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Temporalities Matter: The Disjunct Between Democracy and Capitalism

“Democracy is an Illusion,” read the slide that opened Dr. Tomba’s presentation for the ARC research seminar. The slide pictured a crowd of protestors assembled in 2011 in Brussels who were, Dr. Tomba argued, part of a series of global uprisings against the manner in which democracy is being practiced today. Respected news sources around the world have published articles with similar conclusions over the past five years, declaring: “Democracy is rubbish,” or, “Democracy is in recession.” There is, it seems, a common sentiment around the world of dissatisfaction with democracy. In his presentation, Dr. Tomba examined the cause of this dissatisfaction and two oft-proposed solutions before advancing a third, alternative possibility.

Sign at a rally in Portland, November 17th, 2011. Originally published on the Our Curriculum Maters Blog.

So why is this sense of dissatisfaction with democracy rising around the world today? Dr. Tomba drew on several scholars to argue that the crisis of democracy is due to the tension that exists between the temporality of capitalism and the temporality of democracy. Economic temporality, or the temporality of market, capitalism, and finance, requires rapid decision-making in an increasingly globalized system. Political temporality, in contrast, requires time for discussion and decision-making in a more localized democratic system. Despite their fundamental differences, these two systems are deeply tied to one another. Thus as the pace of the global market system speeds up, the processes of democratic decision-making are also forced to accelerate – a fact which effectively undermines the democratic base of popular participation and erodes the base of democratic participation and consent.

Rising popular discontent suggests that the current acceleration of democratic processes is not sustainable. There are therefore two options commonly advanced by scholars to reclaim democracy, both of which involve a resynchronization of democracy and capitalism. These are: (1) Effectively accelerate democracy to the pace of the market, or (2) Create a slower democracy to enable true participation (and a find means to decelerate capitalism).

Occupy Movement protestors outside of the London Stock Exchange. Originally published in The Guardian.

Using popular movements such as Occupy and Arab Spring as examples, Dr. Tomba broke from these typical arguments to envision the creation of a third possibility outside of the common framework that represents both a different political experience and a different temporality. He argued that this new temporality, a temporality of anticipation, “expresses itself not in new constitutional architectures, but in architectures that have to be realized in the experiential dimension of practice.” Simply, the temporality of anticipation involves: (1) social and political change through self-change, and (2) change by creating new forms of being together in relationship.

Dr. Tomba argued that this is a fundamentally different type of political praxis, focused on solely the means rather than on justifying the means by the ends. Indeed, in addition to highly publicized movements such as Occupy and Arab Spring, this temporality of anticipation is also expressed in many locally-based movements, with local foods, transition towns, ecovillages, and alternative currencies all being examples. These movements create alternatives to the current political and global economic systems through the work of connected individuals using their own agency to affect change in their daily lives. These social movements choose the alternative, rather than the oppositional, path to change.

Whether this approach, this temporality of anticipation, can truly create sustainable social, political, economic, and environmental change, however, remains an open question. Does the temporality of anticipation truly open up new ways of being and doing that are capable of changing global systems? Or do we need the traditional “slow slog” through democracy to truly affect change? This is a conversation that needs to remain active as we continue to evaluate our current systems of democracy and capitalism in order to consider how to build more sustainable societies.

Oppressor Walks Road to Freedom

Famously, Walter Benjamin tried to confront this problem by presenting his ideas unconventionally so that they could not be appropriated for Fascist purposes. In “The Work of Art in the Age of [Its] Technological Reproducibility,” he writes, “The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” The problem Benjamin references, of course, is not limited to rhetoric, but in our very structures of being together. The revolutionary affordance of every new communication technology is exactly equal to its usefulness for surveillance. It works the opposite way as well, however. The internet itself, for example, first developed for governmental purposes, now also hosts art, dissent.

Two weeks ago, Hester Eisenstein, a professor in Sociology at the Graduate Center, presented some ideas from her most recent book, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World. As the title suggests, Eisenstein argues that the ideology of 20th century feminism unwittingly lends itself to the principles of global corporate capitalism. By equating feminist liberation with women’s right to paid labor, feminist rhetoric leaves itself vulnerable to use by hegemonic forces. In her talk, Eisenstein drew from both domestic and international examples to show how corporations have masterfully employed feminist ideology to further exploit female laborers. I had to leave early, so if possible solutions were mentioned, I missed them.

