Tag Archives: mass intellectuality

Authoritarian neoliberalism, the alienation of academic labour and Walsall FC


Posted by hallymk1

Over at the architectural education podcast (Arch Ed Podcast) there is a conversation between me and James Benedict Brown about the state of higher education, with a little bit of jibber-jabber about Walsall FC.

In a connected development, I will be developing some of my thinking about HE in a forthcoming British Educational Research Association symposium, Debating theories of neoliberalism: New perspectives and framings in education research. The flyer can be downloaded here. My abstract is appended below.

Authoritarian neoliberalism and the alienation of academic labour

As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students, increasingly encumbered by precarious employment, debt, and new levels of performance management, are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. This talk takes a Marxist political economic analysis of the implications of this lack of autonomy, in terms of the conception of subsumption (Hall and Bowles 2016; Marx 1867/2004). Movement towards real subsumption, revealed in financialisation and marketization, enables us to reconsider the utility of neoliberalism as a theoretical framework for analysing the re-engineering of the governance of higher education and the re-production of academic labour in the name of value (Clarke 2005; Davies 2014). In particular, this reflects upon ideas of authoritarian neoliberalism in the coercive orchestration of social relations in the name of markets (Bruff 2014). This reflection discusses the imposition of architectures of subsumption through which academic labour becomes a source of both overwork and anxiety. In analysing these connections it is possible to situate abstract, alienated academic labour alongside its psychological impacts, including anxiety and feelings of hopelessness (Hall 2018). The talk closes by examining whether narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour (Johnson 2017). This frames such solidarity in terms of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful knowledge work, as a potential moment for overcoming alienation (Dinerstein 2015).

References

Bruff, I. (2014). The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 26(1), 113-29. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.843250

Clarke, S. (2005). The Neoliberal Theory of Society. In Saad-Filho, A., and Johnston, D. (eds), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press, pp. 50-59.

Davies, W. (2014). The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. London: SAGE.

Dinerstein, A. (2015). The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, R. (2018). On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 16(1), 97-113. Available: http://bit.ly/2EisheS

Hall, R. and Bowles, K. (2016). Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 28, 30-47. Available: http://bit.ly/2dQMx8X

Johnson, P. (2018). Feminism as Critique in a Neoliberal Age: Debating Nancy Fraser. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 19(1), 1-17. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2017.1376937

Marx, K. (1867/2004). Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

 


slides: partnership, co-operation and dismantling the curriculum in HE


Posted by hallymk1

I’m keynoting the Newcastle College HE staff CPD event today. My slides are appended below.

I have amended my keynote at Radical Pedagogies for this talk. However, the notes from that talk are still relevant.

Participants at the talk collated six questions. My responses are posted herewith.

ONE. How do we balance the fact that students spend significant amounts of money on their studies, but at the same time we want them to work for and with us in developing a curriculum and being active participants in the design and implementation of HE?

Money tends to mediate our relationships for us, so our work with our students risks forcing us to view them in terms of value-for-money. Where we exist inside institutions that have to maximise their income from fees, our classroom choices get squeezed because being taught or teaching intensity are perceived as enabling us to manage the risks around student progression. In part, this is defined through policies that situate students and their families as purchasers or consumers, and in part through fear or anxiety-based institutional cultures that situate views of students-as-partners, in terms of their access to curriculum content or specific services. One problem is where this becomes mutually reinforcing to the point where academics and teachers feel that they cannot innovate.

Having worked in several institutions, I have never seen a quality assurance department (or any department responsible for course/programme validation or periodic review) that has stymied curriculum innovation. However, trying to do this in isolation is problematic. Where you are the only teacher or teaching team that is focusing upon student-as-producer, or on co-creation, this can be isolating and high-risk. In part, this is because in that moment, co-creation appears abnormal. That said, I think we are all trying to get our students to co-create or to produce with us and for themselves, through project work, personalised assessments and so on, even where there are regulatory bodies involved.

So, I guess I would see the balance emerging from faith in your own practice, and your ability, in your teams, to discuss the value of student-as-producer or co-creation with the students. This means an open discussion with those students about: first, the explicit value that will be generated for them, in terms of employability and their ability to pay down their debts (NB there is another question here about whether you believe that is possible) – whether the focus is upon community work, employability, whatever; second, the importance of being able to self-manage rather than having to rely explicitly on others (such as a teacher) as a fundamental step towards self-actualisation; third, what this means for staff-student relations and what it means for students to teach themselves rather than being taught – where the role of the teacher changes but remains active; and fourth, the values that underpin this, in terms of mutuality (and mutual support), co-operation, authenticity and so on. There is something important here about the classroom experience moving towards independent learning (there can still be some teacher-focused/teacher-led work), including access to engagements with other communities (of students, in libraries and so on).

TWO. How can the ‘whiteness’ of curriculums be addressed given the lack of diversity in many HEIs?

This is really difficult. It is an ingrained cultural problem, which operates structurally and also subconsciously. As an entitled white, male professor my focus is on constantly questioning my privilege, and determining to enable a plurality of voices across the contexts in which I work. This is intensely problematic because individuals are coming from different spaces and places, with different preconceptions and amounts of intellectual/social capital. The spaces in which I work are also filled with power.

