[p2p-research] Fwd: <edu-factory> The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 5:31 PM
Subject: Fwd: <edu-factory> The Informational University, the Uneven
Distribution of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>




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From: Ned Rossiter <ned at nedrossiter.org>
Date: Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 10:14 AM
Subject: <edu-factory> The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution
of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour
To: edufactory at listcultures.org


‘The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution of Expertise and the
Racialization of Labour’

Ned Rossiter

In his book Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross opens the final
chapter on ‘The Rise of the Global University’ with the following
assessment: ‘Higher education has not been immune to the impact of
economic globalization. Indeed, its institutions are now on the brink of
channeling some of the most dynamic, and therefore destabilizing,
tendencies of neoliberal marketization’.[1] Arguably, one of the central
reasons higher education embodies the intensity of transformations
wrought by neoliberalism has to do with ways in which post-Fordist
labour is ‘multiplied and divided’.[2]

The political-economic technologies of measure are key to the division
of labour in and across university settings. A quick listing of examples
is sufficient to get an idea of what I am talking about here: systems of
ranking institutions of higher education within a global frame serve to
distinguish universities and the labour within them along national and
geocultural lines of division; this in turn shapes the global mobility
of students and thus the logic of economic accumulation, again dividing
universities, labour and disciplines in terms of market competition and
geocultural segmentation. The construction of special economic zones for
higher education, which is most notable across the Asian, Middle Eastern
and African regions, functions to divide national markets internally and
externally along the lines of domestic and global spatialities that have
implications for income generation derived from teaching and research
activities in terms of the scope of student catchment and institutional
sources for research funding.

The political-economic architecture of intellectual property regimes is
another state supported device through which lines of division are
constructed between what McKenzie Wark has termed the ‘vectoral class’
(those who proprietise and thus enclose the productive efforts of
biopolitical labour) and the ‘hacker class’ (those engaged in the
collaborative work of co-production and creation of the common).[3]
Universities and corporations have sought to further establish systems
of measure from such labour through the global rankings of journals and
citation indices. Such rankings overwhelmingly favour journals that are
part of Anglo-American publishing consortia that over the past 20 years
have set out to aggressively takeover the few remaining independent
journals that support research and intellectual debate in national and
regional settings. The effect of this has been to consolidate the
hegemony of global English and erode the connection between the
production of knowledge and its frequently local social-political
conditions of possibility. This, notwithstanding the fact that the very
notion of the local has become enormously complicated with the
consolidation of economic and cultural globalization coupled with the
rise of the network society.

Additional lines of division operate in terms of what Andrew Ross calls
the ‘new geography of work’, and what I’m wishing to frame in this essay
as the uneven distribution of expertise. Incorporated into the uneven
distribution of expertise is the racialization of labour, both of which
connect back to the construction of special economic zones for global
universities. It is on this basis that my essay concludes that the 21st
century informational university in its global manifestations is in many
ways disturbingly similar to programs of institution formation and the
management of populations undertaken by 19th century colonial powers. I
will develop these aspects of my argument shortly, but first I wish to
say a few more things about the multiplication of labour and how this
dynamic and condition relates to the rise of the informational
university.

The Informational University and the Production of the Common

In his book How the University Works, Marc Bousquet’s crucial insight is
that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the
informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal
regimes.[4] This orientation of labour around processes of
informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers
associated with Italian post-operaismo thought. One of the key
analytical and political precepts developed out of such work, as
summarised recently by Tiziana Terranova, makes the distinction between
the social production of value and the model of classical political
economy, which measures the time and cost of labour in determining the
production of commodity value.[5]

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note that traditional models of measure
(e.g. intellectual property regimes, university and journal ranking
systems, citation indicators, etc., all of which operate within the
contemporary neoliberal, informational university), and thus of the law
of value, are in crisis today due to profound contradictions within the
force of economic globalization and the multiple antagonisms between the
cooperative logic of biopolitical labour and capitalism’s mechanisms of
expropriating the wealth of the common as it is produced by the
creativity of biopolitical labour.[6] In his dialogue with Negri, Cesare
Casarino reiterates this point, noting how the common provides ‘the
locus of surplus value’ for capital, whose apparatuses of capture – or
regimes of measure – expropriate the wealth of the common.[7]

A distinction needs to be made here between the concept of *the common*
and that of *the commons*. The latter is associated with processes of
enclosure and proprietary control of that which was previously
collectively owned and managed. In a neoliberal paradigm, such a process
has been marked by the shift of public goods to private ownership. The
key point here is that the commons – whether they are understood in
terms of ecology, culture or relationships – are predicated on the dual
logic of scarcity and ownership, and are thus assumed to be resources in
need of protection. Within social democracies, the state is frequently
bestowed with such a role. The commons is thus ascribed a
representational quality.