Eisenstein’s work is an important reminder that every inch advanced on the road toward freedom will serve the feet of the oppressor equally well. If there is a rhetoric immune to contradictory deployments, we have yet to find it. Famously, Walter Benjamin tried to confront this problem by presenting his ideas unconventionally so that they could not be appropriated for Fascist purposes. In “The Work of Art in the Age of [Its] Technological Reproducibility,” he writes, “The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” The problem Benjamin references, of course, is not limited to rhetoric, but in our very structures of being together. The revolutionary affordance of every new communication technology is exactly equal to its usefulness for surveillance. It works the opposite way as well, however. The internet itself, for example, first developed for governmental purposes, now also hosts art, dissent.

As someone deeply interested in developing tools that empower students to learn as a community rather than competitively and in isolation, this is a problem I think about a great deal. My dream tool kit of scholarly liberation — a personal online archive of all of one’s intellectual activity (though not necessarily public) — would be a disaster in the wrong hands. One need not even call up the fascists to paint a picture of such a disaster. Corporate educational tools have already invaded our pedagogical space to such a degree that software driven by profit rather than pedagogy, such as Blackboard, is a university norm. Any innovation can be co-opted by commercial forces to the effect that it no longer serves its rhetorical purposes.

Hannah Arendt, it seems, was much more stoic about how the fruits of her labor were to be ultimately used. “Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public, obviously everybody is free to do with it what he pleases, and this is as it should be,” she reportedly said towards the end of her life “I do not have any quarrel with this. You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it.” She is speaking specifically, of course, of her individual works, but it is worth considering whether such an attitude is useful or harmful when pursuing our daily activities as activists, academics and toolmakers.

Massimiliano Tomba: Insurgent Universality and the Question of Human Rights

Passive juridical citizen or agentic human being? This was one of the political and ideological tensions explored by Massimiliano Tomba, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Padova, in his presentation ‘Insurgent Universality’ on November 6^th at the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) seminar. The room was filled to capacity with faculty and students eager to hear Professor Tomba speak, and on his birthday no less (Happy Birthday!).

Dr. Tomba presented two starkly distinct notions of human rights, as inscribed in the French Revolution’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and in the far more radical reworking of this document in 1793, the latter never officially adopted in France. Dr. Tomba explained that the 1789 declaration instantiates a type of juridical “universalism,” in which individuals have rights (e.g. life, liberty, property) that are protected by governments, but which have “limitations,” and can easily be suspended in the interest of “public order and national security,” economic interest, war, or states of declared emergency. In contrast, the 1793 declaration, written by the Jacobins, specifies no limits, instead writing that these freedoms “cannot be suspended, forbidden, nor limited.” The 1793 document emerged from an ongoing process of what Dr. Tomba calls insurgent universality, embodied in the radical praxis of slaves, women, and the poor during the French and Haitian Revolutions.

While the 1789 document safeguards the natural right to “resist oppression,” it also regards resistance to the law as an offense, as the law is taken to be the direct expression of the people’s will. The 1793 declaration does not take this for granted, however, averring that the law must be the expression of the will of the people. Furthermore, one of the most radical articles in the 1793 declaration states “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Here, any portion of the people (not just elected representatives) can act as “representatives” of the whole people by rebelling on their behalf. Dr. Tomba argued the poor, women, and slaves at the time did not merely claim the privilege to belong to an unjust order, but rather practiced “disbelonging” to “disorder” the existing unjust order. This is an example of people acting as “citizens” beyond the narrow legal boundaries of “citizenship,” as bestowed by the state.

