Edu Factory
=in 2006 the transnational network of activists in the field of education gave themselves the name edu-factory. The factory that is meant here is again the knowledge factory
URL = http://www.edu-factory.org/
Description
Gerald Raunig:
"Following Foucault/Deleuze[6], the first three qualities of the factory were: concentration, distribution in space, arrangement in time. As post-fordist forms of production became hegemonic, there was undoubtedly a process of dispersal, in the course of which the factories increasingly became diffused in society. The factory, now the fabbrica diffusa, no longer functions in this transformation simply according to the old mechanisms from the 19th century. Concentration, distribution in space and arrangement in time have not entirely lost their significance, but they have certainly varied their functions. The theory of the fabbrica diffusa was invented by the autonomia, the Italian struggles of the 1970s. For the Operaist and Post-operaist theories that emerged in and from these struggles, one of the most important components of the diffusion of the factories into society consists in the exodus of the workers from the factory. This is seen here not as an effect, but rather as the catalyst of the far-reaching capitalist transformations of the last decades of the 20th century (post-fordism, immaterial and affective labor becoming hegemonic, cognitive capitalism).
From and in this theoretical environment, a new generation of activist researchers has developed in the last decade, who have taken on particularly current interpretations of the knowledge factory and established their field of action far beyond Italy as a global one. Not without reason, in 2006 the transnational network of activists in the field of education gave themselves the name edu-factory. The factory that is meant here is again the knowledge factory, but this time in its twofold form: the old figure of the university in its exchange relationship with the purported social and territorial outside, with society and the metropolis, but also the assemblage of institutions and cooperative networks of knowledge production that has become diffuse.
The edu-factory mailing list was started in 2006, dealing with themes relating to the neoliberal transformation of the universities and forms of conflict in knowledge production. A first round of discussion focused primarily on conflicts at the universities, the second on the process of the hierarchization of the education market and the constitution of autonomous institutions. And specifically these two lines are also what define the relationship of the edu-factory to the university, its double exodus strategy: here exodus does not mean simply leaving the university, but rather the battle for autonomous free spaces in the university and simultaneously self-organization and auto-formazione beyond existing institutions.
Just in time for the onda anomala, the wave of protests, occupations and strikes at the Italian universities in late 2008, the edu-factory collective published the book L’università globale: il nuovo mercato del sapere (manifestolibri). The book summarizes the most important texts from the online discussions, and in many presentations throughout Italy it has become a hinge for the discourses fanning the flames of the onda anomala and accompanying it. In the introduction to the book there is an interesting contradiction relating to the name of the network, which represents the paradox of the edu-factory. The central slogan is: Ciò che un tempo era la fabbrica, ora è l’università. As once was the factory, so now is the university. Yet two pages later, we read that the university does not function like a factory at all. I think this obvious contradiction leads us to realize that the university as factory is no longer to be read only as a metaphor." (http://eipcp.net/transversal/0809/raunig/en)