One of the problems of a lack of diversity in many institutions is that those individuals classed as representatives of minoritised groups can end-up picking up more emotional labour, in-part because BAME students see themselves reflected more appropriately in those members of staff and gravitate towards them. Also, those staff may be seen as exceptional cases, or they may have to develop a double or false consciousness, in order to survive and pass through the walls that Ahmed describes. The diversity agenda can also be a threat to some white staff and white students, who need to check their own privilege both inside and outside the institution.

There are a range of innovation projects, such as those on the attainment gap, which are attempting to address the curricula impacts of this, some with a focus on critical race theory. In other spaces there are direct challenges to dominant curriculum narratives, such as in the Black Studies undergraduate degree at Birmingham City University. There is also radical, student-led work, such as Rhodes Must Fall and the Why Is My Curriculum White? Collective. One key issue at the level of the sector is how to develop these initiatives into a movement that questions hierarchy and power.

At the level of the curriculum, I think this works through questions about the way in which the established curriculum and its content, delivery methods, voices and assessments, enable us to meet crises and to support the creation of another world. This means opening up with students about those voices inside the curriculum that are currently heard/silenced and what might be done differently – it is part of a democratic engagement with students about the of governance, structure, content and assessment of the curriculum. What narratives can we engage with in our teaching and how can we critique those in terms of perspectives?

If decolonising the curriculum is important to us then it is important to listen to activists like Angela Davies, Sara Ahmed, Lola Olufemi. The latter’s open letter to the Cambridge English department is particularly useful in decoding the curriculum from a perspective that has been marginalised. She talks about curriculum content, but also operational stuff like the location of books in Library stacks and whether the voices of the colonised are easy to locate. She also talks about who has a voice or is silenced in conversations, and who feels able to have a voice given the attitudes of some staff. She talks about everyday micro-aggressions in conversations, emails, feedback and so on. This connects to Ahmed’s work on working with students to question norms of conduct, and working with them to ask ethical questions about living better in an unequal world as a precursor to creating more equal relationships. This is why she is focused upon being courageous in supporting those who are made marginal or whose engagement with the institution is difficult because of specific barriers.

THREE. What examples are there of a curriculum being successfully ‘reimagined’ for a different or specific social purpose?

See the curriculum work of:

The Social Science Centre

Black Studies at BCU

Work by the Cambridge English Department on decolonisation

Student-as-producer case studies at Lincoln

Papers by: Goodson and Deakin Crick; Phillips et al.

It would also be worthwhile searching for “critical pedagogy in the classroom”.

See also the resources from the recent radical pedagogies symposium at Kent.

On research-engaged teaching, as a precursor to reimagining the curriculum:

Burgum, S., and Stoakes, G. (2016). What does research informed teaching look like? The Higher Education Academy/University alliance. Available at: http://bit.ly/2h2JLke

Healey, M., Flint, A., and Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. The Higher Education Academy. Available at: http://bit.ly/2s5UYbF

Healey, M., Jordan, F., Pell, B. and Short, C. (2010) The research-teaching nexus: A case study of students’ awareness, experiences and perceptions of research. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 47 (2). pp. 235-246. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703291003718968

McLinden, M. et al. (2015). Strengthening the Links Between Research and Teaching. Education in Practice, 2(1), pp. 24-29.

Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2009). The student as producer: Reinventing the student experience in higher education. In L. Bell, H. Stevenson & M. Neary (Eds.), The future of higher education: Policy, pedagogy and the student experience. London: Continuum.

Lincoln University (2013). Student as Producer. Available at: http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/

Neary, M. (2010). Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde? Learning Exchange, 1 (1), p. 2.

Neary, M. (2016). Student as Producer: The Struggle for the Idea of the University. Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives, 5 (1), p. 90.

FOUR. How can the challenges of the ‘traditional classroom’ be overcome when students have such traditional and conservative perspectives of what education is and how it should be delivered?

I understand concerns around students being conservative and potentially wishing only to consume the curriculum for their learning/employability/positional gain, and that this emerges from a highly-assessed and relatively rigid school-based curriculum. However, preparing students for uncertainty requires an ongoing conversation with them about the value of the co-creation or co-production of the world. It would be awful if we used perceptions of students being conservative as a reason for doing nothing. Moreover, sometimes I think we reinforce that perception as a reality because we make assumptions about students not wishing to be more engaged and so we create our classroom environments in that image.

I think we just have to keep on attempting to question preconceptions (and we all have preconceptions that feel safe or enable us to feel safe in the world), and this needs to be done on a departmental or institutional scale. So the bottom line for me is that we need to be courageous in the conversations that we have and to base those on mutuality and solidarity. This is about attempting to enable students to own their own lives and we need to be clear with them about that from our opening conversations with them, before they arrive on campus.

FIVE. In what ways can student input inform and influence the construction of a curriculum?

SIX. Who is qualified to determine what social agenda should be at the heart of a curriculum? Should this be student-led, teacher-led, administrator-led?

