Hamburg EuroMayDay: Ich liebe dich trotzdem. Prekarität in der Kultur- und Wissensproduktion
Ich liebe dich trotzdem. Prekarität in der Kultur- und Wissensproduktion
in the context of hamburg euromayday (http://www.euromayday.tk/), i gave a short presentation of the university and precarity project. there was also a presentation of the carrot workers project (http://carrotworkers.wordpress.com/) and the “mir reichts…nicht” campaign (http://mirreichts-nicht.org/)
How many of your friends have you competed for work with in the past year?
The University and Precarity is a project that is trying to map out some of the different ways that the university is complicit in, and productive of, precarious conditions in living and working life, especially with reference to postgraduates. One of the points where precarisation can be identified is in the different forms of competition associated with postgraduate life and working life more generally. In this context its useful to look at how competition plays out in terms of subjective desires and expectations, through personal and social relations, and how this translates into capitalist modes of production and concrete job markets. To start with the example of the university one can see how competition comes to act as a device for producing the precarisation of subjects on a number of levels that extends to employment outside university:
Unpaid work (competition pitches people against each other in terms of rating ones own personal success)
- Postgraduate students willingly participate in massive amounts of unpaid work with the hope that this will lead to better chances of peer recognition and hence employment
- Also seeing knowledge as exclusive property and as a means to move ahead professionally. Interpersonal consequences: students very judgemental of one another’s ideas (increasing your own self worth by devaluing someone else), take on cynical critical persona as a way to survive the competitive rat race, discouraged from collaboration, less tendency to share ideas and work, the production of individuation and alienation, hierarchies of specialisation/exclusion based on how you speak, how well you articulate yourself, how well you valorise yourself, how well you connect to current trends etc
Paid self-exploitation (competition prevents formation of collective consciousness)
- Tutoring positions (necessary for work experience so that later you might get a tenured job): limited number available so people willing to work for less pay at casualised rates, will sign contracts that are unrealistic and do unpaid overtime
- Because these positions are so highly sought after there is less solidarity amongst workers, example of University of Melbourne campaign and nonstandardised pay rates and the lack of solidarity between the departments based on fear that that would diminish their pay conditions
Post university work/ outside of the university job market (competition to set yourself apart from all others who have gone through same degree system)
- This competitive environment extends well beyond the university sector. Supply of graduates often exceeds demand within the university as there are less and less jobs, and the jobs which you are qualified for outside of the academic institution are also limited. People vying for work which they are not specifically qualified for, needing to sell themselves then as more flexible and having transferable skills, competing with others that have the same qualification.
- Differential inclusion: what university you went to, who you studied with, who you know, how you are branded by what you are associated with, this is the criteria on which your potential use value is assessed
- Excess of graduates also pushes up the entry level in the job market, producing new systems and standards for application aside from simply having a degree (i.e. what “life experience” you have had, what else can you bring to the job or to the company, what other qualifications do you have etc)
- Increased pressure to get an edge somehow, how to make yourself unique, necessary social skills required, reproduces competitive environment as you are constantly seeking to make yourself stand out by proving how you are different from everyone else with the same degree as you
Social networking (competition to accumulate most amount of social contacts/ merits/ opportunities)
- Often comes down to who you know, how you “play the game”
- Collaborations/ collective work often done on this basis of what can I get out of this for my career, considering social relations as springboard for work connection
What are some possible and preliminary ways to negotiate around this?
- work outside of university institutions: form collectives and do independent research/ activities/ produce different forms of knowledge get funding outside of universities
- autonomous education initiatives and free universities
- community based skillshares: re-evaluate what constitutes a skill set, how we share and exchange knowledge, how we can work cooperatively together
Competition works as a mechanism of governance: how we govern ourselves and how we are governed in terms of what employment we desire, what we can do to attain those desires and at what cost. So its important for us to think about and ask questions like: what do I compete for, who do I compete against, is it a personal drive/ a social drive/ ego fulfilment, what effects does it have on my personal relationships, how does it make me feel about myself? All these questions need to be looked at when we try to think of ways to negotiate around this because we have to see this in larger processes of capitalist individuation.
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