Dr. Tomba concluded his lively talk by emphasizing that the 1789 framework sees people as passive subjects who lack agency and whose “universal” rights need protecting. On the contrary, the 1793 declaration promotes agentic praxis that may transcend the state and current political order. Given our current crisis of formal democracy in the US and globally, Dr. Tomba suggested that we think about this insurgent “path less travelled” (which is hardly mentioned in post WW2 thinking). In the wide-ranging question and answer session following the talk, discussion took up Marx’s interpretation of related issues of political, social, and human emancipation, as well as questions about the praxis involved in movements like Occupy Wall St., and even the question of animal rights and agency in relation to humans. One important part of the discussion was the question of the Reign of Terror in France as being related to the 1793 way of thinking. Dr. Tomba pointed out that the radical 1793 declaration was actually one of the first casualties of the Reign of Terror, as the new bourgeois state forcibly curtailed liberties amidst the foreign and civil war in France.

From Citizenship to Cit(y)zenship: Cities as Laboratories of Social Innovation Against Poverty

On March 23^rd, 2014 Professor Yuri Kazepov presented his research into the rescaling of European welfare systems following the incorporation of the European Union as well as trends in European countries toward localized welfare policies.

On March 23^rd, 2014 Professor Yuri Kazepov, Professor of Urban Sociology and Compared Welfare Systems at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo in Urbino, Italy, presented his research into the rescaling of European welfare systems following the incorporation of the European Union as well as trends in European countries toward localized welfare policies. The project proposes that prior scholarship has not adequately taken into consideration that European cities deliver the highest concentration of welfare services irrespective of the policy focus, or how recent changes in the level at which policies are administered affect patterns of welfare distribution. Although the project is in its initial stages, Dr. Kazepov hypothesizes that the localization of welfare policy can be connected to the redefinition of citizenship in accordance with practices of social inclusion and exclusion situated at the level of individual cities.

Dr. Kazepov identified subsidiarization as a major outcome of the localization of welfare policy. Schemes for delegating administrative responsibility and various levels of fiscal autonomy exhibit several inconsistencies in the delivery of welfare services across the European Union and within individual nation states. This mosaic of policies has the advantage of widening options for individual welfare organizations and allowing greater freedom to grassroots organizations. However, a greater number of actors has led to increased difficulty in coordinating services, loss of accountability and procedures aimed at deterring blame rather than improving welfare. Dr. Kazepov suggested that the complex decision-making processes of the Caritas organization are exemplary of these advantages and disadvantages.

Italy was repeatedly highlighted as an area of concern for the rescaling of welfare policies. Dr. Kazepov noted that the figure for young people not employed, in education, or training (NEET) in Italy stood at twenty-five percent. Italy also exhibits a higher disparity in the delivery of welfare services across its region. By contrast, in Norway measures for welfare services were more consistent across regions and levels of implementation. How administrative discretion is parceled out to different actors remains a matter in need of further study, however. Dr. Kazepov noted that he and his colleagues are conducting further interviews about the impact of policy rescaling in over forty case studies, including London, Budapest, Malmö, Lecce, and Dublin.

During the question and answer session following Dr. Kazepov’s presentation, discussion centered on comparison between European and American welfare models. One participant in the discussion raised the issue of the unfunded mandate in American society as a source of considerable friction between federal bureaus and local welfare administrators, to which another faculty member added that the No Child Left Behind policy of the Bush administration was an exemplar. Dr. Kazepov suggested that the unfunded mandate bore some similarities to the passive form of subsidiarity highlighted in his discussion. It did not seem possible for the discussion to reach a satisfactory conclusion about the transnational comparison of welfare. With further research, however, such a comparison looks promising.

Sharon Zukin’s ARC Seminar: “New York’s Creative Ecosystem: ‘Imperial Project’ or Lively Arts?”

Sharon Zukin, Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, presented her current project entitled “New York’s Creative Ecosystem: ‘Imperial Project’ or Lively Arts?” at the Advanced Research Collaborative on Thursday, October 16, 2014. The project is in its initial stages, and explores New York City material changes (changes to physical city structures) and their connection to changes in creativity, and to resulting changes in how people conceptualize the city.

The theme in her work can be expressed as a comparison between, on the one hand, corporations supporting and instigating city-wide creativity, and on the other hand, individual artists creating art on a smaller scale, and perhaps in a purer sense. One illustration she made of this was the fairly new trend of artists and creators making use of shared physical spaces, contrasting starkly with the “old ideal of the independent artist” and private studio.

