Re: <nettime> thedemands.org: list student protest demands (last

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

On 23 Nov 2015, at 23:48, John Hopkins wrote:

> It's Amurika, so if the students can post a letter-writing
> animation on Vine it will be deemed a massive strategic success ...
> clicktivism-clacktivism ... demands for everything from a Gaussian
> grade distribution skewed hard to A+ A A- to classroom-branding to
> corporately-determined curricula...

One thing I learned in fifteen years of teaching was to mistrust a 
certain kind of generational discourse that presents itself as a 
double-bind: 'Well, kids, we fucked everything up -- and/but it's up to 
you to save it!' But even that double-bind at least has the virtue of 
being half optimistic -- your remarks above are just negative. And not 
negative in the superficial sense of harshing someone's mellow. The 
subject of what you wrote seems to be 'students,' but they just appear 
as objects, automatons, empty vessels, and screens. Where's the subject 
in what you wrote? Muttering cynical fatalism from some 'outside,' 
AFAICT. And *that* is your contribution on the subject of a resurgence 
of student activism?

I spent a while earlier today working on a response to Dave Mandl's 
remarks, which I think are spot on, but I found it hard to organize my 
thoughts. Maybe not a bad thing, since in less than a day since, hmmm, 
let's see... More details came out about the thuggish attack on Mercutio 
Southall at a Trump rally. Five Black Lives Matter activists were shot 
in Minneapolis who were protesting, what for it, a police shooting of a 
young African-American man -- who, murky video suggests, may have been 
handcuffed at the time. And the city of Chicago released the dashcam 
video of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. And that's just the 
national news -- don't even get me started on how it related to the 
international news.

On a happier note, some amazing photos were floating around of a 
grizzled Bernie Sanders, who's still a major presidential candidate, 
sitting in a diner booth and enjoying lunch with 'Killer Mike,' an 
African-American rapper and activist several times his size. It's a 
scene straight out of Norman Rockwell, if only he were still alive to 
help us through these times. But, seriously, find the video of Killer 
Mike's speech introducing Sanders in Atlanta, and listen to the fabric 
of what he says and how he says it. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, 
maybe thousands of different voices woven together in his voice, like 
he's seen and heard *too much*: too much pain, anger, sorrow, despair, 
loss, struggle, oppression.

Like I said, I found it hard to organize my thoughts because they orbit 
around a basic contradiction. On the one hand, the racist violence I've 
noted above isn't new, in fact it's a pillar of American culture; on the 
other hand, it *is* new. It's new that the lead GOP presidential 
candidate would deliver angry explicitly fascist tirades, and it's new 
that the kinds of armed white 'supremacist' losers who skulk around the 
edges of demonstrations they oppose would actually start shooting. Not 
unprecedented by any means, but really shocking and frightening.

But that contradiction can be unraveled a bit if we acknowledge just how 
deeply racism in America relies on 'delegating' exclusion and oppression 
to institutions. This allows notionally 'normal' white people to believe 
that *they* aren't racist while nevertheless reaping the benefits of 
racism.

This is important for understanding the activism sweeping US colleges 
now. As I clicked through page after page of student demands, I was 
struck by how *bureaucratic* many of them are. They're overwhelmingly 
concerned with the internal micropolitics of educational institutions. 
There's a lot of talk about things like 'campus climate,' and lots more 
about funding student organizations, initiatives, CDOs -- Chief 
Diversity Officers, of course. Many of the statements make precise 
demands about percentages, procedures, organizational structures, and 
dealdines -- so much so that the demand in one that an apology has to be 
hand-written barely sticks out. On the other hand, only a few of them 
even mention the macropolitical place of higher ed in the US, and when 
they do it's in mostly obligatory posturing like 'We demand free 
tuition!'

That seems strange, because I'd think -- in fact I *know* -- just how 
central finance is to every aspect of higher education. People talk 
about its financialization, but I think few realize just how completely 
it already has reshaped every structure, every procedure, every 
allocation, every evaluation, and of course the *expectations* of a few 
generations of academics. But the fact that it seems strange suggests 
that maybe it's time to rethink some basic assumptions.

The detailed administrative demands the demonstrators make can be seen 
in different ways. If we wanted to be cynical, we could read them in 
defeatist terms, as diminished horizons and an acceptance (even 
affirmation) of the clericalization of education. More harshly, we could 
say that some of it has the feel of rearranging deck chairs, though not 
on the Titanic. Or, if we want to be more optimistic, we can read them 
as savvy, tactical, and pragmatic -- evidence of how much progress 
students have made toward bridging the supposedly unbridgeable cultural 
divide that separated earlier generations of activists from faculty, 
administrators, and (often and wrongly forgotten) staff. I think it's a 
bit of both (and many other things), but one thing it's *not* is 
evidence of what you/John wrote. If anything, I think it's proof of how 
bankrupt those complaints are.

One other thing worth noting: It seems like most of the talk about 
'citizen journalism' and speculation about 'technology' faded away when 
the subject turned to racial violence. Similarly, when #Occupy was all 
the rage there was lots of discussion about consensus, inclusion, 
diversity, horizontalism, infrastructure, etc -- but now that 
#BlackLivesMatter is front and center there's little or no interest in 
that Yankee-Latino/a melange of deliberate sociality and intentional 
communities. These discontinuities suggest just how deep, or maybe just 
how extensive, racial discrimination is in American culture. I say 
'racial discrimination' rather than 'racism' in this context because I 
think it offers a useful distinction. 'Racism' suggests a conscious and 
probably articulate act; 'racial discrimination' seems more neutral or 
ambiguous in that respect, more open to impersonal or procedural 
processes.

Of all the ~groups we could accuse of racism in the US, the Occupy 
movement has got to be just about last on the list. It was far from 
perfect, but at times it set an dauntingly high standard for trying to 
come to grips with these kinds of issues -- and, though it's fallen way 
of out fashion, we should acknowledge the rich vocabulary it left us 
with. It's really a pity that there's been so effort to think through 
the relationship between Occupy and Black Lives Matter -- not so that 
Occupy can 'take credit' but, instead, because it would challenge us to 
treat everyone from the Ferguson demonstrators to the Mizzou *football 
team* as individuals with their own unique stories and heterogeneous 
relationships. Who led that strike? What other tactics were debated? Who 
made diplomatic concessions to keep the momentum going? What methods did 
they used to arrive at a consensus on such an unprecedented action? Who 
did they consult? Questions like that are vitally important, because the 
process of asking and answering them could help to disseminate those 
ideas and approaches. And you know what would be really revolutionary, 
and could decisively change how <cough>academia</cough> works? A 
political movement spreading through collegiate athletics. But the 
reason a scenario like that sound surreal is simple: racial 
discrimination.

Thinking about this all, it's a goddamn wonder that these student 
activists have been able to channel their experiences and their 
legitimate rage into demands. I disagree with a lot of what they say and 
how they say it, and I know firsthand from the last wave of occupations 
how easily student unrest can be hijacked by microfascists, subjectivist 
authoritarians, and nihilistic theory-poseurs. But that's all the more 
reason to listen and think about what they're saying and how they're 
saying it. It's hard to imagine a worse betrayal of the role of the 
teacher than to find yet another way -- on top of indentured servitude, 
say -- to steal the future from students.

Cheers,
T


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