We lead it as a community. It is part of an ongoing negotiation. However, the minute it is imposed it loses its veracity. The idea of co-creation or student-as-producer can be situated at the level of the organisation, but what happens inside the classroom has to be negotiated inside that classroom and be based upon agreed, humane values. It may be that the teacher takes more of a role in facilitating that conversation because she is more qualified to facilitate. I wonder whether anyone is qualified to determine specific social agendas at the heart of the curriculum, and therefore my focus would always be upon democratic co-creation, as much as that is possible. I recognise that there are problems with this, in terms of power, student voice, cultures, student experience/expertise, and staff ability to facilitate the curriculum in this way. I think we define our qualification to do this collectively.

So, student input can inform and influence the construction of a curriculum however you and they want it to, from the definition of activities, to the production of content, from peer-review and collaborative project work, to peer-assessment. Ideally this work emerges at the level of individual and social transformation, because we wish to reproduce a less-alienating world. To do so we need to out privilege and power. Here the practices of critical pedagogy offer hope. This may look different for different cohorts, or for students at different levels of study, but the starting point is in negotiation with them about the value of what it is you are trying to do, and what this entails for both your and their responsibilities in the curriculum. Clearly, this may be different for different students and that then becomes a problem, but focus upon a more authentic experience starts from the students.


On the Alienation of Academic Labour and the Possibilities for Mass Intellectuality


Posted by hallymk1

There is a great new issue of TripleC (communication, capitalism and critique) out on Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism.

I have an article in there on academic alienation, which scopes the terrain for the book on which I am working for Palgrave Macmillan. The article also points towards some work I have done on Mass Intellectuality.

The abstract is given below. I have then appended my thinking about the structure for my book.

Abstract

As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students, increasingly encumbered by precarious employment, debt, and new levels of performance management, are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. Incrementally, the labour of those academics and students is subsumed and re-engineered for value production, and is prey to the twin processes of financialisation and marketisation. At the core of understanding the impact of these processes and their relationships to the reproduction of higher education is the alienated labour of the academic. The article examines the role of alienated labour in academic work in its relationship to the proletarianisation of the University, and relates this to feelings of hopelessness, in order to ask what might be done differently. The argument centres on the role of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful knowledge and knowing, as a potential moment for overcoming alienated labour.

The alienated academic

Alienation is a means of critiquing academic identity and academic labour, and of providing insights into the development of alternative forms of praxis. This is a critical way into a discussion of the abolition of academic labour and the role of public intellectuals in the generation of mass intellectuality. In order to connect the realities of the transnational restructuring of higher education in the Global North to academic labour as it is revealed in response to the secular crisis of capitalism, this book offers a mechanism both for articulating what alienation inside the University looks like from the perspective of the academic, and for developing alternative forms of autonomy. This takes the contested idea of the University as a public good one step further, by focusing on the Marxist term of alienation, in order to tie academic autonomy to co-operative alternatives through critical theory. In this way, the book enables student-activists, academics and practitioners in worker and informal education spaces to critique their own practices and to reveal their struggle against objectification or their struggle for subjectivity.

The structure of the book is in three parts. The first part considers the terrain of academic labour, and consists of chapters on Crisis and Alienation. The first details the mechanisms through which the secular crisis of capitalism is restructuring academic labour. The second situates Marx’s analysis of estrangement, alienation, fetishisation and reification against academic labour. It does this in terms of a focus on the activity of production, in its relationship to material, metaphysical and philosophical conceptualisations. As a result, a dialectical understanding of the layers of objectification, separation, mediation and identity-development will emerge.

In the second part, the terrain of academic alienation is analysed, in terms of: Knowledge (the products of academic labour); Profession (academic labour-power); Weltschmerz (academic self); and Identity (species-being). Here the relationship between subjectivity and objectification, use and exchange, and the potential for new forms of humanism related to the functions of academic knowledge are developed. One focus is on the internalisation of specific behaviours that are disciplinary and which become a key outcome for the system of production, with concomitant manifestations of physical and psychological distress.

In the final, concluding section on a terrain for overcoming alienation, there are two chapters on Indignation and Autonomy. Indignation focuses upon the role of intellectual labour in a range of transnational struggles for an alternative form of social metabolic control. Pivoting around counter-hegemonic and anti-power, the focus is upon the movement of dignity in the development of revolutionary subjectivity. In Autonomy, this is developed in order to critique the idea of autonomy, in light of the duality that, first, Capital is the automatic subject searching to secure permanent self-valorisation, and second, that labour’s search for autonomy-beyond-labour – the abolition of itself – makes it the crisis of capital. This work questions the potential for the social, collectivised use of academic labour, through the liberation of socialised skills, practices and knowledge from inside the University.


book launches: Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

Over the next month or so we have three events to discuss and celebrate the publication of Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education as part of Bloomsbury Academic’s series on perspectives on leadership in higher education. These events are taking place at Bristol, Birmingham and then at De Montfort. There is a fourth planned for Cardiff around Easter. Details of these events are given below.

