Autouni is on today.
UNIVERSITY + WAR
Pine St Community Centre, 64 Pine St, Chippendale
August the 13th, 2005
2pm to 8pm
Sandy and I are going to do our thing in the second last session.
We are looking at student labour.
My contribution is to think a reconfiguration of the university according to labour and the singularity of scholarship, and not in terms of hierarchies and status or outcomes. I draw on The Poverty of Student Life document and Negri’s discussion of poverty in Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo (published in Time for Revolution, see here for some related comments from Negri). I had been thinking about this section of Negri’s work since hearing Tim Rayner speak at the ASCP conference. The difference between the scholarship of the academic and the scholarship of the student is what the academic needs to be an academic: recognition (of being a scholar and the work as scholarship) and the status that comes with this. Student labour is not just confined to the university and spills out into surrounding suburbs or towns. The ‘poverty’ of the student forces them to be creative. Negri’s confounding statement that poverty equals resistance must be understood in the conext of revolution being a total event of which we are internal to it. Kairos as biopolitical event (195). Each act of resistance is but another actualisation of the total event of revolution.
“A gigantic revolution is underway. Free expression and the joy of bodies, the autonomy, hybridization and the reconstruction of languages, the creation of new, singular and mobile modes of production – all this emerges, everywhere and continually.” (201)