Now go figure: On transgressions and trespasses in and from the University

By Irene Peano

From psychoanalysis to postructuralist theory, for several decades now different scholars have argued that rules are structurally made to be infringed; that the requirements of the law are inherently impossible ones, eliciting their own transgressions; and that norms can endure and multiply by virtue of their very failures. This has left many wondering whether any “real” resistance and genuine subversion are possible, sometimes actively undermining any effort in the direction of much-needed structural change. But while intellectuals have spilled much (actual and virtual) ink pondering over the philosphical groundings of revolution, they have not as often – at least not from the white- and male-dominated ivory towers that are the established seats of learning – engaged the liberatory aspects of those realisations. Yet, we do not lack reflections on and proof of how, even though it may not radically alter the rules of the game, transgression still bears the capacity to elicit new responses, modify architectures of power and effect their partial withdrawals. Or, if nothing else, we know that the inevitable failure to comply with and adhere to the letter of the law can be aimed to divert some creative energies to pursuits that we deem necessary and valuable. A perennnial internal dialectic between law and its undersides, that are far from monolithic or self-sufficient, characterises practices of transgression.

This indeed is the lesson many of us, myself included, have learnt as much from books and classes as from those towards whom we have felt a duty and desire for solidarity: the many - a majority - whose lives are spent in contexts (across latitudes and geographies) where the failure of norms is itself the norm, where institutionalised power can afford to not bother with upholding the liberal myth of rights and obligations. Incidentally, along the way we are also watching that myth crumble under our very eyes, in the places where we once thought it was most securely rooted. We are coming to realise how even that rootedness was the short-lived illusion of a minority within post-WWII, “advanced” industrial modernity, and one grounded in struggles and conflicts too often swept under the rug.

In working with transnational migrants who have defied the putative impermeability of the EU’s (increasingly externalised) borders, and more generally with people who are forced to endure the law’s own self-transgressions (for example the many Nigerian citizens that I encountered in over a year of fieldwork, for whom daily life is lived in structural mistrust and corruption), I have repeatedly faced the ambivalence that comes with acknowledging that “crime” can be as productive for the status quo as the law itself. Many activists and/as scholars¹ have argued that migrants’ illegalisation is functional to a hyper-exploitative regime of extraction that relies on the threat, even more than and before the enforcement, of various forms of capture and expulsion. From prisons to administrative detention and forced repatriation, by way of less blatant dispositifs denying citizenship rights to different degrees and creating conditions of progressive segregation and vulnerability, the threat of being deprived of one’s means of sustenance and reproduction always lurks, affecting the range of possible choices at one’s disposal. And yet, those same activists and/as scholars, and especially migrants themselves, at the same time have vouched for the constitutive excess spurring the desire to cross borders in the search of a better life. In other words, while the act of illegally crossing a border can end up being capitalised upon, that same act does not for this cease to bear subversive potential. If the outcome of this scuffle between excess and capture is always open-ended and can never be determined in advance, the border regime’s (as the carceral complex’s) evolution across the last few decades is witness to the reactive nature of attempts to contain and extract. Put differently, dispositifs of power always respond to perceived threats, and the latter are often ingenuous acts of flight and refusal as much as of direct, head-on defiance.

Now that old and new conflicts and struggles (along the lines of gender, racism, class, the environment…) are becoming too many and too blatant for anyone to ignore any further, we are once again seeking for the right tools to foster their radical potential. If the law itself is a ruse, the political-ethical question should be how to inhabit the rift that grounds our very existence in a meaningful way. Where power’s modality is for the most part necropolitical (as it indeed is for ever growing numbers on this planet), figuring such things out is necessarily an undercover operation, requiring camouflage, cunning and a healthy detachment from any belief in the sanctity of the law, in the possibility to abide by it. But if in saying this I am assured of the good company of the many who have dedicated their efforts at arguing for the potentials of subversion and the joys of excess, less frequently have we done so from a reflexive and grounded standpoint. When not from thoroughly abstract coordinates, for the most part academics (like many of those engaged in critical cultural work more generally) have defended transgressive causes on behalf of others – of those others who, a more or less explicit argument goes, are most criminalised, marginalised, excluded. Of course we should have learnt long ago that we must stop seeking to speak on behalf of “the subaltern”, let alone romanticise their predicaments. Yet, the consequences of this realisation for our own practices are still little explored. If supporting those with relatively less entitlements is necessary, just what would count as actual support is no simple matter. We too have figuring-out work to do.

Perhaps our academic reticence to engage with (and in) transgression “at home” is the result of a (perceived) relative privilege, that comes with being able to critically interrogate pretty much anything under the sun as long as the critique remains in print and in print only, and does not touch the house if not marginally and vaguely. Equating this to “biting the hand that feeds us” and thus naming it as betrayal makes the conditions of such feeding fall off the frame entirely. Such indeed is the nature of power struggles – teasing into compliance, threatening and enforcing retaliation against open challenges. All the more so, we need to take the lessons we learnt of others seriously, and imagine more ways of engaging (discreetly or otherwise) the institutions that are failing us, too. For this is the point: many may be too invested in the narrative that interpellates us as a chosen elite, for whose membership, we are told, we should forever be grateful, to recognise – or at least to confront – the myriad ways in which universities and other knowledge-producing institutions are exercising forms of extraction, expulsion and violence on ourselves and others, also thanks to our own complicities, silences, fears and direct endorsements. Our labour is constantly undervalued, the efforts of an ever expanding precariat hardly paid for at a rate that could grant a dignified reproduction. The fact that such processes of extraction and expulsion may touch different subjects to varying degrees is no excuse not to confront them. Nor indeed should it prevent us (quite to the contrary) from identifying the ways in which these same processes are related to others, happening outside the physical and symbolic bounds of the university, in other workplaces and more generally in the lives of ever-increasing numbers of people. War, genocide and ecocide; gentrification, classism, racism, gender discrimination and sexual harassment; precarisation and forms of knowledge enclosure are only some of the possible examples of how the university as an institution is failing not only its members but its supposed mission – or rather is betraying its real motives, which were there all along for those who wanted to see them. And again, is this not true of any institution in the racial capitalist world order? Were the good things we could get out of institutions – any institution – not the result of struggles, open or otherwise?

Some years ago, in their book titled The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argued precisely that “one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university”². And if, in the spirit of figuring things out, subversion may need to remain underground, nonetheless we must renew our efforts to create and recognise complicities, to devise codes that permit these knowledges to travel and these recognitions to happen, extending out to those outside the walls of the tower, to bring these walls down. Making the knowledge we co-create widely available, despite copyright restrictions, might be a good example – if only a small one - of how this is already being done. Other examples may best be kept underground. At the same time, to be up to the task, some open confrontation might also be in order - bearing in mind that even the most cunning, well-disguised transgression is never risk-free, but embracing that risk as a way to dismantle more mundane, discreet and yet as harmful forms of exposure: those of extraction.

1. Notes¶