Timothy Campbell
"A Common Milieu: Italian Thought After 1968 and 1989"

Sunday, September 5, 2010

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A Common Milieu: Italian Thought After 1968 and 1989
Written by Timothy Campbell (Cornell University)

[Guest writer Timothy Campbell was a speaker at the Unit for Criticism's Spring 2010 conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics. His below "manifesto" on Italian thought is written in conjunction with Cornell University's upcoming September 24-25 conference, Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Italian Thought. It also anticipates Roberto Esposito's October 2-5 visit to the University of Illinois as the Unit's first Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]

For the better part of a decade the position of Italian thought in the Anglo-American academy has increasingly grown in importance. From issues as far ranging as bioethics and bioengineering, to euthanasia, to globalization, to theorizing gender, to the war on terror, works originating in Italy have played a significant, perhaps even the dominant, role in setting the terms and conditions of these debates. Indeed it might well be that no contemporary thought more than Italian enjoys greater success today in the United States. If twenty years of postmodernism and poststructuralism were in large measure the result of French exports to the United States—Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault—today a number of Italian philosophical exports are giving rise to a theoretical dispositif that goes under a variety of names: post-Marxist, posthuman, or most often biopolitical. Yet the fact that Italian thought enjoys such enormous success in the United States and elsewhere begs an important question, one put to me polemically recently by a prominent Italian philosopher. Is there really such a thing as contemporary Italian thought? And if there is what in the world do its proponents have in common?

By way of responding, it might be useful to recall some details about the recent reception of Italian thought in the American academy. In the aftermath of the end of the postmodern—which a number of American observers savored as spelling the end of the use and abuse of philosophy by large numbers of literary critics—two works appeared in English within a span of three years: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. Stepping into the void left by the departure of what in the United States was known as "theory," these works made a number of bold theoretical claims about the relation between political power and individual life (Agamben) and globalization and collective life (Hardt and Negri), claims that uncannily—sometimes almost prophetically—addressed some of the most pressing issues in our current state of affairs. Equally a number of important works of Italian feminism appeared over roughly the same period. Works by Adriana Cavarero and Rosi Braidotti, among others, deeply influenced a whole generation of American theorists in fields like gender studies, political philosophy, and law. Looking back it's difficult to overestimate the influence of all these figures when accounting for the intellectual success of Italian thought today. Certainly it became possible for other voices to be heard, Paolo Virno, and more recently Franco Berardi, Roberto Esposito, and Maurizio Lazzarato among others.

But to take up again the question at hand: what do authors as seemingly different as Agamben and Negri, Berardi and Esposito, Braidotti and Bodei, or Cavarero and Virno have in common outside of the mere fact of writing in Italian? Beyond a common language, is there, for example, such a thing as a common Italian philosophical tradition of which they are all a part? Some, most notably, Mario Perniola, would say yes, one found in the elements of repetition, transmission, mixture, and body that together forged an Italian philosophical culture over the last 300 years. Deleuze and Guattari would have said no, arguing that Italy has historically "lacked a milieu" for philosophy. For them the reason for this lack could be found in Italy's proximity to the Holy See, which continually aborted philosophy across the peninsula, reducing Italian thought to mere rhetoric, philosophy's shadow, and allowing only for the occasional "comet" to briefly light up the philosophical sky.

Yet what if Italian thought today does in fact enjoy a milieu? What "event" or "events" in the recent past might have fashioned a milieu for the emergence of Italian thought? What would the features of that milieu look like?

Undoubtedly, the decade-long Italian 1968 would have played the decisive role. The votes on abortion, the emergence of counterculture and student and feminist movements, and changes in labor and production all deeply changed the space in which politics—as well as philosophy—was practiced. Indeed one of the central features of the Italian 1968 was precisely the emphasis on politics as philosophy and philosophy as a form (among others) of politics. We can see this in the place 1968 and 1977 awarded political militancy; in the increasing prominence given to questions of subjectivization; and more broadly in the birth of new forms of social and political life separated from those that had previously dominated.

