Cognitive labour

In the Rawhide thread, Matt remarked on the (shifting) relation between blogging and the universities, and IT has been turning over the issue of writing, the academy and writing outside the academy in various ways.  (I tried to find the relevant links in the comments, but it was like wading.)  There are a few things here that might be useful for thinking through and around such questions, which may have already done the rounds, but in any case.  I'd be interested if anyone has any other additions or takes.

"The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses", by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, I've found particularly interesting, as I have Tizziana Terranova's and Marc Bousquet's "Recomposing the University".

Also, there's quite a bit in the Radical University Notwork collection of links, which ties into a series of discussions about and the develeopment of 'autonomous universities' around the place, some of which has been outlined in a previous edition of Mute. (Mute, of course, has been running a consistent series of discussions about work, so it's worth a look around for those not familiar with it).

And, I'll end with some fragments from the new edition of Borderlands on Althusser, which run to the question not only of what it might been to take one's leave of the university, or at least take one's time, but also of what it might mean to do philosophy as 'anti-philosophy', which is to say, an indisciplined, non-canonical philosophy.

The secret philosophy of the encounter ... "catches a moving train" and, with strong arms, jumps on the wagon that runs from eternity like Heraclitus' water, without knowing where it comes from and where it's going. Through Althusser's image we see in the materialist philosopher almost an IWW activist who travels through America to trigger off strikes, hiding from the cops and beating the industrial centres and mine pits along the railway… - Augusto Illuminati.

[...] The image of the vagabond who boards a train without knowing where it has come from or where it is going is a recurrent metaphor for the materialist practice of philosophy in Althusser's later writings, and it is one that has powerful resonances for many readers. Augusto Illuminati's rendition of it, where the materialist philosopher is something like a Wobbly of the early twentieth century, is not only suggestive of a possible new readership for Althusser's works among a different sort of militant (i.e., one outside both the Communist parties and the universities) but also underlines the fact that for Althusser "materialism" is a practice, a way of doing philosophy that is precisely a non-philosophy - or, perhaps, even an anti-philosophy - rather than a "philosophy" about the relations between "ideas" and "matter". The metaphor of the activist boarding the train without knowing in advance from where it came or to where it might be going reminds us that we must resist any tendency to form Althusser's work into a philosophy, even a doctrine of contingency. It must remain a non-philosophy, a practice of philosophy that intervenes in the theoretical without constituting a new philosophy. Taking Althusser's self-criticism - and his Marxism - seriously means not attempting to construct a "postmodern materialism" or an "epistemology" - even an "overdeterminist" one - out of his work. Guarantees, for Althusser, exist only in ideology. Doing philosophy in a materialist way means, first of all, rejecting all philosophies of matter. Otherwise we might produce a "postmodern Stalinism" - in a philosophical soup kitchen of the State that serves up yet another dreary recipe for the masses, perhaps this time going under the name of "Aleamat and Histomat" - of contingency, of indeterminacy, and overdetermination, with which we might never be able to develop concrete analyses of our conjuncture, nor seize its opportunities for victories in the class struggle, no matter how much we might imagine to have "overcome" the limits of previous forms of Marxism, or indeed the limits of Marxism itself. Our choice remains, now as much as in 1978, and in both philosophy and politics, one between dissidence and revolution (Lecourt 2001).

The rest of David McInerney's editorial is here, and the edition as a whole is definitely worth a read.