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Commoniversity
Making Politics with Knowledge

Barcelona, 25th-26th November, 2010

http://commoniversity.wordpress.com/

Presentation
Self-education and cartography

Self-education shouldn’t be understood as a system which is marginal to the regulated circuits of university education, but as an organizational practice as well as a form of institutional creation. The book published by the EduFactory network, Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge and Exodus from the Education Factory (autonomedia, 2009), shortly to be translated into Spanish language by Universidad Nomada and Traficantes de Suenos, provides a cartography of forms of new institutionality emerging in and from critical struggles against the privatization of the university. These different experiences, at a global level, have contributed to the constitution of a new mode of organisation which, in its various guises, is characterised by a common concern: self-education.

Commoniversity has two principle objectives. Firstly, to bring different international self-education projects to a student public interested in getting to know them and/or participate in their development. Secondly, but just as importantly, to make available various cartographies of the global university which allow us to make an analytical ‘radiography’ of the discourses being produced in the experiences linked to the EduFactory network.

Commoniversity doesn’t end at seminars, however. In parallel to the seminars, Counter Cartographies Collective will do a cartography workshop, setting out the theoretical and methodological bases for a map, to be developed in 2011, of the relations between university and metropolis in Barcelona.

From Fordism to Postfordism.

In what sense is self-education an organizational practice? To answer this question we must first set out some elements with regard to the new nature or ontology of capitalism, which has been defined as ‘cognitive capitalism’. During the fordist epoch, with its scientific organization of work (Taylorism) and assembly lines, the production of value was based on a system of factories in which a large part of the population worked. This system coexisted in the developed world with a social and economic welfare system: the welfare state. Under fordism production was material and the site of struggle was the factory. Later, after the struggles of 1968, the production of value moved out of the factory: seeping out of the sites of fordist production and penetrating the entire city. The production of signs, language, forms of life, affects and communication have become hegemonic and central for the accumulation of value.

Capitalism, no longer material in nature, becomes immaterial, based on the production of immaterial goods. Terms such as the ‘information society’, the ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘cognitive capitalism’ reflect this postfordist transition (we prefer the last term because it doesn’t obscure the continuing exploitation and class conflict in this new form of capital-labour relation). The transition from fordist to postfordist capitalism, or cognitive capitalism, coincided with the dismantling of the Welfare State, with the privatization and commodification of all that was ‘public’. Included in this ‘public’ is the university institution, with the state acting as the guarantor of the university’s privatization.

With the dismantling of the welfare state, we witness the end of the public-private dialectic, which becomes meaningless not just because of the state’s ‘definancing’ of the university but also because the university is no longer the ‘home of national culture’. As signalled by the implementation of the Bologna process, the University is becoming a transnational university, traversed by global flows, subjected to the regulation of the EU and, as such, instrumental vis-à-vis neoliberalism.
The public and national university no longer exits, and we don’t contemplate its disappearance with nostalgia.

University Metropolis

A lot has been said of the university’s becoming-metropolis and the metropolis’ becoming-university. These are related but radically different issues. The first relates to ‘studentification’, the processes of gentrification resulting from the creation of campus universities and faculties in metropolitan zones which are strategic for financial or property based capital. There is also the increasing articulation of border dispositifs through the higher education space, involving a differential inclusion (i.e. access to social and labour rights) of students on the basis of their place of origin.

The second issue relates to the fact that the university is no longer the only space for the production of knowledge, as the production of knowledge pervades the entire city: social centres, museums, social movements, foundations, research institutes etc. We can thus speak of a university-metropolis, of the end of the borders between the university institution and the metropolis in which it is situated, where the metropolis is understood as a series of flows combined with a greater or lesser implantation of cognitive capitalism.

As such, the university is a place in which to experiment with forms of organization based on self-education. These are forms of organization that take into account technical and class composition and which are capable of inserting themselves in the struggles of social movements. They produce non-fragmented or ‘extra-disciplinary’ knowledge, i.e. they transcend the domain of the university curriculum, connecting that which is transversal between academic knowledge and antagonistic knowledge.

Self-education as an organisational practice under cognitive capitalism.

Self-education is a ‘line of flight’ from the dialectic of public-private. It is the construction of the common and the organizational form of cognitive workers. Under fordism the technical composition of workers was based in the specialization and repetition of the assembly line and this was a technical composition corresponding to material work. Under cognitive capitalism the technical composition of labour is completely different. It is based on the workers’ capacity to produce knowledge, and as such the organization of the workers necessarily relates to the production of knowledge.

Emerging from the EduFactory network, and taking into account self-education experiences across the globe, is the project of a Global Autonomous University. This is a second phase of EduFactory, going beyond connecting struggles to the construction of a university capable of creating a programme of ‘oppositional knowledge’ (as Mohande says). A Global University does not seek recognition in the ‘knowledge market’, nor does it search for a new niche within the sphere of regulated education. Rather, what is at stake is the valorization of living knowledge produced in the networks of social cooperation.

Self-education doesn’t aim towards universality but the construction of the common, and, as common, it is situated in, and orientated towards, the production of subjectivity. Self-education is a vehicle for concrete proposals for social transformation: for freedom of movement, for a basic income which ends the coercion of salaried work, for access to housing, for the reorganization of caring work, for sustainability, for the redistribution of wealth and, in terms of analysis, for the work of diagnosis in the present crisis. Against the students’ movement’s demands for a decent public university, the EduFactory network and other nomad and experimental universities assert the necessity of creating institutions of the common, based on the production of a knowledge capable of producing a subjectivity which acts as the motor of change and the catalyst for the generation of social rights.