproducing and potentially transforming capitalism, statism, and the discourses of division, and also how power is exercised in, through, and on our own bodies. As Judith Butler has noted: ‘If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.’43 This means, too, of course, that those of us at Critical U who work out of the university must address our socially structured position as academics, as well as the operation of cultural capital as a form of power –

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albeit a form whose effects are undecidable. At one of our first meetings for a new class, for example, our openness towards organization, the concepts we relied upon, and our insistence that we were not recruiting people for the university were taking us on the wrong path. ‘What’s your agenda?’ some demanded. Others admitted how intimidated they were by our presence. Others expressed frustration about the lack of structure, while others lamented that we had arrived with even a skeletal outline. Finally, a participant intervened, saying something to this effect: ‘Each one of us came here because we read the description for this course, and so we’ve got some sort of common mind. We need to trust one another until there’s a reason not to.’ People stopped leaving the room. Once again, the precarious nature of ‘community’ had revealed itself. Though ‘visiting instructors’ are chosen by the affinity group and/or suggested by people in the classes themselves, there have been situations where the interiorization of academic power and the irradiation of arrogant authority were brought to light by the participants, and dealt with in the meeting. The format of the Critical U classes varies. Often there is a talk of about twenty minutes, followed by a group conversation. One night, for example, a political theorist asked the group to consider whether a shift was taking place from class-based politics to radical democracy as a social movement. Out of this, the participants, who included anticapitalist activists and corporate managers, began to consider together the moral acceptability of violent action against private property as a means of political expression. Other times, there are popular education activities. For example, a banjo-toting Marxist labour historian set up a role-playing exercise with a select few as factory owners (with, of course, the requisite security force and strikebreakers) sitting on one side of the circle, and the rest of the participants as workers on the other. Later, this elaborate game of ‘Capitalism 101’ truly became musical chairs as the facilitator picked away on his banjo in a hootenanny of nineteenth-century labour songs. In other sessions, the concept of ‘place’ has been explored in relation to a discussion about how alternative, bottom-up community design might proceed in practice. Several of the university-based facilitators have commented on the unusual vitality of discussions at the Critical U seminars. This can be attributed in part, we believe, to the fact that everyone is there because they choose to be there, rather than as a means to the distant end of achieving a grade or qualification. Another key factor is the range in the age, experience, political orientation, race, and class of the participants.

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The absence of written work, grading schemes, and all of the regular instrumental apparatuses of the university is also crucial to creating and maintaining a sense of an alternative to an increasingly deadened world of work, school, and consumerism. We remember too that some of the students who come to Critical U have fled from the higher education system, for reasons that range from poverty to disenchantment with how their teachers exercised academic authority. Finally, we think it suggests something of the pleasure to be found in engaged learning as an act of self-transformation. The Fragility of Affinity Throughout the planning process and during the courses themselves, there has been a constant tension between ‘intellectualizing’ about issues and discussing tactics for confronting them head-on through activism and political intervention. This tension is never fully resolved, but remains a vital dynamic left in play, and one that we conceptualize through the notion of ‘relays’ between theory and practice. For example, during a session on the topic of political economy of media ownership, guests from the local Indymedia Centre came to describe the resources they make available for independent media production, and self-publishing was discussed as one possible alternative to corporate journalistic practices. In other courses, we have created more opportunities for these sorts of concrete relays between the session topics and grassroots initiatives. In a session on cooperative institutions, members of local cooperatives, researchers, and participants debated together the viability of co-op economic models as an alternative to, or a form made compatible with, capitalist market relations. In this sense, Critical U is a space where people from disparate political positions can gather to enter a dialogue about alternatives to liberal-democratic global capitalism. The logic of academicus affinitatus compels us not only to analyse dominant social, cultural, political, and economic practices, but also to produce and facilitate relays with alternative practices. As a new experiment, Critical U offered a twenty-week course called ‘Food for Critical Thought,’ which examined the intimate connections between our bodies, everyday lives, consumption, science and technology, and global capitalism by combining the classroom with the field – literally – through the planting, care, and harvest of a community garden. In the class, topics ranged from the political economy of global food production, to genetically modified organisms and monoculture,

