Infrapolitics & the Nomadic Educational Machine
Stevphen Shukaitis
Forthcoming in Randall Amster et al, Eds. (2009) Contemporary
Anarchist Studies: An Introduction to Anarchy in the Academy. New
York: Routledge.
?Stay just as far from me as me from you.
Make sure that you are sure of everything I do.
?Cause I?m not, not, not, not, not, not, not, not
Your academy?
?Mission of Burma, ?Academy Fight Song?
Anarchism has an ambivalent relationship to the academy.(1) This is,
when one takes a second to reflect, not so surprising. How can one
maintain any sense of ethical commitment to non-hierarchal, non-
exploitative relationships in a space that operates against many of
these political ideals? And how to do so without creating a space or
knowledge that can be turned against these political goals
themselves? As Marc Bousquet and Tiziana Terranova remind us,(2) the
institutional setting of the university is not a location outside the
workings of the economy (i.e., it is not a bubble nor an ivory
tower), but is very much a part of it, existing within the social
factory and producing multifarious forms of value creation and the
socialization of labor (the development of ?human capital? and the
ability to brandish forth credentials to obtain employment, practices
of knowledge, information, and organization that are used throughout
the entire social field).(3) This is the case, broadly speaking, both
for the classical university, which played an important role in the
process of state building and the creation of national culture, and
for the neoliberal university, which is more geared to the
development of new forms innovation and creativity. That is to say,
of course, innovation and creativity understood primarily as those
forms that can be translated into new intellectual property rights,
patents, and commodifiable forms of knowledge and skills. Thus, there
is no ?golden age? of the university that one can refer to or attempt
to go back to; it is not a ?university in ruins? that can be rebuilt
to return to its former glory precisely because it is a space that
has always played a role in creating and maintaining questionable
forms of power.(4)
Anarchism, except for perhaps a few strains of individualist
orientations, cannot find a home in such a space without betraying
itself. But the realization that anarchism can never really be of the
university does not preclude finding ways to be in the university and
to utilize its space, resources, skills, and knowledges as part of
articulating and elaborating a larger political project. As Noam
Chomsky argues, ?It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws
and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the
substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the
framework of these flawed institutions, to modify or even replace
them by a better social order.?(5) While the extent of this
?substantial degree of freedom? might very be debatable within the
current political climate of the university and more generally, the
point nevertheless remains: that one can find ways to use the
institutional space without being of the institution, without taking
on the institution?s goals as one?s own. It is this dynamic of being
within but not of an institutional space, to not institute itself as
the hegemonic or representative form, that characterizes the workings
of the nomadic educational machine.(6) It is an exodus that does not
need to leave in order to find a line of flight.
This essay argues against the creation of a distinct area of
anarchist studies within the academy in favor of an approach to
education based on creating undercommons and enclaves within multiple
disciplines and spaces. In other words, to disavow anarchism as
object of anarchist studies in favor of a politics of knowledge
constantly elaborated within a terrain of struggle. The impossibility
of anarchism qua ?Anarchist Studies? proper, far from closing the
question of the politics of knowledge from an anarchist perspective,
opens the matter precisely from the perspective that more often than
not this occurs in the infrapolitical space of what James Scott and
Robin D.G. Kelley call the ?hidden transcript of resistance,? the
space of minor knowledges and experiences that do not seek to become
a major or representative form, instead forming tools from discarded
refuse and remains.
If there is one thing that can be gleaned from the history of
autonomist political thought, it is that the social energies of
insurgency and resistance to capitalism, when turned against
themselves and re-incorporated into the workings of state and
capital, determine the course of capitalist development. That is to
say that capitalism develops not according to its own internal
structural logic, but according to how it manages to deal with and
utilize the social energies of its attempted negation. Similarly, if
one heeds the recent analysis that many people, drawing from this
tradition, have made of the university (the edu-factory project being
perhaps the best example of this (7)), one can see how the university
has come to play an increasingly important role in the social field
as a space for economic production and struggle.
