Individualization Refusal: An Introduction
CIM Camp, Warwick, March 2, 2021. Session organized by Nerea Calvillo Gonzales and facilitated by Naomi Waltham-Smith
Your time is precious. Perhaps, you are wondering why you are here today, what this afternoon will bring you while you could be working on your PhD. We are aware that the material conditions of graduate students in the U.K. are different from those in the U.S. where one can be offered a five year PhD financed by the institution. Or in Germany where one gets three years of scholarship to write a dissertation in what is called a “Graduiertenschule.” In the U.S. and in Germany, the graduate students owe all of their time to the academic institution. Here, it seems to be the opposite. The university owes you. So today, my study partners and I are in the position of contractors, here to provide you with a service. Your time is precious and we are indebted to your giving us some of it. We owe you. And still, we may not give you exactly what you might expect—that is, some knowledge readily applicable to your individual research.
We do not intend to downplay the necessity and obligation tied to an academic career. We all had, or still have to write our qualification works a certain way, following certain codes and fulfilling expectations to assure the institution that we are qualified to perpetuate its purpose. Its main purpose is, following Harney and Moten’s analysis, professionalization in order to fully integrate a highly specialized labor force. In doing so, the University performs the “privatization” of the individual.
What we have been practicing in our humanities lab—S-1 at Duke University in Durham, NC—is to simultaneously walk a parallel way, write a parallel text to the one expected from us as academics. We do it under the guise of study and performance. We have become a practical-speculative work-group. This group escapes the expectations of the university, at least partly, while at the same time “stealing from it” by channeling its social and economic capital towards other purposes.
By working, thinking and writing together on this parallel path, we have been refusing the individualization of academic labor. We have been seeking ways to interrupt the habitus of working against one another, of distinguishing ourselves from the others. We refuse, for a moment, to compete in the violent scarcity economy that is the academe, where it always seems that there are too many of us and that we are never enough.
Working together, as we plan on doing today, is a possible way of performing critique: an embodied way or, as I like to say, a critique in touch; a critique that does not believe in the possibility of maintaining a safe distance with its objects; a critique that accepts to be affected by its object while it hopes to have an effect on it. I am aware that the concept of “object” is limited when trying to describe the kind of relationality implied by a critique “in touch.”
What is a humanities lab? As we discovered during the past year and a half, a humanities lab entails a speculative and a practical dimension. These two dimensions stand in unresolved tension with one another. There is a gap between speculation and practice that needs to be practically and not solely theoretically acknowledged. This is a big and sometimes painful difference to recognize. I think that negotiating this gap constitutes the political core of our lab’s work. Connected to this issue is for instance the question of division of labor inside the lab: who does what work and whose work is recognized, paid, non-paid etc. Since these issues are very frustrating, why not just speculate? Why not stay at the safer distance of observation? It became increasingly clear to us that we couldn’t afford to only speculate, if we wanted to take our theoretical readings seriously.
We do not claim to solve problems or affect big changes. Instead, it is more about operating shifts. In being “in” the institution without being “of” the institution to quote Harney and Moten, we operate what we could describe as a practical, performative deconstruction that displaces stuff in us and hopefully in the people we collaborate with. While rejecting the institution would imply acknowledging it, letting its power fully determine the scope of our actions—plus, we need to eat—, shifting its components from the inside allows us to create some movement (jeu) in its structure, to create new habits, and form new alliances.
We have been thinking about the institution and its surrounding as an algorithm, a series of often recursive procedures through which the institution produces and reproduces itself. S-1 lab was originally a speculative lab working on digital technologies that in 2019 we refused to continue producing. Instead, we have been seeking to invent new algorithms, new material procedures or chains of operations, capable of overwriting and reprogramming the old ones—while also acknowledging how we need to constantly rethink and reformulate what we are doing. These algorithms propagate, transform us and give us strength like a muscle through habit and repetition. Later today, we will run one of these algorithms together. We will be for a time on “a same page” and we will see if we can rewrite some of the codes crowding the “subjectile,” in our case the academic blank page.
What we hope to reach through this camp/lab session with you is to find some pleasure in the refusal to be individualized, in other words to have fun in writing, thinking, doing together. “Being on the same page” doesn’t mean agreeing on everything. Instead, it means occupying for a limited time a common material ground—the google doc—and cooperating in it with generosity and care. In doing so, we accept to let go of some of our fear of being judged, of ownership over the product of our subjectivity. And we hope to tighten our bonds.
