Communiqué from an Absent Future
Posted on | September 28, 2009 | 1 Comment
(from the UCSC occupation barricades)
I
Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the
university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is
the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and
economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what
the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the
old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too,
the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.
These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly
maintained halls.
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of
a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these
remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous
habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and
assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped
up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can
make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of
catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria
following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of
lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they
never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to
happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we
were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge
among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of
exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of
commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We
slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We
shepherd our emptiness from place to place.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a
condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just
what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers
and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot
crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the
dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked
weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work.
We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run
tirelessly in elliptical circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory
tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard”
has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training
for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and
numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American
capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more
years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more
than a share in General Motors.
We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we
work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of
students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of
employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after
graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.
We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has
already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan
debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first
century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a
figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by
nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys
is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.
What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class
without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent
interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the
bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.
This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since
grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege
notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of
psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical
compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.
No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the
cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us
who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of
our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more
take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway,
socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student
achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,”
“minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the
aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our
achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the
circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of
our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for
others, elsewhere.
If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste
our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby
teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like
everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and
it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the
system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and
then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work
hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the
commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one
obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach
are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system.
Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course
easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A?
What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with
a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A
training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation?
There are anti-depressants for that.
Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically
enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for
which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the
grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be
Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the
exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained
through an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer
the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of
capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our
pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable.
Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of
ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the
question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by
somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is
good and all goods appear attainable by credit.
Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted
to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star
professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts
paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here,
with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the
strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its
essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play
apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that
nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the
paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be
the one. Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track
job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.
We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of
coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to
begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first
part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to
break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.
The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible
to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of
enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent
radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of
embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million
Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from
America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the
seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about
it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between
the is and the ought of current left thought. One feels that there is
no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is
possible.
We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is right
in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary. The
ought and the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is here
and now.
Continue reading at: absentfutureonline1
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September 30th, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
This is actually a draft version; the finished pamphlet can be found here, in web-readable and prinatble forms: http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/communique-from-an-absent-future-the-terminus-of-student-life/