Reading Group Schedule

Meeting 4: November 2012
Reading Group Meeting with Guest Brian Holmes

“Autonomous Universities”
Wednesday, November 14, 2012  4:00 – 6:00 pm
212 University Club Building (2nd floor, 432 East Campus Mall)

Description

THE AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY: A Question of Collective Action

As its name implies, the “knowledge-based economy” was built in the classrooms, research laboratories and business centers of the university. Today that economy lies in ruins – yet the bankers, executives and administrators who are responsible for its collapse still dominate the world of ideas. How to create a counter-force, when higher education has been reorganized for maximum profitability and academic labor has been reduced to generalized precarity?

This lecture/workshop asks about the conditions for an autonomous and networked university, mobilizing students, grads, adjuncts, professors, activists and members of local communities in the effort to generate an effective critique of the neoliberal order. At stake is the transfer of living knowledge outside the frameworks of financial control. Sure, it sounds risky and difficult – but it could be the only way for egalitarian and ecological ideas to retake their lost positions in our most vital social institutions.

Readings

1. “Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times: A Dialogue with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi” by David Hugill & Elise Thorburn

2. Christopher Newfield, “Facing the Knowledge Managers” (chapter 8, pp of Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class, Harvard UP, 2008) [pdf coming soon!]

Brian Holmes is a Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches an intensive summer seminar. He holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, and is the author of the book Hieroglyphs of the Future. Holmes gives lectures widely in Europe and North & South America, is a frequent contributor to the international mailinglist Nettime, the art magazines Springerin (Austria) and Brumaria (Spain) and the interdisciplinary journal Multitudes (France). In recent years, Holmes has been co-organizing a series of seminars with the New York City based reading group 16 Beaver Group under the title Continental Drift, working on the issues of geopolitics and geopoetics. He regularly blogs at Continental Drift: The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization.

Meeting 3: November 2012

Meeting of research group on analyzing UW finances (open to all)

Wednesday, November 7, 2012  3:00 – 5:00 pm
212 University Club Building (2nd floor, 432 East Campus Mall)

Readings

1. “Student Debt and the For-Profit University” Occupy UMich
2. “Welcome to the University of Michigan: The Engine of Inequality“ Occupy UMich
3. “They Pledged Your Tuition to Wall Street” An Open Letter to UC Students from Bob Meister, President, Council of UC Faculty Associations. Professor of Political and Social Thought, UC Santa Cruz.

Meeting 2: October 2012

Reading Group Meeting with Guest Joshua Clover
“The Militarization and Financialization of Campus”

Thursday, October 18, 2012 @ 4 pm
212 University Club Building (2nd floor, 432 East Campus Mall)

Readings
1. Joshua Clover, “Reflections from UC Davis: On Academic Freedom and Campus Militarization.” College Literature 39.2 (Spring 2012).
2. “After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California.”
3. Joshua Clover, “Value, Theory, Crisis.” PMLA 127.1 (January 2012).
4. Armstrong, Amanda and Paul Nadal. “Building Times: How Lines of Care Occupied Wheeler Hall.” Reclamations Journal 1. (December 2009).

Optional

1. Adamson, Morgan. “The Financialization of  Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt.” Polygraph 21 (2009): 97-110.
2. Bernes, Jasper. “The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor.”Reclamations Journal 2 (April 2010).
3. Inoperative Committee. “University Occupations: France 1968, 2006, Greece 2006, NYC 2008-9.”
4. Joshua Clover, “The Time of Crisis: Class Struggle and the Politics of Time” reprinted on OccupyEverything.org

Joshua Clover is a poet, critic, journalist, and author, as well as a Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. He writes a column of film criticism for Film Quarterly under the title “Marx and Coca-Cola,” is a former senior writer and editor at the Village Voice, writes for The New York Times, The Nation, among others. Along with eleven students at UC-Davis, he engaged in a sit-in to protest the campus’s financial arrangements with U.S. Bank. Clover and the eleven students, known as the “Davis Dozen,” have each been charged with 20 counts of obstructing movement in a public place and one count of conspiracy.

Meeting 1: September, 2012

“Recomposing the University” [Tiziana Terranova and Marc Bousquet; Mute 28, 2004, 72-81]

“N for Negri: Antonio Negri in Conversation with Carles Guerra”  [Edited and translated by Jorge Mestre, Ivan Bercedo, Raimon Vilatova, Gloria Melich, Elaine Fradley, and Charles Guerra; Grey Room 11, 2003, 86-109]