Destitute the University
An Essay
ABOUT THE WRITER
Michael Templeton is a writer and an accidentally nomadic poetic. After years of wandering in the academy, and more years of wandering in the kitchen, he now lives and works in the Middle of Nowhere, Ohio. He writes books, apoems, essays, experimental essays, and plays. He also works as a freelance writer, mostly for non-profits. You can access his personal blog Templeton Didelphis here.
You can get a digital copy of his book the awaiting of awaiting here.
Desertion, secession, do not necessarily imply cutting ourselves off from a fantasized social body, but rather establishing fragmentary worlds within it, where the communities in process can materialize and we can relearn to cultivate hospitality and new ways to link together.
— Josep Rafanell i Orra
The end of the Spring term at many U.S. universities saw mass student protests against American support of Israel and the Gaza genocide. Students and faculty staged demonstrations across the country calling on universities to disclose where their money was and to divest themselves of all financial involvements with Israel. In response, universities all over the country made sickening spectacles of themselves as they initiated crackdowns, threatening students with expulsion and criminal charges. What should have been object lessons in free speech and the freedom of assembly immediately turned into violent repression as universities found they had no room to budge on budgets and endowments that are hopelessly imbricated in the global capitalist financial relations tied to Israeli interests. The nature of contemporary global capital—Empire—is such that disinvestment is no longer possible, and the American university system revealed itself as one of the key machines of Empire.
It is nearly impossible to find a mainstream news source that will report these events as anything other than antisemitic attacks on Israel as it exercises its right to defense while slaughtering thousands of people, many of them children. The numbers vary, but the number of Palestinian dead exceeds 40 thousand. About 17 thousand are children. The universities at the center of protests have instituted sweeping policy changes designed to render public gatherings in protest impossible. Barnard College has threatened students with expulsion and made unilateral changes to the student code of conduct meant to stop students from gathering in protest. The University of California system has banned all encampments in their efforts to prevent students from gathering in large numbers. The University of Pennsylvania and Indiana University have adopted similar measures. With these policies have come the draconian crackdowns on free speech, and university administrators have been almost unified in their efforts to draw on antisemitic tropes meant to portray all protests as illegitimate and racist.
As expected, the most fascist and violent policies are coming from President-Elect Trump who has promised to deport anyone who participates in protests and charge everyone else with terrorism. A new bill just passed the House Of Representatives that comes with the euphemistic name of the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.” The ostensible purpose of the bill is to allow the President to interrupt financing of groups that engage in or sponsor violent terrorist acts. The real purpose of the bill is to grant our new dictator with sweeping powers to silence his enemies, and students who protest in support of Palestinians are chief among his enemies. The tactic of labeling anyone who poses a legitimate threat to Empire as terrorists has been going on for some time and found real traction in the crack down on protests against Cop City when protestors were charged with terrorism rather that simple misdemeanor trespassing in order to send a message to the left that their legitimate rights and claims will not be tolerated.* Whether the new House bill passes the Senate or not, it is clear that there is tremendous momentum in bringing the most violent and repressive mechanisms to bear on any student resistance to American policies that support Israel and its genocide against Palestinians. That the International Criminal Court has indicted Benjamin Netanyahu on war crimes charges will only intensify actions meant to stifle and punish student and faculty protests.
These demonstrations and the kinds of responses from authorities have revealed the way contemporary power structures function in and through the American university systems. The web of authority that stabilizes the university system is completely bound up with all other modes of power, including the state and all of its violence. The systems of control, coercion, and violence at the center and circumference of power and authority reveal themselves quickly and act just as quickly when people challenge systems of power. All forms of state violence appear dormant and beyond the walls of safe spaces like the university, but in our current age, “Empire exists ‘positively’ only in moments of crisis, only as negation and reaction,” which is to say the war machine of the state is always present and will reveal itself anywhere it deems necessary (Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War, 125). We have all clearly seen that mass challenges to a state that is deeply invested in Israel brings out the same goons as any other enemy foreign and/or domestic. In other words, the university system showed its ass—the ass of a global capitalist enterprise like any other, and one that will crush anything that stands in their way.
