<edu-factory> OPEN UNIVERSITY

[paolo do]

OPEN UNIVERSITY

Dear all,

With this short post I'd like to highlight some aspects of hierarchy
inside the factory of knowledge, rather than concentrate on how the
higher education system of produces the hierarchy of the contemporary
labour market (a topic already discussed in other excellent posts on
this list). I'd like to start with two simple questions: what is this
hierarchy inside the university used for? What are the devices that
realize and reproduce it?

I think that hierarchy inside the university is a governmental device
to prevent the collective management of knowledge production and the
autonomous working of the university. Nothing more, nothing less. Its
existence is connected with this goal. This hierarchy is set up by
devices of differentiation and vertical division, "authority" and
"pure" command over cooperation. These hierarchies are fictitious,
fake and artificial, with a clear political function.

So what are the tools used for this "noble initiative?" First of all
the foundation (or basis) of this internal hierarchisation that
separates students, researchers, professors and semi-professors, is
the hegemony of dead-knowledge on living-knowledge. Dead knowledge is
based on reproduction rather than production; it is knowledge without
mobilized experience, on the contrary it avoids experience as an
inconvenient element. It is lifeless knowledge, uncooperative, a
"knowledge that only reproduces easy and already established
knowledge". Living knowledge, on the contrary, produces action and
can make the new possible: it's not neutral knowledge because it takes
position and threatens.

Moreover we can find a sort of affective and reproductive labour in
the university. The university invests in relational labour: witness
the multiplication of tutors and advisers. At stake is a sort of
"pastoral power", as Foucault said, over students' formation and
careers. This relational and affective labour works against the
potential of students' socialization from below. Such socialization in
didactic spaces can give us some "long awaited and unexpected"
creative processes of collective resistance to dead knowledge. This
space of socialization inside the university is absorbed more and more
by the university itself, in a performative way, through a
differentiation of roles. (In Italy students are now paid by
university to advice other students not to waste time or leave
university, to complete their courses in due time, to move on, to get
over difficulty with exams; a power that becomes more and more
effective when it becomes capillary, personal and individualized).

This internal hierarchization process involves differences of salary,
wage and guarantees for those who work and study in the university.
Precarious work is a tool that mines the autonomy of knowledge
production, and it's closely connected with a certain kind of
knowledge. Moreover the existence of the Professor (with a capital
P) smells of medieval power and mechanisms of total bondage that
persist in many universities in Italy, France and above all Eastern
Europe. (It would be interesting to build up research to map the
different typologies, works conditions and contractual arrangements at
the global level).

Finally, I'd like to focus on another mechanism of hierarchy: the
construction of "excellence". This really had nothing to do with
excellence. It's all about differentiation, segmentation and division.
How does excellence work? What is excellence in the university? It's a
device of elitism. Today measures of excellence involve a selection of
students who are isolated. In those parts of the university designated
as "excellent" you find only the best students.

When I hear about an autonomous university, I think of anything but a
worker's run cooperative, as I've read in some recent posts in this
list. The autonomous university is a political device. It doesn't
exist without conflict. It's not a "good university", but a
battlefield. Surely it's a site for the minority, but an active
minority that can threaten the majority. It's not a ghetto. It's the
idea of a soviet where the working conditions inside the university
are immediately and intimately linked with the quality and the kind of
knowledge produced, exploited and socialized. It's a site where
conflict is practiced.

So the excellence of university becomes the threshold between living
labour and dead labour. Living labour entails the production of
knowledge, not linear reproduction. Talking about an autonomous
university is to find a starting-point to attack and to occupy the
spaces belonging to the enemy. It is to affirm and practice, as with
auto-education, new ways of redefining the notion of excellence.
Excellence, in this context, isn't about rarity against the mediocrity
of the masses, but based on an actual and urgent knowledge. It's not
an elitist system but an intense form of cooperation, which is also
conflictual and expresses itself through autonomous processes of
knowledge production.

Best,
Paolo Do
-- 
----------------------------------------------- --- -- -
www.escatelier.net
www.edu-factory.org
www.uniriot.org
www.posseweb.net