The common, by contrast, cannot be owned or managed, most especially by
statist formations that assume the identity of the people or the public.
The common does not operate within the logic of representation, in other
words, and instead is a force mobilized through non-representational
relations and the multiplication of biopolitical labour. Nor is the
common a resource underscored by the logic of scarcity. And while the
common holds an economic potential – something that is made clear in the
moment of expropriation – its ‘wealth’ is not inherently economic. As I
have written elsewhere with Soenke Zehle, ‘If we understand the commons
to refer both to the material context and the consequence of practices
of peer-production, the common is the political potential immanent in
such practices. Such an understanding of the common situates it
conceptually as the latest iteration of the political; just as there
exists an “excess of the political over politics”, the affirmation of
the common is offered as a condition of possibility for collaborative
constitution, for the sharing of affects of love, solidarity or wrath,
and for the translation of such affects and experiences across the
“irreducible idiomaticity” of ethico-political practices’.[8]

Casarino makes the ‘important qualification’ that there is always a
remainder of the common that is not appropriated by capital. There is
the suggestion that this ‘outside’ or ‘externality’ provides the point
of separation between capital and the common, which otherwise risk
becoming indistinguishable. The precise content of this common is left
without elaboration by Casarino. My sense is that asymmetrical
institutional-social temporalities between capital and the common are
key here. Where the university is often accused as being ‘out of time’
or ‘too slow’ by those who heavily identify with the business sector and
industry, perhaps one could also suggest that the time of the common and
living labour holds a special complexity that refuses absorption into
capital’s apparatuses of capture and regimes of measure, which are
always circumscribed in a way that living labour is not. I can only note
such speculations in passing – the empirical-conceptual content here is
the stuff of future research.

When transferred to the setting of the university and its transformation
under conditions of economic globalization, questions such as the
following emerge: How does the social production of value (brand desire,
affect, subjectivity, online social networking, etc.) shape the
commodity value of the university degree? What relation does this have
with the globalization of higher education? And how does the
informational university – defined increasingly by privatization (as
distinct from being a public good), labour flexibility and informational
management – relate to the social production of value?

Let me outline in concrete fashion how the social production of value
shapes the commodity value of the university degree. Anyone who is
astute to the conditions of cognitive labour within universities will
not have trouble making the connection between diminishing numbers of
full-time faculty, increasing casualisation of teaching staff, the
massive expansion in administrative labour and the viral-like
proliferation of managerial personas, the structural reproduction of
adolescent research subjectivities through short-time contracts for
junior researchers on cross-university projects and what I would term
the incapacity of the disciplines to invent new conceptual and
methodological idioms of practice.

It is a well known if rarely articulated strategy of refusal for
coordinators of course modules to reissue the same material for students
year in and year out. Admittedly this is a practice that has gone on for
years in universities, but it takes on substantially different hues with
the shift from the public-state university to the pseudo-corporate and
informational university. Whereas the academic of the public university
who trotted out the same module outline every year was justifiably
accused of intellectual and pedagogical laziness, these days it is more
a matter of survival as academics struggle to manage an enormous
increase in managerial and administrative workloads that accompany the
ever-expanding mechanisms that define the madness of audit cultures
(another feature that defines the informational university). Come the
start of a new semester, it is not uncommon for academics who have spent
whatever recess from teaching duties by writing grants, undertaking
marking, fulfilling administrative duties, meeting with dissertation
students and maybe, if lucky, engaging in some research, to then find
themselves having no time to redevelop old course materials (forget
about producing new materials), and thus resort out of desperation and
self-survival to repeat whatever it was that they taught the previous
year.