Yet Italy’s long 1968 wasn't enough on its own. It was only with 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall that politics and philosophy truly begin to pass intensely into each other, to stay with the language of Deleuze and Guattari. Although it may seem less the case for those writing in Italy, when seen from the outside 1989 was experienced as trauma more in Italy than in the rest of Europe. The result forced a number of thinkers to re-examine the fundamental political and philosophical categories that had underpinned decades if not centuries of thought: what meaning would the end of a certain form of common life have for politics, for philosophy, for culture? Such a calling into question of the previous understanding of the common had the effect of reterritorializing politics and philosophy under new terms and new problematics, one of which will be “life,” broadly speaking. It is only when 1968 is considered as the motor for deterritorialization of the common in political theory and philosophy and 1989 as the turn toward its reterritorialization as newly mapped by (among other things) biopolitical theory that something like a milieu is constructed for contemporary Italian thought.

This is not to say that proponents of Italian thought share the same understanding of the common or even celebrate it. Clearly they do not. Yet the centrality of the common raises a number of questions about Italian thought and Italian public life today. What does it mean to be or have in common in 2010? What are the effects of questioning the weight of shared life and what possible futures are there for the common? How might singularities be thought together so as to create new forms of life and what kinds of co-habitations or contaminations might reinforce these new forms of life? These kinds of questions are ones Italian thought, in all its diversity, has placed at the forefront of contemporary theory, questions that in turn raise fundamental questions about the nature of relationality and of a politics that would seek to strengthen relations and to extend them in order to create yet further relationality. Such is the force of Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the capacity for love near the end of Commonwealth, though one can well imagine others, including a capacity for play, for attention, and for compassion too.

Yet the relationality implicit in these new forms of shared life doesn't only lead to greater and more positive capacities for relationality among singularities. The deterritorialization of the common as biopolitics, the posthuman or even insurrection by no means conjures away the specter of power; thus with greater capacity on the one hand comes the possibility of more intense and invasive forms of power on the other. The question then becomes: how are new forms of the common that are being forged today—shared singularities, mirror neurons, impersonality—also being reterritorialized and recontained, and by whom? Is it possible that more intense forms of relationality might signal a return to the very terms that earlier critiques of the common had attempted to uncover? On the one hand the recent success of social networking sites like facebook suggests that new forms of virtual relations involving vast numbers of "friends" are not only possible but involve ever greater exposure to others. On the other hand such exchanges continue to be premised on the notion that my body and my opinions belong to me, what the Invisible Committee unforgetably characterized as treating "our Self like a boring box office," using whatever prosthesis is at hand "to hold onto an I." In such a neo-liberal scenario, the circulation of information, of goods, of persons, of persons as goods is taken to mean a return to a common mode of being-together. It's a film we've seen countless times before: the common's reinscription in contexts less open to affect that are continually based upon a conflation of connnectivity with more open modes of relating.

These questions among others will be the foundation for a two-day conference sponsored by the journal diacritics to be held on the campus of Cornell University on September 24-25, 2010. The conference, titled "Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Italian Thought," will bring together a number of Italian voices so as to think together not only the relation between Italy and the common but to consider emerging forms of the common and common life today as well as consider the efficacy of a term like the common for a progressive (bio)politics. Equally, the event, the first of its kind of recent memory in the United States, is an occasion to register the state of Italian thought today. When seen from the other side of the Atlantic, no other contemporary thought more than Italian seems better suited today to offer what Foucault called an ontology of the present. At a minimum, and pace my doubting Italian philosopher, the editorial and intellectual success of Italian thought merits a closer look.

Featured at the conference will be some of the leading philosophical figures from Italy today, including Franco Berardi, Remo Bodei, Cesare Casarino, Ida Dominijanni, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. The conference will be transmitted over the internet at http://www.commonconf.com. A number of Cornell students will be blogging the conference live over the two days.



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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #9
"Downgraded to Democracy"

Sunday, February 28, 2010

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"Veritas" by Joe Moorman at Riverson Fine Art


[The next in our "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" series on higher education focuses on the budget debate in order to ponder the state of shared governance on campus]

Written by Patrick Bray (French)

I never thought that my experience as an undergraduate and graduate student at Ivy League universities would help me think about the so-called budget crisis at the University of Illinois. After all, I am constantly being told that public and private universities inhabit vastly different worlds, dependent as we are on state legislators and on our mission to serve all the people of the state.

