the militarization of the general intellect
I’m going to start posting here my notes for a piece on the involvement of Australian universities in activities related to assisting in the development of more ‘effective’ military and intelligence agencies.
Given the ever-developing forms of subsumption of universities into capital, militarization cannot really be discussed separate from processes of commodification and commercialization in institutions of education and research. Nor can such militarization be understood divorced from the newer forms of integration of military, policing and intelligence activities, as part of ambitious projects of expansion and reorientation of systems of surveillance and control manifest in the War on Terror and the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The goal centres on massive and high tech expansion of intelligence and surveillance integrated with equally high-tech reorganization of communications, intended to make possible new practices of warfare and social control - reconstituting if not collapsing any distinction between them. Such, at least, is the more-or-less declared intent to which enormous energies and capital are being devoted.
The relation of Australian universities to this set of interrelated projects is not widely understood, and it is this which I intend to document.
eh - finally got the rss feed to work on this. Good.
University warmongering is rife wherever anyone cares to look. The following - here might entertain you as much as it appals me. Buckets of money for terror research. Glory glory. Fucking anthros. The program was pulled after criticisms, but I did hear the other day that its resurfaced in more benign looking forms - details when someone digs out the documents. Meanwhile…
There were a couple of good books on Camelot and other war-research by anthros recently. Check out David Price’s War and Anthro page: here. His ‘weaponizing Anthropology’ is a pretty sweet title, but sometimes he advocates an ‘undamaged’ scholarship, and frankly I wonder if that old trick could ever have worked.
Lal Salaam - Trinketization
Comment by John hutnyk — January 20, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
Hey John, thanks for the links, they are fascinating in the usual can-I-stand-to-look-anymore way. I’m concentrating primarily on high-tech research, with social sciences involved in helping develop effective forms of organization into which this new tech can be integrated. I think even you would be a little bit surprised as to the overt nature (and massive scale) of the militarizations virtually coterminous with some institutions’ re-subsumptions into capital.
Comment by theoryoftheoffensive — January 21, 2007 @ 5:51 am
Not Australian universities, but still, there’s this.
Comment by s0metim3s — January 25, 2007 @ 1:26 pm