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108 ▪ Chapter 4 power we could, in Foucaultian fashion, trace the affirmation of an order of discourse, or a procedure of selection and interdiction based on the dichotomous true-false couplet.67 in other words, the imposition of a linguistic and analytic code is at the same time an affirmation of that which Foucault calls an “order of truth,” or a “general politics of truth” through which a society accepts “determinate discourses, which it makes function as true ones.” nonetheless, the French philosopher warns, we should not think of power as an object that emanates from a fixed point or from a sovereign, that is translatable into laws, as much as a situated and relational mechanism through which the legitimacy of an order of discourse is affirmed and at the same time a “logophobia” is created toward discourses that are not aligned to the order of truth that is locally dominant. To the degree that precarious researchers have opted for the exclusive demand of a “permanent position,” therefore becoming structured through competitions (one of the primary instruments for the reinforcement of the relations of individual subordination of the “political economy of the faculty position”),68 they have ended up surrendered in the battle on discourse—that is, “the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized.”69 They have, in other words, abandoned the struggle surrounding the production of living knowledge, understood here as a struggle against the processes of hierarchization, control, and normalization of cognitive labor. By recomposing themselves around a status identity (the defense of the university community against the government), precarious researchers have therefore legitimated vertical relations of power, permitting the reproduction of those mechanisms of segmentation and subordination that are the very source of their exploited condition . This has interrupted the processes of horizontal aggregation with doctoral and undergraduate students, which had earlier been constructed around the common element of not only the struggle around precarity but also the search for autonomy through the paths of self-education. To use hirschman’s categories, in this case voice has been primarily based on faithfulness, aiming toward changing individual positions , or of a status of individuals, within a given context, more than The Production of Living Knowledge ▪ 109 questioning the context itself. The absence of exit has meant the sacrificing of the search for autonomy on the altar of the status of inclusion. The trade-off between the freedom from work and the insecurity that Beck discussed70 is here overturned here in the sign of subordination . adopting readings’s71 image, we could say that many precarious researchers have chosen to take up residence within the ruins of the university like lovers of the ruins of Greco-roman temples, contemplating its past and demanding the possibility of settling onsite, rather than using it as the space from which to chart lines of flight, both singular and collective. if, in the struggles of the graduate students, class practices and languages emerge with clarity, these suffer from being limited all too often to exclusively “bread and butter” demands. in addition, many participants speak of a “color-line” that segmented the nyU mobilizations , as had happened before that at yale.72 This can partly be ascribed to the selection politics of universities,73 but above all it is tied to the limits of a purely trade union action, which turns the question of class into a purely economical identity. To tie the stratifications of the composition of labor to the definition of class in an objectivistic manner risks here as well to naturalize the techniques of control and measure of living labor, transforming the latter in simple identitarian aggregates. exactly as the recomposition of the lines of division in the figures of the “creative” or the “prosumer” permits capital’s mechanisms of capture to operate. This impedes instances of different partialities , ones that are irreducible to a universal code, to combine on a common plane.74 it is exactly on this common plane of the connection of differences that, outside of whatever totalizing or teleological images are proposed of it, the concept of class needs to be rethought. differences , in fact, can articulate themselves in a disjunctive manner, to the degree that singularities are returned to the identity of their presumed belonging (ethnic, sexual, communitarian, territorial, of social group, occupational, etc.). Taking up the classic categories of operaismo that we are proposing to redefine, we could at first blush propose that this...

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