  1. Bristol Conversations in Education – Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education (Tuesday 30 January 2018, with Joss Winn and Joel Lazarus).
  2. Birmingham Autonomous University Collective (supported by MGS, ISRF, Westmere UGS and CPT): Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education (Friday 2 February 2018, with Joyce Canaan, Tom Henfrey, and Jenny Pearce). Register here or by emailing bau.comms@outlook.com
  3. De Montfort University, Institute for Education Futures: Richard Hall, Joss Winn (University of Lincoln) and Sarah Amsler (University of Nottingham) will discuss the recently-published, edited collection, Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. Email me if you wish to attend – it’s invite only.

Blurb from the DMU event…

The context for the book is that higher education across the globe is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What form does intellectual leadership take in addressing these issues and in revealing possible alternatives? The contributors argue that mass higher education is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and long-­term interests of global society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon ‘mass intellectuality’ or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

As editors, Richard and Joss will provide an overview of the context and key themes from the book. Sarah will act as a respondent, analysing the application of these themes to life inside the University, and for educational projects outside. The session will critique intellectual leadership in the university, exploring ongoing efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organizing higher education and the production of knowledge. We will ask: is it possible to re­imagine the university democratically and co­operatively? If so, what are the implications for leadership not just within the university but also in terms of higher education’s relationship to society?

The collection features case studies from academics and students working inside and outside the University. The key features and chapters are detailed at: http://www.richard-hall.org/2017/09/01/published-mass-intellectuality-and-democratic-leadership-in-higher-education/

Reference

Hall, R., and Winn, J. (eds). (2017). Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. London: Bloomsbury Academic. http://bit.ly/2dYsEkDandhttp://hdl.handle.net/2086/12714


dismantling the curriculum in higher education


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday I’m speaking at the University of Greenwich Open Lectures in Teaching and Learning.

The lecture will be broadcasted live via this link:  https://tinyurl.com/critical-pedagogy-2

The slides are appended below the abstract, which is based on this OLH article.

Abstract

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market.

This discussion argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the commodification of the curriculum is central. This enables us to discuss the possibility that an open curriculum rooted in ideas of mass intellectuality might enable new forms of social wealth to emerge in opposition to a curriculum for private/positional gain. One possible way to reframe the curriculum is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces forms of colonisation. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in an engaged and co-operative curriculum, with a focus on praxis.


IEF Seminar on academic labour and alienation


Posted by hallymk1

I’m leading the first DMU Institute for Education Futures’ seminar of the 2017/18 season on Tuesday 31st October from 13:00-14:00 in Hugh Aston, room 2.32.

I’ll be speaking On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality.

The abstract is over on the IEF website.

This connects to the monograph I’m working on for Palgrave Macmillan.

There are some previous notes here.


on weltschmerz and academic ill-being


Posted by hallymk1

In part because I am working on a book on academic alienation, and in part because this week has focused upon the relationship between alienation, overwork, illness and well-being ill-being, the damaging effects of academic labour on both the academic Self as s/he becomes a self-exploiting entrepreneur, and on her humanity as a species-being, have been live for me. I’ve written about this over at WonkHE in terms of academic ill-health. However, more theoretically this might be situated in the relationship between Hegel’s work on particularity and universality, and extended through a more dialectical focus on the internal relations that reveal our subjectivity. Here the realities of an academic life framed by the violence of abstraction are laid bare:

This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations. Marx, Grundrisse.

I wrote previously how this violence of abstraction leads to a sense of academic hopelessness or academic world-weariness. I have developed this into an article for tripleC on the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality. One of the sections of my draft, which I shortened in the accepted version was on weltschmerz, a world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or ennui, and which perhaps reflects a deeper sense of hopelessness about the academic project. Increasingly, in line with Marx’s focus on subjectivity in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the German ideology, I view the importance of this in terms of what it reveals about the particularity of the Self and the universality of the individual as a species-being in the current crisis of capitalism.

What is this world of capitalist work doing to us and can we imagine anything different? The issue, of course, is how to see this as a dynamic process, in order to move beyond alienation, hopelessness, world-weariness. I have reproduced the original section on weltschmerz, below.

Increasingly, academics face an intense sense of weltschmerz; a world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or ennui, and which perhaps reflects a deeper sense of hopelessness about the academic project. This is a recognition that the world once hoped for may never be, and that the concrete world now abstracted for value may never embody our deeper humanity. In fact, in our abstracted world such hopelessness is connected to a loss of autonomy/freedom that is itself rooted in the inability to escape from capital’s domination. Much worse is the fact that the cultural terrain upon which capital works reinforces within us a sense that we are not productive enough, and that this is a sin (Jappe 2013, Kierkegaard 1981). Moreover, our life choices emerge inside a system of structural domination that increasingly alienates us both from ourselves and from our place in the social and natural world.

In response to the revelation that under austerity, academic labour is increasingly a site of alienation, new ideas of good/public and bad/private are projected onto the University (Campaign for the Public University (CPU) n.d., Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) n.d.). It is hoped that the idea of the public good of HE can be recovered against the market. Inside the politics of austerity, academics can either incorporate performativity and control, or internalise the loss of what they hoped the university might become. However, this risks the development of a new depressive position through which despair restricts autonomy and where the overwhelming feeling is one of hopelessness. Addressing such a depressive position requires a different level of grief and mourning to be internalised, so that academics can address their alienation and lack of autonomy in an authentic manner, and in relation to wider society.