This is why it would be absurd to assert a space in the university
for the continued development of anarchist thought in an
institutionalized way, for instance as a department of anarchist
studies or similar form. What at first might seem as if it could be
quite a victory for subversion could just as easily be turned into
another profit-making mechanism for the university, creating the
image of subversion while raking in tuition fees. There are numerous
programs as well as institutions (to remain nameless for the moment)
who constantly turn their ?radical image? into an improved bottom
line while all the while operating on a solidly neoliberal basis,
strangely enough without this seeming to sully the luster of their
radical credentials. Meanwhile, institutions that have attempted to
run their operations in line with their stated politics have endured
a whole host of other pressures and dynamics leading to many
difficulties including programs closing down.(8)
This makes the position of the subversive intellectual in the academy
quite odd, precisely because the finding of space might be the very
act of delivering capital its future. But in other sense, given
capital?s dehumanizing tendencies, no one is ever in a comfortable
relationship to it. As argued by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the
role of the subversive intellectual in (but not of) the university,
is like a thief who steals what she can from it, using the space to
form a ?collective orientation to the knowledge object as future
project.?(9) This would be to utilize the space provided by the
university, not as a goal in itself, nor to assert one?s right to
such a space, but to accomplish something within this space. In other
words the fact that one has managed to create a space to discuss
anarchist politics does not mean that one has accomplished anything
just by that in terms of creating a more ?radical? university. It is
what one does with this space that is the core politics within the
university more so necessarily than the specific content. In this way
at times an engaged but tepid liberal politics can very well yield
material effects and outcomes that are more radical in their effect
than a radical politics without means of its own realization. It is a
politics based more on process and ethics of transformation rather
than the claiming of territory. However, radical knowledge production
does not form itself as a fixed object and space, but one that
constantly moves and morphs across disciplines, frontiers, ideas, and
spaces. It is a form of knowledge production that comes not from a
perspective of separation but rather constant self-institution and
questioning of the foundations that support it.
Rather than necessarily assert and affirm an identity or space, these
forms of knowledge production develop in exodus, in the maroons and
hidden alcoves of the university, in the constantly moving spaces
that James Scott and Robin D.G. Kelley call the hidden transcript.
(10) This hidden social transcript encompasses not just speech but
also an array of practices bound to the particular location?which is
both mediated and created by those practices?and so is marked between
such and the public transcript often through ongoing struggle and
contestation. Between the hidden and public transcripts exists a
third realm of politics, ?a politics of disguise and anonymity that
takes place in public view but is designed to have a double meaning
or to shield the identity of the actor.?(11) Arguably, the
overlooking of this space might in many ways suit the needs of the
social actors who articulate their freedom dreams by constantly
reinventing and reinterpreting their cultural practices as a part of
this third realm of politics, of the infrapolitics of resistance that
creates a space for dreams of transcendence and autonomy to exist in
a seen (yet unseen) manner. Radical academics, when they find a space
in the academy, can use their position to create room and
possibilities for organizers to use it for their ends, to orient
their work towards the needs and desires of organizing, rather than
fixing them as objects of study.
This it to think about the autonomous institution of the nomadic
educational machine as a process of subjectivation, on constant
becoming, which avoids fixed institutionalization: as the constant
movement of constituent power through the undercommons, as one more
instance of creating a transformation machine for the development of
radical subjectivity exterior to capital?s appropriation without
needing necessary to find a physical exteriority to capital. The
undercommons exist as the forms of self-organization developed by the
despised and discounted who no longer seek to develop a form through
which their marginalization be can countered by a recognized form of
being in public. In other words the undercommons are the spaces in
which forms of self-organization exist that no longer seek the
approval or recognition of their existence but more often than not
get along much better without it.(12) This is not an institution in
any sort of Habermasian sense with clearly defined speech acts and
reasonable debate. The nomadic educational machine rather is a
transformation machine;(13) it is a process for structuring an
exteriority of knowledge production to the dynamics of capitalist
valorization through educational labor and production, an exteriority
that is not necessarily physical but often temporal, intensive, and
affective in its nature.
This is the problem (or one of them) that confronts ?anarchist
studies.? What might seem at first a relatively straightforward
phrase quickly becomes more complicated. What does anarchist studies
mean and who will benefit from establishing this field of study? All
too easily, anarchist studies become nothing more than the study of
anarchism and anarchists by anarchists, weaving a strange web of self-
referentiality and endless rehashing of the deeds and ideas of
bearded 19th century European males. This is perhaps a bit too harsh,
but is in general an accurate observation. That of course is not to
deny or denigrate the importance and value of movement histories and
studies, as they often provide a wealth of insight and information.
The problem is when seemingly all other forms of knowledge production
that could be encompassed within the framework of anarchist studies
become forgotten within the endless repetition of the same histories
and ideas. By too easily slipping ?anarchist studies? into the ?study
of anarchism,? the of has constructed anarchism as a pre-given object
that one stands outside as object of knowledge that can be examined,
probed, and prodded, rather than as a common space of political
elaboration and the development of new ideas and knowledge as a part
of this politics. In other words what is lost is the sense of
anarchist studies as the elaboration of ideas and knowledges useful
to further developing anarchist politics, such as studying the
workings of healthcare to financial markets, from the movement of
emboli to the movement of the social, approached from a way that is
deeply connected to questions posed by social movement and struggles.
