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

[Nguyen, Mimi Thi]

ElizaBeth, I don’t have clear-cut conclusions, just a few more questions about what it would mean to “change the shape of learning and knowledge work in institutions of higher education in order to better prepare graduate students for work in a variety of fields.” In this case, I want to close with some thoughts --and other people’s thoughts!-- I am working through about the organization of learning and knowledge in the academy, and whether the alternate forms through which we might imagine these arrangements assume too rigidly that we “know” how power is distributed within the institution.

First, I am thinking about a piece I read some months ago by Alexander Galloway called, “The Reticular Fallacy,” in which he argues the fallacy of assuming that fluidity and flux, horizontality and the rhizomatic, are necessarily revolutionary forms that upend hierarchical sovereignty:

“To summarize, the reticular fallacy refers to the following argument: since power and organization are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation, the elimination of such things will prompt a general mollification if not elimination of power and organization as such. Such an argument is false because it doesn’t take into account the fact that power and organization may inhabit any number of structural forms. Centralized verticality is only one form of organization. The distributed network is simply a different form of organization, one with its own special brand of management and control.”

(http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/the-reticular-fallacy)

I find this insight useful on so many levels, especially as we acknowledge the transformation of administration in the academy via corporate practices that are both heavily bureaucratic (effecting that redistributed network of management) and at other times autocratic (as more and more trustees –and donors, such as the Koch brothers— feel comfortable contravening faculty governance).

This is also a reminder that artists’ (and other subcultural) forms of organization –including dispersed networks, mobility, short-term projects, and flexible labor— might dovetail with neoliberal demands. In Your Everyday Art World, Lane Relyea describes how today’s network paradigm for artmaking lends itself to a neoentrepreneurial mythology about volunteerism and DIY agency. He writes, “DIY serves as the honorific term for the kind of subject required by the constant just-in-time turmoil of our networked world. It has come to stand for a potent mix of entrepreneurial agency and networked sociality, proclaiming itself heir to both punk autonomy, the notion of living by your wits and as an outsider, and to a subcultural basis for authentic artistic production, the assumption that truly creative individuals exist in spontaneously formed social undergrounds.”

We know that the new economy of the last decade or more claimed to prize the so-called creative classes whose commodities included information, services, experiences, and other forms of cultural capital. Promising that individual autonomy, personal initiative, creative spontaneity, and self-realization in creative and intellectual labor would inaugurate this new economy, we might observe that these promises provide ideological cover for the shift in labor conditions to more chronically intermittent and contingent employment without benefits or security, and in some cases without wages or compensation (witness the failure of so many “cool cities” projects that hoped to bring artists and hipsters into diminished post-industrial downtowns to revitalize local economies). As Andrea Fraser has observed, artists “have become the poster children for the joys of insecurity, flexibility, deferred economic rewards, social alienation, cultural uprooting and geographical displacement.”

So I want to pose these provocations to suggest something –I don’t know quite what yet—about the future of training graduate students to be, in this analogy, more like artists in the present context of “reengineering the university.”

Thanks for having me in this space, elizaBeth, Kevin, and --empyre-- of course! I hope I was able to provide some good conversation.


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: elizaBeth Simpson [elizacorps at gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2015 9:42 PM
To: Nguyen, Mimi Thi
Cc: soft_skinned_space; Hamilton, Kevin
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week One : Nguyen and Simpson

Mimi,

Thank you so much for your insightful response, and for kick-starting us on our month-long journey with such fervor!

As our first week comes to a close, I wanted to simply ask if there were any other/closing thoughts you might want to address to our topics (for everyone's convenience, I've replicated the initial questions, below), perhaps including how topics raised by your recent guest, Virgie Tovar, implicate the university...

- The construction of labor value: how the body of the worker is an indicator of how the labor is valued / the way labor done by people on the margins is constructed as criminal and/or value-less
- How artists from the margins engage with the political landscape in which they find themselves
- Code-switching
- Professionalization - the intersections of art practice and non profit industrial complex/monetization
More info about her visit at: https://www.facebook.com/events/404199413089621/

... but perhaps simply closing or loose-end thoughts before we transition to our next guest.

Warmly,
elizaBeth

...
Starting Questions for "Engineering the University:"
- How can the research or labor forms of higher education prepare one for
work outside the academy?
- 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 can the changing shape of academic labor - especially graduate
student labor - tell us about the current role of higher education in a
global sphere?
- Where might one want to change the shape of learning and knowledge work
in institutions of higher education in order to better prepare graduate
students for work in a variety of fields?


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!
www.ucpeopleshistory.org<http://www.ucpeopleshistory.org>


On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:09 AM, Nguyen, Mimi Thi <mimin at illinois.edu<mailto:mimin at illinois.edu>> wrote:
(I don't know what happened to all my formatting in cutting and pasting here, so I hope this still makes sense -- and also it's like 1 a.m., I am barely coherent but really, really wanted to send an answer!)


