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A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration |
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Written by Ned Rossiter
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 |
The edu-factory organizers invited me to comment on the passage from
hierarchisation to autonomous institutions. Indeed, I think it
appropriate to maintain the connection between hierarchy and
autonomy. This constitutive tension is apparent in the political
economy and social-technical dimensions of both open source and
proprietary software that provides the architecture for communicative
relations. And it manifests on multiple fronts in the modalities of
organization that attend the creation of autonomous spaces and times
of radical or alternative research and education projects,
experiments and agendas. There is no absolute autonomy, but rather a
complex field of forces and relations that hold the potential for
partial autonomy, or 'the difference which makes a
difference' (Bateson). How to move and direct such complexities in
such a way that make possible autonomous education is what I
understand to be the program of edu-factory.
And in such guidance - a combination of collective investigation and
top-down decision-making - one finds the movement between hierarchy
and autonomy. This is a matter of governance for networks. Protocols
come in to play, and dispute, disagreement and alliance shape the
culture of networks in singular ways. At the technical level there
are some near universal features of networks: TCP/IP, location of
root-servers according to the geo-politics of information, adoption
of open source and/or proprietary software, allocation of domain
names, etc. But as the debates around the UN's World Summit on the
Information Society (2003-2005) amply demonstrated, it quickly
becomes analytically and politically implausible to separate the
technical aspects of information from social and culture conditions.
Autonomous education that makes use of ICTs will always be situated
within a geography of uneven information. Hierarchies will always
prevail.
The possibility of transnational collaboration that aspires to
autonomous education thus becomes a problem of translation, as Jon
Solomon and others have discussed in rich ways on this list. There
will be no 'construction on an autonomous global university'. How,
then, might autonomous education initiatives engage in scalar
transformation in such a way that makes transnational relations
possible? This seems to be the ambition of the edu-factory. But what
is the desire for transnational connection? Why not keep things
local, rooted in the geographies of the city, neighborhood or
village? Who is the subject of, let us say, not a global but
transnational education project that resides sufficiently outside the
corporate university?
Part of the brilliance of the edu-Summit held in Berlin last May was
to finally break with the anti- or alter-globalization cycle of
staging protests according to the diary of the WTO, G8, etc.[1]
Autonomy begins with invention that is co-emergent with conflict,
crisis, frustration, curiosity, depression, wild utopian desires,
boredom, etc. The sites of conflict are multiple: individual,
institutional, social/collective, corporeal, affective, ecological,
cultural, geopolitical, governmental, etc. Underscored by
heterolingual tensions and incommensurabilities, the edu-factory
organizers' call for and presupposition of 'the realization of our
collective project' is nothing short of complex (a problematic
acknowledged by edu-factory organizers and participants).
What is the situation of autonomous institutions? Paolo Do: 'Talking
about an autonomous university is to find a starting-point to attack
and to occupy the spaces belonging to the enemy'.[2] Such an approach
is a reactionary one if it is to be reduced to a takeover, say, of
the institutional spaces of the university. The conservatism in such
a move lies in a responsive mechanism determined by the space and
time of 'the enemy', or hegemonic institution (the university as we
know it). To simply occupy the spaces of the enemy is to repeat the
failure Foucault saw of revolution: the end-result is a reproduction
of the same. This amounts to a reformist agenda and, in the case of
the transformation of universities over the past 20 or so years,
succeeds in the production and proliferation of managerial
subjectivities.
There are, however, different registers of occupation, and I will
assume this to be the interest of Paolo. A good example can be found
in the case of domestic workers in Hong Kong and their invention of
new institutional forms that arise through the practice of
occupation. The potential for commonalities across labouring bodies
is undoubtedly a complex and often fraught subjective and
institutional process or formation. The fractured nature of working
times, places and practices makes political organization highly
difficult. Where this does happen, there are often ethnic affinities
coalesced around specific sectors - here, we are thinking of examples
such as the 'Justice for Janitors' movement in the U.S., a largely
Latino immigrant experience of self-organization.[3]
In Hong Kong, domestic workers gather on Sundays within non-spaces
such as road fly-overs, under pedestrian bridges and in public parks.