The critical issue is that academic alienation is rooted in enforced compliance and coercion, and in a refusal to locate solidarity across a wider social terrain (The Institute for Precarious Consciousness 2014). Instead of loss or grief, competition and entrepreneurial activity are internalised (Kelman 1958), and the induced behaviour is made congruent with the inner, academic self through the signalisation and dressage of performance management (Foucault 1975). As a result, refusal or mourning reflect the incongruence between performance management and a deeper set of personal, educational values.

Our hopelessness is rooted in the academic’s apparent loss of her labour, as it is brought into the service of value. Marx (1844) knew that this is the logic of capitalism that defenestrates labour, in order that it can accumulate autonomy:

Is then only the semblance of an activity, only a forced activity, imposed upon me only by an external and accidental necessity and not by an internal and determined necessity… My labour, therefore, is manifested as the objective, sensuous, perceptible, and indubitable expression of my self-loss and my powerlessness.

Such powerlessness is a reflection of how social or communal spaces, places, identities, and relationships are all means of extracting value or hoarding private wealth. Moreover, with the formal subsumption of higher education under capitalist social relations, this sense of hopelessness is reinforced as we witness just how far the limits to our alienation from space, society and nature can be pushed. As Berardi (2009, 73) argues:

To be recognized in the networked universe one must become compatible with the generative logic of the matrix. What does not belong to a codified domain is not socially recognizable or relevant, although it still exists in the domain of irrelevance, of residuality. It then reacts with rage and despair, in order to violently reassert its existence.

For academics, this is the alienation and subsequent hopelessness of intellectual dispossession that Stiegler (2010, 125-126) argued forms a

toxic economy of regressive tendencies, implemented by consumerism exercising the psychopower of its cultural hegemony through the intermediary of psychotechnologies, in this way controls the becoming of individual and collective behavior, as well as the dynamic processes of the technical system.

Our atomisation and automisation cannot enable liberation, agency or the reassertion of academic autonomy. The technological system that valorises capital itself co-opts and reproduces social relationships that it then attempts to modify or destroy. We are constantly torn between social (re)combination and individual atomisation/entrepreneurialism. The social relations of production extend their domination beyond the space-time of our work, into the space-time of our life, in order to occupy and valorise humanity and kindness. Control enacted through the internalisation and adoption of automatic operational systems forces us to incorporate negative internal objects. The anxieties of capital as a machine, and the anxieties of the University as a node in our machinic whole, are incorporated and projected onto others.

What this entails for the academic/student is an end to self-care; of hopelessness in the face of overwhelming odds; of the apparent impossibility of scaling-up kindness. This demands a culture of omertà, or the silence of those in the know, who must co-operate even as they compete, and thereby generate complex inter-relationships rooted in uncertainty and anxiety (Hall and Bowles 2016). The question is how to negate rather than accept the basis of domination, through the academic fails to realise her potential for happiness. Is it possible to define a new form of sociability? For Marx (1844/2014, 82), this reveals the tensions between marketised, economised existence that is predicated on the ‘increasing value of the world of things’ at the expense of the ‘devaluation of the world of men’. The questions are whether that world can be superseded across the social factory (Federici, 2012), and what is the role of the university in that overcoming?

References

Berardi, Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Translated by Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, with preface by Jason Smith. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

CDBU. 2017. Council for the Defence of British Universities. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://cdbu.org.uk/

CPU. 2017. Campaign for the Public University. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://publicuniversity.org.uk/

Federici, Sylvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.

Hall, Richard and Bowles, Kate. 2016. Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor 28, 30-47. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://bit.ly/2dQMx8X

The Institute for Precarious Consciousness. 2014. We Are All Very Anxious. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://bit.ly/1KnFiOi

Jappe, Anselm. 2013. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 25 (2): 25–37. Accessed April 10, 2017. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2014.906820

Kelman, Herbert. 1958. Compliance, identification and internalization: Three processes of attitude change. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (1): 51-60. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://scholar.harvard.edu/hckelman/files/Compliance_identification_and_internalization.pdf

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1981. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Kierkegaard’s Writings, VIII) (v. 8). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1844. Comments on James Mill. Accessed April 10, 2017. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/

Marx, Karl. 1844/2014. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. London: Bloomsbury.

Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Malden, MA: Polity Press.


published: Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

Working with 20 co-authors, Joss Winn and I have just had published Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. The edited collection forms part of Bloomsbury Academic’s series on Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education.

The abstract, key features and table of contents are noted below.

Abstract

Higher education in the UK is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What and who have led us to this crisis? What are the alternatives? To whom do we look for leadership in revealing those alternatives?

This book critically analyses intellectual leadership in the university, exploring ongoing efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organizing higher education and the production of knowledge. Its authors offer their experience and views from inside and beyond the structures of mainstream higher education, in order to reflect on efforts to create alternatives. In the process the volume asks: is it possible to re-imagine the university democratically and co-operatively? If so, what are the implications for leadership not just within the university but also in terms of higher education’s relationship to society?