All of this begs profound questions as to how to resist these manifestations of fascist power and violence. The temptation has always been to directly confront power on these issues and meet violence with violence. Protests can and likely will escalate into open violence resulting in mass casualties among protestors and criminal charges that skirt due process by casting lawful gatherings and demonstrations in the language of terrorism. Further violence will be used as justification for even more fascist methods and mechanisms all of which will find general acquiescence in a public that is predisposed to accept virtually anything that comes with the justification of anti-terrorism attached. The very term “terrorism” has long been trucked out as the primary bugbear of middle class fear, what Deleuze and Guattari called “the Unspecified Enemy” of the global war machine, and this has only intensified with the spectacularisms of the past twenty years that have found their highest expressions in the carnival shit-show of Trump (his alleged opposition functioning more like a Face against the Heel in pro wrestling) (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 422). The multiform power structures of Empire that include the university system is constituted so as to either violently destroy direct challenges or recuperate challenges within its constituted forms. Destituent power has the potential to render the entire university system inoperable. By destituting the university, by evacuating the university entirely, we leave the university system itself in a state of profound instability. The long-ranging effects would necessarily carry into the financial heart of what gives the university system its life.
Giorgio Agamben explains that a destituent power works by rendering systems inoperative; it withdraws the substance, the constituent features of systems of power as we destitute the activity within constituted power structures. Inoperativity should not be mistaken for inaction. For a destituent power, “inoperativity does not mean inertia, but names an operation that deactivates and renders works (of economy, of religion, of language, etc.) inoperative” (“What is Destituent Power.” 69). A destituent power deactivates by performing works exterior to the designated functions of those works. Inoperativity does not translate to “a cessation of all activity,” but a transference of activity from interoperative and exploitable work to work put to another use. In effect, to destitute the university is to withdraw the work of the students and the educators and put that work to use elsewhere. The important feature as a strategy for resistance to constituted power is that the object of power, in this case student protestors, is no longer present. In order for power to constitute itself, it must have constituents. A strategy of destituent power is to place the constituted powers into a crisis as its constituents become ungovernable and beyond the reach of ordinary means of capture, control, and violence. To destitute, then, is to leave what exists on its own without the subjective constituents who could form the basis and even justification for constituted power. As Mario Tronti explained: “It is here that a destituent power takes shape. The primacy lies not in building something [i.e.: reforming constituted power out of the resistance which directly challenges it], but rather in destituting what is already there, to place the existent [the university] into crisis” (Ill Will. “On Destituent Power.” P 12).
Consider that while university endowments swell into the billions of dollars, the American university system increasingly relies on part-time contingent faculty who work for pennies, have no benefits, no job security, and are employed on a completely contingent basis with no security from one semester to the next. An article in The Nation reported that one estimate put it at “close to three-quarters of teaching staff in US colleges and universities are now employed on a contingent basis—on one-year, one-semester, or even one-course contracts, often working “part-time,” without benefits, toiling at multiple institutions simultaneously in order to afford rent” (Baker, Erik. “The Education Factory.” The Nation. April 22, 2024). When we consider that the educational purpose of the university is built on one of the most sickening labor abuses in contemporary capitalism, there is little justification for supporting the university. This kind of labor exploitation is intolerable in almost every other sector of the contemporary workplace, and yet it forms the basis of the American university system. A destituent movement of secession on the part of part-time contingent professors would bring the American university system to a standstill. Contingent faculty would exponentially benefit simply by working in almost any field other than higher education.
