by undercommoning on June
4, 2016 in Announcements, Articles, Interventions
Originally published by ROAR Magazine: https://roarmag.org/essays/undercommoning-collective-university-education/
Undercommons (n.): The networks of rebellious solidarity
that interlace within, against and beyond dominant institutions and power
structures
Undercommoning (v.): The conscious and unconscious labours
and process of interlacing the undercommons
The Undercommoning Project (n.): A network of radical
organizers working in the shadow of the university.
The University-as-Such (n.): Their dream, our nightmare.
Beyond the University-As-Such (n.): Our dream, their
nightmare.
The University is a Thief
No spectre is haunting the university; The university is
haunting us. While we are accustomed to imagining “the university” as an
enlightening institution that works in the public interest, we, the Undercommoning Project, hold that: in an
age of skyrocketing tuition prices, soaring student debt, the hyperexploitation
of precarious service workers, the proliferation of highly-paid senior
administrative positions and the increased commercialization and
corporatization of higher education, universities today are anything but a public
good. Indeed, we insist the university-as-such has never been a bastion of
progress, learning, and fairness; it has always excluded individuals and
communities on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship and
politics. Further, it is implicated in the past and present of slavery and
colonial genocide in North America.
Worse, the university has always been a thief, stealing
people’s labor, time and energy. We charge that the university-as-such is a
criminal institution. Along with the Edu-Factory
Collective we understand the university today as a key institution of an
emerging form of global, racial capitalism, one that is a laboratory for new
forms of oppression and exploitation, rather than an innocent institution for
the common good. From its pirating of Indigenous biomedical knowledge to the
marginalization and containment of non-traditional inquiry, from the training
of corporate kleptocrats to the cronyistic production of private patents, from
the university’s role in gentrification and urban enclosures to the actions and
implications of its investments and endowments, from the white-supremacist and
eurocentric knowledge it exalts to its dark collaborations with the
military-industrial complex, the university thrives on its thievery.
So when we say the university-as-such is criminal, we mean
criminal like the police: a force of racialized and class-based figures of
authority, enforcement, and violence that guards, incarcerates, entraps, on the
one hand, and on the other, punishes freedom, solidarity, and communal
potential.
You may accuse us of losing faith in the university; it
never had faith in us. Long ago it transformed us, as it had others before us,
into overwhelmed debtors, precarious adjuncts, and exploited service sector
workers. We were only the latest in a long line of its waste products.
You may accuse us of devaluing study, learning and
research; far from it—we value them so greatly that we know they must be
liberated from the structures of the university-as-such, which today already
lie in ruins. The university-as-such can be the occasion for the joys of study,
of solidarity, of poetic play, of learning and honing our powers. We refuse to
relinquish these pleasures. But we will insist that these are gifts we give one
another, not tokens of the university’s affection for its subjects. We dream of
the thing to come after the university.
Within, Against, Beyond
We want to experiment, explore and enjoy building
solidarity between these outcasts onto whom the university-as-such casts its
shadow, in order to create conditions where something monstrously new can grow
amidst the rubble.
We want to experiment, explore and enjoy building
solidarity between these outcasts onto whom the university-as-such casts its
shadow, in order to create conditions where something monstrously new can grow
amidst the rubble. Therefore, when we say that we organize in the shadow of the
university, we mean that we organize with those who have been used and abused
by the university-as-such: students and workers of color who endure
institutional racism while having their being used for images used in the name
of of diversity; precariously employed adjunct faculty who must rely on social
or communal assistance for survival; exploited graduate teaching fellows still
urged to play the rigged academic game; custodial and food services staff who
are treated as disposable in patriarchal and racist divisions of labor;
so-called “dropouts” who’ve been ejected from the university because they can’t
stand its discipline; students and former students who will be haunted by debt
for decades; and organizers who educate, study, and research outside and in
spite of the university’s present configurations.
And so our study must be molded in the traditions of freedom
schools and oral histories, of fugitive campfires and underground reading
groups. We value autonomous study as an exercise in cultivating collective,
transformative liberation.
No nostalgia for the past, no nostalgia for their future
We have no nostalgia for the fabled university of the past,
the mythical ivory tower of meritocracy, civility and white collegiality: that
supposedly utopian place never existed, at least not for anyone outside the
raced, classed and gendered elite.
We also have no nostalgia for the future long promised by
advocates of the university-as-such. We do not believe access to present
universities merely needs to be widened or brought into the virtual world, nor
do we believe that the mission of the public university merely needs to be
redeemed from the forces of managerialism or commercialization. We believe the
university-as-such must be abolished.
The undercommons deserves to enjoy and reinvent all that it
produces, which is to say everything.
Of course we believe in the value of high-caliber research.
Of course we believe everyone should be able to study to develop their skills
and knowledge. Of course we believe in debate, freedom of expression and
rigorous critical thinking. Of course we believe in communal intellectual joy.
We believe in them so fiercely we refuse to continue to see them enclosed,
warped, choked, defined by and destroyed in the university-as-such.
Does this sound entitled? It should. The undercommons
deserves to enjoy and reinvent all that it produces, which is to say
everything. It is our collective labour and knowledge that university-as-such
prepares, consumes, digests and uses to reproduce itself: we are mobilizing to
reclaim that labour and knowledge, within, against and beyond the
university-as-such, in the name of producing something monstrous.