The result of such practice – which I would expect to be widespread
across the sector – is that disciplines become impoverished. You might
counter this charge by telling me it is the job of research to provide
the material of innovation for the disciplines. To do so falls into the
trap of privileging research and thus dividing the important and
mutually informing relationship between research and teaching. Moreover,
it assumes that research activity is actually doing the job of
disciplinary reinvention. I would suggest that, to the contrary, the
vast majority of national and supranational funded research – especially
in the humanities – is funded on the grounds that it reproduces the
orthodoxies of the disciplines, in which case very little is gained by
way of disciplinary innovation.

This brings me to the social production of value. When academics no
longer have the time and perhaps intellectual stamina let alone
curiosity to test the borders of their disciplines, what do they do?
Well, in similar fashion to capital – and indeed, precisely because they
are subjects of the corporate, informational university – they look to
appropriating the creativity of the common. In my own field of new media
studies, it has become very clear over the past 10 years that academics
have contributed very little by way of conceptual and methodological
invention. Such work has been undertaken outside and on the margins of
the academy by artists, activists, computer geeks and media theorists.

How is such work undertaken? It is undertaken through practices of
collaborative constitution and the multiplication of labour made
possible by the mode of information and the media of digital
communication.9 The key social-technical features here of flexibility,
adaptation, distributive co-production, informational recombination,
open / free content and code, and modulating axes of organization (both
horizontal and vertical) all define the culture and labour of networks.
And as the generative content of the common is absorbed and more often
enclosed by non-generative proprietary regimes that function to shore up
the borders of the corporate university, there is also an informational
dimension of open and generative network cultures that is carried over
and interpenetrates the institutional dynamic of the university.

Actually, an increasing number of universities are recognizing the value
of adopting open content practices – MIT’s OpenCourseWare being one of
the more widely known examples.[10] The reason for this has to do with
the fact that there is very little 'product differentiation' across
degree programs from one university to the next, and universities are
slowly but surely understanding that economic leverage for higher
education comes not from the sale of pre-packaged, static material
(although this is still the dominant economic model); rather, they see
their business as that of awarding degrees (i.e. granting an
institutional / symbolic legitimacy upon a learning experience, which is
the basis of determining tuition fees) and service delivery – a model
that effectively duplicates the business model of open source software
providers who understand that users (including educational institutions,
corporations, small businesses and organizations) expect to download
content (operating systems and office software, for example) for free,
but are then willing to pay for labour that customises the software to
specific institutional needs, with follow-up service as required.

The Uneven Distribution of Expertise

What is the relation between the informational university and the uneven
distribution of expertise across the higher-education landscape? Indeed,
what is expertise and who is an expert? And what are the geocultural
configurations upon which such relations might be mapped out? With the
rise of Web 2.0 and its attendant self-publishing and promotion
platforms such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and YouTube, everyone these days
is an expert. In some respects this seeming democratization of knowledge
production is a structural phenomenon brought about by the outsourcing
of labour and content production in the media industries. These days,
even the corporations want everything for free. And with the social
production of value, which in the case of news media comes in the form
of citizen-journalism that willingly supplies content for free, the cost
of labour is effectively removed from the balance sheet.

How, though, does this Cult of the Amateur impact upon the distribution
of expertise within the university? With the rise of mass education and
user-pay systems, many academics nowadays complain of the ‘dumbing down’
of curricula. Academic departments have become in most cases almost
entirely dependent on income derived from student fees, with
international students making up a substantial portion of annual
budgets. This is especially pronounced in universities in Australia
where, after two decades of partial deregulation and massive cuts in
government expenditure on education, it has become a routine practice
for academics to slide students over the ever diminishing hurdles of
assessment. If they didn’t, then the security of their own jobs is at
stake.

Similar practices are the norm in British and North American
universities, no matter what the 'quality assurance' reports might say
otherwise. Such systems of measure long ago lost any relationship with
their referent and function in a very similar way to the production of
public opinion, which does not exist according to Bourdieu's compelling
thesis.[11] What does exist is the ever-increasing extension of
self-referential reporting measures into the time of academic work. The
tyranny of audit cultures inscribes academic subjects into discursive
practices of accountability and conditions the over-production of
administrative functionaries, whose job is to keep track of the
bureaucratic madness that such systems guarantee.