In either case it is an approach to knowledge production geared
toward the twin imperatives of creating blockages in circuits of
oppressive forms of power as well as prefiguring liberatory forms of
sociality. There is also a tendency in this dynamic to reduce
anarchism to its linguistic instantiation that then further reduces
it to only a specific kind of politics.(14) In other words, we cannot
reduce anarchism to the mere use of the word ?anarchism,? but rather
might highlight and propose social relations based on cooperation,
self-determination, and negating hierarchal roles. From this
perspective, one can find a much richer and more global tradition of
social and political thought and organization that while not raising
a black flag in the air is very useful for expanding the scope of
human possibilities in a liberatory direction. The conjunction of
anarchism and anthropology has been quite useful in this regard.(15)
There is also much to learn from postcolonial thought, queer studies,
black and Chicano studies, cultural studies, and feminism. Some of
the most interesting anarchist thought to emerge within recent years
has explored these conjunctions and connections with great success.(16)
The workings of the nomadic educational machine are closer to the
operations of a diffuse cultural politics than what would be commonly
recognized as an educational project. David Weir makes the intriguing
argument that anarchism?s great success as a form of cultural
politics (particularly within the spheres of art, music, and in
creative fields generally) is because of the inability to realize
anarchism?s political goals in other ways.(17) But there is more to
it than an inability to realize political goals, particularly when
the realization of these goals is almost always understood to be the
creation of a hegemonic space or situation, such as replacing a
particular territorial nation-state with a newly created anarchist
non-state. Rather than seeing the success of anarchist cultural
politics as connected to a failure to create hegemonic forms, one can
see it rather as based on a continued refusal of institutionalizing
forms that contradict the nature of anarchist politics. It is seeing
the educational dynamics that exist within the hidden configurations
of knowledge production circulating in the undercommons, a process
that is just as much about the articulation of ideas through the arts
and culture. The nomadic educational machine is a fish that swims in
the secret drift of history that connects medieval heresy to punk
rock, from Surrealism to Tom Waits; and it is this submerged history
from which insurgent movements draw theoretical and imaginal
substance and inspiration from, to forge tools and weapons for
resistance.(18)
The nomadic educational machine exists as a diasporic process of
knowledge creation within the undercommons. But more than existing
within a diasporic configuration, the workings of the nomadic
educational machine are necessary for the articulation of this space
itself. That is to say that there are forms of knowledge and
interaction that constitute a particular space and an approach to
education such that it is not clear or perhaps even possible within
such to clearly delineate where education and life are different.
Paul Gilroy, in his description of the black Atlantic as a
transnational, transversal space created by the movement of blacks
across the Atlantic, suggests the idea of a partially hidden public
sphere.(19) The black Atlantic, constituted by the movement of black
people both as objects of slavery, colonialism, and oppressive forces
as well as in motion seeking autonomy and freedom through real and
imaginary border crossing, can be considered part of this space.
While the space described is certainly visible in the physical sense,
it is nonetheless a space of history, politics, and social
interaction that has often been overlooked as a site of cultural
production and analysis.
There are a variety of reasons for the overlooking of spaces such
as the black Atlantic as a site of cultural analysis and production.
In addition to longstanding racism and conceptions of displaced
people as having no history or culture (or at least not one that
deserves the same level of analysis of others forms of culture or
history) that preclude a serious consideration of such a space, are
factors created by the relative inability of the social sciences
(sociology in particular) to analyze social forms outside the nation-
state. The social sciences, having evolved concomitantly with the
rise of the modern rationalized nation-state, tacitly assume that
social and cultural phenomena correspond to national and state
boundaries, and are often read as if it were the case even when it is
not so. The continued existence of ethnic absolutism and cultural
nationalism also creates difficulties in analyzing forms of cultural
production that violate these clearly defined political, racial, and
cultural boundaries which are assumed to constitute natural pre-
existing fixed and immutable categories.
The creativity of what the nomadic educational machine is the
articulation, preservation, and reinterpretation of cultural and
social forms as part of this partially hidden public sphere, as a
part of the hidden transcript. The public transcript, or the self-
representation of power, more often than not totally excludes and
often denies the existence of the social forms developed in this
partially hidden public sphere. But this exclusion from the gaze of
power, in the blackness of the undercommons, is not necessarily
something to be decried or banished, but could very well provide the
basis upon which to build a radical cultural politics not instantly
subsumed within the optic of the spectacle and the mechanisms of
governance. Indeed, there is often a great effort put forth in what
Roger Farr (building on Alice Becker-Ho?s work on gypsy slang)
describes as a strategy of concealment, one which builds affective
and intense bonds and politics around the refuge of the opaque space,
the indecipherable gesture.(20) Jack Bratich has also done very
interesting work on the panics that secrecy, or even just the
appearance of secrecy, has caused within the left and more broadly.
