Organized Networks

In his book Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross opens the final chapter on ‘The Rise of the Global University’ with the following assessment: ‘Higher education has not been immune to the impact of economic globalization. Indeed, its institutions are now on the brink of channeling some of the most dynamic, and therefore destabilizing, tendencies of neoliberal marketization’.¹ Arguably, one of the central reasons higher education embodies the intensity of transformations wrought by neoliberalism has to do with ways in which post-Fordist labour is ‘multiplied and divided’.²

The political-economic technologies of measure are key to the division of labour in and across university settings. A quick listing of examples is sufficient to get an idea of what I am talking about here: systems of ranking institutions of higher education within a global frame serve to distinguish universities and the labour within them along national and geocultural lines of division; this in turn shapes the global mobility of students and thus the logic of economic accumulation, again dividing universities, labour and disciplines in terms of market competition and geocultural segmentation. The construction of special economic zones for higher education, which is most notable across the Asian, Middle Eastern and African regions, functions to divide national markets internally and externally along the lines of domestic and global spatialities that have implications for income generation derived from teaching and research activities in terms of the scope of student catchment and institutional sources for research funding.

The political-economic architecture of intellectual property regimes is another state supported device through which lines of division are constructed between what McKenzie Wark has termed the ‘vectoral class’ (those who proprietise and thus enclose the productive efforts of biopolitical labour) and the ‘hacker class’ (those engaged in the collaborative work of co-production and creation of the common).³ Universities and corporations have sought to further establish systems of measure from such labour through the global rankings of journals and citation indices. Such rankings overwhelmingly favour journals that are part of Anglo-American publishing consortia that over the past 20 years have set out to aggressively takeover the few remaining independent journals that support research and intellectual debate in national and regional settings. The effect of this has been to consolidate the hegemony of global English and erode the connection between the production of knowledge and its frequently local social-political conditions of possibility. This, notwithstanding the fact that the very notion of the local has become enormously complicated with the consolidation of economic and cultural globalization coupled with the rise of the network society.

Additional lines of division operate in terms of what Andrew Ross calls the ‘new geography of work’, and what I’m wishing to frame in this essay as the uneven distribution of expertise. Incorporated into the uneven distribution of expertise is the racialization of labour, both of which connect back to the construction of special economic zones for global universities. It is on this basis that my essay concludes that the 21st century informational university in its global manifestations is in many ways disturbingly similar to programs of institution formation and the management of populations undertaken by 19th century colonial powers. I will develop these aspects of my argument shortly, but first I wish to say a few more things about the multiplication of labour and how this dynamic and condition relates to the rise of the informational university.

The Informational University and the Production of the Common

In his book How the University Works, Marc Bousquet’s crucial insight is that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal regimes.⁴ This orientation of labour around processes of informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers associated with Italian post-operaismo thought. One of the key analytical and political precepts developed out of such work, as summarised recently by Tiziana Terranova, makes the distinction between the social production of value and the model of classical political economy, which measures the time and cost of labour in determining the production of commodity value.⁵

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note that traditional models of measure (e.g. intellectual property regimes, university and journal ranking systems, citation indicators, etc., all of which operate within the contemporary neoliberal, informational university), and thus of the law of value, are in crisis today due to profound contradictions within the force of economic globalization and the multiple antagonisms between the cooperative logic of biopolitical labour and capitalism’s mechanisms of expropriating the wealth of the common as it is produced by the creativity of biopolitical labour.⁶ In his dialogue with Negri, Cesare Casarino reiterates this point, noting how the common provides ‘the locus of surplus value’ for capital, whose apparatuses of capture – or regimes of measure – expropriate the wealth of the common.⁷

A distinction needs to be made here between the concept of the common and that of the commons. The latter is associated with processes of enclosure and proprietary control of that which was previously collectively owned and managed. In a neoliberal paradigm, such a process has been marked by the shift of public goods to private ownership. The key point here is that the commons – whether they are understood in terms of ecology, culture or relationships – are predicated on the dual logic of scarcity and ownership, and are thus assumed to be resources in need of protection. Within social democracies, the state is frequently bestowed with such a role. The commons is thus ascribed a representational quality.

The common, by contrast, cannot be owned or managed, most especially by statist formations that assume the identity of the people or the public. The common does not operate within the logic of representation, in other words, and instead is a force mobilized through non-representational relations and the multiplication of biopolitical labour. Nor is the common a resource underscored by the logic of scarcity. And while the common holds an economic potential – something that is made clear in the moment of expropriation – its ‘wealth’ is not inherently economic. As I have written elsewhere with Soenke Zehle, ‘If we understand the commons to refer both to the material context and the consequence of practices of peer-production, the common is the political potential immanent in such practices. Such an understanding of the common situates it conceptually as the latest iteration of the political; just as there exists an “excess of the political over politics”, the affirmation of the common is offered as a condition of possibility for collaborative constitution, for the sharing of affects of love, solidarity or wrath, and for the translation of such affects and experiences across the “irreducible idiomaticity” of ethico-political practices’.⁸

Casarino makes the ‘important qualification’ that there is always a remainder of the common that is not appropriated by capital. There is the suggestion that this ‘outside’ or ‘externality’ provides the point of separation between capital and the common, which otherwise risk becoming indistinguishable. The precise content of this common is left without elaboration by Casarino. My sense is that asymmetrical institutional-social temporalities between capital and the common are key here. Where the university is often accused of being ‘out of time’ or ‘too slow’ by those who heavily identify with the business sector and industry, perhaps one could also suggest that the time of the common and living labour holds a special complexity that refuses absorption into capital’s apparatuses of capture and regimes of measure, which are always circumscribed in a way that living labour is not. I can only note such speculations in passing – the empirical-conceptual content here is the stuff of future research.