The sense of immediacy to take action against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians justifiably moves us to confront those powers that support and finance the crimes we are currently witnessing every day, and there is a justifiable concern that all but direct confrontation is nothing more than quietism. Destitution, abandonment, withdrawal—none of these things are to be taken as retreat or acquiescence. The entire purpose of destitution is to remove ourselves beyond the grasp of constituted power in order to leave that power bereft of its foundation. I am not, nor is anyone else, advocating a form of quietism or stoic acceptance of the status quo. The purpose of destituent power is to evacuate the status quo, to make it insupportable and inoperable. As Ian Alan Paul makes abundantly clear, the world as it is, the “reticular society” which dominates life as it is, unfolds and exists as an infinite web of interoperable functions. The reticular society that Paul defines and describes demands a specific type of subjectivity that is produced and functions within systems that demand a functioning and uninterrupted flow: “The primary function of subjectivity in the reticular society is ultimately for lives to work interoperably, to compliantly and responsively work in conjunction and cooperation with all of the objective and subjective components” (Paul. The Reticular Society, 43). The key here is the interoperable functions of individuals within a global system of interoperativity. Everything must flow with seamless regularity, and that which interrupts this seamless flow constitutes a crisis—a crisis that will be met with the most extreme reactions to neutralize the source of the crisis. To subvert and attack the domination of the reticular society, of which the university forms a key part, is to transform that region of the interoperative functions into inoperative non-functions that disrupt absolutely everything else. Agamben tells us, “(o)nly a power that is made inoperative and deposed is completely neutralized” (71). A destituent power neutralizes those powers which are at the root of the university system which has now taken on the constitutional power of a liberal fascism indistinguishable from any other, and it does this by rendering constituted power inoperative. The great power and primary insight of strategies built from a destituent power is that destitution makes it impossible to simply reconstitute power out of the revolutionary seizure of power. The issue is not necessarily holding power, the issue involves the functions and abuses of power itself, and a destituent power diffuses through inoperativity that which constitutes the violence and abuses inherent to constituted power. The benevolent academy is another face of the global Empire that subjugates all life and now shores up the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The Invisible Committee named this part of a destituent power specifically as they explain that “(t)o destitute the university is to establish, at a distance, the places of research, of education and thought, that are more vibrant and more demanding than it is—which would not be hard—and to greet the arrival of the last vigorous minds who are tired of frequenting the academic zombies, and only then to administer its death blow” (Now. 81). In other words, to evacuate the university would be to open the escape hatch for everyone who already knows that they gain nothing from higher education but crippling debt and a set of increasingly worthless credentials. To evacuate the institution itself of its power by withdrawing from it entirely, this is the fundamental maneuver of destituent power. To destitute the university would effectively suppress the university because to “destitute is not to primarily attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it” (80). As the university system almost declares mission accomplished in its battle against free speech, a destituent strategy seems almost inevitable. The university system is no longer needed. The same global connectivity that provides the circulatory system for Empire also connects the movement of ideas, art, music, research—virtually everything that comprises the functions of the university system—without a university. It is true that most scientific research is funded by government sources, but the fact that what is allowable as “science” has become driven by partisan political games introduces an endless set of problems into current university research. The fact that global climate change can be removed from official websites is proof enough that we have no access to science. The kinds of work done in the humanities is pointless.
In calling for a destitution of the university, it is essential to remember that the recent demonstrations on U.S. university campuses demand divestiture in anything that supports the genocide being perpetrated by Israel and funded and armed by the United States. Divestiture has long been a goal of student protests and protest movements more broadly. The wall student protestors and others are hitting is that the process of divestiture does not work the way it once did. All capital is imbricated within global Empire in which the networks of financial power are woven in webs that are so intricate and so complex that to isolate a single financial target is just naïve. We are no longer living in a time in which any single financial giant can be extricated from all the others. It is a miasma of global financial relations which dominates global Empire, one in which we are caught within a “global society of control that smooths over the striae of national boundaries” and the world market and global society are fully subsumed under capital (Hardt and Negri. Empire, 332). There is no way of teasing out the university investments that are directly linked to Israel because at some point, they all are. We are now forced to speak in terms of “geopolitical monetary strategies” that supersede any single site of individual actors (Marazzi. The Violence of Financial Capital, 83).** The inoperativity of destituent power effectively carries into all economic relations which constitute the economic interests of the university.