The domestics are female workers for the most part, initially from
the Philippines with a new wave of workers in recent years from
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.[4] And as cultural critic Helen
Grace notes, 'there are also mainland migrant workers with limited
rights, working in all sorts of low-paid jobs, moving backwards and
forwards and living with great precarity'.[5]
The domestic workers transform the status of social-ethnic borders by
occupying spaces from which they are usually excluded due to the
spatial and temporal constraints of labour. Sunday is the day off for
domestic workers, and they don't want to stay at home, nor do their
employers wish to have them about the house. The Norman Foster
designed headquarters for HSBC bank located in Central district
nicely encapsulates the relation between domestic workers and capital
and the disconnection between state and citizen. This bank is just
one of many instances found globally where the corporate sector makes
available public spaces in the constitution of an 'entrepreneurial
city'.[6]
Yet the actions of undocumented workers mark a distinction from the
entrepreneurial city and its inter-scalar strategies of capital
accumulation in the form of property development and business,
financial, IT and tourist services. With a first floor of public
space, workers engage in praying and study groups reading the Koran,
singing songs, labour organization, cutting hair and dancing while
finance capital is transferred in floors above the floating ceiling
of the HSBC bank. Used in innovative ways that conflict with or at
least depart from how these spaces usually function, there is a
correspondence here with what Grace calls a 'horizontal
monumentality', 'making highly visible - and public - a particular
aspect of otherwise privatized labour and domestic space'.[7]
Not described in tourist guides and absent from policy and corporate
narratives of entrepreneurial innovation and development, the
domestic worker is a public without a discourse. For many Hong Kong
residents their visibility is undesirable, yet these workers make a
significant contribution to the city's imaginary: their visibility of
Sundays signals that the lustre of entrepreneurialism is underpinned
by highly insecure and low-paid forms of work performed by non-
citizens. The domestic worker also instantiates less glamorous but
nonetheless innovative forms of entrepreneurialism. An obvious
example here consists of the small business initiatives such as
restaurants, deli's and small-scale repairs and manufacturing that
some migrant workers go on to develop, making way for new intakes of
domestic workers in the process and redefining the ethnic composition
of the city. Such industriousness provides an important service to
local residents and contributes in key ways to the social-cultural
fabric of the city.
The competition of urban space - particularly the *use* of urban
space - by the domestic worker also comprises an especially
innovative act: the invention of a new institutional form, one that
we call the 'organized network'. The transnational dimension of the
domestic workers is both external and internal. External, in their
return home every year or two for a week or so - a passage determined
by the time of labour and festivity (there is little need for
domestics during the Chinese New Year). There also consists of what
Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra in their posting called 'a
multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally
heterogeneous'.[8] Here, I am thinking of the borders of sociality
that compose the gathering of domestics in one urban setting or
another - as mentioned above, some choose to sing, engage in labour
organization, hold study groups, etc. Ethnic and linguistic
differences also underscore the internal borders of the group.
Can the example of domestic workers in Hong Kong be understood in
terms of a transnational organized network? I suspect not. The
domestics only meet in particular times and spaces (Sunday in urban
non-spaces). Such a form of localization obviously does not lend
itself to transnational connection. Perhaps NGOs and social movements
that rally around the conditions of domestic workers communicate
within a transnational network of organizations engaged in similar
advocacy work. But if this is the case, then we are speaking of a
different register of subjectivity and labour - one defined by the
option of expanded choice and self-determination.
In this sense, we can identify a hierarchy of networks whose
incommensurabilities are of a scalar nature: local as distinct from
transnational. For domestic workers, much of this has to do with
external conditions over which they have little control: Sunday is
the day off work, exile from their country of origin is shaped by
lack of economic options and the forces of global capital, their
status as undocumented or temporary workers prevents equivalent
freedom of movement and political rights afforded by Hong Kong
citizens, etc. But within these constraints, invention is possible.
Part one of this second round of discussions on the edu-factory
mailing list identified many of the conditions at work that shape the
differential experience of labour and practices of education. How to
make the transition to institution strikes me as the task now at hand.
Notes:
Parts of this text are drawn from an article currently in progress
with Brett Neilson.
1. Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture, Berlin,
24-28 May, 2007, http://summit.kein.org
2. Paolo Do, 'Open University', posting to edu-factory mailing list,
14 January, 2008, http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=89&Itemid=41
3. See Florian Schneider, 'Organizing the Unorganizables', 2002,
http://wastun.org/v2v/Organizing_the_Unorganizable
4. See Nicole Constable, 'At Home but Not at Home: Filipina
Narratives of Ambivalent Returns', Cultural Anthropology 14.2 (1999):
203-228 and Lisa Law, 'Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public
Spaces in Hong Kong', Urban Studies 39.9 (2002): 1625-1646. [both
articles available online - do a search]
5. Helen Grace, personal email, 15 January, 2008.
6. See Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, 'An Entrepreneurial City in
Action: Hong Kong's Emerging Strategies in and for (Inter-)Urban
Competition', (no date), http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/digitalfordism/
fordism_materials/jessop.htm
7. Helen Grace, 'Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale
and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong', Postcolonial Studies 10.4
(2007): 469.
8. Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra, 'Border as Method or the
Multiplication of Labor', posting to edu-factory mailing list, 27
December, 2007, http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=83&Itemid=41
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