Not only has the dependency relationship on student fees had substantive
impacts on the design and content of curricula, it has also exacted a
toll on the capacity for academics to keep abreast with – let alone make
contributions to – advances in their field. Increasingly, the insistence
by students and administration for entertainment-on-demand styles of not
so much teaching but ‘course delivery’ has resulted in more academic
time expended on maintaining online administration and content
management systems such as the notorious WebCT and Blackboard. (Although
for reasons I fail to understand, such systems are embraced with an
obsessive degree of delight by some colleagues I’ve worked with over the
years.)

Within conditions such as these, which again are typical of the
informational university, it would seem the very notion of expertise is
in crisis. And arguably it is. But there are also ways in which
expertise is upheld, since once it can be quantified as measure a
crucial symbolic value can then be accrued that can then be transferred
as brand value for individual academics and their institutions. This in
turn results in a capacity to charge higher student fees and attract the
much vaunted external research funds, whose board of assessors place
great emphasis on so-called ‘esteem indicators’ provided by journal
ranking systems and citation indices which hold their own geocultural
and political economic bias that reinforces what Harold Innis termed
‘monopolies of knowledge’.[12] Such measures supposedly confer upon the
body of academic research a ‘quality assurance’ that effectively removes
from the assessor the task of critical assessment, which is now designed
to be as automated and therefore time efficient as possible. Again,
these are some of the key features that characterise an informational
mode of knowledge management. Though it remains to be said, the
calibration of such systems of automation are deeply ideological and
underscored by cabals of self-interested academic groups and
individuals.

This brief survey of teaching and research practices within the
informational university comprise what Andrew Ross has termed the ‘new
geography work’. A far-from-uniform informational geography of
intellectual property regimes, content management systems, database
economies, flexible labour and open content production becomes
integrated with a geocultural system that valorises the reproduction of
Western knowledge traditions and hegemony of global English.[13] There
are further implications here for disciplinary innovation and the
production of subjectivity. With the rise of the global university,
local knowledge traditions and expertise have very weak purchase within
an educational-machine that demands modes of flexible, just-in-time
delivery provided by staff in contract positions whose structural and
ontological insecurity is offset by largely generic course modules whose
uniformity ensures a familiar point of entry for the next short-term
academic hired by the global university.

The Racialization of Labour

In which cases might a racialization of labour underscore the
informational university? In short, what are the labour inequalities
that shape the market of higher education on a global scale and how are
new (or, as the case may be, neo-colonial) class subjectivities being
reproduced? There are multiple hues of labour differentiation across
universities at a global level. To make the claim of differentiation
along the lines of race is to suggest a reproduction of the 19th century
biological category of race as the basis upon which division is
operating. The official positioning of universities across the world
would be most defiant in maintaining this is certainly not the case, and
indeed may be inclined to issue legal writs against anyone making such a
charge, if it was perceived that brand damage was a stake.

Nearly twenty years ago, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein
‘observe that, in traditional or new forms (the derivation of which is,
however, recognizable), *racism is not receding, but progressing* in the
contemporary world’.[14] Arguably, this is no less the case today, and
one of the sites upon which racism has become reproduced, albeit in new
guises, is that of the informational university. The category of race,
as Balibar and Wallerstein go on to analyse, is one of the key
modalities enlisted in the construction of the ‘people’, or what
Foucault analysed in terms of the biopolitical production of territory,
populations, security and subjectivity.[15] Other social-political
devices through which populations are constituted include the nation,
class, ethnicity, gender and broadcast media of communication. How the
category of race intersects with these technologies of governance that
define the rise of the nation-state and industrial modernity has been a
matter of considerable research, which is in no way exhausted yet. It
may seem a surprise to many that the seemingly archaic category of race
should figure within the time and space of informational modernities.
But, as I go to show, forms of institutional racism are central to the
problem of labour within the global university.

Let me conclude by briefly documenting the operation of what Balibar
terms ‘racism without races’ with reference to the division of labour
and uneven distribution of expertise operating at global universities
present in China. How to situate the differences between labour regimes
in the global university and those of 19th century colonialism? In form
they are similar. In both cases indigenous elites are enlisted as
administrators to provide the linguistic and cultural interface between
the imperial institution and local populations, which include government
officials and industry representatives. But one key difference is that a
relatively high ranking official such as myself in the 19th century
could freely have lavished all the racial epithets on the lower ranking
colonials. Today, however, someone such as myself has to be careful
about how the discourse on race is handled since it could endanger my
position, to say nothing of the offence it may provoke. There’s a
difference here with the 21st century variants of differential racism
that needs to be analysed. And the concept of ‘racism with race’ helps
such analysis part of the way. Racism without race is predicated on
modes of division that while not invoking the biological category of
race are nonetheless reproducing the logic of racism – namely, to divide
and exclude on the basis of race – through other means but which at
their heart are racist in orientation, no matter how unconscious or
unintentional that may be.[16]