The authors argue that mass higher education is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and long-term interests of global society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon ‘mass intellectuality’ or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

Key features

  1. The book critiques the role of higher education and the University as an institution for developing solutions to global crises that are economic and socio-environmental. In this way it offers an analysis of the idea that there is no alternative for higher education but to contribute to neoliberal agendas for economic growth and the marketisation of everyday life. The restrictions on the socio-cultural leadership that emerge inside the University are revealed.
  2. The book describes and analyses concrete, alternative forms of higher education that have emerged from worker-student occupations, from academic engagements in civil society, and from the co-operatives movement. These projects highlight a set of co-operative possibilities for demonstrating and negotiating new forms of political leadership related to higher learning that are against the neo-liberal university.
  3. The book argues that the emergence of alternative forms of higher education, based on co-operative organising principles, points both to the failure of intellectual leadership inside the University and to the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge. The concept of ‘Mass Intellectuality’ as a form of social knowledge that is beyond the limitations of intellectual leadership inside the University is critically developed in order to frame socially-useful responses to the crisis.

Contents

Introduction

  1. Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education ~ Richard Hall and Joss Winn

Section One: Power, History and Authority

  1. Pedagogical Labour in an Age of Devalued Reproduction ~ Stevphen Shukaitis
  2. Co-operation, leadership and learning: Fred Hall and the Co-operative College before 1939 ~ Tom Woodin
  3. Academic Voices: from Public Intellectuals to the General Intellect ~ Mike Neary
  4. Openness, Politics and Power ~ Martin Paul Eve

Section Two: Potentialities

  1. The (im)possibility of Mass Intellectuality: Viewing Mass Intellectuality through the lens of the Brazilian Landless Movement ~ Joyce E Canaan
  2. Still spaces in the academy? The dialectic of university social movement pedagogy ~ Eurig Scandrett
  3. Bradford’s Community University: From ‘Constellations of Knowledge’ to Liberating the ‘General Intellect’? ~ Jenny Pearce
  4. Aesthetic Education, Critical Pedagogy and Specialist Institutions ~ Jonathan Owen Clark and Louise H. Jackson

Section Three: Praxis

  1. Six Theses In, Against and Beyond the University ~ Birmingham Autonomous University
  2. Reconciling mass intellectuality and higher education: lessons from the PPE experience ~ Joel Lazarus
  3. Somewhere Between Reform and Revolution: Alternative Higher Education and ‘The Unfinished’ ~ Gary Saunders
  4. Permaculture education as ecology of mind: the head, hands and heart of transformation ~ Tom Henfrey
  5. Mass Intellectuality from the Margins ~ Sara C. Motta

Conclusion: Politics, Aesthetics and Democracy

  1. Practicing What We Preach? Writing and Publishing In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University ~ Gordon Asher

Dismantling the curriculum in higher education


Posted by hallymk1

On 22 November I’ll be speaking at the University of Greenwich Open Lecture Series, on the issue of dismantling the curriculum in higher education. I will build on my work on academic alienation, mass intellectuality and decolonising the curriculum. The abstract is appended herewith.

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market.

This discussion argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the commodification of the curriculum is central. This enables us to discuss the possibility that an open curriculum rooted in ideas of mass intellectuality might enable new forms of social wealth to emerge in opposition to a curriculum for private/positional gain. One possible way to reframe the curriculum is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces forms of colonisation. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in an engaged and co-operative curriculum, with a focus on praxis.


notes on the cybernetic hypothesis


Posted by hallymk1

I spoke last night at an event hosted by the Breaking the Frame collective. Breaking The Frame is based on the idea that everyone has the right to take part in decisions about technology. The collective aims to break the frame that conceals the politics of technology — to expose the common roots of the wide-ranging social and environmental problems caused by technologies.

My talk followed that of Ursula Huws of the University of Hertfordshire who described the terrain that defines the relationship between the digital and capitalism. There are details of the event, and other events in this series, here.

I was asked to speak about The Cybernetic Hypothesis, which was published by the collective that produced Tiqqun (reparation, restitution, redemption), a French journal with two issues in 1994 and 2015. It was argued that Tiqqun was a space for experimentation (pace The Situationists). It was an attempt at bridging the gap between theory and a number of practices and certain ways of “being together”. At issue was how to recreate the conditions of another community. See The Theory of Bloom and Introduction to Civil War for more information about Tiqqun’s philosophical basis.

Joss Winn’s notes on Reading the Cybernetic Hypothesis are especially helpful in unpacking the concepts developed in this short-ish tract (published in Tiqqun 2, and 43pp in eleven sections). Below, I detail the core themes I wished to open-out, alongside some further reading.

Cybernetics and control

It is important to situate the Cybernetic Hypothesis against the history and development of cybernetics, which was amplified in the aftermath the Second World War across a range of (inter-)disciplines. In particular, it focused upon structures, constraints and possibilities for homeostasis/regulation across specific systems. This focused around work involving to designate what was hoped would be a new science of control mechanisms, in which the exchange of information, four flows of data as real-time feedback mechanisms, would play a central role.

In discussing the cybernetic vision, Peter Galison argues that ‘Cybernetics, that science-as-steersman, made an angel of control and a devil of disorder.’ As a result, resistance (developed in the final three sections of The Cybernetic Hypothesis) has pointed to mechanisms that increase disorganisation, noise, and uncontrollability, such as capacity, panic and fog, as ways to resist silence and control.