Cornell, where I did my BA (with financial aid that, in fact, made it a less expensive option for me than the University of California at Berkeley would have been), is, to my knowledge, unique among American universities, since it is made up of both privately funded colleges (such as Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Architecture, etc.), and state-funded or land grant colleges (such as the schools of Agriculture and Industrial and Labor Relations). Students of the different colleges, while all receiving a Cornell degree, pay different tuitions based on their college, but students at the statutory colleges are limited in the number of credit hours they may take in the private colleges. This creates a partly state-funded system that was at the same time mostly transparent and rather unequal. The university’s motto, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study,” comes with the caveat that you have to find someone to pay for it.

At Harvard, where I did my graduate work, the financial system is even more baroque and unequal. According to Harvard’s folksy saying, “every tub on its own bottom,” every academic unit is directly responsible for its own organization and its own finances – this explains why there is no longer a Harvard School of Veterinary Medicine and why the Business School has such a magnificent lawn. But it also precludes the kind of invisible subsidization that Christopher Newfield argues is common to public research universities, a system in which the tuition dollars gleaned from low-research cost and teaching-intensive disciplines like the humanities and social sciences are tapped to cover the indirect research costs of high-end science disciplines in other colleges. Like Cornell, there is no equality among campus units at Harvard, but there is a semblance of fiscal transparency and autonomy, at least before the harsh veritas was revealed that Larry Summers, president from 2001-2006, had gambled away a significant portion of the endowment and billions of dollars in cash reserves.

As the UI administration struggles to explain the necessity of its furlough program, I am reminded of Cornell’s division of state resources by academic unit and suddenly feel nostalgic for Harvard’s brutal laissez-faire philosophy. On February 7, 2010, UI Faculty Senate leaders circulated an informational letter written by Associate Provost Mike Andrechak intended as a response (“but not rebuttal”) of the AAUP-commissioned audit of the university’s finances by economics professor Howard Bunsis. The numerous inaccuracies and even falsehoods (addressed by Bunsis in a recent response) in the informational letter make the blood boil. But the sloppy wording of the document may reveal what is actually behind the furloughs.

The vast majority of the university’s budget ($3.3 billion of a $4.7 billion budget) comes from non-state sources which according to the university are “restricted,” but “80-90%” of the unrestricted (i.e. state) funds go to salaries. Through a convenient accounting trick faculty and staff salaries are directly tied to state funding, while expensive labs, buildings, the research park, and other university pet projects come from unassailable “restricted” funds. Notice the result: the University of Illinois has become a privately funded university whose faculty are state-dependent employees.


While the medieval university, such as the Universities of Paris and Oxford, has often been described as a guild of instructors (as the Harvard Corporation was originally intended to be in 1650), instructors have steadily, and now almost completely, lost control of the university to an army of administrators and non-faculty professionals (UI has around 2,000 tenure-stream faculty versus 3,940 administrators and academic professionals). It is clear from the tone of the Associate Provost’s letter and especially from the hostility emanating from the “critical response” to the Bunsis report by Nicholas Burbules et al. of the University Senates Conference that faculty criticism of the administration’s expertise is considered out of line—even by those, like Burbules, who reportedly represent the faculty (2/10/10 "A Critical Response to the Bunsis Report"). Apparently, in spite of intellectual credentials sufficient to qualify us for tenure-stream positions at a nationally-ranked research university, we are not considered capable of understanding the complexities of the budget.

Philosopher Jacques Rancière reminds us that the ancient Greek term dēmos means the common people: those who have no right to claim or exercise power. Democracy is, in a sense, the formation of a community of disempowered equals by those who have been excluded from power. I contend that since faculty have been relegated to a dēmos of this kind, it is our duty to challenge the authority of the “experts” who rule our university. It is our duty to assert that, though we are not all accountants, we are perfectly capable of seeing through the shifty numbers and competent to manage our own affairs. To that end, let me conclude this post with a list of questions I have after reading the Associate Provost’s letter, the Bunsis report, and the 2010 budget the University has released.