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to DIY-autonomous practices; in the field, discussion ranged from organic and other earth-friendly approaches, to tomatoes, beans, and corn. There are two things worth emphasizing about this experiment. First, to date it is the most concrete set of relays – between theory and practice, local and global, and specific and general – that Critical U has been able to establish. Second, the limits of affinity – in a composition of ‘community’ – were severely tested. Early on, one participant reacted to what she perceived as an imposition of ‘theory’ on the course by verbally abusing the facilitator and violently disrupting the class. Though one participant deftly defused the situation, the spirit of affinity was shaken considerably. As well, that affinity was challenged in practice. The actual community gardening began enthusiastically; over the course of an unprecedented warm and sunny summer, however, collective care of the gardens became more sporadic; finally, the course ended prematurely, with its composition proving to be far more ephemeral than the plants we put in the ground. A shorter course was offered the following winter. At the time of writing, a new group of organizers has emerged from within and is planning to offer ‘Critical Youth,’ with a focus on media literacy and video production. In the end, the future of this experiment depends exclusively on those who take part in it. The participants refuse to seek constituted power in a hegemonic formation; this means that no permanent structure is built and that there is no mechanism for providing the inertia of reproduction. This, perhaps, is the most abiding lesson to be learned in Critical U’s pursuit of affinity: its strength or fragility depends foremost on the formation of friendship, a commonality of vision, and a willingness to pursue that which is always ‘not yet.’ As such, modesty becomes not only a virtue to behold but a watchword for political action. Conclusion: Continuous Criticism Academicus affinitatus resists a transformation of academia into ‘a circle closed onto itself,’44 and strives to reimagine the role of theory as a practice that, to borrow the words of Stuart Hall, ‘always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect.’45 In experimenting with the efficacy of theory, the Critical U project reminds us that dissenting intellectual traditions, while not constituting politics in and of themselves, can contribute to the development of transformative political and peda-

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gogical practices. The affinity-based academic leverages the oppositional potential of her academic capital by forming relays with other like-minded individuals who continue to work, at least partially, inside the academy. Extending those links to progressive organizations that are rooted and working in specific communities is one avenue towards a revitalized pedagogy that we have found fruitful. Community education, while no panacea, is one space of possibility where oppositional academics might work – within and against both the neoliberal model of education and the sociosymbolic order of neoliberalism generally – ‘to create an autonomous space where a certain kind of discourse can be broached.’46 Creating such spaces, we remember with Gramsci, is of fundamental importance – not merely as an adjunct but as a constituent element of social movements. We agree with one activist who, in response to a polemic on ‘anti-intellectualism’ on the activist Left, called for ‘projects that provide new activists with the analytical tools to begin to critically engage the hard questions that confront our movements and that offer them in a manner in which people will actually be able to grasp them.’47 Valuable lessons to guide such a project can be learned from revisiting the history of radical education initiatives – from anarchist Free Schools to the Workers Education Association in Britain – and from exploring present-day experiments – from California’s School of Unity and Liberation to the Community Economies Project. However education is wired into activism, it must not shy away from the prospect of constant criticism. But Critical U, we want to stress, is not activist education; it is community education, where ‘community’ – as participants were swift to insist at our first meeting – must be maintained as a multiple rather than a monolithic category. The Critical U experiment confirms that, as Massimo De Angelis explains, ‘commonality is a creative process of discovery, not a presupposition.’48 Academicus affinitatus gladly accepts this injunction and the drive for a progressive interplay between theory and practice; the experience of Critical U, however, is a reminder that such efforts will always be fraught with unresolvable tensions. We have offered this chapter in the name of furthering a radical utopian impulse that proceeds from the assumption that, as Michael Hardt writes, ‘the tasks of political theory do indeed involve the analyses of the forms of domination and exploitation that plague us, but the first and primary tasks are to identify, affirm, and further the existing instances of social power that allude to a new alternative society, a coming community.’49 The allusions of Critical U are manifold. For us,