Here it is worth reflecting on Brian Holmes’ work on control, in terms of the continuous adjustment of an apparatus, or an environment, according to feedback data on its human variables. The environment is overcoded with an optimizing algorithm, fed by data coming directly from you and me. In this way we might view our use of social media, search engines and the Internet of things is a way of mapping ourselves both into a wider value-chain (with differential spatial and temporal aspects) and into a new political terrain. See Holmes’ work on Do Cybernetics Dream of Digital Resistance?, and this video on the society of Control: The Neoliberal Civilization.

What emerges in this analysis is a complex architecture the lies beyond the surveillant-architecture of the panopticon, where transnational activist networks (operating as geographies of neoliberalism) continually attempt to manipulate the environments in which individuals exist. This takes the form of ensuring risk-management by focusing on governing networks (as opposed to network governance) exerting hegemonic forms of social authority in a new ways. It also ensures that the system acts as a form of semi-autonomous ‘piloting’ (according to Tiqqun), through which new forms of accumulation can be generated rooted in the circulation of value. One key outcome is control of the future for consumption, and smoothing out outliers, which may form a terrain for resistances and rupture (in the form of reparation, restitution and redemption). For Tiqqun:

It is no longer a question of static order, but of dynamic self-organisation. The individual is no longer credited with any power at all: his knowledge of the world is imperfect, he doesn’t know his own desires, he is opaque to himself, everything escapes him, as spontaneously co-operative, naturally empathetic, and fatally interdependent as he is. He knows nothing of all this, but THEY know everything about him.

Thus, we might see the role of cybernetics in the interlocking systems that congeal as capitalism as enabling a set of holistic, self-regulating, self-organising processes, which in turn underpin a stable equilibrium between interdependent elements. It should be noted that the original hopes for cybernetic theory were in part grounded in systems as self-organising, although this potentially leads to increased complexity and noise, and the possibility for rupture. Such ruptures stand against the production of an objectively-controlled, stable society; such ruptures are amplified by slowing or breaking the flows of information and data. This is important because, as Tiqqun note:

That is to say, cybernetics is not, as we are supposed to believe, a separate sphere of the production of information and communication, a virtual space superimposed on the real world. No, it is, rather, an autonomous world of apparatuses so blended with the capitalist project that it has become a political project, a gigantic “abstract machine” made of binary machines run by the Empire, a new form of political sovereignty, which must be called an abstract machine that has made itself into a global war machine.

Chile/CyberSyn

In her brilliant MIT PhD, Jessica Eden Miller Medina described the use to which the Chilean state, under Presidents Frei and Allende (and then repurposed under Pinochet), put computers as technologies of the state. She refers to these technologies as “state machines.”

These new record-keeping technologies and practices, including early computers and tabulating machines, in turn allowed state officials to plan economic policies and simulate their effects; map the national population statistically with increasing accuracy; and keep detailed inventories of national resources. The resulting databases in turn shaped future economic policies and their underlying theoretical frameworks, the behavior of international lending agencies, perceptions of government efficacy, and levels of public satisfaction. They also created new forms of state control.

Rationalization, organization, coordination, and, at bottom, tecnificacion not only played a crucial role in Frei’s economic policies for development, but also the social changes outlined in the “revolution in liberty” and the president’s dream for modernizing the state so that he might create a better society.

Crucial here was the focus on the relationship between technical relations of production and political vision. Miller Medina quotes President Allende’s speech welcoming visitors to the Cybersyn Operations Room:

We set out courageously to build our own system in our own spirit. What you will hear about today is revolutionary – not simply because this is the first time it has been done anywhere in the world. It is revolutionary because we are making a deliberate effort to hand to the people the power that science commands, in a form in which the people can themselves use it.

However, inside Chile, there were problems in realising a new social terrain, because of: the relationship between deliberative democracy and the realpolitik of power relations; the messiness of economic planning and information at different levels of state and society, from the factory/community to central government; and because of the messy relationship between economic planning and social revolution. That said, analysing examples like CyberSyn, the involvement of the FLOK Society in delivering Ecuador’s National Plan for Good Living, and the Lucas Plan, each offer alternative ways of exploring the relationships between human activity, human needs and technology.

Relationship to capitalism

The development of cybernetics is a systemic, structural and secular response to the issue of maintaining stable forms of accumulation and avoiding crisis inside capitalism. It is a response to the question of how to develop new forms of value without a fatal disequilibrium arising? For Tiqqun:

It is the tool by which capitalism has adjusted its capacity for disintegration and its quest after profit to one another. A society threatened by permanent decomposition can be all the more mastered when an information, an autonomous “nervous system” is in place allowing it to be piloted.

As a result, cybernetics acts as a lubricant for circulating and extracting value, using control devices to maximize commodity flows by eliminating (or at least reducing towards zero) risk and slow-down. One key issue is the relationship between value and machinery (or state machines), which tends to generate surplus population and to generate popularisation/proletarianisation. Harry Cleaver argues that this forces us to consider the conditions under which people become surplus to a capitalist system based on the imposition of work both waged and unwaged. As Amy Wendling notes this is crucial because “the social tyranny of exchange-value is so comprehensive that it determines how things are made and even what is made […] Capitalism does not care if it produces quantities for use; it cares about producing profit.”

