The Labor Issue
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THE LABOR ISSUE nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities 9 affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2014 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668 Jeff Wall, The Well, 1989, transparency in lightbox, 229 x 179 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 1 EDITORIAL BOARD Bridget Alsdorf Ruth Leys James Welling Jennifer Ashton Walter Benn Michaels Todd Cronan Charles Palermo Lisa Chinn, editorial assistant Rachael DeLue Robert Pippin Michael Fried Adolph Reed, Jr. Oren Izenberg Victoria H.F. Scott Brian Kane Kenneth Warren SUBMISSIONS ARTICLES: SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Please direct all Letters to the Editors, Comments on Articles and Posts, Questions about Submissions to [email protected]. Potential contributors should send submissions electronically via nonsite.submishmash.com/Submit. 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ISSN 2164-1668. 2 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #9: THE LABOR ISSUE (SPRING 2013) ISSUE #9:THE LABOR ISSUE SPRING 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS ARTICLES Going Back to Class: Why We Need to Make University Free, and How We Can Do It . 8 Samir Sonti Academic Labor, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise oF Autonomous Work . 22 Sarah Brouillette Bartleby’s Occupation: “Passive Resistance” Then and Now . 48 Jonathan Poore FEATURES The Anti-Dictionary: Ferreira Gullar’s Non-Object Poems . 68 Mariola V. Alvarez Bernhard’s Way . 90 Michael W. Clune Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why . 112 Adolph Reed, Jr. POETRY Some Passages from Virgil’s Eclogues . 148 Nate Klug VIDEOS Todd Cronan and Simon Critchley, “The Ontology of Photographic Seeing” . 162 Todd Cronan 4 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #9: THE LABOR ISSUE (SPRING 2013) ARTICLES ARTICLES 6 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #9: THE LABOR ISSUE (SPRING 2013) ARTICLES GOING BACK TO CLASS: WHY WE NEED TO MAKE UNIVERSITY FREE, AND HOW WE CAN DO IT SAMIR SONTI In 1969, celebrated management theorist Peter Drucker wrote, with respect to the GI Bill of Rights, the passage of which he would years later characterize as perhaps the most significant event of the twentieth century, “We need acceptance of the principle that higher education for every youngster is paid for out of taxes.” 1 Hardly a political progressive, this early cheerleader for privatization and pioneer of modern management science here demonstrated that rationality peculiar to the more sophisticated elements of the ruling-class during periods of social unrest. To Drucker, the GI Bill, which by covering tuition costs and living expenses opened the door to higher education for a generation of veterans, signaled the beginning of the “knowledge economy,” the defining feature of late-twentieth century America. Embracing and expanding upon this legacy, he suggested, was a prerequisite for future prosperity. 8 SAMIR SONTI - GOING BACK TO CLASS: WHY WE NEED TO MAKE UNIVERSITY FREE, AND HOW WE CAN DO IT Sam Durant, Strike, 2003, vinyl text on electric sign, 62 x 48 x 11 inches, Edition of 3. Image courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. To those of us distressed by the state of public higher education—where the life expectancy of colleges and universities as we’ve known them is very much unclear—words from someone like Drucker provide no solace. Indeed, they shouldn’t, since he was at bottom a reactionary whose endorsement of inclusive post-secondary education grew out of a fetishization of human capital more than from any egalitarian aspirations. On the other hand, registering this ostensibly progressive stance from someone whose profession was practicality, even if he came of age in another era and around an altogether different balance of class forces, might help us broaden our understanding of the politically possible. The point, in any case, is that if Peter Drucker thought the state ought to pay for everyone to go to college, why don’t we? *** After a three-decade free fall in state funding levels, US public higher education is approaching a terminal crisis. Whereas in 1980 state governments shouldered the vast majority of the burden, on average contributing close to 80% of the cost of instruction, today 9 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #9: THE LABOR ISSUE (SPRING 2013) ARTICLES students bear more than half of the total expense, a trend that the simultaneous stagnation in real household income has only exacerbated. Indeed, reflecting the same market logic that has worked to naturalize the dramatic upward redistribution of income and wealth in recent decades, the increasing cost of college has been implicitly validated by a shift in how an education itself is understood. No longer conceived of as a social good, it is increasingly viewed as just another commodity whose value is best measured by the fluid laws of exchange. More significant, however, is the other side of the coin, the ways in which the increasing cost of higher education has impelled its commodification. Sources: Trends in College Pricing, 2012 (College Board); Digest of Education Statistics, 2011 (Department of Education); Current Population Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau). 2 Given the mortgage-sized investment required to finance a college education, students’ fixation on their expected rate-of-return is understandable. The stunning magnitude and rate of growth of student debt—which, now hovering around $1 trillion, has surpassed aggregate credit card liabilities 3—throws into sharp relief the material forces pushing students to approach an undergraduate education as little more than a market transaction. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit released in August 2012, after total household debt reached its high water mark in the third quarter of 2008, student debt has grown by more than $300 billion while all other obligations have plummeted by $1.6 trillion. 4 As of the spring of 2011, two-thirds of college seniors graduated with student loans, and those that did owed an average of $26,500. 5 Assuming an interest rate of 6.8%—the fixed rate for unsubsidized and, beginning on July 1, 2013, subsidized federal Stafford loans 6—this typical student debt-holder must shell out $150 per month on interest alone to avoid watching his or her liability inch upwards. Needless to say, given that the class of 2011 was welcomed to a real world with an unemployment rate above nine percent, job opportunities that might allow graduates to begin making a dent in the principal were few and 10 SAMIR SONTI - GOING BACK TO CLASS: WHY WE NEED TO MAKE UNIVERSITY FREE, AND HOW WE CAN DO IT far between. 7 Familiarity with the draconian nature of state budgetary politics along with a realistic assessment of the likely trend in household income in a persistently slack labor market should indicate the direction in which this student loan crisis is headed. The deleterious effects these skyrocketing costs have had on the intellectual atmosphere, working conditions, and general quality of life on campus couldn’t be clearer. Part and parcel of the corporatization of the university, the expense has helped to rationalize the now ubiquitous administrative assaults on academic departments and programs deemed unprofitable, an offensive that bears most acutely on the humanities.