With student demonstrations aimed at disinvestment, we need to take into account the fact that capital as Empire “has taken hold of every detail and every dimension of existence. It has created a world in its image,” and this requires something altogether different in terms of revolutionary action (The Invisible Committee. Now, 84). In an interview with Abigail Susik, Ben Morea, cofounder of “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!”, said that the issue of Gaza and the Palestinians is a defining issue of our time. As he and his peers took on Vietnam, so must we take on Gaza but we now require a new strategy. As Morea says, “Pressure can be put on. Like what the students tried with divestiture. But that has to be resurrected with a different tactic” (Ben Morea. Ill Will. September 1, 2024. “We Wanted to Destroy the University”). That different tactic is the potential to be unleashed through destitution. It may be impossible to state with any certainty that one issue defines an age or a generation, but the genocide of the Palestinian people stands out as the most urgent in terms of human life at this moment, it is clearly the issue around which the state is prepared to mobilize all the violence and repression at its disposal. Protests against the slaughter of Palestinians is the issue that has unified the most powerful sectors of semiocapital toward crushing dissent, and it is the issue of the moment around which young people are on the verge of being transformed into enemies of the state for exercising their constitutional rights. The university has put itself at the center of these issues and problems and has therefore all but invited a destituent power to be mobilized in the service of rendering their power and reach inoperative. The drive, the sense of immediacy to take action against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians justifiably moves us to take actions that directly confront those powers that support and finance the crimes we are currently witnessing every day, and there is a justifiable concern that anything but direct confrontation is nothing more than quietism. Destitution, abandonment, withdrawal—none of these things are to be taken as retreat or acquiescence. The entire purpose of destitution is to remove ourselves out of the grasp of constituted power in order to leave that power bereft of its foundation and ground. I am not, nor is anyone else, advocating a form of quietism or stoic acceptance of the status quo. The purpose of destituent power is to evacuate the status quo, to make it insupportable and inoperable. As discussed above, inoperativity is at the heart of a destituent power. As Ian Alan Paul makes abundantly clear, the world as it is, the “reticular society” which dominates life as it is, unfolds and exists as an infinite web of interoperable functions. The reticular society that Paul defines and describes demands a specific type of subjectivity that is produced and functions within systems that demand a functioning and uninterrupted flow: “The primary function of subjectivity in the reticular society is ultimately for lives to work interoperably, to compliantly and responsively work in conjunction and cooperation with all of the objective and subjective components” (Paul. The Reticular Society, 43). The key here is the interoperable functions of individuals within a global system of interoperativity. Everything must flow with seamless regularity, and that which interrupts this seamless flow constitutes a crisis—a crisis that will be met with the most extreme reactions to neutralize absolutely whatever has led to this crisis. To subvert and attack the domination of the reticular society, of which the university forms a key part, is to transform that region of the interoperative functions into inoperative non-functions that disrupt absolutely everything else. As Agamben explains, “(o)nly a power that is made inoperative and deposed is completely neutralized” (71). A destituent power neutralizes those powers which are at the root of the university system which has now taken on the constitutional power of a liberal fascism indistinguishable from any other, and it does this by rendering constituted power inoperative.
