[-empyre-] tactical media & the university

[Green Jo-Anne]

Hi Rita,

You wrote "it’s not at all surprising and even not contradictory for  
a university to tenure someone on the basis of ECD and then one year  
later make noises about how the matter needs reinvestigation ... it  
is ... consistent with the university’s function as an institution of  
control, one that works by continuous monitoring and assessment."

This "continuous monitoring and assessment" is both internal and  
external, and it's often the external forces that pressure it to  
reassess. So that, internally, it might support ECD but when external  
pressure is applied it backtracks and appears to contradict itself.

Warm Regards,
Jo

On Apr 14, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Rita Raley wrote:

> Hello, all, and thanks to Renate and Tim for organizing this  
> discussion. As I said to them, I wish that this were not the  
> occasion for my delurking but here we are. I have very much enjoyed  
> the contributions thus far and am looking forward to more.
>
> One note to start: as chance would have it, Ricardo Dominguez and  
> Amy Carroll visited UC Santa Barbara this past Friday to give a  
> talk on "Dislocative Media: The Transborder Immigrant Tool as  
> Aesthetic Sustenance." We had been planning the visit for about a  
> year and certainly in different circumstances but, as it turned  
> out, their presentation on the TBT was all the more powerful for  
> its incorporation of all of the utterances (hate mail included)  
> that are situated under the rubric of "response." We are working on  
> the video and I hope to be able to circulate it by Thursday at the  
> very latest.
> http://lcm.english.ucsb.edu/?p=513
>
> Because we have to begin where we are, the point of entry for me  
> into this conversation is to think about the differences between  
> writing about tactical media and actually doing it. I am aware of  
> course of the ways in which that distinction can be complicated and  
> am certainly willing to think about the extent to which writing can  
> have a material effect on the world, but I cannot imagine a  
> university calculus that would regard (even “count”) a book and an  
> act – even if it were but one instance in a larger “performative  
> matrix” – in the same terms.  So, from the university’s  
> perspective, all of the critical discourse on tactical media,  
> including Ricardo’s own essays on ECD, is valuable because it can  
> so to speak be written under the sign of research.  But an actual  
> act of ECD crosses the line from saying to doing (again these are  
> institutional optics).  Even the Transborder Immigrant Tool as an  
> object is legitimate in a gallery exhibition but illegitimate when  
> put to actual use.  Geert is on the same page here in his  
> delineation of different strategies of solidarity, one that would  
> align with “strategies, tools and fights” and one that would  
> embrace the mantle of academic freedom.  Put more crudely,  
> universities like us to write about activism; they just don’t like  
> us to be activists.
>
> Here, too, one would have to consider both the ways in which  
> certain practices have been coded as legitimate (writing letters to  
> the editor) and others illegitimate (ECD) and the different  
> matrices in which such distinctions are drawn (ECD was ostensibly  
> permissible when the targets were Mexican servers).  All of which  
> is to say that the Corpiversity, as Arthur says a paradigmatic  
> instance of “technocratic liberalism with rationalist excess,”  
> works with such amorphous metrics – “excellence,” “innovation” –  
> that it maintains the privilege of deciding what is valuable and  
> legitimate in the context of its core mission at that particular  
> moment.  Even the noted evangelical scholar whose endorsement of  
> evolution can be coded as “free speech” can suddenly become  
> illegitimate, which is to say not Excellent, and summarily  
> dismissed.  This for me is the truly unsettling aspect of what now  
> has to be understood as a juridical case:  it’s not at all  
> surprising and even not contradictory for a university to tenure  
> someone on the basis of ECD and then one year later make noises  
> about how the matter needs reinvestigation.  On the surface it  
> appears to be a contradiction but it is in fact absolutely  
> consistent with the university’s function as an institution of  
> control, one that works by continuous monitoring and assessment.   
> As we well know, however, control and discipline are not mutually  
> exclusive so on a purely practical level I think it may be time to  
> start a legal defense fund.
>
> Onwards,
> Rita
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --------
> Rita Raley
> Associate Professor of English
> Director, Literature.Culture.Media Center
> UC Santa Barbara
> Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
> raley.english.ucsb.edu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Jo-Anne Green
Co-Director
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