A notable feature across global universities operating in China today is
the  substantial presence of domestic Chinese in the administrative
ranks, with considerably fewer Chinese working as academic faculty.
While smaller scale operations may combine academic and administrative
roles and have those carried out by foreigners on casual contracts
familiar with the 'culture' of the national system within which they are
working, the larger universities employ local Chinese for administrative
work on an almost exclusive basis. These staff often hold an
undergraduate degree from a US, British or Australian university, and
many will also have postgraduate qualifications from an overseas
university. In many cases their degrees will have been awarded from
their current employer, which again ensures familiarity with the culture
and administration of their particular institution.

In principle, the Chinese administrators working within global
universities in China are not there because they are Chinese but because
they have met the job selection criteria – relevant degree or diploma,
competency in English language, good interpersonal skills, relevant
experience, etc. The official positioning is thus definitely not about
race in its classic 19th century articulations. On the other hand, if
these administrative staff were not Chinese, then they most likely would
not be working in these universities. Why, then, are there so few and in
enough cases no non-Chinese staff comprising the administrative ranks at
these global universities?

If it was just a matter of holding the appropriate qualifications and
skills, then there could be people from any number of racial and ethnic
backgrounds working as administrators in these universities. As noted
earlier, while the primary administrative and teaching language of these
universities is English, there is a need for at least some
administrative staff to have a high proficiency in Putonghua in order to
interface at linguistic and cultural levels with local and national
government departments and businesses. But there is no obvious reason or
need for all administrative staff to be of Chinese origin. It would seem
that there’s an important subjective desire at work for Chinese
administrative staff with largely Anglophone qualifications to find work
back at home. What emerges from this phenomenon is a dual-language
system where intra-institutional and transnational administration and
engagement with academic staff is conducted in English, whereas the
informal socialisation among administrative staff and their interaction,
to some extent, with Chinese students is conducted in Putonghua or local
dialects.

To not be Chinese, in other words, means to not be participating in
those institutional and social circuits conducted exclusively in
Chinese. This enlisting of the (middle-class) elite ‘locals’ in
administrative positions strikes me as very similar to the colonial
strategy of engaging indigenous elites to administer colonial
institutions (India being the classic example) and in so doing reproduce
and reinforce (or in some cases produce) a local class system. My
understanding of such operations is that racial distinctions determined
the institutional positions and conditions of the labouring subject.
Institutions of globalized higher education provide the institutional
settings and organizational cultures through which the logic of
differential racism is played out today.

Moving to the question of academic faculty and the international staff
that compose its ranks, the opposite display of racialized labour
becomes notable: namely, the tendency for Chinese to not be among those
holding academic positions. Perhaps this is even more remarkable than
the case of the Chinese majority within administrative positions. The
opportunity for movement within administration from a US or British
university to a global university operating in China, or some other
country, for that matter, is less likely than in the case of academics,
who tend to be much more mobile within both national and global
settings. Why, then, do so few Chinese academics comprise the ranks of
faculty within global universities in China? One reason has to do with
remuneration. Local Chinese are paid substantially less than their
international colleagues, and in this respect the economy of labour in
global universities reproduces that of most other businesses in China.
Unlike other business sectors, however, the global universities do not –
at least not yet – fill their academic ranks with local Chinese in order
save on labour costs. Key to the brand value of the global universities
is the assurance these institutions make to students that they are
receiving a product and experience that essentially reproduces what they
could expect if they were enrolled at the 'home' institution. An
important part of that assurance thus rests on a significant portion of
academic staff who are either on secondment from or at least familiar
with the workings of the home institution. There are also administrative
practicalities for this practice associated with the running of
equivalent programs, submission and moderation of grades, establishment
of academic and administrative committees, and so on and so forth.