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it demonstrates the possibility of a non-state, not-for-profit, community education sector. It demonstrates that the political logic of affinity can guide the concrete design of educational and pedagogic alternatives. The real utopian allusions, however, are discovered in the desires expressed by those who participated in Critical U. Speaking at a wrap-up session of a course, one participant described his enduring loneliness, and said that, for him, Critical U filled a gap in his life with ideas and friendships. Reflecting on this gap in subjectivity and on the intellectual collectivity glimpsed at Critical U, we find ourselves remembering what the anarchist socialist Martin Buber called ‘the most intimate of all resistances – resistance to mass or collective loneliness.’50 Indeed, it is precisely what we do not know about how our communities live – and how they might want to live – that demands such experiments in community education, in the hope of producing something unknown and unknowable – something that is valuable precisely because it ‘doesn’t yet exist.’51

NOTES 1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone Press, 1994). 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 3 Raymond Williams, ‘Adult Education and Social Change,’ in Border Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education, ed. John McIlroy and Sallie Westwood (Leicester, UK: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 1993), 257. 4 Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–23. 5 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, introduction to Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ in ibid., 3. 6 Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ 5. 7 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ‘General Introduction,’ Selections from the Prison Notebooks, xci. 8 Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ 16. 9 Ibid., 10. 10 For the most influential post-Marxist rereading of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). For a critique of the theory of hegemony

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from the perspective of the logic of affinity, see Richard J.F. Day, ‘Ethics, Affinity, and the Coming Communities,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 27:1 (2001): 21–38. See Richard J.F. Day, ‘From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of the Newest Social Movements,’ Cultural Studies 18:5 (2004): 716–48. Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ 10. Ibid., 9. Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 194. Cited in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Vintage, 1993), 228, 229. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Flamingo, 1994), 180. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2002), 127. Ibid., 126. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Breaking Things Open,’ in Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia Uiversity Press, 1995), 87–8. Cited in Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 268–9. Gilles Deleuze, cited in Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, 193. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault,’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 289. Deleuze, in Deleuze and Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–84 (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989). For a critique of Deleuze and Foucault on the role of the intellectual and representation, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. Deleuze, ‘Breaking Things Open,’ in Negotiations, 88. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault,’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 288. Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 87. Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ 129–30. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 126. Foucault and Deleuze ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ 81. Michel Foucault, ‘Useless to Revolt?’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 453. Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ 127. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: New Press, 2001), 58.

352 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter 35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in discussion on a panel on ‘Subalternity and Marxism,’ at Marxism and the World Stage conference. 7 November 2003. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 6–8 November. 36 Michel Foucault, ‘So Is It Important to Think?’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 457. 37 The affinity group involved the Vancouver Institute for Social Research and Education, the Britannia Community Centre, the Vancouver Eastside Educational Enrichment Society, the Simon Fraser University Institute for the Humanities, and the Simon Fraser Student Society. 38 Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Bringing It All Back Home: Pedagogy and Cultural Studies,’ in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 388. 39 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15–34. 40 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Scientists, Economic Science, and the Social Movement,’ in Acts of Resistance, 53–4. 41 Brian Massumi, ‘Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy,’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xv. 42 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 147–8. 43 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), 93. 44 Maurizio Viano and Vincenzo Binetti, ‘What Is to Be Done? Marxism and the Academy,’ in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (London: Routledge, 1996), 250. 45 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,’ in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 286. 46 Viano and Binetti, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ 250. 47 Retrieved from www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/02/08/ 4177015 (accessed 20 February 2004). 48 Massimo De Angelis, ‘From Movement to Society,’ in On Fire: The Battle of Genoa and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (London: One Off Press, 2001), 124. 49 Michael Hardt, ‘Introduction: Laboratory Italy,’ in Radical Thought in Italy, 7. 50 Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 14. 51 Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadoria, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 121.