Dr. Zukin next identified large-scale, corporate-financed, “marketed” art initiatives, such as Bloomberg’s Public Art Challenge, a grant supporting temporary public art projects. Another example was Red Bull Studios New York—self-defined on their website as “a multi-disciplinary project space located in the heart of Chelsea, featuring an exhibition space, state of the art recording studio, radio booth, lecture hall and performance space”—a case of a corporation “reaching out” and subsidizing the creation of music by young males (the target group marketed by Red Bull). These examples contrasted with examples of the small-scale, unsubsidized, individual artist, illustrated by photographs taken by the author herself of—for example—an unemployed philosopher offering “creative advice” in Union Square, and a hipster in Downtown Manhattan advertising her creativity on a T-shirt, and identifying it a source of power.

The author drew her talk to a close by establishing five “reshaping” strategies, observed in two general geographical areas: one from Midtown to Lower Manhattan, and one in Brooklyn stretching from Greenpoint through DUMBO. The strategies are as follows: One, attract corporations, such as the Google building in Chelsea; two, re-industrialize, such as the case of the Brooklyn Navy Yard being utilized today as a commercial space and creating thousands of jobs in Brooklyn; three, build on “DIY” (“do it yourself”), such as the New York Media Center in DUMBO; four, encourage small mixed-use development, such as the Chelsea Market; and five, commercialize cultural consumption, as evidenced by the event space and café “Wallplay” in the Lower East Side.

These trends and implementations came together to paint a picture of the varied efforts being made to sustain NYC as a cultural center, cultural icon, and creative ecosystem.

Behemoth: Giant Factories and Discourses of Modernity

Drawing from a variety of sources, from travel accounts and literature to paintings and photographs, Freeman presented preliminary findings to the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) on Thursday, October 9^th. Rather than focusing on the singularity of modern Chinese factories, Freeman began with what might be called a genealogy of the gigantic factory, tracing it from its origins in 18^th century Britain, through the United States and the Soviet Union in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, to the far-flung multinational producers of today’s electronics and consumer goods.

Controversy surrounding some of East Asia’ largest factories has risen in recent years, particularly on the heels of rioting and attempted suicides in plants operated by Foxconn in the Chinese cities of Chengdu and Taiyuan. Joshua Freeman, Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, was inspired to take a deeper look at the cultural significance these “behemoths” hold around the world.

Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry — Diego Rivera’s *Detroit Industry*, 1932-33

Freeman’s project begins with simple questions which might bear much more complex answers: Why do we build such big factories in the first place? When and why have state authorities chosen either to concentrate workers in such numbers, or to disperse them into smaller, separate manufactories? How and why have these factories become poles for public discourse?

A brief historical overview reveals a familiar trajectory in Europe and the United States. Industrialists and state supporters saw that larger factories could increase production and profits exponentially. Leftists and conservatives alike often found a certain wonder in these industrial organisms; Freeman reminds us of the photo-journalist Margaret Bourke-White, who once claimed, “The beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity.” Some hoped these sites could produce a modern, rational, and even utopian lifestyle among its workers.

Homestead LOC 10140 — Homestead Steel Works, Homestead, Pa. (Library of Congress)

Yet there seemed to be a limit to these “Promethean” enterprises: workers, when concentrated in such numbers, would chafe under deteriorating conditions. Gigantic factories had become unwieldy and costly, and eventually attempts were made to disperse manufacturing to more manageable suburban areas.

The recent resurgence of gigantic factories in East Asia cannot be explained by a simple “catching up” of “developing” world powers. Like the 19^th century nationalists of Britain and Germany, modern governments continue to take pride in building massive projects like dams and bridges. Yet many of today’s largest factories do not evoke the same sort of pride they once might have. Freeman wonders whether this might be a consequence of the goods they produce: from Reebok shoes to iPads, these small products, mostly financed by multinational corporations and sold in foreign markets, are a far cry from the train cars and bridge girders of Pittsburgh’s heyday.

It seems that two overarching dimensions of these factories are at play: size, and location. Freeman’s ongoing work hopes to shed light on deeper layers of these dimensions. One observer noted that size can take many forms: number of workers, number and size of machines, and size of the finished products, for example. Location, too, will introduce enticing complications – to what extent can these “behemoths,” having spread around the world over the past three centuries, be linked together in a way that deepens our understanding of their role in social change and public discourse?

