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Border as Method or the Multiplication of Labor |
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Written by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson
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Thursday, 27 December 2007 |
The current globalization of university systems needs to be
rethought in the wider context of changing forms of
mobility, the production of geographies that project
themselves across the limits of modern political spaces, and
the forms of policing that emerge with the proliferation of
borders within as well as beyond such limits. We have in
mind not only the transnational mobility of students and
academics but also the increasingly elaborate systems of
higher education export, outsourcing and franchising that
are emerging with the penetration of Anglophone universities
into market contexts such as India and China. What interests
us about this is not so much the emergence of education as a
commodity subject to GATT and WTO rules of trade like any
other, but rather how the intricate geography implied in the
production of education as a global commodity involves the
continual remaking and redrawing of the borders that
classically separate universities from their outsides.
One aspect of this is the crisis of the ‘university of
culture’ so effectively described by Bill Reddings
over a decade ago. Yet the loss of the university’s
mission of safeguarding the national culture is not the only
factor at play in this transition. It is also necessary to
consider, in a transnational frame, how the value-form of
knowledge is being repositioned not only with respect to
labor market positions (of students, graduates, researchers,
etc.) but also with regard to funding arrangements,
knowledge transfers, intellectual property regimes, and so
on. These changes imply a complexification of the filters
and gate-keeping functions that control access to the
university for students and other figures insofar as they
are the bearers of labor power. In the first round of
edu-factory discussion, this remaking of the borders of
universities was referred to as a system of differential
inclusion. This involves an elaborate system of assessment,
patronage, trade, language skills, visa issuance and border
control that places universities in a transnational frame
and produces and reproduces labor market hierarchies at
different scales.
It is no accident that the concept of differential inclusion
has also been used to describe the filtering of migrants at
the borders of the EU, US, and other continental,
subcontinental and national spaces. But to recognize that
the processes and technologies of differential inclusion are
also at work in the context of global higher education is by
no means to draw a simple homology between say international
students (or other university workers) and undocumented
and/or other labor migrants. The situations of these
subjects are clearly disparate, even if they can also
overlap. Nonetheless, it is important to note and analyze
the commonalities and diversities of these border-crossing
practices and experiences to map the effects of the
concurrent processes of explosion and implosion that
characterize the interlinked and heterogenous geographies of
labor extraction today.
In this post we want to make two main points:
1. That it is insufficient to model these multifarious and
interlinked systems of differential inclusion using the
concepts of governmentality and the international division
of labor.
2. That any possible escape from the commodified global
university must also involve political practices of
translation that question the dominance both of
international English and/or national languages.
To turn to the first of these points, we can remember Toby
Miller’s valuable contribution to this list a couple
of weeks back. Toby’s post traced the tendency for US
universities to transfer costs away from governments and
towards students, who are regarded more and more as
consumers who must manage their own lives. Contrary to many
other writers working in the governmentality tradition, Toby
argues that this situation requires an analysis that mixes
Foucauldian theories of liberal governance with Marxist
critique. We couldn’t agree more. But when we begin to
map the ways in which the global expansion of US
universities sets up patterns of subsidy and investment on
the transnational scale, we need a new set of concepts and
methods adequate to the analysis of the borderscapes that
emerge.
We are less interested in a critique of governmentality that
finds its impetus in the current forms of exception than one
that explores governmental techniques and modalities of rule
in their normative moments. The concept of governmentality
can only account for the infinite repetition of nuanced
variations on the same theme of a given model of liberal
subjectivity. Furthermore, despite the dispersal of
governmental mechanisms across the prismatic geography of
global/local dynamics, there are moments of excess implied
in the continuous production and reproduction of the unitary
and coherent conditions that make the workings of the
technological and legal mechanisms of governmentality
possible. Consider the establishment of US universities, in
which liberal education and English language instruction are
practiced, within specially designated zones in China (for a
strictly delimited period of time). The deployment of zoning
technologies is a crucial character of development in
post-reform China (one needs only to think of special
economic zones as the one established in Shenzhen): whatever
the practices within these higher education institutions,
zoning technologies cannot be reduced to the logic of
governmentality. Rather their deployment points to the
intertwining of governmentality and sovereignty as a
necessary feature of the emerging transnational production
system in higher education.
In this case, the borders between the university and its
outsides obtain a complexity that cannot be fully explained
by the concept of the international division of labor or the
correlate spectrum of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled
workers. What we face is a situation where labor continually
multiplies and divides with the global proliferation of
borders, in this instance the internal borders of China.
Multiplication, we should emphasize, implies division, or,
even more strongly, it is a form of division. But, when it
comes to the globalization of university systems, division
works in a fundamentally different way than it does in the
world as constructed within the frame of the international
division of labor. It tends to function through a continuous
multiplication of control devices that correspond to the
multiplication of labor regimes and the subjectivities
implied by them within each single space constructed as
separate within models of the international division of
labor.
