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'''* Book: [[Title::Factories Of Knowledge, Industries Of Creativity]]. By [[Author::Gerald Raunig]]. [[Publisher::MIT Press]], [[Published::2013]].'''
URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/factories-knowledge-industries-creativity
URL = http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/edufactory-journal-0.pdf
URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/factories-knowledge-industries-creativity
ISBN = 9781584351160
=Overview=
"What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig’s new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance.
Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience."
=Description=
Via Penny Travlou:
""Factories of knowledge: fashionable metaphor for the self-proletarization of intellectuals, misinterpratation of ephemeral Marx marginalia, terminological makeshift solution for the situation of precarious knowledge work? There is no doubt that the [[General Intellect]] has been increasingly seized by capitalist valorisation in recent decades."
=Introduction=
"The old institutions are crumbling--from central banks to political
parties, from museums to newspapers, from broadcast television to
schools. Caught between the continual rollout of crises and the encroachment of networks on their borders, they struggle to cope. Most
are trying to brand their way out of their dead ends. Some will doubtless survive, but the majority will become unrecognisable in the process. In any case, radical politics can no longer be committed to the
long march through these institutions.
Needless to say, universities are undergoing a period of turbulence,
too. ‘As once was the factory, so now is the university’--the edufactory project began with this plain and apparently unproblematic
statement--not to affirm, but to interrogate it. The university does not
at all function like a factory. While we are proud of the factory and
university struggles of the past we cannot afford to be content with
simply being nostalgic for them. ‘As once was the factory, so now is
the university’--this statement is therefore an indication of a political
problem. If we begin with the incommensurable differences between
the actual functions of the university and those of the factory, what
are the political stakes of putting them into relation? If the factory was
once the locus of struggle under Fordist capitalism, what is the site of
political contestation under present conditions? How can the problem
of organisation be rethought in the aftermath of the decline of its traditional forms, such as the union and the political party?
The edu-factory web-journal extends the previous efforts of the edufactory network to find answers to these questions. We know that this
problem concerns prognosis more than diagnosis, and its urgency
is only deepened by the current global economic crisis. Within edufactory, we refer to this state of affairs as the double crisis. On the one
hand, this involves an acceleration of the crisis specific to the university, the inevitable result of its outdated disciplinary divisions and
eroded epistemological status. On the other hand, it is the crisis of
postfordist conditions of labor and value, many of which are circuited
through the university.
Situated on the borders of this double crisis, the edu-factory web-journal will be devoted to analysing how the university works--the ‘occupations’ that it enforces and those that it incites as well as the ‘anomalies’ that take exception to its homogenising translations. In this way,
the journal seeks to derive ideas and practices for a new organisation
of knowledge production, one that is entirely within the purview of
social cooperation and its collective control. This is what we call the
construction of an autonomous institution, which is possible through
the invention of the university of the common, in other words university
of the common can become so only by becoming autonomous.
=Contents=
* Edu-factory collective: The Double Crisis: Living on the Borders
* Christopher Newfield. The Structure and Silence of Cognitariat
* George Caffentzis: The World Bank and the Double Crisis of African Universities
* Jon Solomon: Reappropriating the Neoliberal University for a New Putonghua
* Ned Rossiter: The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour
=Excerpt=
==The Nature of the Double Crisis==
Edu-factory collective:
"Four central points inform the zero issue.
First, the double crisis is global. To say this is not to imply the existence of a homogenous global space, or the construction of a flat
world. Rather, it signals a global scenario of change, characterised by
different forms of declination and/or translation into particular regional
contexts. In fact, there is a great deal of differentiation within the heterogeneous space-time of the double crisis. This differentiation reveals
the process of hierarchisation operating within the planetary education market. Old coordinates no longer suffice in its analysis, however, as this process of hierarchisation no longer follows the classical
lines of division between centre and periphery. Consider the emergent
roles taken on by China or India, and their higher education systems.
