Academia In Action: Get Out of the Library and Into the Streets: a Review of Constituent Imagination
By Matt Wasserman
From the Indypendent
Despite denouncements of “tenured radicals” by commentators on the right, there are few academics with ties to social movements. Plenty of academics write articles for obscure journals on transgression or “interrogate” race, gender and class, but almost none are found in the streets. This is the classic bargain of academia: you can think subversive thoughts as long as you don’t act upon them. Case in point: the firing of Constituent Imagination co-editor David Graeber from Yale University’s anthropology department.
He was dismissed not for his anarchist politics—there’s a sizable number of self-proclaimed Marxists in the academy, after all — so much as for acting on his beliefs, working with the Direct Action Network and supporting the unionization efforts of grad students. The writers who contributed to Constituent Imagination want to tear down the barrier set up within the academy between theory and practice. In an occasionally jargon-ridden, often brilliant and generally provocative set of essays, they theorize and research about the global justice movement from within the movement.
Their approach and focus vary: from first-hand accounts of modern day diggers planting papaya trees on public land, to reflections on how to do militant research (or research militancy), to an argument for do-it-yourself (DIY) culture as a form of “self-valorization," or creation of forms of social organization outside the sphere of capitalism. However, they are united in their commitment to finding or forging a collective intellectual practice capable of aiding the struggle for human liberation.
The authors, rather than seeing their role as diagnosing the “objective” nature of the system and on this basis prescribing the correct strategy for social movements to follow, instead attempt to work out what it means to perform engaged intellectual work alongside, in service to and within social movements themselves. To do so, most of the articles (and the title) borrow theoretical vocabulary from autonomist Marxism. (Originating in Italy, autonomist Marxism stresses the role of the working class in creating and modifying capitalist social relations and the need for autonomous self-organization of the working class and everyday working-class resistance.)
The primary reference point for most contributors seems to be the cycle of struggles from Seattle to Genoa, before the US wing of the global justice movement capsized under the weight of September 11 — the book reads like it could have been written in 2002, with the anti-war movement and immigrant rights movement nowhere to be seen. But in reflecting on the high point of the alter-globalization struggles and drawing on the body of theory that emerged from the decade-long “1968” of Italy, where mass anti-systemic struggle persisted until the late 1970s, the authors try to lay a theoretical groundwork for a new and intensified movement towards that other world that is possible. Constituent Imagination is, among other things, an attempt to consolidate the breakthroughs of the global-justice movement at the level of theory.
While this collection will likely be most interesting to those attempting to do radical work within the academy, it is relevant to anyone interested in (re)building the alter-globalization movement and creating “a new world in the shell of the old.” Constituent Imagination may end up sitting on the shelves of university libraries, but its heart is in the streets.
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- Jim Feast from the Winter 2007 Edition of Rain Taxi -
There is a poignant side to the new anthology, Constituent Imagination , edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, a book concerned with the way complex intellectual skills, such as those involved in anthropological research or media analysis, can be put to the service of social movements and progressive politics. One writer, Uri Gordon, for instance, speaks of how a trained philosopher can help movement anarchists "improve their understanding of the issues that guide them in the project of transforming society." [279]
How is this poignant? Since the early 1970s, the U.S. has been minting a lot more Ph.D.'s and other advanced degrees than can staff educational facilities. The surplus academics have usually migrated into corporate hierarchies. Art majors became art directors at advertising firms, and so on. In the new millennium, though, even those second-choice jobs have disappeared . If one is going to become a cabbie with a philosophy degree, for example, why not use one's skills to analyze and maybe organize the other drivers?
These reflections are not meant cynically. After all, it's such displaced malcontents, from any class, that have filled the most positive movements for democratization and social justice the world has witnessed. I hypothesize that the authors in this book, who write of diverse, countercultural uses of learning, are those liable to such displacement
Some of the ways contributors have engaged in "militant research" are these. Jeffrey Juris, while participating in debates and organizing around anti-corporate globalization, uses ethnography to analyze "diverse movement networks, how they interact, and how they might better relate to broader constituencies" in order to deepen their reach and impact. [173] Another writer, BRE, uses autoethnography, whereby he, homeless and a dissident, puts his body on the line (and in print) describing both life on the streets and in demonstrations for homeless rights. Contributors also, more traditionally, explore lesser known political formations they are a part of, as Kristy Robertson does in talking about the Revolutionary Knitting Circle and other groups that use knitting in surprisingly deviant and liberatory ways, or have studied, as Ben Shepard does, displaying great empathy in making explicit the tactics of Housing Works in its fight to find shelter for AIDS patients.
Aside from presenting these details of political activism, the book also includes pieces, ones written with considerably less élan, about the more theoretical issue of how knowledge is produced from different sites in society. Then there are the essays that raise the question of whether anything in the current university system, now so beholden to the state and business culture, is salvageable. The élan comes back in views ranging from the hopeful (Jack Bratich writes eloquently of the fractures in academia that can be exploited for anti-authoritarian ends) to the despairing (Ashar Latif and Sandra Jeppesen look at the near-unbridgeable gulf between talking about something and doing something about it) to the gleefully subversive (CrimethInc writes, "If you look at the modern educational system not as a site for resistance but as a supply depot for looting, things brighten up quickly"). [307]
In the end, this provocative book gives one the urge to re-study the demonized Cultural Revolution. Remember the phrase go down deep, which in 1960s China referred to an intellectual leaving his privileged urban post and moving to the country to work with the peasantry or in a factory? This was not a punishment but for education, that of the intellectual. In October 1967, an editorial in The People's Daily put it like this: "They [teachers] should realize they are educators and educated and that their students are wiser than they in many respects" [*] The point was driven home by the much-touted example of the Shanghai machine tools plant where the design sector was (roughly) half college trained engineers, half factory workers learning the field in night courses. The most significant innovations came from the latter.
Certainly, the context is different. Where the Chinese were seeking to improve business efficiency, the writers in this anthology are seeking to increase the efficacy of anti-business organs of dissent. Nonetheless, the contributors to Constituent Imagination do detail less drastic but equally searching attempts to go deep down as they try to collaboratively connect skills garnered from academic training to the enhancement and empowerment of communities bent on creating a better world.