The Widening Divide Revisited- Economic Inequality in Los Angeles

Professor Paul Ong presented a case of Los Angeles in terms of income inequality and poverty. He and a group of his colleagues examined the income inequality in LA about a quarter century ago, and found a prevalent economic disparity in those days. Their report in 1989 spurred the public and media to pay more attention to the economic phenomenon. Now, Professor Ong reexamined whether the situation has been improved since then…

Professor Paul Ong presented a case of Los Angeles in terms of income inequality and poverty. In fact, this is his second visit to the area. He and a group of his colleagues examined the income inequality in LA about a quarter century ago, and found a prevalent economic disparity in those days. Their report in 1989 spurred the public and media to pay more attention to the economic phenomenon. Now, Professor Ong reexamined whether the situation has been improved since then, because the recent housing and financial crises across the nation affected LA to a great extent and concomitantly renewed attention was called for. But, what he found is that there still exist a substantial degree of income inequality, in fact, even a greater disparity in the city.

In his study, he used Gini Index, which is widely used to measure income and wealth inequality. Before going deep into the examination of the city, he showed some historical changes in terms of economic disparity. To list a few points, he underlined economic disparity in 2000 was about 80% of that in 1920 when we had a Great Depression. In addition, income share of top tenth was about the same between the two times, and bottom 80% incomers’ non-home financial wealth decreased by about 50% from 1983 to 2012 (8.7% to 4.7%).

After the review of national, historical trend in economic disparity, he laid out findings in the city of LA. Comparing LA households with the US overall, he pointed out that income inequality increased substantially from 1980 to 2012 while it increased gradually in the US as a whole, and that disparity in wealth was even greater than that in income. In addition, economic inequality is still substantial between upper 20% and bottom 80% in labor market within each group of native people and immigrants.

Upon these findings, the audience expressed some concerns on a solution to the problems or a vision for LA. Corresponding to their concerns, Professor Ong anticipated that there would not be a significant change or development in the economic matter. However, showing some small, positive changes affected by scholarship engagement, such as Mayor’s minimum wage proposal and County Supervisor’s neighborhood hiring proposal, he said “we still can have hope.” In this presentation, not only his scholarly findings but also his active engagement in policy arena to bring justice was impressive.

Chad Goldberg on sociology of culture, Jewish studies, and collaboration

The following interview is with ARC Distinguished Visiting Fellow Chad Alan Goldberg, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At UW-Madison Goldberg is also affiliated with European Studies, Jewish Studies, and the Mosse Program in History. His primary research interest is the historical sociology of citizenship, broadly understood to include the development of citizenship rights and duties over time, changing levels and forms of civic engagement and political participation, and shifting patterns of civil inclusion and exclusion. He is the author of Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Question: Please tell us about your research project.

Answer: I’m completing a book that compares the portrayal and meaning of Jews in the French, German, and American sociological traditions from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This is the discipline’s formative period, when its fundamental ideas first took shape. Those ideas were a response to the big upheavals that shook Western societies during the long nineteenth century from 1789 and 1914, including democratization, modern industrial capitalism, and urbanization. Sociology’s raison d’être was to interpret and explain the modern world that those upheavals produced. The thesis of my book is that ideas about the Jews formed an important part of the cultural toolkit with which classical sociologists constructed their understanding of modernity in an era of rapid social change. One chapter focuses on the perceived relationship of the Jews to the French Revolution within the French sociological tradition. Another chapter examines the perceived relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism in the German tradition. A third chapter turns to the Chicago School of American sociology, where the key metaphor of modernity was neither democracy nor industrial capitalism, but the city, partly conceived by reference to Jewish immigrants as a quintessentially urban people. I plan to conclude with a chapter that highlights the relevance and implications of the study for the present, particularly in regard to how modernity and European and American identities are defined today.