The changing geopolitics of higher education is tightly linked to the
disequilibrium between the debt deficit of the Western countries and
the saving surplus of the so-called ‘emergent countries’. The U.S. has
had to come to terms with its Asian creditors. In order to trace the genealogy of the contemporary crisis, it is necessary to move outside the
‘West’. As Miguel Carmona and Nicolàs Slachevsky rightly remind
us, Chile was one of the first laboratories for the Chicago Boys. And
as George Caffentizs points out, Africa’s double crisis began in the
1980s. That decade saw the World Bank become a kind of ‘Knowledge
Bank’, making loans to African universities in the hope of priming a
knowledge economy that was out of step with the continent’s position
in the international division of labour. While universities across the
world now face varying degrees of economic instability, debt, in its
many forms, has been the central source of the contemporary crisis.
Secondly, we define the current crisis as an economic crisis, not only a financial one. Far from
making the old distinction between the real and the financial economy, following the collective
theses developed by Uninomade, we can say that finance is precisely the real form of the economy, when knowledge becomes both the central source and means of production. There is no
outside to financialisation, because it represents the perverse form and the capture of what it is
produced in common. Rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s are evermore
important actors in the formation of the hierarchy of the global education market.
In this context, and this is the third point, management strategy spans and in a certain way dissolves the dialectic between public and private. As Marc Bousquet’s article emphasises, education
leaders don’t demand a ‘bailout’ or a ‘New Deal’ for universities. On the contrary, they impose
austerity and control on the academic workforce--that is, students, faculty and precarious employees. These leaders seek to maintain and reproduce their positions based on the rent and ‘capture’ of living knowledge. The university is not only a part of, but also a paradigmatic site for the
double crisis. More precisely, as Bousquet also observes, it is a leading ‘innovator’ in the production and engineering of the lousy forms of employment that have gutted the global economy. It is
a laboratory for the ‘capture’ of value, or what it refers to as ‘human, social and cultural capital’.
Therefore, its current situation provides a good standpoint from which to analyse the contemporary global crisis and the new conflicts and struggles that have emerged with its unfolding. Chris
Newfield analyses the ‘logic of cuts that contradicts the knowledge economy’s apparent requirement of a mass middle-class, a society that has a majority of college graduates and of knowledge
workers’, highlighting the changing terms of the contradiction between productive forces and
relations of production. In other words, Newfield examines the processes of hierarchisation in
the labour market and of differential inclusion in the education market. Extrapolating from his
analysis, we can venture to suggest that today the labour market is immediately an education
market, and vice versa.
Finally, the double crisis is not a stage or phase of the capitalist cycle: it has become permanent.
Contrary to the proclamations of governments, global elites, and think tanks, the crisis isn’t over.
The growth of precarisation, unemployment and poverty, the decrease of salaries, the funding
cuts to university departments all demonstrate that the crisis is ongoing. When the bubble becomes the contemporary form of economy, crisis becomes a new form and technique of governance. In other words, the problem for rulers, from those operating in the university to those
active in the broader society beyond it, is that of continuous adaptation to a permanent crisis.
This double crisis is also manifest through the insurgent knowledges that still are produced or
find place in the existing university set up, yet which the university as an institution finds extremely difficult to identify with, use, or contain. This is fundamentally a post-colonial scenario,
where the past and the present of the university are caught up in an impossible paradox. In this
post-colonial set up the managers of capital may like to do away with mass education, but popular democratic politics simply do not allow the gate crashers to the university to melt away. This
makes the double crisis even more acute.
To the double crisis there also corresponds a double fantasy of exit. On the one hand, there is a
reactionary idea: that is, to rebuild the ivory tower, with its separation between production on
the one hand and the ‘fortress of knowledge’ on the other. Not only is this separation impossible,
but more importantly it works against the reality of contemporary cooperation and the subjective
desires of living labour. It is the dystopia of academic elites, which seek to reproduce their rentier
position. On the other hand, there is a liberal fantasy: to make the university--or ‘metroversity’, to
use the category proposed by Stefano Harney--the engine of a new economic cycle. Knowledge,
in this fantasy, is understood not only as the basis of the contemporary economy, but also as a
positive and ‘neutral’ aspect of cognitive capital. Yet the university remains the most anomalous
institution. Neither can capital eat it up, nor can it vomit it away.