Inoperativity entails living and working so as to deactivate forms of power which make life and work meaningless. It means to carve out and begin to live a life that coincides completely with the kinds of actions and creativity that directly express that life. This as opposed to giving over our lives to pre-existing forms which are produced so as to extract life from us. To leave those forms of power destitute. This is to advocate for a “better and more authentic form of life by making those constituted forms which subjugate and exploit: “Inoperativity is not another work that appears to work from out of nowhere to deactivate and depose them: it coincides completely and constitutively with their destitution, with living a life. And this destitution is the coming politics” (Agamben. 74). Thus, to destitute the university is to free those who are tied to its institutional forms to live and work in the ways the institution would demand while leaving the institution itself destitute; to leave the institutional form devoid of is substance. And in this sense, to destitute the university has ramifications far beyond the immediate target. “Destitution makes it possible to rethink what we mean by revolution,” explains the Invisible Committee, which is to say that the conventional revolutionary moment in which power is overturned as the climax of a violent struggle is now replaced by the very real “potential for accomplishing the work of destruction,” in this case the destruction of the imperial power structures expressed in and through the university system (Now, 88).
In the most immediate sense, it is students themselves who have the most to gain in a destituent power brought to bear on the university. The university system has little to offer in the contemporary world, and in many ways, people are beginning to destitute the university in the ways they have been leaving conventional Christian churches.*** It simply holds no value or promise for them, and they no longer believe in it. The university in the United States largely persists on old mythology that says we are more employable and make more money with a university degree. That is increasingly not the case. Even drawing on sources that would appear to be the most favorable for a traditional educational route toward financial stability and gain, we find that the value of a college degree is consistently falling. Huge corporate giants like Apple, Tesla, and IBM no longer require a college degree for a job interview, and the number of people who believe a college degree is worthwhile dropped from 71 percent to 41 percent in six years.**** The kinds of skills that are marketable in the global capitalist world are those that younger people cultivate by playing games on their phones. In the age of generative artificial intelligence, one has to wonder why anyone would study in a traditional liberal arts institution when a degree of this kind has been doomed for decades. The number of articles that claim that a liberal arts education is still worthwhile is simply protesting too much and is proof enough that a liberal arts education is not worthwhile, at least not if it is going to consign a young person to a lifetime of crippling debt. And on the debt topic: the average student debt for a four-year degree from a public university is almost $40,000. It will take on average 20 years to pay that off. The idea of taking on that much debt for a degree that no longer has any value is absurd, yet young people all over the country are mortgaging their lives for the promises of a by-gone era. And certainly, the time has come for those whose sole purpose is to enter the world of global capital to begin asking why they are paying for their college education at all. To gain access to a global system that trades money in the trillions of dollars, it would seem that these corporate giants could and should pay to train their own soldiers at business schools at the university level. The value of a college education is a myth that is past its sell-by date, and destituting the university is an obvious strategy toward meaningful revolutionary movements.
The goal of any destituent power is to create where the formal structures of power have stifled creativity in the service of modes of production that stifle human potential. And it is precisely potential that Agamben places at the heart of a destituent power. It is here that the form-of-life that emerges from a destituent power “unrelentingly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself living, without negating them, but simply using them” (“What is Destituent Power?”, 71-72). And to accomplish this one draws on the “destituent potentiality,” the potentiality of human creative work devoid of the formal constraints which extract value from that work without valuing the work or the living human life which performs the work. Ultimately, the entirety of a destituent power depends on a creative maneuvering away from constituted power toward an open and unrestrained potentiality. In this, “to destitute work means in this sense to return it to the potentiality from which it originates” (73). And this leaves the forms of power, in this case the university and the financial powers which depend on it, in a state of destitution, at least insofar as this end of the imperial webs is concerned.