1. Professor Bunsis claims that in 2009 the university had about $600 million in cash reserves. Senate leaders and the Associate Provost have suggested that the university has “burned through” its reserves trying to make payroll, and yet according to Moody’s recent rating of university finances, the university has over $400 million in cash reserves which can be immediately accessed. Where did this money go, and how did it magically reappear?

2. Professor Bunsis bases his analysis on the university's own reports to the federal government, including a statement written by the university as recently as January 2009 which claims that "the University is well positioned to continue its strong financial condition." The fact that the state of Illinois has not yet paid the university money that has already been apportioned should not greatly influence the long-term budget outlook, considering the university's increased revenues, large cash reserve, and very good credit rating. Is the university misreporting its own financial situation to the federal government or is the Provost's office misrepresenting the university's finances to the faculty?

3. The Associate Provost’s letter claims that "$200M is 28% of the budgeted unrestricted funds, the vast majority of which (80-90%) are for salaries and payments to personnel." We have heard many times over the past year or two that salaries are between 60, 70, 80, or 90% (depending on the e-mail) of the university's "operating budget". What proportion is it exactly, and what proportion of the total budget? Is it, as one might imagine, 20 or 30% or is it more? How can there be such uncertainty in the percentage? The ten percent difference reported amounts to $20 million of the money owed by the state to Urbana-Champaign—more than was conserved through the spring 2010 furlough and enough to pay hundreds of faculty members a salary of $100,000! Why, moreover, are salaries considered "unrestricted funds"? Are endowed chairs and science faculty who receive grant funding considered to be paid through "restricted funds"?

4. If we concede that the University of Illinois is in a dire budget crisis and needs to make up the $200 million owed by the state just to Urbana-Champaign, why do we need a furlough program when the relatively small amount ($17 million) generated will not even make a dent in the budget gap? Either the crisis really is monumental, in which case we would need 94 days - and not just 4 days - of furloughs, or the university could borrow a relatively small amount from the Illinois Foundation (the money generated by the furloughs represents less than 1% of the Illinois Foundation's endowment). Other Illinois public universities are borrowing money, why can’t ours? Then again, why can the university plan to borrow $47 million to pay for the construction of the “Stanley O. Ikenberry Commons,” but not borrow a measly $17 million to avoid faculty and academic professional furloughs? To my knowledge, the University of Illinois is the only state university that has implemented furloughs on its own, without directives from either the governor or the state legislature (as occurred in California, Maryland and Wisconsin). Why is the University of Illinois’s unelected administration so ready to do what the state’s elected representatives have not yet done?


5. Here is a hypothesis. Is it possible that the relatively small downgrade of the credit rating for all Illinois public universities, a downgrade which has since been reversed, is at the root of the administration's push for furloughs? The Associate Provost's document makes a point of emphasizing the university's credit rating according to S&P, while Bunsis refers to Moody's US Municipal ratings. Yet Moody’s has recently raised the university’s credit rating to pre-crisis levels. Why hasn’t the university adjusted its policies accordingly?

What the slightly downgraded rating really meant for the university was higher costs for projects that have been dear to the administration (such as the research park, Global Campus, or the stadium expansion), but remote from the instructional and research interests of faculty and students. In order to prove to its bondholders that the university can control labor costs it classifies faculty pay as "unrestricted" and imposes a small but, for the bond rating agencies, highly symbolic faculty furlough, while also proving it can increase revenue at will by raising student tuition and fees. Is it fair to say that the administration is ceding the university’s financial autonomy to rating agencies?

6. The University budget for 2010 shows the budget for every campus unit and indicates how much comes from so-called “state” funds. Why does the budget collapse tuition and state appropriations into one number? How are tuition dollars apportioned? How are state appropriations divided among units? If these funds are all “unrestricted,” who decides which units get money?

At this still great university, where, for the moment at least, one can study pretty much anything and faculty have not yet been driven to find our veritas in vino, it’s time to remind the university community of Illinois’ motto that “Learning and Labor” go hand in hand.




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