>From the perspective of the Chinese academic who may give thought to
shifting from a Chinese university to one of the increasing number of
global universities setting up shop in China, a number of practicalities
need to be considered. The linguistic barrier presented by the necessity
to have a working command of English is just one of various factors to
take into account. While the low pay may be equivalent between Chinese
and global universities, the Chinese academic will have to forego the
frequently informal ways in which income is supplemented within the
Chinese system. The household items and food parcels supplied by the
national teacher's union, for example, would not be part of academic
life in a global university. Moreover, they will have to suffer the
knowledge that for effectively the same labour they are being paid a
fraction of the amount received by their international colleagues. It
must be said that such differentiation of remuneration levels is not
based on whether one is Chinese or not. The same applies for those
international teachers who have entered the global university from
within China, and thus are structurally positioned as part of a domestic
labour force. Nonetheless, the material effect of these multiple forces
results in an academic body that is largely absent of Chinese staff.

While the differentiation of work across the spectrum of academic and
administrative life points to standard divisions of labour in
universities around the world, often enough both the individual worker
and collective experience will embody these distinctions in singular
ways and thus becomes a subject who multiplies rather than divides the
borders of labour. This process whereby the borders of labour become
multiplied is made clear in the relation cognitive labour holds with the
social production of value, as sketched earlier in this essay. The
racialization of labour, on the other hand, serves as a technology of
division in the case of global universities currently operating in
China. As the hegemony of the Chinese state unfolds and exerts its power
across the geocultural terrain of global institutions, it should come as
no surprise that the composition of labour within those institutions
becomes increasingly comprised of mainland Chinese workers whose skills,
expertise and symbolic value is no longer perceived as second tier. Such
a transformation will occasion new lines of struggle in the
globalization of higher education. The challenge for biopolitical labour
will be to assert the autonomy of the common from emergent apparatuses
of capture. A key part of this struggle will involve refusing the
informational technologies of measure.


Notes
Thanks to Brett Neilson for comments and suggestions and co-panellists
Paolo Do and Jon Solomon for their dialogue on themes and conditions
addressed in this essay. Thanks also to Wang Xiaoming for hosting the
edu-factory presentation at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
Shanghai University, 7 December 2009.

1. Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in
Precarious Times, New York: New York University Press, 2009, p. 189.

2. See Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Border as Method, or, the
Multiplication of Labor’, transversal (2008),
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en

3. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2004.

4. Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher-Education and the
Low-Wage Nation, New York: New York University Press, 2008, pp. 55-89.

5. See Tiziana Terranova, ‘The Internet as Playground and Factory:
Prelude’, The New School, New York, 2009, http://vimeo.com/6882379. See
also Tiziana Terranova, ‘Another Life: the Nature of Political Economy
in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics’, Theory, Culture & Society 26.6
(2009): 234-262.

6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 314-316.

7. Casare Casarino, ‘Surplus Common: A Preface’, in Casare Casarino and
Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and
Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 20.

8. Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle, ‘Exodus from the General Intellect’,
working paper, 2009. Oddly enough, Michael Hardt confuses the common
with the commons in one of his preparatory texts leading up to the
publication of Commonwealth. See Michael Hardt, ‘Politics of the
Common’, Z-Net, 2009, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21899

9. That such invention is undertaken through practices immanent to media
of communication would suggest that it is a mistake to assume that
informational modes of communication and practice result in outcomes
such as the informational university. Clearly, such a position is one
that holds a technologically determinist viewpoint, which is undermined
by the fact that social-technical practices of collaboration
constitution facilitate the production of the common.

10.  For a discussion of the implications of initiatives on cultural and
disciplinary formations, see Ross, p. 202

11. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Public Opinion Does Not Exist’ (1973), trans. Mary
C. Axtmann, in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub (eds), Communication
and Class Struggle, Vol. 1: Capitalism, Imperialism, New York:
International General, 1979, pp. 124-130.

12. Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1951.

13. See Ross, p. 202.

14. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class:
Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, 1990, p. 9.

15. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.  See also Michel Foucault, Society Must Be
Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David
Macey, London: Allen Lane, 2003 and Michel Foucault, Security,
Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978,
trans. Graham Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

16. Balibar offers the following definition of 'racism without races':
'It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the
insurmountability of cultural differences, a racisms which, at first
sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples
in relation to others but “only” the harmfulness of abolishing
frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short,
it is what P. A. Taguieff has rightly called a *differentialist
racism*'. See Balibar, 'Is there a “Neo-Racism”?', in Balibar and
Wallerstein, p. 21.


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