“During a black period in my own life (a spell during the morbid twenties), I prayed that at least somebody would be able to see the faithful chromatics of my soul. I imagined that if and when the physiological house that contained my being could be looked into (perhaps not until death), angels or other heavenly inspectors would be able to open up the skin to reveal a network of luminous bands of tissue that accurately depicted the true character of my inner life, all the sweet and noble yearnings, even those unachieved or poorly expressed.”
Whenever I’m feeling deeply confused about life and my direction my brain is like “Okay. Time to get sexier” Like girl that is not the solution every time
What would happen if every time people used the word ‘university’ it came out sounding like ‘factory’? Why do people think working in the university is special? The university is a gathering of chances and resources; a cache of weapons and supplies; a concentration of dangers and pitfalls. It’s not a place to occupy or to inhabit; it’s a place to work, to get in and out of with such rapidity and rapacious purpose that it disappears in that its boundaries disappear. All of that work ought to be securing the capacity to use those resources and to take those chances and to pass them around to the extent that they are useful. It’s not a point on a line. It’s not an aspirational beginning or end; it’s a respirational organ that is all but certainly laced with malignancy. It requires us to consider, as if it actually had something to do with us, what farmworkers think of working on a farm, before that activity is congealed into the achievement of the identity ‘farmer.’ In this regard, the undercommons is not, except incidentally, about the university; and the undercommons is crucially about a sociality not based on the individual. Nor, again, would we describe it as derivative of the individual – the undercommons is not about the dividual, or the pre-individual, or the supra-individual. The undercommons is an attachment, a sharedness, a diffunity, a partedness. If we mentioned the university at all it was because it was the factory we were working in when we made our analysis.
This is all to say that the undercommons has no particular relation to, or relative antagonism with, a sector created by the capitalist division of labor called higher education. As Marx said, the criminal creates the criminal justice system. We find “informal and situated knowledge” amongst prisoners, prisoner’s families, courtroom clerks and reporters, etcetera. This undercommon work is what the legal sector exploits. Lawyers and judges are primarily supervisory. And so it is with the healing work of patients and families that makes the health sector. Doctors and nurses are primarily supervisory. Beyond all the ideology of the special mission of the university sector it is worth remembering two things. First, students make the higher education system. Professors are primarily supervisory. Second, students working to become teachers, in any area, are – all of them – being groomed for management. Graduate students feel this contradiction and it hurts because they are moving from the shop floor to management. But the fact is that if you want to teach for money in our system, you’re supposed to supervise. None of this would need saying if we were talking about the automobile sector. Those who work in an auto plant know their roles. If they solder they are workers. If they evaluate the quality and speed of soldering, they are management. Of course, managers get evaluated, too, and sometimes something like an appetite for being (de)graded, which accompanies the appetite for (de)grading, appears to appear. But that’s small scale compared to the mechanics of “teacher-student relations,” which study refuses.
Realizing that you have to supervise to teach for money, even lousy money, in our system can then lead to two forms of collective organization. We can take from the job our money and do something else together, or we can work to overturn a system that chains study to supervision because only this overturning is going to break that line. And at a certain point since any exodus both goes nowhere and undermines what it leaves, these two forms of organizing come together. Any other approach is just waiting around to be offered “supervisor of the month” or a “Distinguished Teaching Award.”
Of course, part of the ideology of the university’s exceptionalism is that under this capitalist division of labor the university is permitted to gather knowledge, that is, supervise not just its own sector and its students but also to supervise other sectors. It creates agronomy departments to share in the supervision of the agricultural sector, or an art department to share in the supervision of the art market, through research. But this should not fool us. It is the same for the banking sector, whose oversight and supervision of other sectors produces papers and reports.
Like most people don’t like to admit this, but one of the reasons a lot of us have so many mental health issues is because we live in a world that has basically become untenable. People can’t afford basic necessities, let alone to cultivate their interests or take breaks and rest or do any of the things necessary for good mental health. People my age are wracked with debt, working at jobs they hate or studying topics they hate, living in a shitty apartment with five roommates. We live in a world that’s very hard to be healthy in. So while yeah, a lot of people obviously do have mental illnesses that would need medication no matter what, they are greatly exacerbated by these issues, and a lot of people have basically just been thrust into an eternal situational depression. So if that doesn’t change, medication is just a band-aid.
got a dm asking if i could last minute watch over a gallery, i scroll through tumblr to pass time and this is the first thing on my feed.. i look up and it’s on also the wall across from me
if you can i recommend reading the book fertile matters: the politics of mexican-origin women’s reproduction by elena gutiérrez (i scanned some parts of the preface ), it’’s a very hard read but the way that reproductive racism institutionally (legally, structurally, medically) is used is terrifying, it happens & it’s been happening
and again, i recommend killing the black body to learn more about how this specifically affects black women in the u.s
choice and coercion is also a good intersectional resource and starting point to understand how reproductive and sexual violence is used specifically as a tool of oppression
COVID is slowly becoming a “third world” disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can’t get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.
Watch also when some first world countries finish vaccinating their populations, they will turn to third world countries and “donate” or sell surplus vaccines. People in these countries will go “Oh how sweet! The government is donating vaccines to the poorer countries <3” when it was their hoarding that led to many, many third world citizens dying before they could even get vaccinated in the first place.
They’re not only hoarding and blackmailing, but the cherry on top is that the US, UK, Australia, most of Europe, Brazil et al. actually voted AGAINST waiving intellectual property agreements for the existing vaccines, something that India & South Africa proposed MONTHS ago to the World Trade Organization, and which most of the Global South voted yes to. So rather than letting countries manufacture these vaccines themselves, meaning they could have their own supply, they’re being kept, by multiple measures, beholden to the Global North for donations. The US voted multiple times to block this, before and after Biden’s inauguration.
Read more:
Overview from JANUARY of this : https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/01/02/india-south-africas-covid-vaccine-proposal-wto-patent-waiver-must-considered-compulsory-licensing/id=128652/
Update from February: https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news21_e/trip_23feb21_e.htm
Recent coverage of the deal not being met (again): https://www.law360.com/lifesciences/articles/1363457/wto-fails-to-reach-deal-on-covid-ip-waiver-proposal-again
Map of the vote (colorblind-friendly): https://twitter.com/comradesquirrel/status/1370595876536729600?s=21
[Image description: a world map. Countries in black (US, Brazil, most of Europe, Japan, Australia) opposed; countries in green (Africa not including Algeria/Libya/Western Sahara/Eritrea; China, South Asia, and most of southeast Asia; and Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua) are co-sponsors/full supporters; countries in yellow (Canada, Mexico, Chile) are undecided; countries in light brown (Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, the Phillipines, and Papua New Guinea) are general supporters; and the remainder are gray, which is not designated as anything]
Meanwhile as India is getting hundreds of thousands of new cases a day and running out of oxygen tanks for hospitals, the US won’t lift restrictions on raw material exports that would support vaccine production: https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/us-defends-restrictions-on-export-of-covid-19-vaccine-raw-materials-amid-indias-request-to-lift-ban/
On vaccine nationalism: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/coronavirus-vaccine-justice/
Poor countries are paying more for the doses that remain after rich countries have had their fill.
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