The Edu-factory Project: Inside and Against the Transformation of the Knowledge Production. Struggles and the Common within the Crisis. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University 7 December, 2009 Speakers: Paolo Do, Ned Rossiter, Jon Solomon

Paolo Do Abstract This presentation describes the edu-factory project (a transnational m-list, a website and a web journal) and its history. Each will be introduced in order: the mailing list, the past two rounds of discussions about the changes in the production of knowledge, social conflicts and new hierarchization. Many of these contributions form the basis of the new book edited by Edu-Factory, Towards a Global Autonomous University (New York: Autonomedia, 2009). Finally, we will introduce the new web journal of the Edu-Factory and the zero issue introducing the concept of the “double crisis of the university”.

What does the “edu-factory” mean? I will explain this concept in terms of the role of the university in cognitive capitalism. The university today is an immediately productive apparatus integral to the new capitalistic accumulation, in which knowledge has become more and more important as a productive tool. It is precisely through knowledge and its quality that capitalistic command exercises control. In this way the measure of knowledge has become a new tool in the exploitation of living labor, and the process of differential inclusion has become the new battlefield in the declassement of living knowledge.

Following this description, I will try to explain the work of edu-factory through the political organization coming out of the struggles inside universities. What does the idea of the “Global Autonomous University” mean? From the experience of the “anomalous wave” movement in Italy last year to the occupation of the universities nowadays in California, Germany, Austria, Greece, etc… what does it means today rethink the institution of the university and the production of the common? The idea of this presentation is to pose these questions showing the collective research of the transnational project of Edu-factory.

Paolo Do is a PhD student at the Queen Mary University in London. Member of the edu-factory collective and of the Uninomade project in Italy. He is editor of POSSE [www.posseweb.net]. He co-edited Lessico Marxiano, concetti per ripensare il presente (Rome, 2008) within LUM (Free Metropolitan University) at ESC in Rome. In 2008 he co-organised The Art of Rent seminar series at Queen Mary’s University of London. www.theglobaluniversity.org

The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour

Ned Rossiter

Abstract This paper revisits Marc Bousquet's insight that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal regimes. This orientation of labour around processes of informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers associated with Italian post-operaismo thought. One of the key analytical and political precepts developed out such work, as summarised recently by Tiziana Terranova, makes the distinction between the social production of value and the classical economic model that measures the time and cost labour in determining the production of commodity value. When transferred to the setting of the university and its transformation under conditions of economic globalization, questions such as the following emerge: How does the social production of value (brand desire, affect, subjectivity, online social networking, etc.) shape the commodity value of the university degree? What relation does this have with the globalization of higher education? And how does the informational university - defined increasingly by privatization (as distinct from being a public good), labour flexibility and informational management - relate to the social production of value?

Such questions invoke another set of framing questions: What is the relation between the informational university and the uneven distribution of expertise across the higher-education landscape? What are the geocultural configurations upon which such relations might be mapped out? And in which cases might a racialization of labour underscore the informational university? In short, what are the labour inequalities that shape the market of higher education on a global scale and how are new (or, as the case may be, neo-colonial) class subjectivities being reproduced? This paper concludes that the 21st informational university in its global manifestations is in many ways disturbingly similar to programs of institution formation and the management of populations undertaken by 19th century colonial powers.

Bio Ned Rossiter is an Australian media theorist and Associate Professor of Network Cultures, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006). http://orgnets.net / http://nedrossiter.org

The Financialization of Knowledge and the Biopolitical Management of Geocultural Areas During the Transition from Industrial to Cognitive Capitalism Jon Solomon

Abstract

Le rencontre du communisme du capital le plus développé de la planète avec le communisme reduit au jacobinisme de la bureaucratie bolchevique n’est pas une surprise. Yann Moulier Boutang, Le capitalisme cognitif

Although the commodification of knowledge under the regime of industrial capitalism was quite well established, the new conditions of cognitive capitalism are creating a situation that differs significantly from the previous era. Although the financialization of the university is now becoming quite well understood in terms of capital investment, property rights, and labor conditions, it is equally important to understand a corresponding development in the production of knowledge. With the term « the financialization of knowledge », we refer not only to the institution of audit bureacracies as a means of both disciplinary control and informatization, but also to their biopolitical role as a governmental technology. This presentation proposes to describe how the tendency under conditions of cognitive capitalism to maximize “positive externalities” while controlling accumulation through the devices of property rights and financialization is connected to profound transformations in the university that are activating new forms in the biopolitical articulation of ‘population’ and ‘area’—a transnational cognitive bureaucracy presiding over the financialization of knowledge.

Bio Jon Solomon is a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and has published extensively on issues related to biopolitics and translation.