One way of reframing this, which we can imagine emerging from an analysis of cybernetics in Chile or Ecuador, is to recognise how productivity reduces people to appendages of the machine through Capital’s autonomy over the General Intellect. As Marx writes in volume 1 of Capital:

The productive forces… developed [by] social labour… appear as the productive forces of capitalism… Collective unity in co-operation, combination in the division of labour, the use of the forces of nature and the sciences, of the products of labour, as machinery – all these confront the individual workers as something alien, objective, ready-made, existing without their intervention, and frequently even hostile to them.

We may consider resisting through the recognition of our collective knowledge, skills and capabilities as forms of mass intellectuality, which might be liberated in those unalienated areas of our lives yet to be colonised by capital. This leads us towards a struggle against work. As Moishe Postone argues, this is fundamental because the machining realities of the world we are in

opens the possibility of large-scale socially-general reductions in labor time and fundamental changes in the nature and social organization of labor. Yet these possibilities are not realized in capitalism.

Resistance

In discussing a co-operative pedagogy of struggle, I argue:

The fight against forms of cybernetic control is not one of destroying or refusing high technology, but rather focuses upon using technology and technique to reveal the internal, totalising dynamics of capitalism. From this position, alternatives rooted in self-organisation and a societal complexity based on variety, improbability, and adaptability emerge. For Tiqqun, this forms the negation of the cybernetic hypothesis through a return to what it means to be human. A critical role for educationalists using technology inside-and-against the cybernetic hypothesis is to develop educational opportunities that highlight the development of counter-narratives of commons, co-operation, sharing, and openness, and against the separation and alienation of money, price, quality, and competition. As Tronti (p. 105) argued, at issue is the extent to which the forms of control that pervade human existence inside the social factory can be revealed and alternatives critiqued so that ‘capital itself [] becomes uncovered, at a certain level of its development, as a social power’.

Here we remember that Kautsky in discussing the class struggle argued:

The economic machinery of the modern system of production constitutes a more and more delicate and complicated mechanism; its uninterrupted operation depends constantly more upon whether each of its wheels fits in with the others and does the work expected of it.

Here there is an argument that the complexity of the wheels make up the capitalist machine offer moments of slow-down and machine-breaking. For Tiqqun, this did not mean a better, or more democratic use of technology inside capitalism. It meant a different set of social and humane formations:

a cascade of devices, a concrete government-mentality that passes through [inter-subjective] relations. We do not want more transparency or more democracy. There’s already enough. On the contrary – we want more opacity and more intensity.

Attacking the cybernetic hypothesis – it must be repeated – doesn’t mean just critiquing it, and counterposing a concurrent vision of the social world; it means experimenting alongside it, actuating other protocols, redesigning them from scratch and enjoying them.

For the collective moments of reparation, restitution and redemption were to be sought: in the increase in moments of panic disequilibrium; in the generation of noise; in becoming invisible inside the system; in the duality of sabotage and retreat; through deliberate slow-down; through humane, rather than technologically-mediated encounters; by increasing the space for opaqueness and fog. It was argued that “Speed upholds institutions. Slowness cuts off flows.”

This reminds us of Marx’s conception in the Grundrisse of the social cost of productivity and technological intensification:

The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. (If labour time is regarded not as the working day of the individual worker, but as the indefinite working day of an indefinite number of workers, then all relations of population come in here; the basic doctrines of population are therefore just as much contained in this first chapter on capital as are those of profit, price, credit etc.) There appears here the universalizing tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production.

For Tiqqun, then, the point was widening the space for autonomy.

It gives itself the means of lasting and of moving from place to place, means of withdrawing as well as attacking, opening itself up as well as closing itself off, connecting mute bodies as bodiless voices. It sees this alternation as the result of an endless experimentation. “Autonomy” means that we make the worlds that we are grow. The Empire, armed with cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it alone, as the unitary system of the totality: it is thus forced to annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous. We say that autonomy is for everyone and that the fight for autonomy has to be amplified. The present form taken on by the civil war is above all a fight against the monopoly on autonomy. That experimentation will become the “fecund chaos,” communism, the end of the cybernetic hypothesis.

There are some outstanding issues which need to be addressed as part of this discussion.

  • Issues of intersectional oppressions, which are reinforced cybernetically, including the emotional and psychological toll this takes. This is then related to reproduction of white, male, hetero-normative power.
  • The role of accelerationism: see Jehu’s discussions over at The Real Movement.
  • An engagement with issues of proletarianisation, and working class composition, autonomy and power. This leads to a discussion of the abolition of alienated-labour, across the wider social terrain.
  • How do we use narratives to generate forms of solidarity, and in order to offer examples of rupture and alternatives? Here I am interested in the tactics offered by PlanC in generating a machine for fighting anxiety.

NOTE: I have written about cybernetics in the context of the relationship between Autonomist Marxism and eduction, and also in terms of emerging technologies and commodification. There are useful resources in the reference lists.