All of the articles in this zero issue illustrate a double opposition. They reject nostalgia for the
university before it ended up ‘in ruins’. And they oppose the vision of the university as a cognitive factory of accumulation and exploitation. Edu-factory is not interested in rescuing the corporate university. As Jon Solomon points out, innovation is not a form of value-added, but the
expression of the common. In this decisive transition, a new role for the university is only possible
through social cooperation and conflicts. This means turning the university from a place occupied
by capital to one occupied by the bodies of living labour."
=Review=
Susan Kelly:
"In the first half of the book, Raunig develops a careful analysis of the contemporary university, drawing on Gerhard Seyfried’s 1970s image of the university as machine which was heavily re-circulated at the start of the anti-Bologna campaigns from 2007 onward.1 This proposition of the university as a factory has also been interrogated in the recent forums of edu-factory and Uni-Nomade in order to explore how the university has become a key site of conflict and social struggle in recent years.2 Raunig is careful to point out that the disciplinary image of the factory suggested in Seyfried’s image cannot grasp the complexity of what constitutes the contemporary modulations of economy, control and knowledge production in the university. He is also careful to differentiate his proposal of the factory of knowledge from what he calls the potentially universalising notion of the social factory as it has been debated since the 1970s. Avoiding the use of the factory as metaphor, Raunig nevertheless argues that the university retains three crucial qualities that also made the factory a key site of social struggle in previous generations. He argues that the qualities of condensation, assembly and re-territorialisation make the university a ‘becoming factory’ of new economic and social assemblages today. He argues for the specific resonance and possibilities embedded in these qualities in the context of our increasingly precarious and dispersed social life. The university as factory offers, in his view, a concentration and assembly of bodies and knowledge that have the potential to re-territorialise and valorise other forms of labour, life and resistance.
While there may be an argument for seeing the contemporary British university as a paradigmatic site of struggle today, this sense of the institution as a site of assembly and concentration is becoming increasingly remote. Faced with mounting debt and exorbitant housing costs, most students I have worked with in London hold down one or more part-time jobs or increasingly take on full-time jobs on different shift patterns while studying. They rush off after class to work, and make rational economic decisions on their percentage of attendance to technically ‘get through’ their degree and simultaneously keep a roof over their head. An increasing number whose families live within commuting distance never move out, dashing to get the last train home, leaving only a handful of students in the pub for post-seminar social life, debates, scheming and arguments. For others still, student life is taken up with both part-time work and a succession of unpaid internships in cultural institutions, fashion houses, PR firms, media organisations and so on, in the hope that this ‘experience’ will translate into paid work on graduation. While we may lament the shift from university as a protected time in life where experiments in thought, knowledge and other ways of living can take place, to a period of study that is utterly instrumentalised for the job that comes after and makes good the debt, the reality in many universities today is that even this sequencing of life phases no longer holds true. For many arts and humanities graduates, the time of university and of work completely coincide. Often, the minimum wage service sector job held during the student period simply becomes more full-time upon graduation, or the student internship leads to yet more internships and service work on graduation. Perhaps proposing the university as factory in this context could do more to bring in an analysis of the working and studying patterns of these students of the new debt regime, where the worlds of learning and labour (both paid and unpaid) are intertwined like never before. And perhaps proposing the university as factory could look more closely at what is learned in this intertwining, what pedagogy of work and what forms of subjectivation are set in place there? It becomes clear either way that while our need for temporalities and sites of concentration and assembly as a condition of revolt is ever more crucial, such qualities are increasingly under attack in the contemporary British university.