When transferred to the setting of the university and its transformation under conditions of economic globalization, questions such as the following emerge: How does the social production of value (brand desire, affect, subjectivity, online social networking, etc.) shape the commodity value of the university degree? What relation does this have with the globalization of higher education? And how does the informational university – defined increasingly by privatization (as distinct from being a public good), labour flexibility and informational management – relate to the social production of value?

Let me outline in concrete fashion how the social production of value shapes the commodity value of the university degree. Anyone who is astute to the conditions of cognitive labour within universities will not have trouble making the connection between diminishing numbers of full-time faculty, increasing casualisation of teaching staff, the massive expansion in administrative labour and the viral-like proliferation of managerial personas, the structural reproduction of adolescent research subjectivities through short-time contracts for junior researchers on cross-university projects and what I would term the incapacity of the disciplines to invent new conceptual and methodological idioms of practice.

It is a well known if rarely articulated strategy of refusal for coordinators of course modules to reissue the same material for students year in and year out. Admittedly this is a practice that has gone on for years in universities, but it takes on substantially different hues with the shift from the public-state university to the pseudo-corporate and informational university. Whereas the academic of the public university who trotted out the same module outline every year was justifiably accused of intellectual and pedagogical laziness, these days it is more a matter of survival as academics struggle to manage an enormous increase in managerial and administrative workloads that accompany the ever-expanding mechanisms that define the madness of audit cultures (another feature that defines the informational university). Come the start of a new semester, it is not uncommon for academics who have spent whatever recess from teaching duties by writing grants, undertaking marking, fulfilling administrative duties, meeting with dissertation students and maybe, if lucky, engaging in some research, to then find themselves having no time to redevelop old course materials (forget about producing new materials), and thus resort out of desperation and self-survival to repeat whatever it was that they taught the previous year.

The result of such practice – which I would expect to be widespread across the sector – is that disciplines become impoverished. You might counter this charge by telling me it is the job of research to provide the material of innovation for the disciplines. To do so falls into the trap of privileging research and thus dividing the important and mutually informing relationship between research and teaching. Moreover, it assumes that research activity is actually doing the job of disciplinary reinvention. I would suggest that, to the contrary, the vast majority of national and supranational funded research – especially in the humanities – is funded on the grounds that it reproduces the orthodoxies of the disciplines, in which case very little is gained by way of disciplinary innovation.

This brings me to the social production of value. When academics no longer have the time and perhaps intellectual stamina let alone curiosity to test the borders of their disciplines, what do they do? Well, in similar fashion to capital – and indeed, precisely because they are subjects of the corporate, informational university – they look to appropriating the creativity of the common. In my own field of new media studies, it has become very clear over the past 10 years that academics have contributed very little by way of conceptual and methodological invention. Such work has been undertaken outside and on the margins of the academy by artists, activists, computer geeks and media theorists.

How is such work undertaken? It is undertaken through practices of collaborative constitution and the multiplication of labour made possible by the mode of information and the media of digital communication.⁹ The key social-technical features here of flexibility, adaptation, distributive co-production, informational recombination, open/free content and code, and modulating axes of organization (both horizontal and vertical) all define the culture and labour of networks. And as the generative content of the common is absorbed and more often enclosed by non-generative proprietary regimes that function to shore up the borders of the corporate university, there is also an informational dimension of open and generative network cultures that is carried over and interpenetrates the institutional dynamic of the university.

Actually, an increasing number of universities are recognizing the value of adopting open content practices – MIT’s OpenCourseWare being one of the more widely known examples.¹⁰ The reason for this has to do with the fact that there is very little ‘product differentiation’ across degree programs from one university to the next, and universities are slowly but surely understanding that economic leverage for higher education comes not from the sale of pre-packaged, static material (although this is still the dominant economic model). Rather, they see their business as that of awarding degrees (i.e. granting an institutional/symbolic legitimacy upon a learning experience, which is the basis of determining tuition fees) and service delivery. This is a model that effectively duplicates the business model of open source software providers who understand that users (including educational institutions, corporations, small businesses and organizations) expect to download content (operating systems and office software, for example) for free, but are then willing to pay for labour that customises the software to specific institutional needs, with follow-up service as required.

The Uneven Distribution of Expertise

What is the relation between the informational university and the uneven distribution of expertise across the higher-education landscape? Indeed, what is expertise and who is an expert? And what are the geocultural configurations upon which such relations might be mapped out? With the rise of Web 2.0 and its attendant self-publishing and promotion platforms such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and YouTube, everyone these days is an expert. In some respects this seeming democratization of knowledge production is a structural phenomenon brought about by the outsourcing of labour and content production in the media industries. These days, even the corporations want everything for free. And with the social production of value, which in the case of news media comes in the form of citizen-journalism that willingly supplies content for free, the cost of labour is effectively removed from the balance sheet.

How, though, does this Cult of the Amateur impact upon the distribution of expertise within the university? With the rise of mass education and user-pay systems, many academics nowadays complain of the ‘dumbing down’ of curricula. Academic departments have become in most cases almost entirely dependent on income derived from student fees, with international students making up a substantial portion of annual budgets. This is especially pronounced in universities in Australia where, after two decades of partial deregulation and massive cuts in government expenditure on education, it has become a routine practice for academics to slide students over the ever diminishing hurdles of assessment. If they didn’t, then the security of their own jobs would be at stake.

