Re: <nettime> More Crisis in the Information Society

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

Florian, unfortunately, I agree with what I think is the gist of what 
you wrote -- but didn't say anything to justify your various rebuttals.

So, for example, I noted that there's a fracture between how people 
working roughly political science and the humanities understand what it 
means for something to be 'political,' I didn't dismiss the latter, let 
alone the micropolitics it has enabled. And your suggestion that there's 
less to be learned from thinking about different academic responses to 
the FB study *now* than there is from reducing them to a reenactment of 
'the last 30 years' seems strangely ahistorical -- but less so than 
listing off how much money starstruck CEOs paid the Ziggy Stardust of 
academia by way of arguing that higher ed's economics haven't changed in 
the last 50 years. And your response on photography is really quixotic 
in the sense of mistaking windmills for giants. I agree with you about 
photography's staggering cultural impact. In fact, I think it's been so 
wide-ranging and protean that it makes makes little 'macro' sense to use 
photography as a stable reference point like a labor category in a 
ministerial economic report. (Nor does it make much 'micro' sense to say 
"aperture and shutter speeds have remained aperture and shutter speeds" 
when we have incredibly fertile critical vocabularies for disassembling 
so many constituent practices and thinking about how they shaped ideas 
about the observer, time, landscapes, light[ing]...)

My point was pretty simple, so I'll see if I can put it more clearly and 
'go there,' like Michael wanted. Like the old joke that there are 10 
kinds of people, those who can count in binary and those who can't, 
universities have 10 sides: they're microcosms where brilliant human 
minds investigate everything ever and they're bureaucracies, basically. 
Their bureaucratic aspect both enables inquiry (e.g., by providing 
security and some insulation from politics, commerce, etc) and hobbles 
it (I think we're all familiar with academics' litany of gripes). These 
institutions have changed drastically over the last century +/-, and 
that change has metastasized in the last few decades (financialization, 
standardization, etc). Faculties *should* assert themselves as a 
political force and press to redirect the transformative function of 
universities *as such* in more positive directions, but, it's safe to 
say on aggregate, they aren't doing that. With that failure, they're 
squandering a critical historical moment and pissing away their 
legitimacy -- basically, by serving as clerks while their students are 
reduced to indentured servitude (which is *not* an exaggeration).

So, Michael, when I pointed out that most of the people who'd said 
something in this thread are dig-studs faculty, I wasn't 'liking' that 
fact, FB-style. On the one hand, it helps to think about how that 
perspective shapes what's said. On the other, I don't think it's a 
generic standpoint -- on the contrary, people working in that field have 
been sitting at a very special conjuncture -- say, of sectors, 
disciplines, networks. (That opinion is also self-validating: I spent 
the last decade+ as a faculty member in exactly that context, and my 
experiences in university governance, which were pretty extensive, left 
me very pessimistic and glad I've left that world.) My case certainly 
involved a crisis of conscience, and the problem of debt was at the 
heart of my own crisis. In time, I think more and more faculty will face 
their own version of that crisis as well -- too late. But make no 
mistake, the real crisis isn't inward at all, any more than the economic 
meltdown of 2008 was a Bildungsroman.

It's bad enough that faculties are pretending there's no problem; it'd 
be be even worse if, like abolitionists adjusting the fit of a chain, 
they started lecturing to their students about how these changes -- 
which are very definitely macro and political-economical -- are 
unacceptable. So who can they talk to? 'Local' academic administrations 
are strangely even more powerless (not less powerful). 'Everybody'? The 
same 'everybody' who's coming 'here,' driven largely by the rise of 
computation that's one of the main objects of critical media literacy?

Florian, like it or not, I think this validates the gist of what you 
wrote: that this curious conjuncture can and should play a crucial role 
in experimenting with the political as you put it -- in a descriptive, 
reflective, constructive, and experimental senses. But it also 
challenges what you say, because there does come a time when we need to 
think about how that model of politics can give rise to more traditional 
models of effective collective action.

I also agree with your point that "If we look at the larger picture, we 
see a major (and I would argue: global) economic shift from visual 
'creative' practices - no matter whether photography, graphic design, 
illustration, moving image - to IT." But in my experience 'IT' is 
regularly invoked, weirdly, as *the* timeless category of hopelessness 
-- which is incredibly dangerous, (a) because it's plainly absurd given 
how new it is, and (b) because that borderland is *precisely* where 
political conflict takes place. Universities are mutating into 
fantastically incompetent bundlers of third-party IT services, and the 
effects are vertically integrated in the worst ways -- of the kind 
Michael alluded to. But it's not just a devolution into training, 
assessment, and documenting those processes in the service of ever-more 
unstable markets. They still have enough social prestige that, when 
those efforts fail, they can 'reframe' discussion -- for example, on a 
theoretical plane through pseudo-critical rethinking, and on a practical 
plane by conjuring up new programs and degrees suited to the aesthetics 
of last year's model.

That's a very dangerous situation for faculty, the majority of whom are 
faced with a choice: either (a) get with the new program or (b) be 
dismissed, in every sense, as an old fart who doesn't get it. But this 
is a false dilemma, so they need to figure out what the *true* dilemma 
is and act accordingly.

This goes back to the discussions on this list in February about Stuart 
Hall and "conjunctural analysis."

Cheers,
T


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