Pedagogical Labor in an Age of Devalued Reproduction (original) (raw)

2017, Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education

This chapter explores the connections between shifts in labor, pedagogy and the dynamics of network culture. It suggests that the previous role of education as an avenue of class advancement has been undermined by the current transformations of neoliberal capitalism, thus leaving education in precarious position needing to justify what it produces. From that an argument is made that a critique starts from a reflexive understanding of its position within broader processes of social production, and thus the necessity for rethinking what kinds of learning are already occurring within existing flows of immaterial and free labor. Acknowledging and working from shared conditions of precarity creates the possibility of rebuilding a new form of labor-pedagogical politics. Paul Willis in his classic book Learning to Labor (1982) describes the way that it is precisely the rejection of education by working class British lads that slots them into their continued role as future factory workers. By refusing knowledges and skills within education, and the opportunity for advancement offered through such, the lads refusal means that they have little other choice than taking the low-skilled, low paying factory jobs. What we see here is a kind of refusal of pedagogical labor, of academic achievement, which ends up forming the lads for their place in the working of the economy: the reproduction of the class relationship. In considering the relation between labor and pedagogy it is key to that while the institutional space in which formalized teaching occurs is indeed a prime space for how that relation is formed, it is far from the only site this occurs. This is what someone like Tiziana Terranova points toward in her exploration of labor involved in the functioning of what she describes at “network culture” (2004). For Terranova this means that various information technologies, from mass media to the Internet, interactive and participatory media, have congealed together into one integrated media system. Terranova argues that such an integrated network culture can only function through an immense supply of the “free labor” of participation, which can range anywhere from the building of websites and running of listservs, to generating content through social networking sites, to writing open source code. This essay will explore the pedagogical function of these dispersed forms of free labor, which occur throughout the social field, and that are very much part of structuring the habitus of today’s student-workers. From compulsory engagement in social media to the expectations of taking on unpaid internships, today’s proletarian learns that they will only advance if they are willing to take part in an arrangement that demands the de-valuing of their labor as a necessary entrance cost of trying to claim any future value over its worth. The question of mass intellectuality thus attempts to reorient this conjunction of labor and pedagogy, to find ways to turn this dynamic of engagement with these very conditions as a step towards organizing to change them.