Similar practices are the norm in British and North American universities, no matter what the ‘quality assurance’ reports might say to the contrary. Such systems of measure long ago lost any relationship with their referent and function in a very similar way to the production of public opinion, which does not exist according to Bourdieu’s compelling thesis.¹¹ What does exist is the ever-increasing extension of self-referential reporting measures into the time of academic work. The tyranny of audit cultures inscribes academic subjects into discursive practices of accountability and conditions the over-production of administrative functionaries, whose job is to keep track of the bureaucratic madness that such systems guarantee.

Not only has the dependency relationship on student fees had substantive impacts on the design and content of curricula, it has also exacted a toll on the capacity for academics to keep abreast with – let alone make contributions to – advances in their field. Increasingly, the insistence by students and administration for entertainment-on-demand styles of not so much teaching but ‘course delivery’ has resulted in more academic time expended on maintaining online administration and content management systems such as the notorious WebCT and Blackboard. (Although for reasons I fail to understand, such systems are embraced with an obsessive degree of delight by some colleagues I’ve worked with over the years.)

Within conditions such as these, which again are typical of the informational university, it would seem the very notion of expertise is in crisis. And arguably it is. But there are also ways in which expertise is upheld, since once it can be quantified as measure a crucial symbolic value can then be accrued that can then be transferred as brand value for individual academics and their institutions. This in turn results in a capacity to charge higher student fees and attract the much vaunted external research funds, whose board of assessors place great emphasis on so-called ‘esteem indicators’ provided by journal ranking systems and citation indices which hold their own geocultural and political economic bias that reinforces what Harold Innis termed ‘monopolies of knowledge’.¹² Such measures supposedly confer upon the body of academic research a ‘quality assurance’ that effectively removes from the assessor the task of critical assessment, which is now designed to be as automated and therefore as time efficient as possible. Again, these are some of the key features that characterise an informational mode of knowledge management. Though it remains to be said, the calibration of such systems of automation are deeply ideological and underscored by cabals of self-interested academic groups and individuals.

This brief survey of teaching and research practices within the informational university comprise what Andrew Ross has termed the ‘new geography work’. A far-from-uniform informational geography of intellectual property regimes, content management systems, database economies, flexible labour and open content production becomes integrated with a geocultural system that valorises the reproduction of Western knowledge traditions and hegemony of global English.¹³ There are further implications here for disciplinary innovation and the production of subjectivity. With the rise of the global university, local knowledge traditions and expertise have very weak purchase within an educational-machine that demands modes of flexible, just-in-time delivery provided by staff in contract positions whose structural and ontological insecurity is offset by largely generic course modules whose uniformity ensures a familiar point of entry for the next short-term academic hired by the global university. 

The Racialization of Labour

In which cases might a racialization of labour underscore the informational university? In short, what are the labour inequalities that shape the market of higher education on a global scale and how are new (or, as the case may be, neo-colonial) class subjectivities being reproduced? There are multiple hues of labour differentiation across universities at a global level. To make the claim of differentiation along the lines of race is to suggest a reproduction of the 19th century biological category of race as the basis upon which division is operating. The official positioning of universities across the world would be most defiant in maintaining this is certainly not the case, and indeed may be inclined to issue legal writs against anyone making such a charge, if it was perceived that brand damage was a stake.

Nearly twenty years ago, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein observed that ‘in traditional or new forms (the derivation of which is, however, recognizable), racism is not receding, but progressing in the contemporary world’.¹⁴ Arguably, this is no less the case today, and one of the sites upon which racism has become reproduced, albeit in new guises, is that of the informational university. The category of race, as Balibar and Wallerstein go on to analyse, is one of the key modalities enlisted in the construction of the ‘people’, or what Foucault analysed in terms of the biopolitical production of territory, populations, security and subjectivity.¹⁵ Other social-political devices through which populations are constituted include the nation, class, ethnicity, gender and broadcast media of communication. How the category of race intersects with these technologies of governance that define the rise of the nation-state and industrial modernity has been a matter of considerable research, which is in no way exhausted yet. It may seem a surprise to many that the seemingly archaic category of race should figure within the time and space of informational modernities. But, as I go to show, forms of institutional racism are central to the problem of labour within the global university.

Let me conclude by briefly documenting the operation of what Balibar terms ‘racism without races’ with reference to the division of labour and uneven distribution of expertise operating at global universities present in China. How to situate the differences between labour regimes in the global university and those of 19th century colonialism? In form they are similar. In both cases indigenous elites are enlisted as administrators to provide the linguistic and cultural interface between the imperial institution and local populations, which include government officials and industry representatives. But one key difference is that a relatively high ranking official such as myself in the 19th century could freely have lavished all the racial epithets on the lower ranking colonials. Today, however, someone such as myself has to be careful about how the discourse on race is handled since it could endanger my position, to say nothing of the offence it may provoke. There’s a difference here with the 21st century variants of differential racism that needs to be analysed. And the concept of ‘racism with race’ helps such analysis part of the way. Racism without race is predicated on modes of division that while not invoking the biological category of race are nonetheless reproducing the logic of racism – namely, to divide and exclude on the basis of race – through other means but which at their heart are racist in orientation, no matter how unconscious or unintentional that may be.¹⁶

A notable feature across global universities operating in China today is the substantial presence of domestic Chinese in the administrative ranks, with considerably fewer Chinese working as academic faculty. While smaller scale operations may combine academic and administrative roles and have those carried out by foreigners on casual contracts familiar with the ‘culture’ of the national system within which they are working, the larger universities employ local Chinese for administrative work on an almost exclusive basis. These staff often hold an undergraduate degree from a US, British or Australian university, and many will also have postgraduate qualifications from an overseas university. In many cases their degrees will have been awarded from their current employer, which again ensures familiarity with the culture and administration of their particular institution.

