Edu Essay: The structure and silence of cognitariat
By Christopher Newfield | Edu Factory | Jan 2010
Intro: Many Americans assume that because business and political leaders agree that the U.S. is a ‘knowledge economy’, they therefore support an increase in knowledge production and support the university systems that perform the majority of this basic research in the U.S. and other wealthy countries. The reality is something quite different. American leaders are preoccupied with reducing public expenditures on higher education and with lowering the cost of each degree produced. They are containing and cheapening the research and educational systems on which they say the future of their economies depend. This raises the core question I’ll discuss here: why would wealthy societies cut back on the sources of high-tech knowledge when they believe their future lies with high-value, high-tech industries? Isn’t this contradictory, and also fairly dumb? Well yes: some of it is ordinary human myopia and selfishness. Some of it is the result of the artificially created general hostility towards universities and towards the politically independent and racially diverse middle-classes that had been produced by public universities after World War II. Some of it is the result of a business reflex in the United States, which is to address all revenue issues with downsizing and layoffs.
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Many authors have pointed out over the years that knowledge capitalism obligates firms to seek rents and a monopoly position in their markets. Clear support for this thesis comes from the oligarchic structure of the information technology and biotechnology industries in the U.S. and elsewhere. A companion thesis has been that there is a fundamental contradiction between capitalism and the knowledge economy, clearly described by André Gorz, since knowledge is abundant and capitalism artificially forces its scarcity. In fact, the U.S. experience suggests that this contradiction is productive of the system of cognitive capitalism in Foucault’s sense of a productive contradiction: the appropriation of abundant knowledge, the privatisation of public and socially-created goods, that is, the famous ‘enclosure of the knowledge commons’ is the set of operations that cognitive capitalism exists to perform, with full knowledge that it is forcing knowledge out of its creative collective habitat.
In this article I will look at several aspects of this process. One is a systematic stratification within knowledge workers as a class or group. The second is the development of a structural basis for this stratification--proprietary knowledge--that gives the powerful system of financial capital a direct stake in stratifying knowledge workers. The third is the system of unequal universities and disciplines within universities that reproduces the labour hierarchy of knowledge work and that makes opposition psychologically difficult. Finally, there is the practice of ‘open innovation’ in which a firm defines value-creation not as the output of its own workforce, but as the output of proprietary knowledge workers from a whole network of firms. I suggest that this leads to a new version of the ancient regime’s Three Estates, and that this structure needs to be confronted directly by knowledge workers in academia and industry alike.
Complete: edu-factory.org
CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD TEACHES IN THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA. AN ACTIVIST AND SCHOLAR, HE WORKS ON EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY. HE IS AUTHOR OF IVY AND INDUSTRY: BUSINESS AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, 1880–1980 (DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004) AND UNMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: THE FORTY-YEAR ASSAULT ON THE MIDDLE CLASS (HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008).
hat tip: Doc Searls
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