Raunig’s proposition of the university as factory does, however, bring a particular focus to struggles over education, and moves us toward a more material analysis. Such a focus, like Raunig’s examination of the term ‘Industry’ in the cultural field, cuts through a lot of the surprisingly persistent myths of independence, autonomy, freedom and so on, that actually work to prop up neoliberal universities and cultural institutions today. Working from Adorno and Horkheimer through to Paolo Virno’s analysis of the cultural industry as paradigm of post-Fordist production, Raunig comments on the cultural sector’s ongoing fantasy of independence and repugnance at talk of industry in a context where the neoliberal state seeks to entirely eliminate all public cultural funding and promote what he calls temporary, flexible ‘project-based institutions’ reliant entirely on entrepreneurial activities, private and foundation funding. It is clear that holding on to such anachronistic notions of independence masks what Raunig describes as the creation of the cultural sector’s utter dependency on free labour, self-exploitation, self-enterprise, and I would add, transnational corporate funding and image laundering. The term dependency is very useful in this context, as it moves beyond a discourse of helpless complicity and complexity, and instead draws attention to the real economic dependence such institutions and indeed individual artists and cultural workers have on undemocratic, privatised and highly questionable economic models and funding regimes today. In analysing conditions through dependence we come closer to explaining the self-censorship Raunig points to in many cultural institutions, their increasingly controlled PR machines and their imperative to either avoid or radically separate all critical ‘content production’ from broader institutional critique and struggle. In other words, looking at contemporary culture and its institutions through dynamics of dependence, might bring us closer to both the ethical and economic stakes at play in the cultural sectors continued fantasies of autonomy, and to the stakes involved in their silence.
There is a risk however, in using notions of the factory and industry in this attempt to re-describe and re-imagine conflicts in education and culture right now. Raunig raises this briefly when he asks if the emergence of the notion of factory in debates around education might simply be an enchantment with a powerful metaphor. I would ask if the notion of the factory might also block our imagination of what else these sites and struggles might be? Does tying current struggles back into the framework of classic industrial conflict foreclose more than it enables? This use of the notion of the factory is reminiscent of the problem of the normative or regulatory figure of the ‘wage labourer’ in contemporary debates around precarity and free labour. Michael Denning for instance has argued in an important essay entitled ‘Wageless Life’, that analysis of political economy that always starts with an industrial norm and the figure of the wage labourer has real difficulty in accounting for the reality of those without wages, or what he describes as the ‘wageless base of subsistence labour’.3 He argues that our political analysis would look very different if we didn’t take the wage labourer as a regulatory figure, as some kind of universal base. Feminism has of course long understood this problem of modelling political struggle around the norms of industrial conflict. Silvia Federici amongst others has analysed women’s ‘discontinuous relationship to waged work’ and critiqued the male-centric conception of work and social struggle.4 In the context of the Wages for Housework struggle in the 1970s – where the factory worker was hegemonic and championed as the privileged revolutionary subject, and the factory as the privileged revolutionary site – feminists understood that their identification with the waged worker was partly strategic.5 Struggles around the wage were understood by Federici and others through a kind of double move, or what Marina Vishmidt calls ‘a dialectic of affirmation and negation’.6 First comes a social affirmation of housework as labour that produces value. This affirmation presents itself as the demand for wages for unpaid reproductive labour. Following on from this, it becomes clear that this demand is incompatible with capitalism and patriarchy; it proposes a category of value so expanded as to become an immediately political, and not only monetary. The initial demand therefore ‘engenders a precondition for the political imperative to negate wage-labour and capital.’7
One of the important questions campaigns against free labour and precarity in culture share with these earlier debates around feminism and work is how we demand a living wage that allows us to live with dignity, without reducing our work, our passions, desires, capacities to create, to care and make, to the alienated form of the wage relation? How can we organise our struggles in such a way that operates both within and against the existing economy and political imaginary? And in doing so, how can we draw on important histories whilst simultaneously instituting other imaginaries, other figures? Apart from isolating important qualities of the factory that can be found in some universities today, and proposing less familiar definitions of the notion of the factory and industriousness to help us think this through, Raunig doesn’t offer an account of how strategic or other uses of these terms might foreclose or enable an intensification of our struggles at this moment in time. For there is no doubt that how we describe our current conditions affects how we understand our collectivity, our work, and our agency.