In principle, the Chinese administrators working within global universities in China are not there because they are Chinese but because they have met the job selection criteria – relevant degree or diploma, competency in English language, good interpersonal skills, relevant experience, etc. The official positioning is thus definitely not about race in its classic 19th century articulations. On the other hand, if these administrative staff were not Chinese, then they most likely would not be working in these universities. Why, then, are there so few and in enough cases no non-Chinese staff comprising the administrative ranks at these global universities?

If it was just a matter of holding the appropriate qualifications and skills, then there could be people from any number of racial and ethnic backgrounds working as administrators in these universities. As noted earlier, while the primary administrative and teaching language of these universities is English, there is a need for at least some administrative staff to have a high proficiency in Putonghua in order to interface at linguistic and cultural levels with local and national government departments and businesses. But there is no obvious reason or need for all administrative staff to be of Chinese origin. It would seem that there’s an important subjective desire at work for Chinese administrative staff with largely Anglophone qualifications to find work back home. What emerges from this phenomenon is a dual-language system where intra-institutional and transnational administration and engagement with academic staff is conducted in English, whereas the informal socialisation among administrative staff and their interaction, to some extent, with Chinese students is conducted in Putonghua or local dialects. 

To not be Chinese, in other words, means to not be participating in those institutional and social circuits conducted exclusively in Chinese. This enlisting of the (middle-class) elite ‘locals’ in administrative positions strikes me as very similar to the colonial strategy of engaging indigenous elites to administer colonial institutions (India being the classic example) and in so doing reproduce and reinforce (or in some cases produce) a local class system. My understanding of such operations is that racial distinctions determined the institutional positions and conditions of the labouring subject. Institutions of globalized higher education provide the institutional settings and organizational cultures through which the logic of differential racism is played out today.

Moving to the question of academic faculty and the international staff that compose its ranks, the opposite display of racialized labour becomes notable: namely, the tendency for Chinese to not be among those holding academic positions. Perhaps this is even more remarkable than the case of the Chinese majority within administrative positions. The opportunity for movement within administration from a US or British university to a global university operating in China, or some other country, for that matter, is less likely than in the case of academics, who tend to be much more mobile within both national and global settings. Why, then, do so few Chinese academics comprise the ranks of faculty within global universities in China? One reason has to do with remuneration. Local Chinese are paid substantially less than their international colleagues, and in this respect the economy of labour in global universities reproduces that of most other businesses in China. Unlike other business sectors, however, the global universities do not – at least not yet – fill their academic ranks with local Chinese in order save on labour costs. Key to the brand value of the global universities is the assurance these institutions make to students that they are receiving a product and experience that essentially reproduces what they could expect if they were enrolled at the ‘home’ institution. An important part of that assurance thus rests on a significant portion of academic staff who are either on secondment from or at least familiar with the workings of the home institution. There are also administrative practicalities for this practice associated with the running of equivalent programs, submission and moderation of grades, establishment of academic and administrative committees, and so on and so forth.

From the perspective of the Chinese academic who may give thought to shifting from a Chinese university to one of the increasing number of global universities setting up shop in China, a number of practicalities need to be considered. The linguistic barrier presented by the necessity to have a working command of English is just one of various factors to take into account. While the low pay may be equivalent between Chinese and global universities, the Chinese academic will have to forego the frequently informal ways in which income is supplemented within the Chinese system. The household items and food parcels supplied by the national teacher’s union, for example, would not be part of academic life in a global university. Moreover, they will have to suffer the knowledge that for effectively the same labour they are being paid a fraction of the amount received by their international colleagues. It must be said that such differentiation of remuneration levels is not based on whether one is Chinese or not. The same applies for those international teachers who have entered the global university from within China, and thus are structurally positioned as part of a domestic labour force. Nonetheless, the material effect of these multiple forces results in an academic body that is largely absent of Chinese staff.

While the differentiation of work across the spectrum of academic and administrative life points to standard divisions of labour in universities around the world, often enough both the individual worker and collective experience will embody these distinctions in singular ways and thus becomes a subject who multiplies rather than divides the borders of labour. This process whereby the borders of labour become multiplied is made clear in the relation cognitive labour holds with the social production of value, as sketched earlier in this essay. The racialization of labour, on the other hand, serves as a technology of division in the case of global universities currently operating in China.

Both the multiplication and division of labour are features of the informational university and its expropriation of the social production of value. Cognitive labour includes modes of peer-to-peer production that make available resources in the form of an informational commons. While more immediately understandable as a technology of division, the racialization of labour also feeds into the symbolic production of a commons in terms of the image repertoire and affective registers that are communicated about the global university as a site for international experience and certification. When situated within China, such an imaginary is reproduced in material ways in terms of the domination of mainland Chinese in administrative ranks coupled with the general absence of Chinese academics from faculty programs.

The relationship between the multiplication and division of cognitive and racialized labour, however, is substantially different in terms of how they connect with the social production of the common, which can be understood as the political potential that subsists within and conditions the possibility of the commons. The point of connection between such immediately distinct modes of labour lies precisely within the ways they shape the brand value and thus economy of the informational, global university. While there is unlikely to be political affiliation between transnational cognitive labour and Chinese administrators in global universities operating in China (the geocultural disparities being largely insurmountable), there is potential for relations to be forged between workers who experience the informatization of labour as it manifests in both global and national academies. It is at the point of shared experience borne out of struggle that the possibility arises for differential inclusion in the social invention of the common. Both the racialization of labour and the uneven distribution of expertise hold the capacity to be a part of such a process.

