art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

once self-deprecating and self-protective, becomes less and less relevant. If students
and teachers lose some of the latitude of action relative privilege once afforded, they
also become potentially participant in, and connected to, movements outside the
university. These movements in turn, are drawn into the orbits of socio-technological
innovations, such as the Internet, where universities continue to provide a matrix of
radical experimentation. The corporate world’s subsumption of the campus generates
a mirror-world of counter-capitalist activity.
The current scope and the capacity of this activity should not be exaggerated. The
forces presently challenging cognitive capital in today’s university campus are real,
but sporadic, and unsynchronized - a scattering of micro-resistances, occasionally
constellating in a loose mesh of affinities. This mesh could unravel. In the aftermath
of 9-11, the ‘war on terror’ has drawn a dark, scorched line across the horizon
towards which so many radical rivulets and transformative tributaries were flowing.
It brings to crescendo what many heard approaching: confrontation between the
techno-cultural whirlwind of cognitive capitalism and an array of religious-ethnonationalist
fundamentalisms arising as a defensive response to the immiseration and
disruptions of the world market: ‘Jihad versus McWorld’.[35] In this neo-exterminist
spiral, the amazing techno-scientific expressions of general intellect will not appear
as retrovirals and open source software, but instead as swarms of robotised battledrones
chattering to each other in the skies over smoky landscapes as they search
for mobile, weaponised smallpox laboratories.
In this context, there is a risk that all types of dissent will be de-legitimised and
attacked. The chilling effect has already been felt on campuses in the United States,
for example in the proposals to replace programmes of post-colonial studies, seen
as over-critical imperial hegemony, with programmes that train experts in Islam and
Arabic languages in a way that is functional to ‘homeland security’ requirements. As
we enter a phase of ‘armoured globalisation’, in which continued expansion of the
world market is accompanied by hyper-militarisation, we can expect further closures
of intellectual space. So too, however, can resistance expand to these closures.
Students and their teachers were widely involved in the massive movements of
opposition to the Iraq war, defiantly in the United States and in the United Kingdom,
successfully in Canada and in many parts of Europe. Currently, in the aftermath of
a second electoral victory by the Bush regime, counter-globalisation and anti-war
movements are in a phase of recomposition. The outcomes are uncertain. But, to
be unabashedly speculative, and in a spirit of grounded utopianism, I would suggest
that this moment opens towards the emergence of ‘species being’ movements.
‘Species being’ is the term the young Marx used to refer to humanity’s self-recognition
as a natural species with the capacity to transform itself through conscious social
activity.[36] Today, in the era of the Human Genome Project and the World Wide Web,
species-being manifests in a techno-scientific apparatus capable of operationalising
a whole series of post-human or sub-human conditions. By entrusting the control and
direction of this apparatus to the steering mechanism of marketisation, cognitive
capital is navigating its ways onto some very visible reefs: a global health crisis,
biospheric disaster, yawning social inequalities dividing a world well seeded with
terrifying arms.
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