Knowing/Practicing our Value
We see the university-as-such not as an alma mater (“giving
mother”) but as a parasite
Thus we advocate grassroots study groups and collective
research projects within, against and beyond the university as we know it. We
advocate the creation of new networks of study, theory, knowledge and
collaborative learning outside the system of credit(s) and of debt. We see the
university-as-such not as an alma mater (“giving mother”) but as a parasite. It
feeds off its students’ future earnings via their debt, and off its
increasingly precarious employees via their labor; it thrives on the good
intentions, the tragic idealism, and the betrayed hopes of those over whom it
casts its shadow.
Undercommoning is the process of discovering and practicing
our value within, against and beyond the university’s measures. We refuse to
suffer silently the depression and anxieties the university-as-such and its
constant crises instill, trigger and exploit. We will not relinquish the senses
of radical wonder, passionate curiosity, and critical integrity we create
together. We insist that the splendor of the university is not to be found in
the mahogany or the oak of its aristocratic chambers but in the tapestry and
grain of insurgent collaborations.
We recognize that the university as it currently exists is
part of an archipelago of social institutions of neoliberal, free-market racial
capitalism. It includes the for-profit prison and the non-for-profit agency,
the offshore army base and the offshore tax haven, the underfunded public and
the elite private school, the migrant-worker staffed shop floor and the Wall
Street trading floor, the factory and the factory farm. All are organs for
sorting, exalting, exploiting, drilling, controlling and/or wasting what they
call “human capital” and that we call our lives.
We are well aware of how much privilege and comfort the
university-as-such affords many of its inhabitants, employees and clients. But
the privileges of this university life are less evidence of institutional
largesse than they are how the university-as-such sustains and reproduces the
reigning social order. If this university appears to provide a greater latitude
of freedom for independent thought and action, and if it bears within it
resources unlike any other, we can nevertheless only advocate, along with
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, who coined
the term “the undercommons,” that the only appropriate relation to the
university today is a criminal one.
To resist the university-as-such from within is to
recognize that it has already turned us into criminals in its own image. If the
university is, today, already a criminal institution, one built on the theft of
the time and the resources of those it overshadows, we who enjoy its bitter
embrace must refuse its codes and values of ownership and propriety.
Don’t just steal a piece of chalk and write on the
sidewalk. We advocate forming autonomous study and affinity groups that build
alliances between students, faculty, workers, families, insiders and outsiders.
We advocate using the university’s classrooms, spaces, libraries, databases and
infrastructure as resources for abolitionist organizing. We advocate
repurposing trade unions and student associations as platforms for developing
new forms of mutual aid and solidarity within and beyond the
university-as-such. We advocate taking time with and taking pleasure in our
evolving collective powers. We advocate revolt.
You may accuse us of abandoning the university. Far from
it; we would be loath to give the university-as-such the satisfaction. Rather,
we recognize the centrality of the university-as-such for contemporary life in
the reproduction of contemporary power. It has an unprecedented importance as
the supposed key to employment in the extortionist capitalist economy. A large
proportion of North Americans feel they have no choice but to seek a
“necessary” degree while saddling themselves with debt; for others, even this
limited access is out of reach.
The Stakes
We locate our struggle within and against the
university-as-such, not in the name of its survival and restoration, but of our
own. For the university-as-such teems with dangerous social tensions and
contradictions that cannot be ignored. These tensions build as the university
is used to warehouse whole generations for whom capitalism has little use, as
the university increasingly teaches us that we will be made to compete for any
chance at a decent life. The university’s criminal contradictions demand our
fugitive resistance.
Nevertheless we also know that as the university-as-such
accumulates tensions and contradictions, these may inspire and catalyze
reactionary forces of hatred and violence on the part of others. Already the
elites of the university-as-such are closing ranks, with administrators,
faculty and complicit students conscripted to defend the idealized, imaginary
institution from the barbarian hordes. Whether they rally behind the tattered
banners of “civility”, “excellence”, “collegiality” or “tradition” they are
really championing a neoliberal institution that rewards the few while
oppressing the many. Incidents of racism, misogyny, transphobia, abuse, rape
culture, and hatred on campuses are on the rise and the university-as-such has
all but destroyed the elusive academic freedom and job security for those who
would challenge power, which faculty and students of the past sought through
difficult struggle.
We insist that the struggle for a better world and against
the university-as-such is necessarily anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist,
queer, trans-liberationist and anti-ableist.
We, by undercommoning together, are slowly building a
network of organizers, with members currently located Anglophone North America,
of those eager to link their struggle with others around the world. We, by
undercommoning together, want to transform the tensions inherent to the
university-as-such into visions, actions and experiments for a radically
different world. We will shout in every common space that the values the
university-as-such claims to profess–of knowledge, fairness, inquiry and
truth–cannot thrive in our capitalist, white-supremacist, hetero-patriarchal
and colonial economy, based as it is on ignorance, greed, sorrow and fear. We
insist that the struggle for a better world and against the university-as-such
is necessarily anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer, trans-liberationist
and anti-ableist. We insist that free education is about freedom in these
terms, not simply the absence of tuition fees or tokenistic inclusion.
We are already building the thing that will come after the
university-as-such. We build it in stolen and redirected classroom discussions.
We build through shared cigarettes or small gestures of compassion and
solidarity. We build it on the picket lines and in the lunch lines and between
the lines of essays and manifestos, in our statements of support and letters of
condemnation. It emerges as we capture and liberate our time and thought,
together. The reality of the undercommons is all around us in the reality of
our struggle to collectively know ourselves and our power. Our goal is to
create the tools and toys by which undercommoners can find one another and make
common cause.
To that end we facilitate digital and local discussions
with activists working in generative and surprising ways. We collect and
broadcast examples of tactics, ideas, inspirations and techniques. In all we
do, we seek to sustain alternative institutions seeking to build new forms of
research, study and collaborative learning in and outside of the university’s
shadow.
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