My immediate reflection on this essay is that this kind of precarity is precisely what the free market requires. There is no permanence, little unpacking makes any sense. You are whatever you are worth at this moment, the future is uncertain, and the past is a chain of data about what you used to be worth.

So elegantly articulated in the blog, I wonder it if it does not help us to understand what has happened to the White working class in the US. In the face of enduring precarity and given a desire to believe that bad things don’t happen to good people for no reason, perhaps feverishly latching on to pseudo system-destroyer finds an explanation. Better to believe in something than in nothing.

Come to think of it, I didn’t know anything about the history of the NYRB, so those testimonials were quite informative. Thanks, Victor. And Sivers sounds a bit like I.F. Stone — workaholic, immersed in language, intellectually omnivorous.

I think this piece would have been intellectually better if it hadn’t been written by someone so committed to consensus liberalism. But I fear that the unstated masculinism may well also have cropped up even in a piece written by a better-informed (male) Marxist…

It comes to my mind that a new genre can itself be a critically consequential event, so in that sense, even though genres are forms of enclosure, the making of a new form of enclosure can be an opening. (metaphorically.)

Indeed!

My comment was for the original writer! This mistake is actually very common…

About “je ne m’oublierais pas de vous inscrire”, logically, I agree, it ought to be the future tense, but if you look closely at the photo (above) that has the original text, I’m pretty sure the author wrote “oublierais.” Not all French speakers always write with perfect grammar, I guess, right?

Thanks, Lauren, “cheesy is better than disaffected” sounds like words to live by! There’s so much that’s shaped by how people hold their bodies, etc, it would be nice to try some of these exercises to interrupt the norms. I actually started out this class the first day by having the kids go outside the classroom on a sort of cultural scavenger hunt, but I never came up with a good reason to do that again, alas.

Perhaps I could ask my students to come up with their own movement exercises to enact the course material 🙂

Hi Paul, yep, Agamben seems like a good example to me as well (though I don’t know a lot about his life and career to be honest). It seems to me in any event that most reasonable critical theorists understand that their relationship to a public is a matter of historical and institutional conjunctures that are outside their control. I don’t really feel that there is any disrespect involved in pointing that out (though it also occurs to me that only a deeply hierarchical intellectual culture would tell us that we MUST respect famous theorists as such…).

Sorry to reply so belatedly, and thanks for the great interpretive challenge! I tend to think I agree with your reinterpretation, on re-reading, but I have to think more about what exactly the relationship between cruelty and vulnerability consists of…

Thanks so much for the great commentary, Sharon!

I completely agree with your observations about the ways that hierarchy interferes with any kind of institutional critique. My experience, having gotten my Ph.D. in 2014, is that almost all previously activist graduate students abandon all political involvement when they are looking for jobs. It’s understandable but also a telling commentary on institutional intimidation.

As far as the social class angle, I also think this is completely true at middle-class and elite universities — my sense, though, is that the story about class would be completely different at a very working-class institution (especially the 2-year places). Where I teach right now at Whittier College, there is a lot of class diversity alongside ethnic diversity, which the faculty talks about quite a lot, to their credit, though I’m not sure exactly how students think about it. I would tentatively observe that the massive social diversity seems to *decrease* identity politics thinking among students, perhaps because Latino/a students are a majority of the student body.

anyway, these interview snippets are wonderful.

So the first step is creating a space for sharing experiences and, in highly repressive situations, this phase often takes a while. People who have been silenced often require time to develop their own story and to figure out how to tell it, to say nothing of deciding if the space is safe enough to do so. For major organizational change processes, these processes need eventually to include the other key stakeholder groups, in our case, students from across the institution with diverse backgrounds and experiences, administrative staff members across the major functions, etc. Whether or not senior administration is included is a contextual decision. With oppressive administrations, it is not smart to do so because figuring out actions to deal with them and their supporters is likely to emerge as a key issue. Also most stakeholders will not feel “safe” in their presence and will be silenced or will self censor. When the rest of the stakeholders are ready, these “uppers” are either invited into the process or become the targets of the other stakeholders change projects.

We had one (though diverse) stakeholder group present and the discussion went as far as it could under the circumstances of being a panel at a professional, disciplinary meeting. My reaction was that the discussion was not only franker than I expected but that the voices of the younger generation present embodied many of the experiences we recounted in our presentations. That our presentations resonated was confirming to me. That members of the audience stayed suggested there is energy for change when the context permits. It is a long road ahead. This is why the book Morten Levin and I are copyediting links Bildung, academic integrity and freedom, change away from neo-Taylorism and neoliberalism, and the link between the changes needed, action research, and promoting participatory democracy more broadly.

It is no accident that films like the “Hunger Games” and the dystopias of current video games resonate with so many people. Kafka also lives at “Wannabe U”.