edufactory

A combination of government policies, market trends, and intellectual dispostions inherited from the colonial/imperial modernity have resulted in global English acquiring the de facto status of official language for higher education in Taiwan. (E.g., promotion for junior faculty is more and more dependent upon publishing in SSCI-listed English journals; the point system used for reviewing faculty performancy accords much higher weight in general to publications in English over those in Chinese; more and more degree programs are being designed to be taught in English; undergraduate education at many schools now incorporates mandatory on-line e-learning courses (in English) with an anglophone correspondence university; graduate students in literature and language programs other than English are required to take additional courses in English; etc., etc....). In short, global English is essential both for the accreditation offered by the system and for promotion within its ranks. Evidently, this combination of policies leaves the Taiwanese university system dependent upon the globalized anglophone educational industry. As a result, we can predict that Taiwanese institutions of higher education will be completely unable over the long term to preserve autonomy vis-à-vis the aggressive expansion of anglophone universities in east Asia (and elsewhere) described in the first round of edu-factory discussion by Andrew Ross. Similar developments are occurring elsewhere in east Asia, notably in South Korea and the People's Republic of China. As we witness the emergence of transnational chains of higher education, we should begin to think about what it means and where the possibilities for creative transformation lie.

For reasons too numerous to elaborate, the national form of organization continues to underlie many of the best critiques of English-language dominance and neoliberal market universities. A similar problem arises in the critiques of English-language dominance in the global education market, thereby preventing us from developing a response tailored to the specifities of our contemporary situation. To illustrate this theoretical bottleneck, Ross' critique could be fruitfully compared, for instance, to the critique launched in 2003 by a group of critical Taiwanese intellectuals, gravitating around the revue known in English as "Taiwan: a radical quarterly in the social sciences", who attacked the connection between neoliberal marketization and the dominance of English language in Taiwan. (Their intervention is now collected in a volume of essays in Chinese published by the revue). If both Ross' critique of the aggressively globalized anglophone university and the Taiwan intellectuals' critique of English-language neo-imperialism exhibit at certain points of their arguments a common appeal to national forms of organization as a defense against neoliberalism (seen for instance in Ross's critique of "outsourcing" and the Taiwanese intellectuals' defense of Chinese cultural values for which language is supposed to be a vessel), we must ask if this not because they share the assumption that language and linguistic difference correspond-naturally-to anthropological difference?

In order to unpack the contemporary implications of this convergence, it is necessary to remember what the perspective of translation teaches us: each individual state language in the modern age (according to UNESCO, there are only 225 of them among the 3,000 (out of 7,000) not in immediate danger of extinction) is not the autonomous, organic creation of "a people", but the arrested result of an essentially transnational governmental technique-the subjective technology of translation that cofigures languages in order to distinguish them-aimed at population management. Translation, from the perspective of such research, includes not just the practice of inter-lingual translation normally associated with the concept, but also the idea of intra-lingual translation often considered to be a secondary or exceptional instance. Our research has shown that the very category of national language, crucial to the biopolitical formation of global populations under the system of nation-States, must be understood as a product of translation. National languages do not precede the translational exchange, but are in fact predicated upon it. In fact, to speak a national language is to speak through the mediation of translation even when one pretends to speak without it.

Under this regime of translation, the modern university received its fundamental mission to work for the nation-State by producing an aesthetics of national culture. The different university systems established in each country under this regime could thus be seen as institutions of national translation, each bearing the task of translating (producing) knowledge in the national idiom according to the particularities of each nation's historical situation (particularly its internal minorities and gender, race, and class differences). In other words, it was assumed that the rationale for such institutions of national translation lay outside the university itself (most likely in the State, or, depending on one's view, the nation). Today, however, the supposed exteriority of the university (vis-à-vis the putatively "organic" interiority of national language) no longer matches the needs of the postfordist economy for flexible accumulation across different linguistic markets. As a result, the differential between global languages is now being incorporated directly into the university as an organizing principle for both the value of knowledge and the cartography that maps knowledge onto regions and anthropological difference.

This state of affairs implies an increasing multiplication-both production and reproduction-of class differences by linguistico-ethnic differences, forcing us to rethink both the Foucaultian notion of the university as a site of discipline and the Althusserian notion of it as an ideological state apparatus. What neither Foucault nor Althusser foresaw was a situation in which entire languages-the products of nationalization now subsumed by the emerging global-State-could in themselves become practices of discipline and ideology. The relative status of English and Chinese language in the context of Taiwanese higher education reveals not just a startling equation between normative competency and economic rationality (for which the analyses of Weber and Marx would suffice), but also the further association of these two elements with a cartography of geographical regions , anthropological differences, and orders of knowledge codified in different national languages arranged in overtly hierarchical fashion. There is not even the pretense of parity between English and Chinese-the unequal point system makes such disparity inherently quantitative and impossible to deny.

The fact that anglophone universities have no immediately apparent, corresponding linguistic differential internal to their constitution must not be taken as a sign that they are removed from the problems being experienced by other non-Western university systems. In fact, it is precisely because the non-Western languages are delegated to anthropologically-specific specialized fields and disciplines that they institute and control the border between languages.

