[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week One : Nguyen and Simpson

Fri Mar 6 02:38:42 AEDT 2015

Thanks, Mimi, for warding us off the track of "self-care for greater
service." You remind me that, before capitulation, a dominant social system
will often seek first to integrate elements of its counter public in order
to maintain as many of its elements as possible for as long as possible. I
am reminded of this both by stressful workplaces that integrate health
options to mitigate workplace effects, and by the tendency for individuals
to be identified as the site of ailments, rather than the context. An
obvious example of this is the therapeutic language that positions the
individual as depressed, rather than the societal conditions as depressing,
instructing the individual to use self care in order to accommodate their
socially untenable surroundings.

Charlotte Linde explains how a life story serves to account for oneself and
demonstrate worth to the community. When your creative and intellectual
work is not "*for* the institution, then what is it for? An answer might
be, "it's not *for* anything" or "it's for itself." This "non-productive"
logic tends to baffle, especially in a culture whose basic personal inquiry
is "what do you do?" But it is exactly the logic of productivity that
renders youth, the elderly and folks without so-called normative ability
(that is, many of the people we love, and the people we will ourselves are
or will become) outside the scope of social legitimacy in a capitalist,
production-oriented culture which can't help but breed abilism and distain
for life cycles and death.

In response, there can be an integrationist approach that seeks legitimacy
from the academy for various forms of work that currently go unrecognized,
which reflexively positions the university, not the cultures of origin, as
the final arbiter of value. William referred to "osmosis;" it is important
here to remember directionality... it the university
integrating/accommodating the community? Or vise versa?

So, Mimi- I have two directions to offer you…it's
choose-your-own-adventure!

Option One… Given what you have seen regarding the co-optation of
non-dominant cultures, whether they be indigenous, politically adverse
(punk!), or otherwise: *What are the offers and risks of seeking or
extending academic legitimacy to practices, ways of thinking, cultural
work, etc. that currently lie outside of the university's blessing? *

Options Two… One of the foundational questions of this Engineering the
University thread is: "What can the study of technology, ethics and society
offer a discussion about the research university's potential as a space of
social or political imagination?" *What do you consider to be the
contemporary university's potential as a space of social or political
imagination, broadly or in specific cases? *

Warmly,
elizaBeth

elizaBeth

217-979-2820 cell

The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no
parachute. The good news is, there's no ground. - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

