Net/Working in the Edu-factory

Abstract

Net/Working in the Edu-factory Max Haiven (bio) Net/Work, or else I’d like to begin with the observation that, as was so vividly dramatized in the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network, the university was the “primal scene” of that most august of social media sites Facebook. It is no accident. When has the university not been about social networking, or net/working social life? When has it not been an apparatus for producing and incubating relationships and modes of sociality, first among social elites, today among a much broader range of people? How many of us, for instance, met the loves of our lives (or our loves of the moment) at university? And it’s not just us inmates of the asylum: as a greater and greater proportion of youth pass through our halls, as the so-called labour market seems to demand bachelors’ and even masters’ degrees where once they required only high-school diplomas or informal apprenticeships, the university is emerging not merely as a source of a commodity called “higher learning” but as a key site of contemporary “biopolitics”: the production of life itself. In a funny way, the university, part feudal, part neoliberal, has become a key site, if not the key site of capitalist production. This is the thesis of a consortium of radical scholars and activists, students, professors, and [End Page 4] precarious academic workers, who call themselves The Edu-factory Collective. This initiative originated in Italy and England and today counts contributors from Japan to Tunisia, Mexico to India, and Nigeria to Poland. Their organizing thesis is that “as once the factory, now the university”: where once, in an industrial economy, the factory was the key site of the industrial capitalist production of values and life, today, in the knowledge economy, the university has become the pivotal and iconic institution of the new capitalism. While at first blush this may seem hyperbolic, Edu-factorians point out the way the university has become an apparatus of what Carlo Vercellone calls “cognitive capitalism,” a tendency in the global division of labour based increasingly on communication and connectivity, one that, more than ever, depends on harnessing people’s creativity, agency, and intellectual life. From the need to constantly accelerate consumerism to the way global production chains are stitched together through communicative labour, from the incessant exhortation to “entrepreneurship” to the mushrooming prominence of the (largely-feminized) “service sector,” global capitalism as a whole relies on our mental and social labour as never before. Even more so, it relies—as sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello note—on the production of networks, on people fabricating, traversing, and exploiting connectivities. In a world where the welfare state erodes and where we are taught to expect no job security or pension, where we can rely only on ourselves, and where we must constantly compete with one another in order to not only succeed but survive, we are each tasked with becoming creators and facilitators of personal networks in an information economy. The Edu-factory Within this new milieu, the university and the humanities take on several new roles. First, the university becomes a key “switch” in global networks of power and privilege, working as a means to separate, segment, and place in hierarchies members of the global “cognitariat.” The university has become an iconic facilitator of global flows, a space where public and private are negotiated, where the for-profit sector and the not-for-profit sector court one another, where the common good and individual ambitions are put into dialogue. While a more valorized aspect of this occurs in the “stem” fields (science, technology, engineering, medicine—partnered with major corporations), we in the humanities are no less part of that system, if only (at worst) to provide the veneer of scholarly integrity and critical inquiry. But we also provide shared cultural signposts and, importantly in our field of English language and literature, enable the liquid [End Page 5] deployment, transmission, and reception of information and ideas. In a strange way, we have always taught and researched social networking: the collective production of meaning, the way cultural value, subjectivity, and possibility is a negotiation...