In a couple of fascinating chapters that refer to Michel Foucault’s Courage of Truth (1984), Raunig analyses of the notion of parrhesia as ethical truth speech: a form of speech that promotes both inquiry and self-inquiry, and focuses on modes and relations of subjectivation. Drawing on the tradition of the cynics, Raunig gestures towards political practice as manifestation of truth tied to experimentation with forms of existence. Against simplified notions of the disciplinary factory and reductionist critiques of culture industry as the mere commercialisation of art, he recalls Foucault’s speculations on art as a practice that is capable of giving new form to existence. Bringing together Foucault and the tradition of the cynics, Raunig calls for a focus on this ethico-aesthetic aspect of forming life; the political project of continuous and renewed work on giving form to life, of living together. In identifying the ethical charge of the 15M movement in Spain, the importance of the space of assembly in the university, and the radical inclusivity and polyvocality of the various Occupy movement general assemblies, Raunig highlights some of these experiments already taking place in the social movements, and how this work on the production of subjectivity and collectivity has become central to our struggles. It is good to see this focus emerge in the book, but it might have been good to hear more about how such gestures and insights can be conceptualised, organised and enacted in the spaces and temporalities of the severe neoliberal assault the spaces in which we live and work are undergoing right now.
In the UK at least, there is no longer any guarantee of a social wage or social insurance to support our work, squatting has been made illegal, anything public that was left after New Labour has been sold off and marketised, there is an epic housing crisis that receives little public attention, and resisting bodies are ruthlessly and systematically criminalised. We have lost almost every battle so far. The university and spaces of culture are in no position to offer their traditional protection, consolation or open time for reflection and creation, and discrete collectives of intellectuals and artists reflecting on these processes offer little or no traction in these struggles, quickly becoming either marginalised or thematised. Caught in dynamics of dependence, much of our energy is taken up with survival and conjuring new conditions into least-worst scenarios, often reproducing the worst forms of accommodation and self-governance in the process. These self-defeating contradictions can be seen nowhere more clearly than the current absence of resistance to the REF, ‘Research Excellence Framework’, in British Universities. Academics in the university, although highly unionised and almost unanimously and publicly against the current REF, its discriminations and destructiveness, cannot or will not organise even a partial boycott. The growing legions of the forced self-employed become more deeply embedded in a similar subjective schizophrenia – where as entrepreneurs of themselves, they ‘are at the same time exploited and interested in exploitation.’8 Subjectivity is produced in contemporary spheres of work, culture and education in deeply paradoxical and problematic coils of contradiction: in attempting to escape current regimes of austerity, precarity and exploitation, individualisation and reinforcement of our conditions of dependence become more deeply entrenched. This struggle on the terrain of subjectivity, this ethico-aesthetic task of living and forming lives together feels harder, more immutable and intractable than ever.
Working with the ideas, forms and materialities of resistance on this terrain is incredibly difficult. Yet, as our experience of these new waves of activism and occupation testify, the necessity of the slow, collective work of composing new spaces, temporalities, relations and economies must be grasped. I don’t think it is enough right now to call our governance under current conditions a kind of machinic subservience (neither voluntary nor enforced), nor can we assume that our desiring machines will somehow ‘compose another industry’. Concurring instead with Raunig’s call elsewhere for an evental break, a complete breach of the current regime of time and living, we must find ways to sever these systems and simultaneously build alternative practices and economies through which to live and practice otherwise. This would require the careful construction of spaces and commons that are sustainable, that take on the longer term, the conflicts between users, and the challenges of mutual aid and other forms of material support. It is clear that we have to build more powerful, self-sustaining social compositions through slow everyday practices, repetition and consistency. Many of these efforts are underway in the UK and elsewhere.
Silvia Federici puts this challenge another way. Rather than building towards events, demonstrations and temporary actions which present themselves as the peak of our struggles, she calls for a focus on the ways in which we reproduce our struggles, our movements and ourselves today. She says that we need to put this analysis and practice of social reproduction at the centre of our work.9 In the afterword to Raunig’s book, Antonio Negri states that without a place to rest, it is impossible to revolt. It is precisely these spaces that are disappearing today, and that need our time and attention. Raunig’s book gives us a really useful account and set of frameworks for thinking about where we have arrived in the last five years. In its more strident analysis and its focus on the modulations of subjectivation, institutions and work we can begin to map key terrains of struggle today."
(http://www.metamute.org/editorial/reviews/university-factory)
=More Information=
* discussion by the chief editor Raunig: http://asounder.org/resources/raunig_modulation.pdf
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