As the hegemony of the Chinese state unfolds and exerts its power across the geocultural terrain of global institutions, it should come as no surprise that the composition of labour within those institutions becomes increasingly comprised of mainland Chinese workers whose skills, expertise and symbolic value is no longer perceived as second tier. Such a transformation will occasion new lines of struggle in the globalization of higher education. The challenge for biopolitical labour will be to assert the autonomy of the common from emergent apparatuses of capture. A key part of this struggle will involve refusing the informational technologies of measure.

Notes
Thanks to Brett Neilson and Justin O’Connor for comments and suggestions and co-panellists Paolo Do and Jon Solomon for their dialogue on themes and conditions addressed in this essay. Thanks also to Wang Xiaoming for hosting the edu-factory presentation at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, 7 December 2009.

Unique visitors to post: 10

[Published in International Review of Information Ethics 11 (2009)]

‘As long as there are people on this planet, the waste industries will never die. So we’re not worried about the future of the industry’.
– Owner of a small e-waste processing business in Ningbo, China.

This essay is interested in the relationship between electronic waste and emergent regimes of labour control operative within the global logistics industry, the task of which is to manage the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiencies. Central to logistics is the question and scope of governance – both of labouring subjects and the treatment of objects or things. The relation between labour and electronic waste constitutes a milieu (environment) and population (of human and technological life) whose communication comprises a unique multi-scalar space that severely tests techno-systems of governance. In registering the contingency of governance – its capacity for failure or oversight – this essay signals the uncertainty that underpins the technics of control special to logistics.¹ At stake is the connection between the milieu and the labour of human life.²

Paradoxically perhaps, conflicting governance regimes make possible the production of non-governable subjects and spaces. Electronic waste and many of those working in its informal secondary economies can be considered as occupants that reside off the grid. Such positioning in itself does not constitute a political program or articulated agency. Non-governance should not, in other words, be assumed to be synonymous with some kind of counter-political force. This would be the error of translation understood as a system of equivalence in which an a priori relation exists between, for instance, non-state actors and political agency. Indeed, it may even be desirable for biopolitical powers to ensure a non-governable dimension in order to manage the political, economic and environmental problem of electronic waste – the maintenance of unregulated informality serves as one of the structural resources that sustains the current economy of waste. Since there is no globally implemented consensus or treaty and quite frequently an absence of national legislation on how to address the economic and social life of electronic waste, it helps to reflect on the question of e-waste by taking this ‘indifferent’ status of e-waste as a point of departure – both technically within logistics software and politically within the institutional limits of the state apparatus. As I argue below, such indifference comes at a potential political and social cost, one that sees a further expansion and penetration of biopolitical technologies of control over the relatively autonomous aspects of labour and life.

To complement the various hypotheses above, this essay also addresses the relation between regions and the composition of labour in electronic waste industries in China. The multiplication of regions through practices of translation coextensive with the movement of people, language, technological protocols and things presents a serious challenge to regions as they are defined by hegemonic orders and interests. A region such as the European Union, for example, is translated as a legitimate political, economic and social entity through an ensemble of institutions (state governments, international institutions, universities, cultural organizations, labour unions, etc.). While there may be numerous instances of dispute and conflict between such actors, ultimately the fact of their relation serves to mutually reaffirm the legitimacy of the EU as a region. But to reduce the configuration of a region to such translation devices alone is to overlook the diverse practices and technics through which spaces and populations are comprised. The battle of hegemony, in this sense, is a contest over idioms of translation.

Similarly, the social practice of translation brings into question the analytical modalities that assume the existence of the region as a set of stable coordinates and coherent institutional practices that facilitate economies of depletion.³ In the case of the global logistics industries, the rise of secondary resource flows accompanying the economy of electronic waste is coextensive with the production of non-governable subjects and spaces. I suggest that the relation between these entities constitutes new regional formations that hold a range of implications for biopolitical technologies of control.

Multiplication and Division

With their capacity to adapt flexibly to a range of circumstances and skill requirements, the rural migrant worker in China is arguably the exemplary post-Fordist subject rather than, as often assumed, the specialist work of the designer, architect, filmmaker or ad-man attributed to the figure of cognitive, creative or immaterial labour. Such a distinction in the body of labour-power points also to the residual class dimension of post-Fordist labour, which in this case is frequently underscored by the spatial division between rural provinces and metropolitan centres. Ethnic divisions also prevail, with the rural migrant worker often enough not belonging to the Han Chinese majority population.⁴

Fieldwork undertaken earlier this year with my MA students in Ningbo – a 2nd tier and major port city a few hours south of Shanghai – began to make visible (at least for us) the ‘division and multiplication of labour’ within the electronic waste industries.⁵ Mezzadra and Neilson:

By speaking of the multiplication of labor we want to point to the fact that division works in a fundamentally different way than it does in the world as constructed within the frame of the international division of labor. It tends itself to function through a continuous multiplication of control devices that correspond to the multiplication of labor regimes and the subjectivities implied by them within each single space constructed as separate within models of the international division of labor. Corollary to this is the presence of particular kinds of labor regimes across different global and local spaces. This leads to a situation where the division of labor must be considered within a multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally heterogeneous.⁶

And as Neilson elaborates elsewhere:

It is crucial to note that the multiplication of labour does not exclude its division …. Indeed, multiplication implies division, or, even more strongly, we can say multiplication is a form of division.⁷

Hierarchies of labour separate the first stage of waste processing and storage from the initial collection of unwanted trash in the cities of China. The looped tape recording of diannao (computer/electronic brain) and kongtiao (air conditioner) rhythmically alerts locals to the arrival of the junk men and women as they move about neighbourhoods on a bicycle equipped with a flat tray for the transport of waste. Situated among those at the bottom of the supply chain of electronic waste industries (others working in particularly toxic conditions include children who dissemble electronic products, stripping copper from plastic casings while inhaling poisonous fumes from incineration), the junkmen are among the most transient in the economy of e-waste. The working life of junkmen is one of low income and frequently changing low-skill jobs determined by the fluctuation of market economies and the informal social networks and family demands that shape the movement of populations from country to city, job to job. Here, we see the multiplying effect of labour: while hierarchically distinct from other modalities of work in the economic life of electronic waste, the job of the junk men and women is underscored by mobility and uncertain transformation. It is unlikely, in other words, that waste collection is a job for life.

A different story prevails, however, in the case of many of the small businesses that deal with the sorting of electronic waste. Like many Chinese cities, the waste collection centres dispersed across the neighborhoods and districts of Ningbo are pivotal sites in the social and economic life of electronic waste. Often run as small family businesses, these recycling centres can be divided along formal and informal lines, both with differing degrees of toxicity in terms of the type of waste materials collected. Of the thousand or so businesses with official licenses to operate in Ningbo (a legal requirement in Zhejiang province), there are many more that exist illegally. At 6000 RMB (approx. 600 Euros), the annual license fee is a costly obstacle for many, yet it offers a level of economic and political security not afforded by the illegal collection centres. The official sites tend to have a regular network of waste suppliers based on guanxi (social relations or networks) and, unlike the illegal sites, do not negotiate prices. This in turn affords the junkmen a level of guaranteed income, albeit with wildly fluctuating and typically declining prices over the past year. Trading prices for metals are set each morning according to futures markets, which are usually accessed as daily updates by mobile phone more often than through computers.

External and internal forces have placed enormous pressure on the recycling industry and labour conditions across China. The owner of one small licensed recycling company we spoke to, who had been in business for 15 years, made note of the Chinese Labor Contract Law, which came into effect in January 2008, making it harder for companies to sack employees.⁸ He offered this reference as an indication of the more stable and secure working conditions for the migrants he employs from Jiangxi and Húnán provinces to the west of coastal Zhejiang.

By contrast, reports produced by various human rights NGOs and environmental monitoring organizations document numerous instances where workers’ rights are violated in the electronics factories and recycling industries, with excessive and often unpaid working hours, hiring of child labour, gender divisions, dangerous working conditions, suppression of efforts to organize labour and strike actions, fines and punishments for violation of highly punitive rules (correct haircuts, smoking in designated areas, improper attire, wastage of water, making noise, posting or distributing unauthorized articles, etc.).⁹ More broadly, in her assessment of the legislative reform of labour conditions, Jenny Chan notes ‘severe rights violations in at least three major areas: job security; the use of contingent labor; and fair, fixed-term labor contracts’.¹⁰ Worker layoffs from factories have also been on the rise since the end of the Chinese new year – the social effects of this became rapidly clear, if relatively short-lived, on the streets of Shanghai and Ningbo, with increased numbers of homeless migrants and visible instances of untreated mental illnesses.

Improved labour conditions are often perceived by businesses and investors to come at a cost rather than a benefit in terms of higher productivity through workplace stability. Other economic forces impact in more immediate ways. Since 1st of January 2009, recycling companies have had to absorb the cost of a 17% value added tax – a burden not suffered by other industries. This comes on top of an enormous drop in prices of around 50-60% for recyclable metals due to the global economic recession. With successive months of depressed prices, the global recycling economy is now dire. In China, this manifests in the form of massive stockpiling of waste that cannot be sold. There are additional storage costs and increased health risks associated with prolonged exposure to inventory accumulation of toxic metals, to say nothing of increased pressures on labour.

Another owner of a Ningbo recycling business, Mr Yu, assessed the situation in the following way earlier this year:

Metals and papers are online transactions. Copper and aluminum are sold and bought in the futures markets. For China, marketing Chinese products is fine, however, in the global market it is hard to do good business. I have to purchase and sell the waste at cheap prices. I suppose the economy will improve. Copper makes more profits, however it makes me lose more money. Now the price of copper is 17 yuan/500 grams compared with the previous price (27/28 yuan / 500g) – we lose 10 yuan per 500g. We are a small business. Foreign waste such as plastic, copper and aluminum are packaged and put into containers that are transported to Beilun dock.

The Battle of Standards

The connection made here between electronic waste and the maritime industries is worth noting. Despite the fact that importation of electronic waste in China has been illegal since 1996, much of the movement of waste from North America, Europe, East Asia and Australia is channeled through the ports of China.¹¹ There’s a story to be told here about the global logistics industry. In short, logistics is concerned with the management of global supply chains and labour regimes. The electronic waste industries obviously fit into that schematic. Aided by software applications and database technologies, logistics aims to maximize efficiencies at all levels. In terms of labour management, the optimum state of governance arises at the moment in which the execution of a task, or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), is registered in the real-time computation of Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs). In other words, the labour control regime is programmed into the logistics chain at the level of code. Similarly, the governance of labour is informatized in such a way that the border between undertaking a task and reporting its completion has become closed or indistinct. As such, there is no longer a temporal delay between the execution of duties and their statistical measure.