While some concern is valid around closed circles (perhaps to avoid
the emergence of informal hierarchies, as Jo Freeman has famously
argued), one cannot forget how much of the history of revolts and
insurrections are founded upon conspiracies both open and not, with
the ability to cloak such plans oftentimes quite important to their
success or even mere survival.(21)
It would be arguable that in a sense the overlooking of this space in
many ways suits the needs of the social actors who articulate their
freedom dreams. Constantly reinventing and reinterpreting their
cultural practices as a part of this third realm of politics, the
infrapolitics of resistance creates a space for dreams of
transcendence and autonomy to exist in a seen yet unseen manner. This
corresponds well with the two notions of politics that Gilroy poses:
the politics of fulfillment (?the notion that a future society will
be able to realize the social and political promise that present
society has left unaccomplished. It creates a medium in which demands
for goals like non-racialized justice and rational organization of
the productive processes can be expressed?) and the politics of
transfiguration (which ?emphasizes the emergence of new desires,
social relations, and modes of association?. and resistance between
that group and its erstwhile oppressors?).(22) While he describes the
politics of fulfillment as much more willing to play along with
western rationality and the dynamics of the state political process
(and thus to exist in full view), the politics of transfiguration has
a profoundly different character that makes such unlikely. The
politics of transfiguration focuses on the sublime and the creation
of new forms of social relations and realities. Thus while the
politics of fulfillment can show its designs in full view (for the
most part), the politics of transfiguration have a more subversive
character, that which expresses itself in the partial concealment of
double coded articulations and the infrapolitics of the partially
hidden public sphere.
It is in this space that the arts figure so prominently. The
formation of the space itself, as a site for interaction, can itself
be considered a form of social sculpture or aesthetic activity. And
in so far as it also creates channels for the development and
articulation of knowledge through social interaction, also a form of
education. From folk songs to tap dancing, theater, tales, and more
recently movies, are all involved in creating what Gilroy describes
as ?a new topography of loyalty and identity in which the structures
and presuppositions of the nation-state have been left behind because
they are seen to be outmoded.?(23) This is the space, as much as it
isn?t a space at all, where the freedom dreams that Kelley explores
come to be and are retold, reinterpreted, and re-dreamt in a million
new combinations. Although Kelley laments that in a world where
getting paid and living ostentatiously seem to be held as the ends of
the black freedom movement, this is the space where to build
radically democratic public cultures, to acknowledge and foster the
social force of creativity and imagination.(24) In its transmutable,
transversal form created and maintained by these articulations that
enable there to be discussion about creating a radically democratic
public culture even if the existing political context or situation
prevents such conversations from happening openly.
The diasporic aesthetic, which characterizes the form of appearance
of the nomadic educational machine (as well as its partial non-
appearance), is the social function and creativity displayed by the
articulations of those who through displacement and marginalization
must partially hide or conceal sections of their expression, often
times in plain view, so that they may continue to exist under
marginalizing or oppressive conditions. It is the voice, to borrow
from the ideas of the Zapatistas, which must hide itself in order to
be seen. It is the expression of those who bow before the master
during the day in order to pilfer the grain warehouse at night. It is
the space created by, containing, and sustained by the articulations
and dreams of those who dream out loud in semi-opaque manners. It is
not the will be misunderstood, but rather a question of who wants to
be understood by, and who wants to remain an incomprehensible glyph
towards. As Nietzsche once observed, the only thing worse than being
misunderstood is being totally understood, for that is indeed truly
the end.
There is an odd parallel between social scientists that have
difficulty understanding and theorizing liminal and recombinant
spaces as those in diasporas and the of-going failure of well
intentioned, largely white progressive political forces to
appreciated forms of resistance and subversion that occur within
displaced communities in an on going manner. As traditionally
sociologists have seem stymied by non-state forms of social analysis,
the left in general often fails to appreciate politics aside from
marches, rallies, and other visible manifestations. But the result is
similar: the failure to understand a large segment of social reality
because it is does not jive with existing conceptual and analytical
frames of reference. And if there is anywhere that an actual
anarchist educational project can find a home, it is here within
these spaces and enclaves, rather than in the brightly lit halls of
academia or in the company of polite conversation.