Thanks again for these provocations, elizaBeth, and I believe I can answer both at once, actually! To do so, I should situate that I come from the interdisciplines – all my degrees, undergraduate and graduate, are granted in those fields of inquiry (feminist studies and ethnic studies) that are usually narrated as emerging from the social movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. So first, I can say truthfully that the critical scholarship I read in those fields blew my mind again and again; as an activist who found herself wanting to stop reacting and responding to the immediacy demanded by the language of crisis, it was immensely transformative for me to be able to sit (and struggle) with those theories that helped me to understand that what we called “crisis” was actually our condition. It wasn’t that I didn’t encounter critique in the other spaces I occupied as a punk –there was no limit to the arguments anarchists could have with sectarian Marxists and Maoists and amongst ourselves!— but most of it, at the time, didn’t speak to gender, race, or coloniality in a satisfying way, nor did it unfold for me the “how” as well as say, Gayatri Spivak or Lisa Lowe did.

I say “usually narrated as emerging from social movements,” however, because as scholars such as Roderick Ferguson and again Nick Mitchell observe, the rise of the interdisciplines within the academy is not distinct from power’s control or knowledge’s interference. The university is all too willing to incorporate the minor as minor! Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things demonstrates so well how easily the interdisciplines were enfolded (in order to contain) into state and capital forms, and Mitchell recently tweeted for National Adjunct Walkout Day an analysis of the political economy of adjunctification. He argues that adjunctification is not primarily (or singularly) a neoliberal effect, but a consequence of the academy’s double-dealing with the interdisciplines – that is, granting them some marginal status (because it suits the premise of liberal inclusion) while under-resourcing them with deliberation. Here’s the collected tweets:

http://www.lowendtheory.org/post/112138864200/theses-on-adjunctification

So academic “legitimacy” (which is a shifting set of metrics) for what I call minor objects is less an achievement or even a process (which would seem to lead to something), but a contingency.

These are some of the tensions we deal with, I think, when we consider the “marginal” in the academy. We must also contend with the fact that the humanities broadly, but the interdisciplines specifically, are forced to justify themselves all the time to their institutions in an increasingly “output-driven” economy, and according to an austerity logic – in terms of resources, including tenure lines and budgets, but also research, including tenure approval, academic freedom, and faculty governance (as we are watching unfold on our campus right now, over the administration’s breach of the American Indian Studies program’s decision to hire Palestinian American professor Steven Salaita, but which also happens all the time at so many other universities and colleges over “uncollegial” women of color faculty denied tenure, for instance). So I believe that our incorporation into the institution is a wary one, on both sides (hopefully, on our side – there are probably too many who believe the institution is actually on our side!).

A few more specific notes: Though there are clear distinctions between the university and punk –I mean, obviously, just all the forms of capital and their distribution through structures is so on two planets— I actually feel that there’s not a clear divide in terms of their transformative effects on me, personally. The critique of US empire I first read as a sixteen year-old in the pages of the punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll set me on a (long, long) path toward the first book. It was Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, which I would bring with me to punk shows to read between sets, who helped me figure out how to understand the particular traction of the gift of freedom as not just a ruse but the rule of that empire.

I will also say that in my own academic research, I just noticed that I argue all the time against rendering minor objects transparent or accessible, even as I write about refugees or punk. I very explicitly note in The Gift of Freedom that I am not uncovering refugee subjectivity, even though people ask me all the time how some of the persons I discuss --like the Vietnamese woman whose napalm-burning as a child is pictured in that award-winning photograph-- how they really feel. (My answer is always, “I am not a mind reader.”) And I actually hate writing (or talking) about punk as an object of scholarly inquiry, and (yet?) I wrote a whole essay about it for the “Queering Archives” special issue of Radical History Review. Here’s the premise of the essay, which is called “Minor Threats”:

“Called on to provide presence (as a constitutive outside) and course correction (toward a more ‘complete picture’), even as a minor object might be brought to bear upon the fractures of empire, ‘the good life,’ or feminist movement, the negative integration or partial recognition or presence of some minor objects into major histories can be made to resolve the same. What happens to the brats, new bloods, poison girls, androids of Mu, persons unknown, or younger lovers, when interpellated to fill a void, correct a partial claim, set straight a story? How do the politics surrounding institutional discourses of a minor threat, especially at the crash with race or gender, displace or defuse that threat through its incorporation into a politics, history, or archive? How might the specific difference of the minor object be enlisted to enhance a normative principle, an already known unity? This query then is about minor objects becoming objects of knowledge, especially once marshaled in institutional histories and inquiries to achieve continuity, chronology, and correspondences, and the consequences for those objects and those who might wish otherwise for them.”

I end the essay arguing against legibility and accessibility, drawing on this amazing movie called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Suffice to say for now that the last line of the essay modifies slightly a famous line from the movie (uttered by a teenaged punk played by Diane Lane): You’re perfect, don’t let anyone in this shithole get you, you don’t have to put 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<mailto:mimin at illinois.edu>
www.mimithinguyen.com<http://www.mimithinguyen.com>

________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> [empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>] on behalf of Nguyen, Mimi Thi [mimin at illinois.edu<mailto:mimin at illinois.edu>]
Sent: Friday, March 06, 2015 2:43 PM
To: elizaBeth Simpson; 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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