The potential for escape, invention and refusal become severely compromised within such a biopolitical regime of control, one that is already dominant for millions working across the world in different industries articulated with global logistics systems. Moreover, and most oddly, it would seem that the capacity for capital to renew itself is substantially challenged within such a system: logistics aims to diminish the force of contingency, which plays a key role in the emergence of innovation upon which the reproduction of capital depends. Do we find here, then, an instance whereby capital programs its own obsolescence?

An important control device in the maritime industries is radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, which registers the geographic position of ships and goods and assists in the management of inventories and the efficiency of supply chains. While RFID technologies are indifferent to the matter of things, and thus do not discern between, say, automotive parts or textiles on the one hand, and electronic waste on the other, their database logic nonetheless identifies the content of motion. In other words, the database provides a record of that which migrates from one place to another. And in the case of electronic waste, there are strict national and international regulations governing its transport and treatment. But since, as noted earlier, electronic waste is deemed an illegal import in China, it is questionable whether it falls into the purview of the database and its informatized sovereign power. Like many countries, electronic waste holds a contradictory status within the rule of law in China, with waste businesses requiring a license to operate, as mentioned previously.

In another respect, the connection between electronic waste, logistics and software systems constitutes the battle of standards across idioms of translation. The governance of labour associated with electronic waste varies enormously depending upon whether or not the movement, economy and treatment of e-waste is made visible by logistics software used in maritime logistics, to take one example. In such a case, there are industry, state and union standards that shape the conditions of labour and management of waste. Logistics software facilitates such relations by tracking cargo movement, registering times of passage in global supply chains and accounting for inventory accumulation. The standards established in such an economy run into conflict, or are just modulated differently, when the circuits of labour and resource flows associated with electronic waste are translated through less formal standards found in economies not officiated by the state. The case of electronic waste in China is one of these economies. The sex-trade in and across many countries and regions would be another.

Translation can be understood in one sense as the process of establishing standards expressed through a community of practice. In Naoki Sakai’s terms, this is the ‘homolingual’ operation of translation.¹² Yet such an occasion should not be seen as the end-point of translation, but rather in terms of the instantiation of a particular border that promulgates new modes of practice and relation. Indeed, it is precisely the scene of conflict that attends the drive toward standardization that raises the problem of translation.¹³ The example of standardization in the shipping and transport industries helps clarify this process.

The standardization of shipping containers from the 1950s was accompanied by disputes between engineers, corporations and governments over competing economic and geopolitical interests in the transport industries.¹⁴ By the 1970s a global standard in containerization had been established, around the same time economic globalization came into full swing following the end of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1971 and the oil crisis of 1973. Such cursory contextualization indicates that standard containers did not alone determine or create economic accumulation (the same might be said for logistics software). Marc Levinson notes that by the late 1960s,

The economic benefit of standardization … was still not clear. Containers of 10, 20, 30 and 40 feet had become American and international standards, but the neat arithmetic relationship among the ‘standard’ sizes did not translate into demand by shippers or ship lines. Not a single ship was using 30-foot containers. Only a handful of 10-foot containers had been purchased, and the main carrier using them soon concluded that it would not buy any more. As for 20-foot containers, land carriers hated them.¹⁵

Conflicts over standards in logistics and software systems define the terrain of translation in more recent years. Logistics, as defined earlier, is concerned with maximizing efficiencies in global supply chains and labour regimes. Once the logistical problem of container standardization had been resolved, the work and political economy of translation shifted to data standards. While present in a primitive form in the 1960s, the computerization of transport industries did not really take off until the 1980s following the standardization of shipping containers and the advent of just-in-time production. Effectively integrating and simulating the logic of containerization in order to produce enhanced efficiencies, the information architecture of code can also be understood as a container or silo formation.¹⁶ Again, the drive toward interoperability across different software systems is an example of translation as homolingual address or equivalence.¹⁷ Software technologies are key devices in the translation of labour and the mobility of things as actionable, visible and subject to control and instrumental consolidation. Once registered within the database logic of informatized sovereignty, electronic waste and its modalities of labour and social life become governable within the economy of real-time. Such an idiom of translation is one of co-figuration and equivalence, to draw on the formulation of Sakai. Yet logistics software consists of multiple standards whose disparities in code produce conflict and competition in the effort to determine systems commensurate with the demand for intermodal freight transportation, pervasive labour management and economic hegemony. Such tensions over standardization give rise to the heterolingual dimension of translation – its social practices of ‘differential inclusion’, struggle and multiplication – that confers a non-governable potential to electronic waste.¹⁸

While I am in no way idealizing such practices – as noted earlier, there is enormous social, environmental and individual damage that attends the toxic life of electronic waste – I wish to stress that once captured within the instrumental world of logistics that economizes labour, life and space according to efficiencies in time, the work of translation becomes automated and effectively annulled. And it is precisely at this moment of informatization coupled with logistics that the region becomes constituted within the sovereign space of the database. Once code is king the variable capacity of labour, life and things finds itself subject to an intensive form of territorial and proprietary control that formal settings such as ASEAN, APEC and NAFTA can only gesture towards.¹⁹ But no matter how much communication regimes may be indifferent to noise, contingency, feedback and indeed life itself, the difference necessary for the work of translation is never entirely eradicated by techno-scientific systems.²⁰ More likely certain modes of labour and life simply migrate off the radar and subsist instead in a world of non-governance, by which I mean idioms of expression, practice and economy external to the state-corporate nexus that defines contemporary sovereign power.²¹