Q. What is about this research most excites you?

A: I started this project thinking I’d draw on expertise I already have: at the University of Wisconsin, I’ve been teaching classical sociological theory for years, and I’ve been affiliated with Jewish Studies for nearly as long. But in fact, I’ve learned an enormous amount in the course of researching and writing the book. It’s always exciting to have your intellectual horizons expanded that way, and ARC has been a big part of it. My project connects in one way or another to all three of this year’s themes—immigration, inequality, and religion—and my conversations with other fellows and with faculty at the Graduate Center have really stimulated my thinking in fruitful ways. The meaning of American and European modernity today is still constructed in relation to out-groups. New minority groups make up part of that dynamic today; immigration scholars at ARC have provided engaging conversation on this subject, particularly on the importance of Muslim immigrants in Europe. At the same time, I don’t think that Jews have disappeared as a touchstone. At the end of my book I want to draw out these contemporary resonances from my research. Overall, I suggest that we need to not just reflect on the past but to historicize ourselves as contemporary inquirers, regardless of our discipline.

Q: How is this research interdisciplinary?

A: I believe the book will have strong interdisciplinary appeal: it engages scholarship in sociology, Jewish studies, and history, and it is also relevant for scholars in anthropology, cultural studies, and European and American studies. I hope that it will provide some insight and inspiration to other scholars interested in broadly similar questions about the formation of the social sciences, the representation of out-groups, and the uses to which those representations have been put.

Q: What broad implications does this research present for your field?

A: The book is intended both as a study of social theory and as a study in the sociology of ideas. On the one hand, it aims to advance our understanding of classical social theory by situating it more fully in the historical and social context in which it was produced. I want to expand our view of that context to encompass conversations and arguments about the Jews (including depictions that circulated in the public sphere and negative stereotypes promoted by antisemitic and nativist movements), which in my view is an aspect of the context of classical sociology which has not yet been adequately explored. (An important step in that direction is Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, an edited volume to which I contributed a chapter that the University of Nebraska Press will publish this summer.) On the other hand, my project also aims to contribute to the sociology of culture by identifying patterns in how classical sociologists discussed Jews and Judaism, accounting for those patterns, and showing how recurring patterns in social thought (in this case, about Jews) are reproduced over time.

Q: How have your time and experiences at the Advanced Research Collaborative influenced your work?

A: Thanks to the generous support of ARC, I’ve been able to complete a 24,000-word chapter (including notes and references) of my book-in-progress. I’ve also completed two related articles, one submitted to the journal Jewish Social Studies and another commissioned by the editors of the Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. ARC provided valuable time, library resources, and most importantly, opportunities to share and discuss my work with its director Don Robotham, other fellows, and regular CUNY faculty in a creative, intellectually vibrant, interdisciplinary environment. For example, an informal discussion over lunch with another fellow, Mauricio Pietrocola, about the role of cultural schemas in education—a topic seemingly unrelated to my own—helped me to conceptualize the transmission of the intellectual influences about which I’m writing. My work has really benefited from these cross-disciplinary exchanges, and I hope I’ve contributed in equal measure to others’ work. I particularly enjoyed working with the student fellows, who are embarking on interesting and innovative work of their own. Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t express my gratitude for the very helpful and capable Assistant Program Officer Alida Rojas and Ally Murphy, without whom my time would not have been nearly as productive or enjoyable.

Q: What’s next? Or what other projects are you working on concurrently?

A: Once this project is completed, I’d like to embark on an intellectual biography of Horace Kallen, a twentieth-century American intellectual best known as the architect of cultural pluralism in the Progressive era. This is an interest that partly comes out of my chapter on the American sociological tradition. I’m interested in exploring how Kallen negotiated the tension between his commitment to cultural pluralism and the ideal of a common democratic culture promoted by the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who exercised an important intellectual influence on him. It seems to me that we’re still struggling with that tension today, so a historical study of Kallen’s thought would very much speak to contemporary concerns.

Q: Finally, where do you hope your field is headed? What do you look forward to seeing more of?

A: Sociology is a very big tent, and it’s pulled in competing directions because like all social sciences it occupies an intermediary position between the “hard” sciences and the humanities. As a result, sociology is always galloping off in multiple directions at once. But I hope my work will encourage younger scholars to see the value of the discipline’s historical and humanistic wing and to take up that kind of social inquiry.