To destitute the university is above all to return the work of the university to the domain of the human unity that is the form-of-life, and “by the term form-of-life, we mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something like a bare life. A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which, in its way of living, what is at stake is living itself, and, in its living, what is at stake above all else is its mode of living” (Agamben, “What is Destituent Power?” 73). The university as constituted power can only extract from life the actions which invigorate life itself. The university exists as a formal structure of imperial power which serves Empire and nothing else. Thus, to destitute the university is to deprive crimes such as the Israeli genocide the fuel it needs to continue. As students and others work to stop these hideous crimes, it becomes increasingly crucial to destitute the university as a way of initiating a revolutionary strategy that forestall constituted power and the overwhelming violence at its disposal. To render such a profound cog in the great machine of Empire as the university inoperative begins a process of depriving the United States and its war machine of what it needs to continue fostering crimes against humanity, and it achieves these goals without offering up the bodies of students as sacrifices toward a revolutionary project that can only result in the reconstitution of all that it sought to destroy. To destitute the university is to return the creation of art, the process of formulating compelling questions and creative answers, the process of sharing ideas and knowledge, the entire project of the communal life of human beings to human communities themselves and the forms-of-life which are developed under such conditions.
* The ACLU reported that the State of Georgia brought charges against Defend the Atlanta Forest activists using anti-terrorism laws and RICO laws and cited the movement’s ‘anarchist ideals’ and claimed that actions and activities like “mutual aid, the advocacy of collectivism, and even the publishing of zines as hallmarks of a criminal enterprise.” The fascist tactics here are clear and these kinds of strategies set the bar for the current federal efforts to shut down all opposition to established power. (“RICO and Domestic Terrorism Charges Against Cop City Activists Send Chilling Message.” (link). Accessed 11/25/2024).
** Just by way of a simple example: Columbia University reported the total value of its endowment for fiscal year 2023 at $13.64 billion. This is a staggering amount of money. It is managed like nearly all universities by an Investment Management Company made up of University staff and outside staff whose sole purpose is to manage investment funds. Nothing in this process has any contact with the kinds of university actions that pertain to outside issues and politics. In essence, the IMC is an independent body that consists exclusively of finance capitalist professionals. Protests and calls for disclosure and disinvestment are directed at one site. The processes of investment and endowment management are an independent and exclusive site. All of this forms the citadel of Empire as it is manifested in the university system, and this is precisely why a strategy of destitution is absolutely crucial. To empty this form of power of its content leaves this entire formal structure pointless. The money remains, but the structural justification for it is gone. (The Columbia Endowment for Fiscal Year 2023. (link).
*** Christians in the United States make tremendous noise about being oppressed by a “war on Christianity” precisely because this war does not exist. These are the empty bloviations of a pampered and privileged class who are driven by a white supremacist vision utterly removed from religion. I have written about this elsewhere and shown that there has been a continuous and steady decline in Christian church membership and the rise of the American Evangelical movement is a feature of white supremacist fascism and the big business of church. (Templeton. Impossible to Believe, 48. London: Collective Ink. 2025).
**** These figures and statistics are from The Harvard Business Review, a publication that is arguably about as pro-capitalism as one is likely to find. That a publication such as this is admitting that a college degree has become profoundly devalued is extremely revealing. (“How Important is a College Degree Compared to Experience.”) (link)
Works Cited:
Agamben, Giorgio. “What is a Destituent Power?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), 2014. 65-74.
Baker, Erik. “The Education Factory.” The Nation. April 22, 2024. (link).
The Columbia Endowment for Fiscal Year 2023. (link)
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Tr. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
(“How Important is a College Degree Compared to Experience.” The Harvard Business Review.) (link) The Invisible Committee. Now. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series No. 23. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.
Marazzi, Christian. The Violence of Financial Capital. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series No. 2. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.
Morea, Ben. Ill Will. September 1, 2024. “We Wanted to Destroy the University.” (link)
Orra, Josep Rafenell I. “Against Liberal Fascism.” Ill Will. June 19, 2024. (link)
Paul, Ian Alan. The Reticular Society. U.K. Zero Books, 2024.
“RICO and Domestic Terrorism Charges Against Cop City Activists Send Chilling Message.” (link)
Templeton, Michael. Impossible to Believe. U.K. Iff Books, forthcoming January 2025.
Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series No. 4. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.
Tronti, Mario. “On Destituent Power.” Ill Will. May 21, 2022. (link).