Mowitt’s essay puts before us in terms of work or, as Mowitt puts it, ‘re: working’ the work of study, scholarship, and research under the contemporary conditions of ‘biopolitical contol’ or neoliberal structural adjustment of the academy. Mowitt warns against reducing the issue of study to complaints of poor pay and poor working conditions and therefore holds the issue of the labor of study on a fine line between the refusal of the work of study altogether and the insistence on simply enjoying the study that we are required to do or paid to do. Mowitt is not denying the poor conditions under which so many of us work for insufficient pay in and outside the University; he rather is warning us about moving too quickly off the fine line between refusal and enjoyment of the required or paid work of study. He is arguing instead for the value of study as a labor of the negative. Mowitt then takes some elegant last moves to turn this return to the labor of the negative into the work of affirmation, thought affirming itself; he thereby moves beyond the dialectic and the Euro-centric Hegelian tradition of progress to affirm instead the immanent unfolding of mindfulness or thoughtfulness, an unfolding of an affective labor that bears within it the in-excess of measure, the yet-incalculable excess of the current calculability of value. This makes the re: working of study not merely a matter of the human or the humanities but of the technical/human medium we fast are becoming, and which we are coming to know we always have been, as has the University.
Articles by John Mowitt
\John Mowitt is Professor in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota where he has worked since 1985. He currently holds the Imagine Fund Chair in Arts and Humanities and is the author of numerous texts on the topics of culture, theory and politics. His books include: Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Duke UP, 1992); Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Duke UP, 2002); Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages and the co-edited volume, The Dreams of Interpretation: a Century Down the Royal Road, both from the University of Minnesota Press (2005 and 2007 respectively). In 2008 he collaborated with the composer Jarrod Fowler to transmute his book, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking, from a printed to a sonic text/performance. See/hear \\Percussion\\ as Percussion (Patrick Lovelace Editions). His most recent book, Radio: Essays in Bad Reception, appeared from the University of California Press in December of 2011. He is also a senior co-editor of the journal, Cultural Critique a leading Anglophone academic publication in the field of cultural studies and critical theory.\