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The Crisis in the University

Universities have long enjoyed the pre-eminent position in the social life of cities and, more generally, in the modern public imagination. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, which became one of the founding documents of the Students for a Democratic Society, aptly expresses this view:

The university is located in a permanent position of social influence.
Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically
makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. In
an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for
organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge…. Social rele-
vance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness — these
together make the university a potential base and agency in the
movement of social change.

Do universities still hold this position?

Professor Don Mitchell’s talk “Social Justice and the Sausage Factory: Struggles in and over the University in the US and UK” revolved around the paradoxical situation that universities find themselves in within cities in the present. Are universities still a social force for public good within cities, or, are they increasingly turning into capitalist entities? Based on a collaborative project to study universities across four different urban contexts in the US (Denver/Boulder, Oakland/Berkeley) and UK (Manchester, Glasgow), Mitchell argued that universities continue to be an important social force, but they are redefining the ‘public good’ in the process. Universities remain a social force because there is an ever-increasing flow of teachers and students into urban communities, and the rising student protest is reshaping the urban public sphere. However, amid declining public support for universities, which has intensified under the neoliberal recession, these historic sites of political organizing have tried to reinvent their social relevance by emphasizing commitment to community engagement and socially-engaged scholarship. In reality, though, as Mitchell pointed out, these goals are sometimes neither concretely defined nor seriously practiced.

Women in a sausage factory — “A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation” –Karl Mark, Capital, Vol 1

Declining public support has combined with massive transformation within the university culture over the last two decades, resulting in the evacuation of the autonomy that allowed these institutions to perform their social function in society. These transformations, according to Mitchell, include an increased push for professorial productivity, the proliferation of online courses, overemphasis on the “student experience” (leading to massive diversion of funds to non-essential services), instrumentalization of research, etc. Financial considerations determine these changes more than social needs. In cities, where universities historically acted as public forums—aside from being economic engines that provided employment and brought business to local economies—universities are now beginning to close themselves off to local communities by redefining universities as “non-public forums”.

The discussion that followed Mitchell’s talk further interrogated the crisis that universities are facing. Comments ranged from how, despite corporatization, universities remained the only Left public spaces in the US to how this crisis might just be a British-American phenomenon. Commentators further asked if the neoliberal restructuring of universities had shifted the emphasis within the universities from the academic imperatives to the administrative-financial ones. Mitchell, speaking from his own experience as a member of the board of trustees at the Syracuse University, pointed out that university administrators too had little control over the broad direction that the universities were taking.

While the optimism of the talk and the discussion was quite helpful in conceptualizing why universities remain enormously important within cities, a few observations might point to why we need to worry more than ever about the transformation of universities. First, on the question of universities redefining the ‘public good’, for instance, one can extend Mitchell’s argument to see how the transformation of universities, more than just causing a crisis within these institutions, might in fact be putting them in direct confrontation with local communities, especially in poorer neighborhoods. For instance, Columbia University’s plans to expand into Manhattanville in West Harlem, its demand for exclusive control of the site and ultimate pursuit of eminent domain, has sought to destroy local businesses instead of bringing business to the neighborhood. The university officials saw the local businesses as an “urban blight” that stood in the way of New York City’s knowledge-based economy—a much-touted public good.^[1] This is a wider issue, and not specific to a single university. Second, while it is certainly true that the flow of teachers and students into the urban community keeps universities vitally important as a social force, there are also unhealthy trends, like the complicity of institutions, departments of economics and individual academics in establishing and maintaining neoliberal hegemony.^[2] David Harvey has expressed this failure of universities in the following manner:

The current populations of academicians, intellectuals and experts in the social sciences and humanities are by and large ill-equipped to undertake the collective task of revolutionizing our knowledge structures. They have, in fact, been deeply implicated in the construction of the new systems of neoliberal governmentality that evade questions of legitimacy and democracy and foster a technocratic authoritarian politics. Few seem predisposed to engage in self-critical reflection. Universities continue to promote the same useless courses on neo classical economic or rational choice political theory as if nothing has happened and the vaunted business schools simply add a course or two on business ethics or how to make money out of other people’s bankruptcies.^[3]

Finally, universities have begun to falter on even their basic promise: that they are a vehicle for upward social mobility. As the army of underpaid adjuncts grows,^[4] more and more students find it harder to get decent jobs.^[5] The crisis is acute in humanities and social sciences. Instead of finding ways to generate support and sustenance for these critical domains of knowledge, we hear exasperation and calls to reduce the support further,^[6] or desperate calls from within the academy to move toward non-academic careers.