Corollary to this, and relevant not only to the currently
globalization processes in the university sector, is the
presence of particular kinds of labor regimes across
different global and local spaces. This leads to a situation
where the division of labor must be considered within a
multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves
internally heterogeneous. To put it simply, to make sense of
the characteristics of the contemporary global geography of
production and exploitation, one has to consider at once a
process of explosion of previous geographies and a process
of implosion by which previously separated actors are forced
into interlinked systems of labor extraction. While this
intensifies modes of exploitation, it also leads to a
multiplication of lines of flight and possibilities for new
forms of transnational social and political cooperation and
organisation. While capital divides labor in order to
produce value added, the multiplication of labor provides
opportunities for new practices of subtraction or engaged
withdrawal.
This leads us to the question of auto-education and
autonomous university experiences that emerged in the first
round of edu-factory discussion. In his post to the list a
couple of weeks back, Jon Solomon expressed what we think is
a very legitimate worry: that the various attempts to
construct alternative or nomadic university experiences
might end up reproducing ossified forms of national and
cultural resistance to the neoliberalization of the
university. This is a real danger and we would be lying if
we were to claim that we have not ourselves experienced
situations where it is precisely this that threatens to
occur. But we would also like to emphasize that this is not
necessarily so. Indeed, an attention to what we have above
been calling the multiplication of labor implies a practice
of subtraction that must necessarily involve practices of
translation that work against the retreat to national
culture in the face of global English and the consequent
inattention to the seemingly contradictory complicity of
nationalism and neoliberalism.
The practice of translation we have in mind demands a new
political anthropology of organization and a rethinking of
the very notion of the institution which is a far cry from
the trite calls for universal languages and transparent
forms of discourse that have occurred on this list. What
these polemics fail to recognize is that any practice of
translation that attempts to flatten all meanings and
affects onto a single plane of arbitration will imply
incommensurabilities and miscarriages in communication, even
if the conversation is occurring in a national language. We
couldn’t agree more with the Counter-cartographies
Collective when they write about the tendency for critical
intellectual and activist idioms to divide and separate. But
we do not see this tendency as one that can or should be
remedied by the imposition of a single mode of address that
would close the differences at play. The task is rather to
work in and through translation and to join this work to a
politics that recognizes that capital itself attempts to
close such heterogeneity by abstracting all values onto a
single plane of equivalence.
By rethinking translation outside the frame of equivalence
and neutral arbitration between languages, it is possible to
distinguish patterns of multiplication and proliferation of
meaning that do not result in a politically dehabilitating
dispersion of forces and alliances. Conversely, such a
heterolingual approach to translation does not imply the
reduction of political thought and action within a series of
haphazard articulations which are nonetheless constrained by
the existing institutional arrangements. To reconceive the
political within this frame is not to obscure or abandon its
conflictual dimension. The practice and experience of
struggle is not incommensurable with a practice of
translation that does not seek to level all languages onto
an even field. Such translation, however, does lead us to
ask how a politics of struggle in which one either wins or
loses can be thought across a politics of translation in
which one usually gains and loses something at the same
time.
Since translation is a practice, we find it more useful to
speak of it in practical rather than theoretical terms. For
us, translation is never simply about language – it is
a political concept which acquires its meaning within plural
practices of constructing the common. On the other hand, it
implies conflictual processes and struggles that constellate
about the heterogeneity of global space and time. To return
to our initial concern about borders and border-crossers, we
might mention the work of the Frassanito Network. Founded
after a border camp protest in Puglia, where a number of
internees managed to escape from an illegal detention
center, this network links a number of groups across Europe
and beyond doing political work around movements and
struggles of migration. Neither simply an autonomous
university nor a group of activists, the practice of
translation is fundamental to the modes of organization
instituted by this network. We can mention, for instance,
the transnational newsletter Crossing Borders
(http://www.noborder.org/crossing_borders/), which has been
published in up to ten languages.
At stake here is not simply the communication of a stable
message to readers in different language groups but the
entry of translation as a practice of political organization
that is central to the constitution of the network. The
production of these texts across languages necessitates a
time and space of organization that is fundamentally
different to that which would emerge in the absence of this
practice. This is only one instance in which translation
becomes a principle of political organization that
constitutes new forms of struggle and movement that reach
toward the global scale and question the division of
activist from migrant that has plagued many political
efforts in this regard. We do not want to celebrate this
mode of organization or to claim it is without its problems.
Nor do we want to forward it as a model for other attempts
to invent new institutional forms. Political invention, to
be short, cannot be cut and pasted. What we can state is
that organizational forms that seek to move beyond the dyad
student-citizen, which continues to animate many attempts to
oppose the corporatisation of the university, will have to
involve translational practices that exceed the conceptual
and political frame of governmentality.
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