learn about my latest creative initiative:
Art from the Streets!
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On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Nguyen, Mimi Thi <mimin at illinois.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> (I hope this works!)
>
> Thanks, ElizaBeth (and Kevin and Empyre), for having me in this space! Let
> me see if I can answer your question, which encompasses quite a
> constellation of clashes and concerns. First, thank you for mentioning the
> interview I did with the brilliant undergraduate students who run the
> feminist magazine Bluestockings; in the interview, they specifically asked
> me about self-care in the output-driven economy of the digital age, so I
> responded to them in their terms.
>
> (Found here:
> http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/01/27/unproductivity-in-the-digital-age-a-conversation-with-mimi-thi-nguyen/
> )
>
> For myself, I would actually wish to consider the wandering of the term
> “self-care” which –like so many terms we use in art and politics
> (“creativity,” “flexibility,” “participation” –of the latter especially I’m
> thinking about Claire Bishop’s critiques—and so on)— has been harnessed as
> a social good under the (produced) conditions of austerity, both in terms
> of the economic but also political imaginary. First, I am reminded of Nick
> Mitchell’s brilliant exploration of the life of the Audre Lorde quotation
> about self-care (“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is
> self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”), and his
> careful observations:
>
> "I would argue that the “self” of self-care came into being precisely as
> an effect of [neoliberal] management, as well as of the clobbering that
> both preceded and accompanied it. It euphemizes as a goodwill gesture (the
> benevolent “take care of yourself!”) an imperative that, if elaborated,
> looks much more like a relation of coercion and discipline (“take care of
> yourself or your job will go to someone who does”; “take care of yourself
> lest you fall ill and get saddled with medical debt”; “take care of
> yourself because you have no right to expect that society will”; “take care
> of yourself…or else”).  The self of self-care, all of this is to say, has a
> history that should serve as a caution toward attempts to make self-care an
> unqualified good.  It is a self that is specifically calibrated as a
> defensive reaction to the combination of austerity politics with
> reinvigorated forms of gendered racism that cut across the entire social
> formation."
>
> (
> http://www.lowendtheory.org/post/50428216600/on-audre-lordes-legacy-and-the-self-of
> )
>
> Self-care and all its attendant qualities, and others also make this
> point, has become a part of the austerity politics of the moment, as it is
> presumes to sustain or adjust our range of capacities and skills in order
> to prolong our productivity; consider the language of resilience that
> pervades the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program,
> examined so well by Alison Howell, that aims through positive psychology
> and an array of “mindfulness” practices to instill in soldiers the
> necessary capacities to endure what is now an unending war.
>
> Mitchell goes on to argue that the leftist version of this same austerity
> logic that produces self-care as necessarily useful – in this case, as
> “political warfare”— should also trouble us, because self-care then must be
> justified (and can be evaluated) according to its generation of political
> value. He thus argues that this logic reproduces the demands of
> hyper-productivity -- especially for him, from black women in the forms of
> superhuman strength and resistance.
>
> This is all to say that I am a little resistant to the hope that our
> institutions might provide for us the conditions to better practice
> self-care – not necessarily because I don’t enjoy meditation (which I do),
> but because I know too well that our institutions would love for its
> laborers to generate for them more economic and other value. Consider the
> emergence in the last decade or more of the no-collar workplace, for
> instance, which might provide on-site childcare or exercise facilities in
> order to encourage employees to spend more time at the workplace, and to
> invest affectively in their labor as a form of gratitude for that “care.”
> This arrangement is arguably preferable to the absence of these services in
> other workplaces, but as someone who values an anti-work ethic, it bothers
> me that these services are not “free,” but attached to labor and increasing
> productivity.
>
> But this is not to say that I disagree with you that we need to consider
> what communal and personal well-being looks like, especially in the academy
> where intellectual and other labor has that particularly terrifying
> resonance of being over-identified with one’s sense of self or value! I
> know that for me, I struggled for some time with the academy’s evaluation
> of my intellectual and creative labor (counting publications, weighting
> them according to journal rankings, et cetera) – but that I also do not
> want the institution to “have” it all (which is to say, to hold that labor
> as a quantifiable property or to count it capital as such). It was and is
> important to me that the greater part of my intellectual and creative labor
> is not “for” the institution; and I depend on those other encounters with
> my labor (through my zines, or whatever) to sustain those aspects of my
> well-being that hinge upon building communion or dialogue outside of the
> metrics of productivity or employability.
>
> At the same time, I do wish there were practices in place to recognize and
> value the affective and other labor that does sustain the academy, and the
> students that they claim to value – which comes from our office support,
> our faculty, and at times especially our women faculty, our people of color
> faculty, and our queer faculty who bear the particular weight of rendering
> the institution a “caring” one. One of the buttons I made for the Gender
> and Women’s Studies teach-ins this last semester reads, “The more she
> works, the less she makes,” a quip from my wonderful colleague Professor
> Ruth Nicole Brown (also a member of the Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms
> Collective), and it also reminds me of that infamous lyric from the British
> anarcho-punk collective CRASS: “Do they owe us a living? Of course they
> fucking do!”
>
> So the question becomes – what constitutes a “living” outside of and not
> dependent upon our present and possible productivity as laborers for
> institutions such as the military, or the state, or the corporation, which
> might want to force upon us a particular form of living that, as Lauren
> Berlant put so well, is meant to both prolong our lives through these
> continuous adjustments to our capacities, and also wear us out?
>
>
>
>
> Mimi Thi Nguyen
> Associate Professor,
> Gender and Women's Studies
> Asian American Studies
> Unit for Criticism
> Associate Chair,
> Gender and Women's Studies
> Conrad Humanities Professorial Scholar 2013-2018
> University of Illinois
> 1205 W. Nevada MC 137
> Urbana, IL 61801
> mimin at illinois.edu
> www.mimithinguyen.com
>
> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au [
> empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of elizaBeth
> Simpson [elizacorps at gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2015 7:00 PM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Cc: Hamilton, Kevin
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week One : Nguyen
> and      Simpson
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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>
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