Given these crises, it is perhaps not easy to determine if universities will be able to make a turnaround or not. Perhaps the bright spot in this grim scenario is that this has been an ongoing affair for over a century now. Corporatization of universities is not new, but it is unlikely that it is ever going to be complete. We might have to contend with the fact that universities might be less than singular forces for social justice, yet they are more than just sausage factories.

^[1] For a detailed study of Columbia University’s plan and its consequences, see Steven Gregory (2013) “The Radiant University: Space, Urban Redevelopment, and the Public Good”, City and Society, 25(1): 47–69.

^[2] For more on this see John Brissenden “The Academy is the Crisis” http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_academy_is_the_crisis^[2]

^[3] See http://davidharvey.org/2009/12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transition/

^[4] See James Hoff (2014) “Are adjunct professors the fast-food workers of the academic world?”, The Guardian, 24 January. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/24/exploitation-of-adjunct-professors-devalues-higher-education^[4]

^[5] For instance, read this recent personal account, Patrick Iber (2014) “(Probably) Refusing to Quit” http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/03/10/essay-about-inability-find-tenure-track-job-academe

^[6] See Edward Conard (2013) “We don’t need more humanities majors”, The Washington Post, July 30. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/07/30/we-dont-need-more-humanities-majors/

Storytelling as Resistance

From chapter 5 of her upcoming book, Dr. Fernandes’ talk centers around the increasing use of storytelling as a campaign strategy for social movements. As she explains, “stories are constructed in ways that promote reconciliation, provide a therapeutic release for the teller, and win sympathy in media circles, among politicians, and the broader public.” In precise details, Fernandes weaves through the ways in which storytelling was invoked in organizing meetings, public hearings and in press conferences throughout the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights campaign. A much watered down bill was passed in 2010 guaranteeing the same basic rights as other workers. Despite its modest legislative success, Fernandes is concerned that the involvement of funders, coaches and advocacy groups in framing of the stories to win legislators over represents a retrenchment from the kind of (more confrontational?) organizing work needed to change the conditions for immigrant workers.

Many interesting points were raised during the Q&A: How effective is storytelling when much of the legislative negotiations tend to happen behind close doors between powerful stakeholders? How does the actual labor process of domestic work, where emotions play a significant role in the employer-employee dynamic, complicate campaign strategies? More broadly, is storytelling part of a larger cultural pattern in American society that valorizes the presentation of the “self” (e.g. reality TV shows, facebook, instagram, selfies)? If we agree on this point, then isn’t storytelling a manifestation of the liberal, and by extension, the neoliberal trope that the “self” must be worked on? This is particularly salient in the framing of victimization in individual stories to win over legislators and the public, as if to suggest only in extreme individual hardships can we make claims for social change.

Still, concerns were also raised over the use of the “American Dream” narrative in stories and public outreach. The idea that these domestic workers work hard and play by the rules and thus deserve basic human dignity effectively appeals to a broader sentiment, but, it also creates a distinction between “good” and “bad” immigrants, sectioning off a certain group to be the undeserving. Indeed, this contradiction speaks to Fernandes’ claim that perhaps storytelling represents the narrowing of space for which social movement work can operate, where the moral high ground is fought over individual troubles and injustices

Not all hope is lost though. The domestic workers campaign effectively brought these private troubles at home/work into the public consciousness. This is particularly relevant to my own research on undocumented Chinese restaurant workers who share some similar working conditions – small family-owned businesses, labor exploitation, abusive treatment, low wages and having to live in the shadows. I share in Fernandes’ interest in thinking through how political subjectivity is formed and in critically analyzing organizing strategies, even when they have progressive intentions. In the end, my take away message is that we should continue to be critical of the ways in which neoliberal thought can mutate and reappear, while keenly aware that we don’t operate in conditions of our own choosing.

Category: Inequality