More comments on the communique

Another section of the communique:

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning.  We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt.  We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.  Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood.  This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society.  Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

If the university is already dysfunctional, then preventing the university from functioning IS participation in the status quo. Indebted students, underpaid teaching-assistants, over-worked adjuncts, collapsing infrastructure, dissolving libraries--this is the current dysfunction. What about making the university serve another function? What about making it function for common ends, for common futures? This is the more vital task--and it is so much harder. It requires discipline and sacrifice, not the affective intensities of manifestoes and blockades.

Yes, calls for unity are empty. But working to forge a commonality, a solidarity, a collective is the only way that a taking that is not empty is possible. The university is more than a set of crumbling buildings. What if part of the real dysfunction of the university has been the way its capitalist subsumption has prevented students (and sometimes faculty) from valuing ideas, history, theory, thinking. What if part of the crisis is the crisis of imagination--students are captured because they don't read, don't think, and we (faculty) aren't teaching them to do so.

The real destruction of the status quo involves more than occupying buildings. It involves reclaiming the capacity to think critically and becoming disciplined enough to do so.

Comments

[lisa harms]

clearly the solution to the problem, as the writer seems to often suggest, must be in the redefining of the education system, the university - which is what is reflecting our societies destructive ideologies. Education, not simply more transferance of money (though I still think boycotting big box stores helps too in the short term), is at the heart of the problem. The problem is destruction, and mass chaos is easy enough to acheive. What the system would look like rebuilt in its place becomes the difficult part.

capitalism taken to its extreme can relate to a sort of communism in the sense that eventually only the most powerful will rise to the top in power. Really, regardless of our system, a leader will always rise. Under what authority is the question....money or something that rises out of a liberty of imagination and truth seeking and sharing..... still left with questions though about the playing out of it all....