In the maintenance of scarcity and border controls is where a neat convergence between the internal organization of the university, the division of knowledge along linguistico-anthropological lines, and neoliberal governmentality appears. Because the differential relation between nationalized languages in a postcolonial world is now becoming internal to the University (making the University of National Culture a façade), it requires an apparatus to manage the "differend" or disputes that could easily arise between the two. Even as the Human Sciences lose their monopoly on knowledge in the postfordist economy and thus lose in fact their very reason for existence, they still perform one function crucial to the regime of neoliberalism: the maintenance of normative moral standards that justify the differend and prevent the articulation of social differences into a project of social cooperation. As David Harvey and others have noted, this is the function performed by nationalism under the conditions of neoliberal flexible accumulation. Harvey doesn't mention language, yet it is hard to think of a better moral standard than language in its nationalized form. Precisely because the history of linguistic nationalization-a sordid history of the repression of minoritarian differences linked to reorganizations of territory and labor accomplished by the post-imperial or colonial state-must, by definition, be disavowed when speaking the national language, national language provides a moral standard that is inherently depoliticized and for that reason much more useful to neoliberalism's delegitimation of the political in general. In this sense, the linguistic regime of the neoliberal market university resembles most closely the function of humanitarian aid and global warming: as the archetype of depoliticized moral discourse, it is impossible to disagree with it, and yet it establishes a normalizing aesthetic whose main function is to cover up complex political, social, and economic relationships.

We often hear that under the postfordist regime, language (communication) is immediately productive. This is most easily seen in the construction of elaborate bureaucracies of "quality assurance auditing", which require a constant input of labor-much of it by un(der)paid graduate students-in order to notch up ratings that garner more revenue. But it is also to be seen in the use of global English, which like computer science and biotechnology, contributes directly to the valorisation of capital in diverse processes of production.

Given my concern with the politics of language, knowledge and labor, I will advance the idea that while political forms of resistance to the market university (such as developing a counter-rationality) are necessary, they will only reinscribe the dominant neoliberal paradigm if they deliberately or unwittingly exclude or devalorize biopolitical forms of invention. Many recent discussions of the market or managerial university-the critique of complicit managerialism that Paul Taylor recently shared with us is a good example-propose to revitalize the university as a site of either cultural and/or political resistance to neoliberal imperatives. The political goal of such calls is not in question, but it must be recognized that their efficacy will be largely diminished by the implicitly national framework notions of "culture" and "politics" invariably inherit from the imperial/colonial modernity. To adopt such a posture is to ignore not only the link that intrinsically binds nationalism to neoliberalism in spite of the apparent contradiction between the two, but also to reinforce the colonial legacy that sustained the University of National Culture for several centuries.

Ingrid Maris Hoofd's recent response to Ronaldo XXX's post (forgive me, the surname was not included in his post) reminds us that the problem of the relation between languages always concerns the construction of subject positions related in a differential way. The problem is not that global English is coming to dominate the higher education market, but rather that the differend between languages is itself subsumed under the logic of capital and made internal to the organization of the university, and, furthermore, that this differend is being instituted in tandem with the proliferation of "class"-like codings of anthropological difference internal to the emerging global State. It is this internalization that must be addressed, utilized and transformed.

Hence, to "deconstruct this hierarchy of languages" (Ronaldo) would not be as revolutionary, I suspect, as to transform and appropriate the operation (= translation) that generates discrete languages and organizes them in hierarchical fashion in order to invent a new, non-anthropological and non-colonial basis for the Human Sciences as well as for social relations. Rather than attempt to stage rear-guard defensive actions against the domination of global English in defense of nationalized languages formed through a regime of translation, we might instead try to mobilize not this or that particular language but rather the very fact that the linguistic differend has been incorporated into the global University system as both its organizing principle and a structure of subjectivity. In other words, we should use the internalization of the linguistic differend in the global University as a point of departure to forge new subjects capable of engaging in a new social contract (pending revision of the entire concept of "contract"). The nomadic university should take full advantage of the specificity now being accorded to the biopower of language within the university system in order to effectuate a biopolitical transformation that could be exported or externalized.

Minimally, this means we will need to establish both sustained counter practices of translation-against-the flow as well as a commitment to a long term radical reorganization of the disciplines of knowledge themselves. Disciplines and regions that have nothing to do with non-Western cultures and languages are now the primary sites of insurrection, places in which the linguistic differend can be mobilized to great effect, promoting a reorganization of the very anthropological basis for the division of labor in the Human Sciences. Rejecting the taxonomic scheme of anthropological difference managed by translation that forms the primary dispositif of both population management and disciplinary divisions since the event of colonial discovery and conquest, the insurrection aims to model transdisciplinary, transnational, transcultural, and translingual objects where there had only been unitary objects before. With these objects now in view, the previously nationalized Human Sciences can become a place to pose questions about the political and social stakes informing the various subjective technologies-from literature and art to phrenology to neurobiology-designed to manipulate or engineer the plasticity of Man. In place of the sovereign decision described by politics, we can begin to pose more properly biopolitical questions about decision and exception. Can people actually decide what race and/or culture they are or want to be? To what extent is culture and/or race related to something like a 'decision' at all? If it is a question of decision, who is the subject of decision (or again, what are the problems of individuation?) and what meaning does this have for our understanding of the limits inherent in the founding, generic categories of colonial/imperial modernity? How does the new regime of cognitive capitalism, with its technologies of immaterial production, genetic engineering, virtual reality and flexible accumulation, affect the expressions of 'decision'? The theoretical goal of the project is to contribute to the urgently-needed reorganization of the social relations codified in the disciplinary divisions of the Human Sciences along the lines of a new transdisciplinary figure-the multitude of foreigners-no longer indebted to the structure of ressentiment and the taxonomy of the "metaphysicolonial" difference.