The Limits of Translation

With its indifference to matter, substance or qualities and concern instead with the management of mobilities and efficiencies of action, logistics dispenses with borders that distinguish labour, life and milieu.²² In doing so, the constitutive differences that make possible the translation of relations between labour, discourses, social-technical practices, economies and geocultural formations is surrendered to the world of ubiquitous homologies.²³ What I am calling ‘ubiquitous homologies’ stems from the political economy of globalizing design industries (where architecture begins to resemble a sports shoe, toothbrush, motorbike, office chair, computer monitor, etc.), and shares something with what Sakai terms ‘co-figuration’, ‘linguistic equivalence’ and ‘homolingual address’ – all of which are homogenizing operations of translation that comprise the sovereign power of the nation-state.²⁴

This is the limit of translation, and hence the scene of the political. With borders (limits) comes struggle. It may seem a contradiction is at work in this formulation: the subtraction within logistics of constitutive differences does not immediately lend itself to the idea of the political as the struggle with borders. Nor does such a formulation of logistics as a system of techno-social and economic practices of indifference to borders correspond with the concept of translation, which both assumes and requires difference as a condition of operation. How, then, to address the political and conceptual challenges that attend the rise of new indifferent forms of communication and governance? The erasure of constitutive differences through the biopolitical power of logistics defines the limits of translation. But the occlusion of difference should not be taken as some kind of finitude since the coding of indifference in itself multiplies the fields of distinction through the force of relations.²⁵ There are and always will be relations. In this process new border struggles are comprised and the work of translation is remodulated in ways coextensive with the production of subjectivity.

The analysis of electronic waste flows serves to cleave the inter-relations of software, labour and logistics in order to identify how the indifference of communication special to logistics technology points to the limits of translation, which holds implications for biopolitical regimes of governance. The heterolingual address of translation is the analytical method that makes visible the possibility of escape from biopolitical technologies of control at work in the global logistics industry. Or, rather, the non-governable dimension of social and economic life within the electronic waste industries asserts a singular indifference to the regulatory control of logistics. This is the practice of refusal. The extent to which labour and life can withstand the encroaching predisposition of logistics as a control system par excellence is – in part – a matter of time, capital and the sovereign demand that populations comply with technologies of governance.

A study of the economies and socialities of electronic waste in China helps illuminate the political status and potential of non-governable subjects and spaces. The earlier discussion of labour and the circuits of exchange in Ningbo’s electronic waste industries are a case in point. As forms of social relation, the labour and economy in Ningbo’s e-waste industries operate outside the scope of state-corporate regimes of governance supported by logistics technologies of control. Of relevance here is the constitution of regions and the politics of translation in order to address an emerging tension of scale that extends more broadly to the global management of labour and life at play in the logistics industry. Such an analytical strategy indicates how the problematic of non-governable spaces and subjects – for better and worse – reside beyond the ‘informational sovereignty’ that imbues the biopolitical power of logistics. The social practice of translation (re)constitutes regions as they figure around the economy of electronic waste. Translation here is not so much a conscious act on the part of workers in electronic waste industries – at least not in any way that I am capable of discerning – as a social-technical relation of exteriority that arises through structural conditions and the techno-social operations of logistics software managing the movement of labour, commodities, resources and finance. What I am calling a social-technical relation of exteriority extends to the challenge of method and analysis: there is always the subject that resides beyond comprehension, that refuses to be known as such – something Gayatri Spivak carefully analyzed as the politics of the subaltern condition.²⁶

In so far as that which is perceived or manifests as non-governable – the labour and economy of electronic waste, in the case of this essay – some final points can be proffered. The spatialities of non-governable subjects constitute regions in ways that do not readily correspond with more hegemonic regional formations. Translation thus becomes a form of inventing new circuits of movement. Within such a context, regions become contested geocultural and political spaces, bringing into question the dominant understanding of regions as defined within the political-economic discourses of trade agreements, innovation and knowledge transfer and statist formations of geopolitical equivalence such as ASEAN and its expansion into ASEAN+3 (China, Japan, South Korea) and ASEAN+6 (Australia, New Zealand, India). Regions, when understood as conflictual constitutions underscored by the movements and frequently informal practices of language, culture and labour, comprise geocultural formations that seriously question the power of border technologies such as trade formations, migration and labour regimes, state alliances and global logistics. Moreover, the analytical method of translation as social practice and heterolingual address initiates a critique of sovereign power by elaborating the tensions embedded within the informal and formal dynamics of geocultural configurations. Sovereign border regimes, in other words, are brought into question with the rise of non-governable subjects and spaces associated with the social-economic life of electronic waste.

Informal circuits of exchange comprise the multiplication of economies that attend the movement of electronic waste. Such configurations may be territorial in terms of the distribution of waste, as seen for example in the intra-national or trans-regional economies of electronic waste. Within this complex of relations there is a sense in which the non-governable aspects of labour, waste and economy reside outside the biopolitical power of logistics technologies.

While this essay has concentrated on the very localized case of electronic waste in Ningbo, there are always multi-scalar dimensions and circuits that both manifest in the local and connect the local to the trans-territorial whose specificities reconfigure how the regional comes to be understood. As long as the movement and treatment of electronic waste evades the sovereign power of informatized logistics, then the connection of waste with regions remains open to the possibility of multiple configurations.

Notes
Thanks to Soenke Zehle and Brett Neilson for comments and critique of earlier drafts of this essay. The text also benefitted from questions and discussion at the Inter-Asia Cultural Typhoon Conference, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 3-5 July, 2009.

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