Contributors

353

Contributors

Michael Albert helped found and operate South End Press and later Z Magazine and currently works primarily on Z’s website, ZNet. He is the author of many books and articles on a wide range of activist concerns, most recently Parecon: Life after Capitalism (Verso) and Thought Dreams: Radical Theory for the Twenty-First Century (Arbeiter Ring). Brian W. Alleyne teaches sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His academic interests are in global issues, cultural politics, and research methods. When time allows he does some activist work and explores software development and Linux. Ian Angus is professor of humanities at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of (Dis)figurations, Emergent Publics, A Border Within, and Primal Scenes of Communication as well as essays on politics, technology, and phenomenology. Allan Antliff, Canada Research Chair, University of Victoria, is author of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. Franco Berardi (Bifo), a media theorist, was a militant in Potere Operaio in the 1960s, and founder of the magazine A/traverso (1975–81), and of the radio station Radio Alice (1976–8). Recently he launched the Telestreet experiment against Berlusconi’s media-dictatorship. His books include Ciberpunk e mutazione (1992) Cibernauti (1995), and Félix (2001). The Book Telestreet – Macchina immaginativa non omologata is being translated into English.

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Contributors

Mark Edelman Boren teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the author of Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject (2001), and his essays have appeared in Lingua Franca, Chronicle of Higher Education, Style, Philological Quarterly, Genre, and Studies in American Fiction. Guido Borio was a militant in the Italian autonomist movement of the 1970s. He is a coauthor of Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (2002). He works in the field of social cooperatives. Enda Brophy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His work has appeared in Computers and Society, Historical Materialism, DeriveApprodi, and the Canadian Journal of Communication. Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of researcher-militants based in Buenos Aires. It has participated in numerous grassroots research activities with unemployed workers (piqueteros), peasant movements, human rights groups, neighbourhood assemblies, and alternative education experiments. Their elaboration of their experience has resulted in many articles, a series of notebooks published under the title Cuadernos de Situación, and four books: Genocida en el barrio: Mesa de escrache popular; La hipótesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes; Contrapoder: Una introducción; and 19 y 20: Apuntes para un nuevo protagonismo social. Mark Coté is a visiting scholar at the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University and a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His current research is on Foucault, Italian autonomist marxism, and creative networks. Mariarosa Dalla Costa is a professor of globalization studies, global social movements, human rights, and feminism in the Faculty of Political Science at the Università di Padova. A well-known figure in the international feminist movement, at the beginning of the 1970s she opened the debate surrounding domestic labour and the woman as reproducer of labour power. Works by Mariarosa Dalla Cost include ‘Domestic Labour and the Feminist Movement in Italy since the 1970s.’ International Sociology 3:1 (March 1998); with Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, eds., Paying the Price: Women and the Politics of International

Contributors

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Economic Strategy (London: Zed Books, 1995) and Women, Development and Labour of Reproduction: Struggles and Movements (Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1999); with Dario De Bortoli, ‘For Another Agriculture and Another Food Policy in Italy,’ The Commoner 10 (Spring Summer 2005) (www.thecommoner.org); and with Monica Chilese, Nostra madre Oceano. Questioni e lotte del movimento dei pescatori (Our Mother Ocean. Questions and Struggles of the Fishermen’s Movement) (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2005). Richard J.F. Day is an anarchist activist and scholar based at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. His work on radical social theory has appeared in various academic journals, zines, and websites. His latest book, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, is available from Pluto Press. Greig de Peuter is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is currently active in the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry. Nick Dyer-Witheford is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (1999) and, with Stephen Kline and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (2003). Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University. His most recent books include The Terror of Neoliberalism (Paradigm, 2004); Against the New Authoritarianism (Arbeiter Ring, 2005); Take Back Higher Education (with Susan Giroux; Palgrave, 2006); America on the Edge: Henry Giroux on Politics, Culture and Education (Palgrave, 2006); Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism (Paradigm, 2006); and Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Paradigm, 2006). His primary research areas are cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, media studies, social theory, and the politics of higher and public education. Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica and educated in the United Kindgom. He has lived in England since 1951. He was director of the Centre for Contempory Cultural Studies and professor of sociology at the Open University. He is currently chair of the Board of Autograph, the Asso-