It is this task of the constant renewal of the grounds of politics,
of finding a way to create a space for subversion, sabotage, and
learning within social movement, that is the task of the nomadic
educational machine. It is also the same process engaged in by people
drawing from the history of militant inquiry and research within
autonomist politics.(25) This is a constantly renewing process, not a
onetime thing but rather an orientation towards tracing out the
development of the grounds on which struggles occur and constantly
rethinking on those shifting grounds. It becomes the task of
continuing in the tradition of nomadic thought, of embodying and
working with philosophy as described by Deleuze and Guattari, which
is to say in the creation of concepts through processes of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Calling forth ?not the
one who claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower,
anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race? it is this double
becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth.?(26)
Notes
The author would like to thank the many friends and comrades with
whom years of discussion provided the basis for this essay. Special
thanks to those who provided comments on this piece including David
Harvie, Stefano Harney, Dave Eden, Scott Cheshier, and the excellent
editors of this volume.
1. For the purposes of this essay I?m limiting my comments to the
relation between the nomadic educational machine and the university,
or higher education more generally. Arguably there are different
dynamics to consider within other educational spaces.
2. Bousquet, M. and T. Terranova (2004) ?Recomposing the University,?
Mute, Number 28: 72-81.
3. For some thoughtful consideration of value production and
struggles within the classroom, see Harvie, D. (2006) ?Value-
production and struggle in the classroom,? Capital and Class 88:
1-32; and Bousquet, M. (2008) How the University Works: Higher
Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: New York University Press.
4. Readings, B. (1997) The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
5. Chomsky, N. (2003) Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship. New York:
New Press, 19.
6. There is a good deal of resonance between the concept of being in
but not of a space and the framing within Open Marxism of the
position of being both within and against capital or the state. The
moment of suspension created between existing within but not of is
precisely an exteriority which is not exterior, a fold of the
interior that creates the outside within.
7. See www.edu-factory.org
8. The Institute for Social Ecology?s campus in Vermont, which
operated as a haven for radical thought and played a very important
role in the radical left in the US, is perhaps the most striking of
recent examples. The New College in San Francisco seems to be
suffering a similar fate, albeit for a larger set of reasons and
dynamics.
9. Moten, F. and S. Harney (2004) ?The University and the
Undercommons: Seven Theses,? Social Text, 22 (2), 102.
10. Scott, J.C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden
Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Kelley, R.D.G.
(2002) Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon
Press.
11. Scott, J.C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden
Transcripts, 19.
12. Harney, S. (2008) ?Governance and the Undercommons.? Available at
http://info.interactivist.net/node/10926. April 7th, 2008.
13. Patton, P. (2000) Deleuze & the Political. New York: Routledge.
14. This need not always be the case. For examples of people who have
not fallen into this trap see work of Peter Marshall, Jason Adams,
Harold Barclay, and others who have not fallen prey to such a
tendency. Even Kropotkin did not base his history of anarchist
thought around the use of the word, but rather on what he identified
as the ?libertarian tendency? which he traced all the way back to Lao
Tzu.
15. Graeber, D. (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
16. In particular see the work of people such as Jamie Heckert,
Lorenzo Kom?boa Ervin, Ashanti Alston, Mohamed Jean Veneuse, Richard
Day, Sandra Jeppesen, the Leeds May Day Group, El Kilombo
Intergalactico, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Alan Antliff, Daniel Colson,
Saul Newman, Marta Kolarova, and Arif Dirlik as well as publications
such as Siyahi and Affinities.
17. David Weir (1997) Anarchy & Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of
Modernism. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
18. Marcus, G. (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
19. Gilroy, P. (2003) ?The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of
Modernity,? Theorizing Diaspora. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita
Mannur. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 73.
20. Farr, R. (2007) ?Strategy of Concealment,? Fifth Estate Number
375; Becker-Ho, A. (2000) The Princes of Jargon. Trans. J. McHale.
New York: Edwin Mellen.
21. Bratich, J.Z. (2008) Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and
Popular Culture. Binghamton: SUNY Press.
22. Gilroy, P. (2003) ?The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of
Modernity,? Theorizing Diaspora, 233-246.
23. Ibid., 63.
24. Kelley, R.D.G. (2002) Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.
25. See for instance Shukaitis, S. and D. Graeber, Eds. (2007)
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective
Theorization. San Francisco: CA; see also the transversal issue on
militant research (http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal) and
Generation On-Line (www.generation-online.org).
26. Guattari, F. and G. Deleuze (1994 [1991]) What is Philosophy?
Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 109.
--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://slash.interactivist.net
"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is
created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political
practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and
compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied
practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a
political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary
knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social
and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of
skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with
others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts
the domination and hegemony of the master?s rule." - subRosa Collective
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