La Trobe Thinking Aloud: Tolerance as the weapon of the strong. by Francesco- Monday, 27 August 2012, 04:21 PM

La Trobe Thinking Aloud: Tolerance as the weapon of the strong.



“We need to understand how fortunate we are to live in freedom. We need to understand that living in liberty is such a precious thing that generations of men and women have been willing to sacrifice everything for it. We need to know, in a war, exactly what is at stake”

-Lynne V.Cheney



What happened yesterday will forever remain in the collective memory of La Trobe students’ body, staff members, administrators and educators. It was an exceptional day as the students mounted a strong protest against the decision taken by the university senior management body to cut 41 staff members and more than 500 subjects from the department of Humanities and Social Sciences because of an “apparent” luck of state funds.

The responsibility was thus shift from the university way up to our Canberra buddies. However, this increases the responsibility that students have in order to defend an education internationally under attack, which has slowly but constantly been commodified, you can buy it as you would a delicacy or a car. What students so vociferously stated was exactly its opposite; education is first and foremost, a right, you cannot just cut it.

The protest was an overall success as journalists crews gathered around to record the much waited event, which took place on Open Day, the most important opportunity for the university to recruit new students and make sure the university is competitive worldwide. Competition (corporate restructuring) is the main reason for which the university said it is implementing this cuts so far, to stick higher in the Word Wide Rankings of Universities. In 2007 La Trobe University’s HUSS department ranked at around 70, today at around 200. Well something has changed very fast and it does not depend on how much money the university has in order to foster tertiary knowledge, but in how much money it can redistribute between the 1% senior management body. For this reason the protest at La Trobe took the shape and the name of the larger international Occupy Movement.[1]

The department which more than anyone else is built on creating a liberal space for criticism and debate about the better ways to live together in society is the one witnessing the first wave of corporate cuts. Once the Philosopher King’s head has been cut who will criticize the corruption and abuse of power coming from an unfair governmental structure based on policing and restricting liberties? A question I cannot answer at the moment because I do not have a clue about the answer.

All the above is pretty common knowledge and nothing new has been said. However, what intrigued me, being part of this movement was the role played by tolerance and biopower and their role to the use of legitimate violence and exclusionary tactics.

This is a starting point of discussion as a true analysis will require probably a thorough researched essay. But a starting point is always better than nothing I might say. These perplexities came up to me only once I went home and received a message from a friend literally stating: “fuck yeah we made the news and it’s a good one, congrats for the red wig!” This made me look for the video on the web and once I saw it I started thinking about three specific points mentioned by our Vice Chancellor John Dewar, here I report some info coming from ABC News 6pm news bulletin:

-He says it just goes to show how passionate students are about humanities.(Dewar)

"I was just anxious to ensure that the parents and the children and prospective students were not too alarmed by what was going on so the campus could focus on the main business of the day," he said.

Despite the scare, Mr Dewar says he supports the students' right to protest.

"I think it adds colour and movement to life on campus, I think it's fantastic," he said.

La Trobe University will review what happened and some students may face penalties, which include expulsion.- [2]


The three specific points I was referring to are:

The use of the word “rationality”;

If you have time to look at the footage he states that he is willing to talk to students if he could be sure the conversation would be a rational one. [3]

The fact the he supports the right to protest, saying that it shows a vibrant university life can be, but
Threatening students’ activists with penalties including expulsion.

Why the meeting with Mr Dewar has not taken place until now it remains a mystery to me like the paradox of stating that protesting adds colour and movement to life on campus while at the same time threatening to expel those same people who manifested. Am I the only one losing the sense of rational discourse here? He literally used the word fantastic to describe the protest. It reminds me of the rape charges raised against Julian Assange when the night before the Swedish woman who mounted the accusations had sent a message to a friend stating how marvellous it was to spend time with the smartest and coolest people on earth. Firstly I kiss you, then I stab you, just like a Shakespearian novel.

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the Latin root of tolerance as tolerare literally meaning “to bear, endure or put up with and implying a certain moral disapproval.”[4]

The way the university tolerates activism in campus implies a specific degree of subordination. Tolerance works always in regard to something different, a minority that needs to be tolerated within a majority. Inequality is built within the discourse and without, in real social life and debates. As exclusion means marking a definite line between the insider and the outsider, tolerance in the liberal state has the capacity to encompass differences without exterminating them, but subjecting them for otherwise they could threaten the life of the main organism, body, university, government or state.

Tolerance requires an enduring of some sort of pain and uneasiness that one will certainly choose to avoid, but is located in an intricate social web in such a way that one has the ability to choose what one will suffer from it, how and what will be allowed. We are moving from power to authority as politically and morally charged mechanisms of order and co-existence. As Wendy Brown explains authority and power together make possible the third dimension of tolerance toward what one decides to endure. Tolerance becomes highly politically charged and entails a softening disguise, “the catholicity of spirit.”[5]

Moreover, Foucault sees the government as “not a matter if imposing laws on men, but rather of disposing things, that is to say, to employ tactics rather than laws, and if need be to use the laws themselves as tactics.”[6] To this extent the government does not hold the monopoly of political powers rather it distributes them through a web of formally non-political knowledges and institutions. La troeb University works in the same way altough on a smaller scale.

Society as whole comes to serve modern governmentality and its effect of omnes et singulatim “all and each” (Lecture delivered by Foucault about the nature of modern political power) where tolerance emerges as one sophisticated technique in managing “large and potentially unruly populations.” Tolerance becomes a technique of biopower as it sets out to manage society not through the threat of death but through the managing and regulation of life simultaneously totalizing and individualising. This is exactly what happened yesterday for open day, while it was alright to protest we were filmed by security for identification and for later disciplinary measures to be taken.

I sincerely hope that Mr Dewar realizes that by choosing his rationality as the only viable one he would have tolerated students’ right to protest while refusing to listen or try to understand what the protest is all about, and open up to a different rationality. If charges will be brought out it means that Corporate Fascism is nonetheless still in vogue.
Francesco.

[1] QS Top Universities. http://www.topuniversities.com/institution/la-trobe-university



[2]ABC News. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-26/vice-chancellor-escapes-uni-mob-through-tunnel-network/4223688

[3] Ibid.

[4] Oxford English Dictionary, compact ed. (1971)

[5] Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)p.26.

[6] Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Choicago Press, 1991), p. 95.

Well said Francesco!

I saw you on the News on Sunday!!

Please remind me to say something about this in class this Friday. A funny story about that scary man with a big red wig.

Yeah well said and awesome work defending our Uni and fighting to preserve what we all value! Interesting that Mr Dewar has time to speak to the media but not students. And even more bizarre that LaTrobe has an underground tunnel system, what the!?