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Contributors

ciation of Black Photographers, and inIVA, the Institute of International Visual Arts. Kelly Harris-Martin is a graduate of the archaeology program in the First Nations Program in Kamloops, B.C. She has been accepted to continue her work in forensic archaeology in Bournemouth, England. Imran Munir is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His dissertation focuses on globalization, social and political movements, and peasant revolts in Pakistan. Originally from Lahore, he has worked extensively as a journalist in Pakistan in both print and television, with a focus on politics, labour, and human rights. Besides struggling against both martial law and religious fundamentalism, he has been connected to the street theatre movement since the mid-1980s. Francesca Pozzi has a degree in communication science from the Università degli Studi di Torino. She is the co-author of Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (2002). She works in the field of social research. Jennifer Pybus is a graduate student in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University. Her research focuses on the role that affect and immaterial labour play in the construction of ‘tween’ (8–12year old) subjectivities. Gigi Roggero has a degree in contemporary history from the Università degli Studi di Torino. He is the coauthor of Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (2002). He is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Università della Calabria. Shveta Sarda works at Sarai/CSDS (www.sarai.net), Delhi, with the CyberMohalla (a project of Sarai and Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education). She is a process chronicler and keeps the diverse CM content in circulation among English-speaking publics through blogs, essays, and postings on discussion lists. She seeks to critically engage with the debates in pedagogy, translation, technology, and inequality. She is a member of the editorial collective of Sarai.txt.

Contributors

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Sarita Srivastava’s research interests include the interdisciplinary, historical, and organizational study of race and gender. She is currently working on a book, Facing Race, Saving Face: Anti-racism, Emotion and Knowledge in Social Movement Organizations, which explores the historical debates, emotional responses, and educational practices that arise when social movements such as feminism are faced with internal antiracist challenges. She has been active in the environmental, labour, and feminist movements and is a professor of sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Richard Toews is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University in the First Nations Institute at Kamloops B.C., where he teaches sociology and anthropology. He has published short stories in West Coast Line and the Anglican Catholic and is the author of the forthcoming novel A Dance with the Dragon. Carlos Alberto Torres, professor of social science and comparative education and Director of the Paulo Freire Institute (GSEIS), is a political sociologist of education who did his undergraduate work in sociology in Argentina, his graduate work in Mexico and the United States, and postdoctoral studies in education foundations in Canada. He is also a founding director of the Paulo Freire Institute in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dr Torres has been a visiting professor at universities in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Portugal, and Sweden. He has lectured throughout Latin America and the United States and at universities in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Sebastián Touza is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is writing his dissertation on intellectuals and autonomy. He is currently finishing an English translation of a book by Colectivo Situaciones on the Argentinean revolt of December 2001 – a project done in collaboration. Jerry Zaslove has taught literature, humanities, and the social history of art at Simon Fraser University since it opened in 1965. He is compiling his writings on modernism and anarchism under the title ’Anarchism from the Other Shore’ and is actively writing on the fate of cultural memory, utopia, exiles, and outcasts. Recent publications are on Herbert Read, Siegfried Kracauer, W.G. Sebald, and Jeff Wall.

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CULTURAL SPACES Cultural Spaces explores the rapidly changing temporal, spatial, and theoretical boundaries of contemporary cultural studies. Culture has long been understood as the force that defines and delimits societies in fixed spaces. The recent intensification of globalizing processes, however, has meant that it is no longer possible – if it ever was – to imagine the world as a collection of autonomous, monadic spaces, whether these are imagined as localities, nations, regions within nations, or cultures demarcated by region or nation. One of the major challenges of studying contemporary culture is to understand the new relationships of culture to space that are produced today. The aim of this series is to publish bold new analyses and theories of the spaces of culture, as well as investigations of the historical construction of those cultural spaces that have influenced the shape of the contemporary world. Series Editors: Richard Cavell, University of British Columbia Imre Szeman, McMaster University Editorial Advisory Board: Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University Hazel V. Carby, Yale University Richard Day, Queen’s University Christopher Gittings, University of Western Ontario Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto Heather Murray, University of Toronto Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney Rinaldo Walcott, OISE/University of Toronto Books in the Series: Peter Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School Sarah Brophy, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies Jasmin Habib, Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging Serra Tinic, On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market Evelyn Ruppert, The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization