Author: Jana B

Abundance

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This is part 1 of the (anti-)work(no)shop series Against academic monocultures: rewilding the academic ‘self’ running this year (September ’25-June ’26). Sign up to learn more; you can participate in as many or as few sessions as you wish. Or, you can just follow the prompts/suggestions set out here.

What is there a lot of?

When we think about transformation, we often think in terms of lack. We tend to start from a place of insufficiency; from the perception that we are missing something, that we are poor, that there is something we need more of.

Lack shapes our desire: in the contemporary world, we are always wanting. Whether in things, concepts, objects, or qualities. Whether we want or are found wanting, we train our perception on what is missing.

What if, instead, we focus on what there is a lot of? This prompt asks you to look around you and notice abundance. Things that are plentiful. Things that are many.

Odds are that your mind is first going to go to what there is too much of. You may, for instance, observe with some irritation that there is too much trash on the pavement. Or too many people on the train; too much noise that they are making, preventing you from concentrating on this exercise.

Try, if anyhow possible, to move past this perception. Yes, it is true that for many of us there are too many distractions. Yet, to call them to mind almost immediately conjures up what we would like to replace them with: onerous tasks with moments of leisure; fools with people we love, respect, and are respected by; rain with sunshine. By doing this, we have almost automatically slid back into the perception of lack, where every element of abundance turns into something we want to have instead. Instead of this, try focusing on what there is a lot of – without deciding whether this is good or bad.

You can start from a simple exercise of counting – how many flowers are in this room? How many mobile phones? How many objects that are pink in colour? You can also perceive abundance in living environments. Are there a lot of leaves on the ground? Are there many butterflies in this field?

What this prompt enables us to perceive is that the world is significantly more diverse, and radically abundant, than we normally notice. Even more, what we perceive as “a lot” or “enough” or “too little” is, at the end of the day, a social and cultural invention (as the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, among other things, teaches us). The training of perception on “too much” or “too little” over time blunts our sense for the diversity of the world, the one surrounding us as well as the one within.

What is there a lot of within? 

As you reflect on this, over the coming week(s), you can also think about what this abundance – what there is a lot of – requires, and what it has displaced. In order to be many of X, what are the Ys, Zs, and Qs that are absent?

If you would like to share your thoughts, reflections, creations, or listen to others share theirs, here is the link to the Zoom meeting on 3 October, 2-3pm UK time.

Mercure Brigstow

Blog, history, Politics, Uncategorized

To be fair, odds are I would have gone to any counter-demo in any city I happened to be in, even if it had been in front of a hotel I didn’t know, had never been to, and was unlikely to. This is just what I do. In fact, I initially thought this was a different Mercure in Bristol – one farther from the centre – which seemed more in line with the government policy towards asylum seekers, which is to get them out of sight and out of mind, so they can be usefully demonised. It was not until the day before the demo that I realised which Mercure it was, and that I had been there before.

Bristol held me. The first time I came to Bristol (save for a stopover in 2007, when I took a walk on the Quayside, saw a film at the Watershed, and was instantly hooked) was in 2014, for – initially – a seminar that was part of a job I hated and regretted taking. What sounded like a dream – tenure-track postdoc, secure, well-paid in a notoriously precarious academic environment, etc., with the possibility of staying on in what was billed as one of the bastions of social democracy – wasn’t; I was bullied and felt lonely and isolated in the sterile, conformist Danish social environment, ripped out from the precarious but dynamic, ever-changing, international, circle of friends and acquaintances at CEU. My primary relationship buckled under the pressure of another international move, combined with my disappointment in the job, and life, that everyone felt I should be settling down in. I felt very much the opposite, but struggled to see anything in the future that did not involve some version of the same. The only bright spots involved the possibility of extended research stays in Bristol and in Auckland, two of our project partners, so when a work event got scheduled in Bristol for February, I decided to bring a larger suitcase and not return until spring.

I still remember that first night. I don’t know why we were staying at the Mercury – I think the organisers at Bristol decided it was convenient for downtown and probably fitted the budget. I remember it being one of the nicer hotels I had stayed in – years of precarity combined with the desire to travel meant that I stayed in very cheap hostel and hotel accommodation well into my 30s; while Denmark was the first time my disposable income meant I did not have to worry about money, the country itself was prohibitively expensive, meaning that I was still having the more-or-less same lifestyle, just paying much more for it. It was not the hotel itself, however, but sitting outside it, on the Welsh back itself – I had snuck out for a cigarette (sorry!); the night was surprisingly mild, or at least that is how it appeared to me, my blood frozen by the unforgiving Danish northern winds – watching the glistening lights over the canal, that I felt happy for the first time in months.

Bristol melted me. It was not only my blood that had turned to ice over that first winter in Denmark; being in the southwest made me feel human again. It wasn’t only the casual smiles of staff in coffee shops*, or friends I (quickly, and thank you, you know who you are) made; it was also the fact that it was the only place (and to this day, even after more than ten years in the UK, even with the small exception of London) where I felt truly welcome. It was – still is – the only place where people would (occasionally, and casually) ask if I was from Bristol, rather than where I was from. In honour of that, one of my social media profiles still says I am from Bristol.

This, in sense, is true – I was born in Belgrade, but Bristol made me. The next time I came in autumn, I saw Nick Cave’s ’20,000 days on Earth’ – at the Watershed, where else** – went back to my room, and made a decision on how to live the next ten years. The rest, as they say, is history. While most of that history involved living elsewhere (Cambridge, London, and, for the past five years, the north-east), Bristol always felt like coming home.

It is not only that I came at the right time, at the cusp of the upswing of gentrification, but before the major part of the London fallout began. I lived everywhere – from a shared flat above a shop (yep) in Gloucester rd. (a lease I had taken over from a friend who has split up with her boyfriend) to a shared house in Horfield where I rarely saw anyone else to a horrible HMO in Clifton where they insisted the boiler room was an acceptable place to sleep; I stayed in friends’ flats, houses, gardens (usually lovelier than the boiler room). I went everywhere, walking, cycling, on the bus, and the railway. In between, I bid ny days in Copenhagen and elsewhere, waiting to return to Bristol.

It is also true that I was well-positioned as an outsider-in – I was doing research on how universities were engaging with local communities, so this gave me good access to both, at the time when impact had not yet begun to strangle the milder, less instrumentalised public engagement. This does not mean I did not witness, and was explicitly told about conflicts emanating from this; as elsewhere, universities (and particularly elite universities) are almost by definition conduits of gentrification. Even from this perspective, I (almost) always felt welcome; Bristol has no suspicion of ‘outsiders’ the way many other places in England do.

It is also not the proverbial ‘mildness’ of the southwest, memorialised in Banksy’s grafitti over Hamilton House. Yesterday, I watched that mildness scale up very quickly when crowds of angry, shouting men decked out in St. George’s flags showed up on either side of our lines, in front of the Mercure Brigstow. No pasaran.

As I said, I would’ve gone to any anti-fascist demo, anywhere. But the fact that someone is trying to prevent people who are, in a very different but very real way, seeking refuge at exactly the same spot where I found it*** – the Mercure Brigstow – meant there was no place I would have rather been yesterday.

*I write this with very much of an awareness of cultural expectations of emotional labour, especially in the so-called ‘hospitality industries’. While Denmark has a bit of a reputation for staff explicitly not performing it, which we can also attribute to decent labour conditions and thus absence of need to work for a tip, tipping (especially over-the-counter) was not a thing when I first got to Bristol either. People still chatted away in ways that, at least to my human-contact-starved Scandinavian eyes, seemed genuine.

** Of course, I also saw quite a few films at The Cube, including If a Tree Falls, another film that has been very influential on my orientation.

*** I’ve picked up on social media that one of Britain’s racism-loving publications has apparently used a similar angle to justify the far-right racist attacks on hotels hosting asylum seekers – apparently it’s “understandable” that people who have had their weddings there feel aggrieved to see the same places used to host migrants (as you can imagine, with the requisite set of adjectives/qualifiers added, incl. “off public purse” – despite the fact that it is explicitly the policy of the British government to ban asylum seekers from working – and “lounging”, despite extensive reports on how horrific conditions for asylum seekers in hotels actually are). I don’t think the kind of dour-faced conservatism that sees your ‘joyful’ occasion (= wedding) and someone else’s different kind of ‘joy’ (= being able to escape explicit oppression, persecution, starvation and likely death wherever it is you are escaping from) as mutually exclusive or even hierarchical (and if the latter, then in my view it certainly wouldn’t be the posh weddings that should be prioritised) is worth commenting on, but I do think there is another kind of resentment fuelling the far-right that does merit more attention. Given some things we know about the social composition of the British far-right (leaving aside for the time being the social composition of those who fund and direct it), I think it is more likely that their resentment stems from their own (perceived) inability to afford the exact posh weddings in the exact same hotels that the said article (which I won’t link to) is nostalgically referring to. Which only confirms what we already know, which is that one of the aims of far-right mobilisation in the UK is to divert attention of the working/exploited precarious class away from the (very needed) economic redistribution and onto attacking migrants and minorities.

On refusing to be a spectator

Blog, climate change, higher education, Philosophy of social science, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, Uncategorized

I had a dream.

No, no the Martin Luther King kind of dream, by which I mean I do not think this one will be used to retroactively construct a politics of reconciliation where none are due.

A real dream, like, sleeping n’all. To clarify at the outset, this isn’t in and of itself a matter of particular exceptionality: I do dream relatively regularly, as long as I am not extremely stressed, which now happens rarely and only for very brief periods.

I also pay attention to dreams. This started when I was a child, and reading Freud‘s “Interpretation of dreams” gave me a sense that there is a world beyond our own that we are, nonetheless, (almost) unique authors of. This fascinated me, as it opened the question of existence and multiple planes of reality in ways different than fairytales and fantasy had, and also in ways different than physics (here’s something I’ve written on relational ontology in dreams).

I can also lucid-dream (this isn’t intentional, just something I picked up along the way, mostly as a way of waking myself up from nightmares).

I also learned to ask dreams for guidance.

Yet, my sleep has been surprisingly dream-free of lately. I noticed this about a week ago; I first attributed it to being on holiday (= in Britain, the accepted expression for an out-of-office email responder), which means I have more time for free-flowing thoughts and thus less processing ‘backlog’ to do while asleep, but then I realised it’s probably been close to a month, if not two.

Then I attributed it to the intensity of the events in Belgrade earlier in June (as I’ve described, this did involve a week of severely disrupted sleep), but that in and of itself should only increase the backlog, and thus the quantity of material for processing. More to the point (did I mention I can ask dreams for guidance?), I can ask – by which I mean induce (no, no drugs involved, in case this is what you’re thinking) – dreams, and my subconscious delivers. So I did.

Nada.

Until last night.

The second thing to note is that nothing happens in my dreams – they are usually elements of a conversation or interaction, fragments of a feeling, observations, but there is no major “plot”. I dream of the weather, of course – of storms, hurricanes, floods – but even that is increasingly rare; whatever prophetic meaning those dreams had has been either fulfilled or rendered obsolete. Now, we can talk about whether climate change is an “event” in the Badiousian sense, but at any rate it does not involve (in my dreams, at least) a large amount of conscious agency (I cannot control the weather, for instance).

Most of the time.

Jonathan Lear’s (2006) “Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation” opens with these words of Plenty Coups, a Crow elder:

When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.

Lear is exceptional (I mean by standards of white men in the Angloamerican academia) insofar as he refuses to see this as an expression of something else – a reflection of ‘depression’, a metaphor – and asks: what would it mean to take Plenty Coups’ words seriously? In other words, what does it mean for nothing to happen?

What kind of ontological disaster erases the possibility of history?

***

In this dream, I am queuing in a coffee shop. It is a nice place, one of the sort of places people like me tend to feel naturally good in – it’s decked out in wood, spacious, with lots of light & lots of plants. As I approach the counter, though, I realise I am signing up for a petition to obstruct/block a theatre performance – the petition is on a paper napkin and I am signing it in ink, but I already see a few other names (not clear which) above mine. I move back to the front room, as I learn that the venue/café workers are on strike. The tables on the front room are covered with sandwiches – stacks of white subs, mostly wrapped in clear film; these are here to avoid crossing the picket line by getting something from the café.

I don’t know if anything else happens in the dream; my recollection of it ends there.

At first, I was perplexed. I am not a huge fan of theatre – I occasionally see plays but it has certainly not played a major part of my life in any meaningful sense, real (compared to cinema or gigs/concerts, for instance) or symbolic (certainly, I’ve written on performativity and I’ve read my Shakespeare and blah blah but I do not, in fact, see the world – including the social world – as a “stage”).

Sure, I was able to recognise elements of direct organising, but sandwiches?

Digging into the associative chain, sandwiches reminded me of the food redistribution service I was part of while in San Diego; last night, I observed a similar street sleeper distribution service on the rainy, blustery streets of Belfast. Which brought to mind a question:

–> Why have we not organised something similar at Durham University, with food redistribution on the streets of Durham/Newcastle?

Sure, many people take part in different similar initiatives (e.g. Community Kitchen) across the region, but why are we not using the institution as a hub for this kind of thing? It would be a faster, better way to redistribute privilege than either vague gesturing at “widening participation” or feeling upset or guilty about the fact the social composition of the university is at odds with that of the town (something that, by the way, conveniently entirely erases ‘international’ students, who are apparently classless).

Which brought me to the following question:

What would it really mean to interrupt the performance?

–> What if we refused to reproduce the university in response to the human rights violations we see every day?

When students in universities across the UK last summer declared occupations in response to the institutional and national complicity in genocide, there has been some (in my mind, insufficient) support among university staff; but, for most part, the business of the university continued as usual.

What if we stopped the performance?

What if, instead of politely queuing to get our coffees and then sitting back and observing the show, we brought the whole damn thing to a halt?

What if nothing stopped happening, and something happened instead? Would our hearts lift off the ground? (I think so).

***

For a while, there has been – on and off – talk about ‘boycotting the REF’, but it seems that the principal reason (most) people would end the REF is because they do not like it, rather than because ranking and ordering is itself a practice run for ranking and ordering human beings.

Like grading (I’m sorry, Brits, marking).

Like “undeserving migrants”.

Like “sure, Gaza is so sad, but I have to worry about my kids’ scholarships and my mortgage and I’m afraid of getting it wrong if I say something, I mean, this cancel culture has really gone too far and and and”

Which, really, brings me to the following question:

–-> Why have we not declared indefinite strike and refused the reproduction of the university (which, of course, is the means of reproduction of classed, gendered [increasingly, with the new legislation, exclusively cis-gendered] subjects for inclusion into mechanisms and institutions for the (re)production of the militarised state which, as we can so clearly observe, is the guarantor/guardian of the continued extraction of capital, human, fossil, financial, near and far, at no matter what cost?

But anyway, that’s just analysing a dream.

***

One of the usual anarchist/organising principles is to respond with “well, why don’t you do it yourself”. Two observations.

  1. Not everyone is equally positioned to act: as a migrant (and migrant rep), and someone who only recently acquired UK citizenship, I am starkly aware of the contrast between freedoms for those who have the privilege of “full”, meaning unqualified political membership, and those who do not (for instance: most migrants on General Work visas cannot afford to lose their jobs without at the same time losing the right to remain in the UK. In this case, they would also be ineligible for benefits – see “no recourse to public funds” – so much for the myth of the migrant benefits claimant, btw). In this sense, who can afford risking to lose their job, let alone who can afford to risk arrest/conviction, depends not only on financial security, but also – and primarily – on migration status. In this context, it is a durable shock to me that my British colleagues – or others with secure status – are often the most reluctant to act, and most likely to invoke different excuses (see above).
  2. Earlier this summer, I spent a period in Serbia, where a full-scale popular anti-authoritarian revolution/movement has been happening since November (in case you missed it in the news, no idea why this would happen). The movement started as a series of student occupations, but university staff have – almost immediately, and almost unequivocally – expressed solidarity with students, including by stopping teaching (union laws are a bit different in Serbia, but I do not have time to get into this). In response, as a threat/retaliatory measure, the Serbian government (a significant chunk of public universities are financed dominantly, if not exclusively, from the budget) has stopped/curtailed their salaries (the equivalent of pay deductions in response to industrial action in the UK context). For some, this means that they have had 100% pay deductions for three months. Yes, that’s right, British comrades: not three days; not three weeks. Three months.

Excusez-moi, but this makes it a bit harder than usual to hear excuses from significantly better-paid university environments that “people just cannot afford to go on strike”.

For that matter, Serbian public universities are not composed uniquely of artistocracy (remember, we had communism) or plutocracy (they don’t work at universities, they run the country) who can safely afford to dispense with a three-month paycheck; of course, class privilege does exist, and is perhaps most obvious in higher education. What does make a difference is a more distributed/equalised access to housing (not necessarily equitable as such, but nothing compared to the classed horror that is British housing), more affordable childcare and, of course, a strategic and solidaristic approach: choosing when, who, and how can take risks, and of what sort, is a vital part of ensuring any action bears results.

But don’t mind me, I’m just recounting a dream.

***

Let me leave you with the words of CrimethInc, rather than my own:


For the civilian born in captivity and raised on spectatorship and submission, direct action changes everything. The morning she arises to put a plan into motion, she awakens under a different sun-if she has been able to sleep at all, that is- and in a different body, attuned to every detail of the world around her and possessed of the power to change it. She finds her companions endowed with tremendous courage and resourcefulness, equal to monumental challenges and worthy of passionate love. Together, they enter a foreign land where outcomes are uncertain but anything is possible and every minute counts.

***

This, for those of you who keep asking, is what it means to stop the performance. This is what it means to refuse to be a spectator, of your own life, of others’, or of deaths, others’ as well as, inevitably and eventually, your own.

All I am saying is: there should be more names on that sign-up sheet.

Revolutionary time

Blog, history, Politics, Uncategorized

I don’t recall when was the last time I slept throughout the night. The barricades are almost literally under my window; the fact I am between two occupied faculties means I spend most nights at one of the blockades, then being woken up intermittently by garbage trucks (which are sent to clear out the road blocks) and the police (which comes to break the blockades, beat and arrest people). There is also the general noise of a protest movement – whistles, cheers, slogans. I generally let the bin people do their work (in Serbia, these kinds of workers often don’t have a choice), not the police. I got used to the sound of protest, though not sufficiently to not wake up.

A month or even a few weeks ago, this would have been a problem.

For a long time, I’ve been reluctant to write about Serbia, or even answer questions about what is going on. For ethical reasons, I believe in platforming people who are on the ground, and while I am from Serbia – and from Belgrade – I have not lived there for a long time. I resisted being pinned down (domained, as I’ve called it a lifetime ago when I still cared about things such as knowledge production) as being ‘from Serbia’ or a ‘Balkans expert’ or even a ‘post-socialism scholar’ (despite the fact I’ve written a book on Yugoslavia and its successors). Whenever someone asked me for an interpretation or an opinion, I kindly pointed to people who are actually in the region and who I thought knew what they were talking about.

Almost equally importantly, I believe the usefulness of ‘interpretation’ is very limited. The intellectual tendency to focus on knowledge production – on writing, publishing, speaking – in crisis can contribute to the perpetuation of status quo; this isn’t to endorse a simplistic ‘words vs. deeds’ dichotomy nor to elevate action beyond the status of questioning (after all, we must think about what we are doing), but to note that, for most of the past decade, most contexts I have encountered have had an overabundance of critique, and a corresponding dearth of action. I have, in fact, written about that too – a whole PhD and some – but in the past year(s), I’ve become very reluctant to offer any interpretations, and have instead focused on calling upon people to act.

Now I must, though, not because I have an investment into the position of an ‘intellectual’ (you can read about my departure from that position here and here), but because the situation calls for it. Not because it needs interpretation, but because it exceeds it.

So, confession number one: this situation has exceeded my interpretative capacity.

I’m conversant in roughly five disciplines, so this isn’t for a lack of options. Sure, I can give you political philosophy names for what’s going on, and sure, I can also give you a Marxist perspective, or maybe a slightly longer-durée historical/political economy explanation. I can waffle on about semi-periphery, extractivism, necropolitics like a champion (I have). Like a retired lute player, my mind occasionally touches the floating signifiers of the concepts others have used: Badiou’s ‘event’…Žižek’s working through of Lacan’s subjective destitution with a ‘radical act’…Butler’s performative theory of assembly…Honig’s morphing of inoperativity (Agamben) and power of assembly (Butler)…and Clover, Osterweil, everyone on riot.

Unimportant.

None of the concepts match stuff I have seen.

Here, another confession.

Yes, as far as identities are concerned, I am an anarchist, and yes, I am an anthropologist, and yes, I am also a Buddhist, but I have always been ambivalent about the idea that people are inclined to do good in situations of crisis. I believe people are inherently capable of acting in any number of ways – selfish, altruistic, appropriative, non-proprietary, exploitative, generous – and that it is a complex set of circumstances and evaluations decides how they will act in specific situations. Hell, my current research – Uncategorical imperatives – was motivated by the belief we’d better find out how we tend to act (or: morally reason about action) in crises before climate change-driven exploitation and wars collapse into global disorder.

Whoops.

But (trigger warning: a Bladerunner ‘time to die’ monologue)

What I have seen on the barricades (blockades) in Belgrade surpasses what I know about social movements, informal organisation, or human behaviour. Don’t get me wrong – I was in protests since my mid-teens, including in 1996/7, 2000, and many, many other. I have been in protests in Budapest, the UK, the US. I also visited the occupied faculties in Belgrade this winter. I’ve been in protests in early June. I’ve watched, half-crazed with worry, the footage of the 15th March and 28th June protests.

This is different.

I have seen examples of mutual aid, solidarity, restraint, and self-organisation that go beyond what textbooks on mutual aid, self-organising, and community building tell you. I have seen examples of courage, protection of the weak, and having each other’s back that I have only seen intermittently before, except that they are now sustained and unquestioned. I have seen or heard, narrated, first-hand, forms of creativity, ingenuity, and resistance that I have read about, but never thought possible. I have seen anarchist theory, in practice.

Confession number three. I never thought this could happen.

Yes, I read the reports, and for a long time, all of that was encouraging, but not impossible. Everything fit the predictable range of human behaviour, one that follows identifying a common enemy, and organising around a similar cause. There was a foreseeable scope of outcomes.

This is different.

Please don’t try to explain, as I still can get angry. It’s different.

One of the things I remember reading (can’t recall the reference – might’ve been Rosa Luxemburg?, and it anyway no longer matters) is that the revolution does not involve only changing the system; it involves changing you. You will, literally, not be the same person after the revolution. We are no longer the same selves, and this is coming from someone who already believes identities are an illusion, and not a very interesting one.

But it is still tangibly different.

I know people tend to lose themselves in historical moments. (Here is Badiou’s event again). I’ve read endless accounts of transformative experiences, from 1917 and 1968 (both in Yugoslav republics – also, my mum participated in it – and beyond), to Occupy, to first environmental protests, Seattle, Gezi Park, Tahrir, you name it. I understand that. But this isn’t a ‘change’, be it ‘regime’ or ‘social’, or even ‘system’. I’ve witnessed happenings – some personal, like love, some interpersonal, like death, some communal, like concerts, some spiritual – that have come close to transcendence. This is not it.

It is also not the (a)voidance of doubt, of incertitude, or anything that seems like discomfort. It is the realisation that this is what we do now. This is how we live. There is no ‘end’ or ‘goal’ or even ‘victory’. There is no teleology.

This is revolutionary time.  

Confession number four. I am afraid.

Some days ago – I do not recall when, where, with whom – I was in a protest, and, as is my habit, tried to get the person with me to shift to the fringes. You see, I am uncomfortable in crowds, and my strategy – for close to 30 years now – is to avoid being kettled, so I can quickly run if the cops descend. It has kept me mostly safe, with one small exception.

Now I stand. Not because “the movement” or “the revolution” is transcendent, worth sacrificing for, or because I’ve lost myself in the adrenaline of the crowd. Because this is a choice. A choice that came earlier, and slightly differently, than I expected (I honestly thought I’d die fighting masked government agents in the UK or the US, but here we are). I stand because this is what we do now, and in perpetuity.

P.S. Thought it important to add a few remarks, lest people start thinking I’ve completely lost critical capacity: (no, I’m just very underslept :)) – critical in the sense of critical friend, not as someone who is looking to form an intellectual position. These are meant to highlight some of the areas for further work, especially if/when the blockades morph into more long-term forms of organising:

  • the fact homophobic language (crowds occasionally chant or spray “gay” as derogatory term for Vučić) regularly makes an appearance should be addressed immediately. homophobia is not funny, not even as a throwback to that mid-90s high-school playground vibe. the country should really move on from there, not only because nobody wants to go back to mid-90s, but also because homophobic violence is still alive in Serbia.
  • the resurgence of ethnic nationalism, not only in terms of rhetoric (which, even if it is your thing – it certainly isn’t mine – is entirely and utterly politically useless, given that the only national(ist) project Serbia could conceivably pursue entails trying to reclaim Kosovo, which no-one in their right mind would want to do), but also in terms of (again) shouts and slurs; e.g. shouting the derogatory term for Kosovar Albanians at police (reminder, the predecessors of those forces were actually engaged in committing crimes against Kosovar Albanians, so the slur is not only racist/chauvinist, it is self-defeating). Same goes for shouting at police to “go to Kosovo” – it should really go without saying that organising against police repression in your own country makes little sense if you are at the same time encouraging the police to go and repress the people in another.
  • glorifying masculinism and masculinity – while elements of this tend to be prominent in all protest movements that feature substantial physical labour/force (e.g., flipping over heavy garbage bins, etc.), it tends to erase (a) the fact that most of this work is *also* done collaboratively (in fact, the most recent one I’ve witnessed was performed by a very gender-mixed team) and (b) the relevance of organisational, logistical, and communication labour, most of which seems to be performed by women and non-binary folk. this has been accompanied by an unprecedented platforming of men (as ‘heroes’, speakers, leaders, experts, commentators, whatnot), often with names, while women mostly appear as generic category (“young women [devojke]”, “student [studentkinja]”). While there are good reasons to stick to anonymity in times like these, this should be equal across the board. There is a good lesson to learn from the Zapatistas here, whose ‘Revolutionary law of women’ was the first and integral part of the Chiapas rebellion, not an afterthought.

Three ghosts of British higher education

Blog, Conference presentations, higher education, Philosophy of social science, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, Uncategorized
[These are the more-or-less unedited notes for my speech at the event Multiple Crises of Higher Education, held on 20 May 2025 at Queen Mary's Mile End Institute, and organised by the fantastic Accounting and Accountability Research Group. Queen Mary's branch of UCU have also been at the forefront of fighting and writing about redundancies in the sector, and maintain an excellent and well-organised webpage, so give them a follow alongside AARG (the best acronym in the sector?)]

To start, as philosophers do, from examining a concept, a crisis means a point of shattering; sense of rupture; breaking point, crack in the fabric of reality. To say something has reached a crisis is to recognise that from this point there is a division into multiple paths. From a personal perspective, to reach a crisis means we can no longer go on as before, or as usual; a crisis usually invokes a reconsideration of what the project (whatever project we are committed to – a movement; an ideology; a job; a relationship; an idea) is, and whether it is still worth doing or living.

So when we start from the diagnosis that higher education is in crisis, we are in fact acknowledging that multiple facets of what we thought higher education is are no longer viable. Some of these (also mentioned in the description for this event) include the sector’s funding model; its approach to academic labour, including benefitting from precarity (insecure, temporary contracts) and competition (for research funding, for prestige); and its relationship to other important sectors of society (government, the military, industry, and so on). But where do we go from here?

To foreground the question of where we go from here is also to acknowledge – or argue – that turning back is no longer possible. This is the starting point for my remarks today. I draw inspiration from Adam Phillips’ On Giving Up (am currently reading the book, but the link is to the – open access – essay in the LRB), which opens with Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms: “from a certain point there is not more turning back. That is the point that must be reached”. To say we are in crisis, among other things, is to say that we have reached that point. From here, Phillips asks: what are we willing to give up in order to go on living?  

Philips’ question reframes giving up as a fundamental element of worth. As worth is the key of valuation and as such of any kind of counting, including acc-counting (sorry), I believe it is tantamount to understanding how we talk about value. In this sense, I intend to perform an analysis that sketches in more explicit terms this intersection between moral and economic; between what we give (and expect to receive in return), and what we give up on.

Giving up/going on

I want to argue that any analysis of a ‘crisis’ that harbours the illusion that turning back is a possibility is one that is fundamentally committed to maintenance of the status quo, and thus counterperformatively denies the very diagnosis is purports to establish. Indeed, it is quite possible to argue – in analogy with how some Marxist critics have described the 2008 economic crisis – that there is, in fact, no crisis at all, and that the system is working exactly as intended. The major thing I will be arguing we need to give up on, in this consideration, then, is our commitment to the system as it is, given that as it is it is a system working as intended.

So from there, we need to reorient ourselves, perhaps towards a different system, perhaps towards one working towards different ends. To do this, however, we need to rid ourselves of three ghosts. Three ghosts, a bit like in Dickens’ The Christmas Carol.

The first ghost is the ghost of the Empire. Now, some of you may be surprised by the appearance of this ghost. After all, haven’t we comprehensively purged this ghost by decolonising our curricula, by extensively renaming our halls and libraries, even – gasp! – in some cases, by enquiring into our links with slavery?

But this ghost rests barely disguised in the ideal of the superiority of British higher education, the idea of higher education as an ‘export’, and the almost unquestioned assumption that we should reap profit from international students. For what is the source of appeal of British higher education for (most) foreign students today if not the accessibility and usefulness of an education in English (the language of global trade, the fact we owe to the British Empire) combined with the opportunity to take endless photos in front of different vestiges, artefacts and similes of that very empire, from the Big Ben to Harry Potter-esque halls in Oxford, Cambridge and Durham? What is the ambition to be on top of league tables if not a transmogrification of the desire to sustain a hierarchy that was built on a monopoly on trade routes and cotton mills, and now continues through degree mills? Finally, what is the belief in the ‘superiority’ of British higher education but an inflated ego projection of our own (yes, I am British now) colonial past, which in turn enables if not validates the racialised and classed hierarchy of the UK immigration system, the system that requires people to prove their ‘worth’ in order to be exploited as much as (or more than) British nationals?

The second ghost is the ghost of welfare state. Now, quite contrary to the previous, the ghost of the Empire, this one is the kind of ghost we repeatedly and obsessively summon. We do this in ritual invocations of the famed social contract that created the NHS, or in the postwar (meaning WWII) expansion of higher education, enabled by the Education Act in 1944 but usually attributed to the Robbins report (1963), which opened higher education to “all who qualify, by ability or attainment”.  

The most important contribution of the report, perhaps less visible because it was bordering on the obvious, was to, for the first time, conceptualise higher education as a system and thus a distinct domain of public policy. In 1964, the University Grants Committee officially became part of the newly created Department of Education and Science (DES). Instead of a set of disparate universities and colleges, with their histories, traditions (or lack thereof), and institutional trajectories, higher learning became a matter for the nation-state – and, consequently, its development deemed relevant for the well-being of its citizens (citizen-subjects) on the whole, not just for the (still small) proportion of those who attended the (equally relatively small) number of institutions. This is how the massification of higher education became the main ‘lever’ for state intervention into university governance. The essence of the ‘social compact’ between the university and the state, thus, was always a tradeoff between expansion and funding.

It is important to note that this social compact intentionally excluded international students, who were exempt from no tuition fees since 1962. It is also important to understand/acknowledge how it occurred in the first instance. The expansion of higher education was not some benevolent act of enlightenment (well, neither was the Enlightenment a benevolent act of enlightenment, after all 😊); it was a strategic investment into upskilling the workforce so as to enable UK – no longer an empire, at least by its own lights, though still very much keeping overseas territories – to compete in industrial production, including that of weapons and surveillance technologies. This is explicitly acknowledged in EP Thompson’s edited Warwick University Ltd., which documents the analyses and reactions to the revelations made during the student occupation of the Registry of the University of Warwick in 1970. The files students found revealed widespread labour surveillance and military contracting, including to Bristol Sideley Engines, the predecessor to British Aerospace Limited, which which provides jet engines to Saudi Arabia and Israel (if you’d like to see the continuing links between universities in the UK and arms manufacture/trade, I strongly recommend this). This critique, however – just like Thompson himself – stopped short of reimagining higher education that would not be beholden to national (and, increasingly, offshored) industry, even if that means arms industry.

This also tells us something about the vestigial dream of a Labour government restoring this ghost of a welfare state to its former glory. Recent policies suggest Labour has no intention of dusting off this model of the social compact. More importantly, however, it tells us something about the ethical tradeoff involved in the dream of higher education as part of a welfare state – whose welfare?

The third ghost, and this is going to be most difficult for some of you to hear, is the ghost of social mobility.

From this post.

This brings me to the diverging (or converging, if you’re a fan of strict visual metaphors) rates of graduate debt and graduate premium.

There are different policy solutions proposed to address this, and today we have heard some of them. What we fail to comprehend, however, is that the graduate premium itself is based on the idea that there should be an exploited and underpaid class of (under)labourers. It makes sense to remember that the concept of ‘social mobility’ assumes that there is a class to escape from (move out from), usually the working class, and a class to aspire to, usually the middle class.

The fact that the ‘graduate premium’ is stagnating or decreasing apart from in a few professions/sectors (and we know what those sectors are – finance, fossil fuels, big tech) tells us little about the intrinsic ‘value’ of higher education (as if there were a thing such as intrinsic value) and more about wage suppression across sectors.

After all, in an equal society, where we would all be paid the same, what would be the reason to have a graduate premium?

So that people can pay off debt; and this brings me to ‘the system is not in crisis, it is working as intended’.

Why should we expect a graduate premium?

Not long ago, I encountered the same question in a session on cooperatives.

It was run in the local community/anarchist centre, and I came by to hear what people thought setting up a cooperative would really be like. When it came to the distribution of income, I mentioned that I thought it fair that people be paid the same kind of money for the same kind of work, and that that was the principle I tried to institute in one of the collectives I had been part of (The Philosopher).

But what would people with PhDs do? Asked one participant.

Be paid as everyone else, I said. Independently of qualification? They asked. Of course, I said. (They did not know I had a PhD – two, in fact).

But why would people with PhDs agree to that, they protested. After all, they paid so much for their education, they surely have to earn more to pay that off!

And that, my friends, is why we cannot have nice things.

Because as long as we cannot accept – or even conceive – that knowledge (by which we mean tokens or credentials of knowledge) should not bestow material privilege, as long as we accept inequalities in employment, as long as we cannot even imagine that a ‘professor’ could be earning the same as a ‘lecturer’ and as a ‘teaching assistant’; let alone as a cleaner or a nurse, or, if we want to bring this closer to university contexts, as an IT technician – we are both naturalising and reproducing this hierarchy. This hierarchy tells us that of course higher education should confer a privilege, and of course there should be an (over)exploited and (under)paid class, and of course British higher education bestows that privilege (particularly luxuriously), so of course we have the right to ask people to pay for it, and foreigners to pay even more. Unless we are willing to give that up, we are not only tacitly but, what is I hope by now obvious, explicitly accepting that higher education is an instrument that serves to reproduce and maintain the status quo. If anything, it is intended to maintain graduates tied to low-paid, precarious, and exploitative jobs – think Starbucks – that they cannot get out of, even if they would want to, because they have too much debt. And there is one thing people like that are unlikely to do: create any kind of meaningful, longer-lasting, opposition.

So what we need to give up, in order to go on, is the fantasy of exceptionalism – institutional, sectoral, or personal. That universities (as institutions), higher education (as a sector), or the fact we are in them, makes us special. And even if we are committed to status quo – and it remains my belief that many academics who would call themselves ‘radical’ or ‘progressive’ are, in fact, deeply committed to it, not least because they cannot imagine alternatives – it is clearly breaking down. So we cannot go back. The question is, where shall we go forward?

P.S. Some people asked me about other stuff I had written on the topic. Most academic publications are listed (in chronological order) under Articles and books; I also blog and write invited op-eds. Some of the stuff directly relevant for this one are:

On the relationship between academic freedom, autonomy, and the state:

On political economy of higher education, including the relationship between extractivism and knowledge production:

On the relationship between social change, social inequalities, political subjectivities, and education policy:

and, of course, my book:

Bacevic, J. 2014. From Class to Identity: Politics of Education Reforms in Former Yugoslavia. Budapest and New York, NY: Central European University Press.

On elephants

Blog, Philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, Uncategorized

From Ayya Khema:

Once Pessa, an elephant trainer’s son, came to see the Buddha and said to him: ‘I have no problems with elephants. They do exactly as they appear to want to do. They have an intention and I can see that intention and then they follow through with it. But I have a lot of problems with people. They say one thing and do another.’ The Buddha said, ‘That’s right. The elephant lives in the jungle, but the human being lives in a mental jungle.’ People say one thing and mean or do another. The worst of it is that we’re not even aware of it. We think that is the way it ought to be done. We think that this is convention, custom or tradition, and we don’t thoroughly examine our thoughts, speech or actions.

(“Being Nobody, Going Nowhere: Meditations on the Buddhist Path“, 1987, pp. 37-8)

For various reasons this quote has been on my mind a lot over the past few days (the book, incidentally, is also a lovely introduction to Buddhism/meditation for those looking to get better acquainted with either or both). It is not only that intentionality works differently with different sorts of beings, but also that the environment – for humans, the mental jungle – can sometimes seem poised to ‘scramble’ the relation between intention, speech, and action.

Less of a problem if you’re an elephant, I guess.

Here’s a longer snippet – also important to pay attention to the distinction between pity and compassion, the first, Khema says, the feeling of being sad for, the latter being sad – as well as, conversely, happy, joyful, etc. – with.

Future of Higher Education: remarks for the 2025 British Sociological Association Presidential Event, 23 April, Manchester, UK

Blog, climate change, Conference presentations, higher education, Politics, social theory, theory teaching, Uncategorized

Hi all,

I want to start by thanking Rachel Brooks and the British Sociological Association for the invitation, as well as my co-panelists for being present. I want to thank all of you who have chosen to be here this afternoon, not only because, as we tend to say in a slightly facetious mode at conferences, there are so many other things you could be doing – by which we tend to mean, not only other panels you could be attending, but also taking a walk outside, catching up with friends, or sleeping – but because, in a slightly different way, there are other things you could be doing. At the very end of my remarks I will come back to what some of these things are. 

There are, however, many other people and things that contributed to all of us being here today; the workers involved in organising this conference, from administrative staff to volunteers to cleaners and caterers; cooks making breakfast at the hotel this morning; the pickers at coffee plantations who make our coffee; workers in steel factories who smelted the material that goes into the rail tracks that carried the train that brought me to Manchester. Some of these things we tend to think about as being about higher education; others, less so.

This isn’t, if you were wondering, a covert argument for the ‘agency of things’ or STS-informed approach to higher education. Rather, it is to ask what we are doing when we talk about the future of higher education in a sociological language, in a space such as this, at a conference such as this? My work over the past decade has, among other things, been about how these forms of categorisation, domain-association and positioning – that is, the ‘aboutness’ of things – make certain forms of recognition and or/ignorance and invisibility (im)possible. My remarks today will be building on this.

When we talk about higher education, we tend to talk about funding, by which we mostly mean public, that is, tax-derived state funding, but we do not talk about the amount of funding UK universities are receiving from arms companies & other military technology manufacturers, including those currently involved in the bombing of Gaza, as research, investments and scholarships:

In the UK, the absolute champion in this category is the University of Glasgow, with £115,247,817.20  (value of partnerships with the world’s top 100 arms-producing companies in the last 8 years); Manchester is at £6,700,328.00 (see research from Demilitarise Education https://ded1.co/data/university). That is A LOT of scholarships for Palestinian students, as one of the people interviewed in the excellent documentary The Encampments says: I’d rather you didn’t bomb me, keep your scholarships.

Nor do we talk about the proportion of university staff pensions (yes, USS, the fund many of us defended so vigilantly in 2018 and have been defending since) still invested in fossil fuels. 

We talk about the reproduction of social inequalities, by which we mostly mean, in Paul Willis’ perennially-relevant formulation, why working class kids get working class jobs (or why working class kids don’t make it to Oxbridge), but not about the fact that a lot of those other ‘prestigious’, ‘elite’, and non-working class jobs working class kids should presumably aspire to are in finance, digital technologies including surveillance (which I think Janja may be saying more about), or in fossil fuels. So is it OK then – as that butterfly meme says, “is this social mobility?”. 

Not least, we talk of decolonising, by which we mostly mean making curricula a tiny bit more reflective of the diversity of knowledge production, usually by wedging in a few nonwhite people – the approach to teaching social theory I”ve described elsewhere as “white boys + DuBois” – but we do not talk about the continuing and new forms of extractive colonialism enabled, among other things, by treating international students as raw resources that can be mined for money (or sometimes money + cheap labour, as in the graduate to job market conversion), something I presume Aline will be addressing. 

This, of course, is not a particular moral failure of ours. All forms of knowledge presuppose forms of ignorance. This does not make us ‘bad’ people, or at any rate much worse people than many similarly privileged. As the Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön once I think said, we are like passengers in the backwards-facing seat on a moving train; we only see what we have just passed, never what is in front of us. Or, if you prefer a more familiar name, you can think of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, looking at the past but nonetheless propelled by the winds towards the future. 

This connects to one of the main motifs of my academic work over the past decade, the question of non-prediction: what kind of futures do we become unable to see? As I have argued, it is particularly our embedding in institutions of knowledge production and the concomitant commitment to habitual ways of seeing, making, and relating to the world (among other things, by going to conferences) that makes us unable to see some kinds of futures. In the remaining two and a half minutes, I want to try and give you a brief view from the front seat. 

The world is now firmly committed to at least 2 degrees C warming by the end of this century, and that is if we left all fossil fuels in the ground tomorrow. We are used to thinking of climate crisis as a crisis of nature, with images of melting ice caps and emaciated polar bears, but this is a social and political crisis. Rising authoritarianism, including Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy is climate crisis; the genocidal destruction of Gaza is climate crisis; and what is known as the refugee crisis is in fact a combination of famine- and industrial agriculture-induced migration combined with a broader drive towards retraditionalization in wealthy countries, including policing of reproduction and gender boundaries, amplifying anti-immigrant resentment and breeding more authoritarianism. 

What is the future of higher education in this kind of world? When we talk about ‘higher education’, we have to acknowledge that the idea of higher education as a sector – as an organised and regulated activity distinct from specific institutions such as universities – is supervenient on the idea of a state (first, the imperial/colonial, then, increasingly, nation-state). In this context, the future of higher education involves reconsidering our relationship to the state. Clearly, in this context, just asking for more money from ‘the government’ won’t do. What is there to guarantee ‘higher education’ would not become handmaiden to authoritarianism, funnelling people into extractive jobs and positions (or ensuring their compliance by encapsulating them in cycles of debt), and amplifying racism and environmental degradation? Higher education institutions across the world will, increasingly, face a choice. Remaining part and parcel of the system that (re)produces it, that enables this to function – or?

So, to return to my initial remark, in this context, I want to ask – what else could you be doing? If you weren’t here, where else could you be – at a protest, an occupation, a community food distribution? Or ‘shopping’, digitally consuming/doomscrolling while performing reproductive labour at home? Because your answer to that will determine the future of higher education.    

Five good things

Blog, climate change, Media, Politics, Reviews, Uncategorized

The day after the Conservative Party won the 2019 UK election, I came up with a trick. It was the culmination of several weeks (if not months) of prolonged exhaustion and creeping despair, as I watched parts of the UK’s supposed ‘left’ systematically tear away at the country’s only progressive political current in years, and its only shot at creating a vaguely decent society – you know, a society that would not systematically humiliate its members – dissolve in the toxic concoction of incurable conservatism (small c, this time), parochialism rendered even more obsolete by a self-aggrandizing belief in the centrality of the UK to the world (historical or contemporaneous, irrelevant), and genuflection at the tiniest display of power, authority, or hierarchy so absolute that you would be forgiven for thinking it genetic. In other words, this set of nasty gammonish tendencies – to my surprise, seemingly equitably distributed across the political spectrum – proved a fertile ground for a campaign whose ostensible target was to prove Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable, and the actual to make sure he would not be elected. Add to this that many of us were fighting on several fronts – in one of the rare moves I explicitly disagreed with, my union (UCU) decided to run another round (third or fourth? in two years) of strike action, thus making sure we would have to split time, energy, and resources between election campaigning and picket lines (for why it is impossible to unify the two causes – even in such an obvious case – see above). For me, it was the beginning of a very dark period of five years – of fear (of what was going to happen), of anger (for the fact so many people, including those I believed I shared basic ideological affinities with, allowed it to happen), and disappointment, not so much because Corbyn didn’t get elected but because I saw, possibly for the first time, in such stark terms: most people would rather suffer in a world they know than risk the chance of building a different one. In that moment – the day after, still sniffly from the downpour I got caught in during the last desperate attempt at canvassing the evening of the election – I Tweeted something along the lines of “whatever else you do today, go out and look at some trees. Stand by the river. There are things bigger than politics. There are things older than the Conservative Party.” (I’m paraphrasing, not only because I have no desire to log back into Twitter but also because the actual formulation is not particularly important.)

I remember being slightly surprised by the volume of positive reactions (kindness and self-care, to put it politely, not being exactly my default style of interaction on social media back in the day – the platform has its own dynamics and patriarchy failed spectacularly at instilling in me the tendency to please other people), but mostly because what seemed to me amalgamated commonsensical advice – decenter your own feelings; step away from social media; in times of great turmoil, seek solace in things you know are eternal – seemed to strike a chord with so many people. It was probably the first time I truly understood how many people were never taught basic self-soothing and regulation skills, but also how much of a difference prior experience of system breakdown/state collapse made in terms of knowing how to cope (together with a group of other ex-Yu scholars, we reflected on this here).

Five years later, I know better than to offer unsolicited advice :). I am also aware that people, especially people in the US, have long traditions (obviously, most of these reaching way before settler colonialism) of sacralization and reverence for nature. Hence, it is not my intention to share this particular trick, not least because I tend to think people who are receptive to this mode of relating to the world either already do it and practice in similar (even if superficially or nominally different) ways, or would otherwise need to change perception in order to avoid this becoming yet another ‘trick’ to allow them to stay, in fact, deeply plugged into the circuit of capitalist (over)production, including affective (a bit like fintechbros using mindfulness to continue building extractive infrastructures whereas being actually ‘mindful’ would inevitably lead to the realisation your mode of living is directly harmful to many beings). However, the memory of many positive reactions to that original Tweet in 2019 – at a time that was a time of anger, and disappointment, and despair for many in the UK – made me want to share a different technique, one that I hope can not only help people dealing with anger and despair but which I also believe will come in handy in knowing how to orient ourselves in the future, especially as the world burns.

Why this isn’t a practice of gratitude

The technique is a related one, but different in terms of its orientation. It is called ‘five good things’, and, true to its name, it asks you to think of five things. Do not be tempted, however, to think this is about your life, or what you have, or ‘things’ in the sense of material objects. In other words, you are not meant to name ‘things’ such as “well, I at least have a job” or “my child is healthy” or “I ate a really good burrito yesterday”. All of these examples – while important – are either cases that are meant to invoke gratitude (so, basically, either outsourcing responsibility to a different/higher power, or, in some forms, acknowledging the fundamentally underdetermined nature of the universe and the role of luck – in other words, all of these things could have turned out differently) or to affirm your own capabilities, usually expressed in and measured by money or equivalents/proxies – power, prestige, admiration (under present circumstances, chances are that the burrito you ate is a burrito you bought, in which case your sense of satisfaction comes from your purchasing power. This is somewhat different if the burrito was e.g. part of a community kitchen or food-sharing event, which would hopefully lead you to recognize your relation to and interdependence with others, but this is not clear-cut either – not least because of the often disproportionate amount of cooking/caring labour performed by women in some of these settings).

Instead, think of five things that are beautiful, and good, and true.

It’s really important that they are all three. Many things are beautiful (at least by culturally dominant/conventional standards) without being either good or true. True in the sense of being true to form, rather than correspondent to the actual state of affairs; for instance, it is almost impossible for a rose as a flower to not be ‘true’ (unless it’s an artificial rose), but it is quite possible for a rose being given as a gesture to not be ‘true’ (as in not being motivated by genuine feeling). Similarly, it is possible for a plant to not be ‘good’ – for instance, if it is a plant introduced to eradicate other plants in the area, or to eliminate sources of food for diverse other organisms.

(There is, of course, a humongous philosophical background literature on defining each of these terms, and especially their interrelation/combination. If you are not familiar with it, I could probably suggest starting with Schopenhauer and Kant, or even Plato, but I do not think this is either necessary or helpful. Every human is capable of reflecting on what it means to say something is beautiful, good, and true; namedropping dead white men can sometimes distract from it, and in most cases under present circumstances turns into an exercise of academic prowess, rather than a way to think with others).

You can think about concrete instances as well as things, generically; sometimes, one will be more appropriate, sometimes the other. For instance, I tend to think that bunnies, in general, are good, and beautiful, and true; I may see a particular bunny for which I will think this, but given that bunnies in the form in which I encounter them are relatively hard to individuate, odds are I will continue thinking this for the bunny kind, rather than a particular bunny. Equally, I tend to think friendships are a good thing, but odds are that if I think of any friendship (or relationship) at any point as beautiful, good, and true, I will be thinking about a concrete relation.

(Again, masses of philosophical, theoretical, and empirical work – my own included – on how we categorise groups, genera, members, and how we form judgments based on inclusion/exclusion, derivation, and boundary categories. Much interesting if you are a social ontologist. Possibly less if you’re not).

Have you thought of five things that are beautiful, and good, and true?

Now fight like hell for those things.

Not to ‘have’ them or to keep them; but to enable them to exist in exactly that form, in their own goodness, and truth, and beauty.

If you ever find yourself in a period of despair, think of these five things. At the end of each week, see if you can come up with five. Sooner rather than later, you will begin to realize that the things worth fighting for are not those the majority of the people are taught to fight about.

I may publish my list from time to time.

Further inspiration:

Maria Popova shared at the start of this week Louise Erdrich’s poem “Resistance” – I love Erdrich but I have not read this one before. It is also related to another project I am developing, so seemed perfectly resonant.

Another element of resonance – as I was finishing this blog post I tuned into The Philosopher conversation between Isabelle Laurenzi and Lida Maxwell on Maxwell’s new book, “Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love“. It seems that the awe with the world that Maxwell traces in the relationship between Carson and Dorothy Freeman as well as much as their relationship to the natural world very much resonates with the feeling I hope these exercises will inspire – the combination of wonder, dedication, and a commitment to change the (human) world. I’m yet to read the book (as I found out recently, living in the UK while being temporarily in the US creates massive issues in terms of e-book licensing), but very much looking forward to it.

Speaking of books that are about the sense of wonder, this book – “A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship With Nature” by James William Gibson (2009) – is probably among the nicest, most beautiful (both in terms of style and in terms of content) books I’ve read recently. I also learned many things (not least, that Paul Watson, the founder of Sea Shepherd, volunteered as a medic for the American Indian Movement protesters at Wounded Knee, as well as about RFK’s environmentalist past, which makes his public health policies even more bizarre); the book is a remarkable feat of sociological analysis that manages to not be condescending. This book is definitely one of the things that are beautiful, and good, and true.

Incidentally, I also ended up watching again Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (2022), which has a scene in which August is asked to make a list of good things. I think this is a good list! It is also one of the best films made about the process of turning anger and frustration into collective will/self-determination; while depicting a truly dark incident, it is a good example of things beautiful, good, and true.

Soundtrack:

Moby ft. Benjamin Zephaniah – Where is your pride?

Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) – New World Water

Reading (on) resistance

Blog, Politics, Reviews, Uncategorized

I’ve been in the US for about a week. The feeling of utter shock, panic, and disarray among people – qualitatively different from what could be discernible back when I was across the pond, qualitatively different from the previous Trump regime, qualitatively different from many previous instances of ‘unprecedentedness’ I had written on (the Covid-19 pandemic, the Brexit referendum, Trump’s 2016 election victory, the breakup of former Yugoslavia) – is tangible. Good centrist liberals and their projections are falling like planes out of the sky, the latter, by the way, not a metaphor at all.

It is easy to be both dismayed and cynical, but both are, ultimately, defense mechanisms. To give into collective panic/despair is (I guess) to at least temporarily redistribute anxiety by letting it dissolve into a collective feeling. To knowingly smirk with a “we have, in fact, told you so” may be easy for someone like me, who works on the politics of non-prediction, and is relatively protected from dismissal, deportation, or incarceration, but it is a way of insulating yourself from the collapse that is very real, and very present, for a lot of people. Given that I am, for better or worse, in a plethora of social networks that are dominated by academics, and give that academics are more

likely to be like this

than like this

let alone like this

the least I can do, then, is to offer some resources for resistance, from the perspective I have (east-central European/transnational, UK-domiciled migrant; woman*; educated, middle-class; some experience of movement, organising, etc.) and with the resources (and constraints) I currently have. None of this is meant to be exhaustive (maybe just exhausted :)) and hopefully only adds to the bountiful and excellent resources, networks and initiatives comrades in the US have been building for years.

The Emperor is truly naked – but still an Emperor

I think what most people are experiencing now is best described as cognitive dissonance about the state. On the one hand, they are becoming rapidly aware that what they believed are the stalwarts of liberal democracy (the rule of law, checks & balances, accountability and the like) are barely scarecrows that can be blown away overnight, and the crows are no longer scared. On the other hand, they are beginning to realise — if they had not before — what truly unchecked power looks like. (Every leader, potentially, is a dictator; the fact the US has a presidential system, with high weighting on executive power, just makes it more likely there will eventually be one not bound by convention to hide it). This means that, for a lot of people, the state is simultaneously all of a sudden very absent (FAA being just the most obvious, and immediately high-risk, case) *and* very present (both in terms of intrusion into domains most Americans are taught to associate with ‘privacy’ – finances – and in terms of threats of further deportation, incarceration, and retaliatory dismissal).

For those lucky enough to be able to think about (rather than just react to) these developments, this poses a problem because it places them in the uncomfortable zone most people have been politely educated out of: thinking about what to do when the state fails in a way that does not entail asking for more state. Surprise! There is a whole group of political theories that engages with exactly this problem. It starts with an A, ends with an M, and is not animism. Even better, many of the classical (and more recent) works in this line of thinking just end up being magically available, online, for free. Two particularly good websites for this are here and here. I know, wild. Worth thinking about, if nothing else, because it also turns out many of these will probably give you good ideas for how to face the next couple of years.

In addition to or beyond this, or if you just want to get the hang of self-organising without having to confront your own ideological limits (but if you do: try here, here, or here), these are some of the handy reading tools I’ve selected a few from the list of my favourite books in 2024, and added a few I believe to be most useful for the present situation.

  1. For brief inspiration: To change everything (CrimethInc)
  2. To see the work done by collectives across the world, including during the previous Trump administration: Constellations of care: anarchafeminism in practice (ed. by Cindy Barukh Milstein)
  3. To remember that anti-neoliberalism does not equal nationalist protectionism: Fields, factories and workshops (Petr Kropotkin)
  4. To learn from organisers who have been doing it for a long time: Shut it down: stories from a fierce, loving resistance (Lisa Fithian)
  5. To learn how to organise and not burn out (and also not be terrible to other people if you do!): Let this radicalize you: organizing and the revolution of reciprocal care (Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba)
  6. To not forget that there is no way to address a political crisis without addressing the climate crisis (and, of course, capitalism as the root cause) – but that there are so many ways (already tried and tested) to do it: The solutions are already here: strategies for ecological revolution from below (Peter Gelderloos)
  7. To recall that some people have, in fact, foreseen this: The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents (Octavia Butler)
  8. To acknowledge that when you say “someone should do something” that someone is, in fact, you: Mass Action (Rosa Luxemburg)
  9. To remember that there are many other places where this, and worse, had been true for a long time: We are not pawns, we are people who rose against the regime (Jwana Aziz)
  10. Again, CrimethInc: tools and tactics

This should be more than enough to start from. Get reading.

*I realized, upon reflection, that this term is a bit inaccurate – I am comfortable with ‘woman’ or ‘she’ in languages where gender is primarily grammatical (so where chairs, stones, and concepts have a ‘gender’), both for convenience and because it is more difficult (but not impossible) to associate grammatical gender with hierarchical difference; but I have never felt any degree of affinity with the cluster of ideas around supposed feminine ‘essence’, even if they do not veer into biological determinism, reductionism, or transphobia. It is thus that in these languages – and contexts, UK being one of them – that I tend to use ‘they’ or ‘she/they’.

On books and hope (2024)

Blog, climate change, Philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, Sociological fiction

This is the continuation of the habit I have kept for a few years, which is to write a post on books I have read that year. That said, “habit” is hardly a deserving name for something I did two years I a row – in 2021 and 2022 – and then dropped in 2023: the year had been too filled, both with ups and downs, and the context in which I read some of those books too convoluted; it is also possible I read more than I usually would (having been on research leave in spring) – or less. I wouldn’t know, as I gave up on keeping a list; I gave up on many other things, including possibly the last vestiges of ego-investment in the academia, which also meant I gave up on reading for competitive, pedagogical, or perfunctory reasons. In this context, coming up with a list of all the books I have read would have seemed a bit counterperformative; not least, the time I would have normally spent writing up this post – the quiet days after the end of term, as Xmas and New Year drag themselves over the hill – was spent flat out from Covid (which I finally caught, one and so far only time) and the ongoing pressure at work.

This year, I am coming back to this, but in order to share the books that brought me hope. This may seem like an odd choice for someone whose approach to knowledge always emphasised the ethical and political responsibility of recognising tendencies in the present that may lead to harmful and disastrous futures – even if that entailed coming to terms that, in not-insignificant ways, our present (in)action may be rendering certain kinds of futures impossible. This, for most of my life – starting with the rather famous moment when, aged eight, I argued to my father that Yugoslavia will fall apart – meant having the courage to be a ‘killjoy’, not only (or primarily) in terms of disrupting the cozy consensus that scaffolds some of the most odious things about contemporary social life – consumerism, patriarchy, xenophobia and racism – but also by pointing out, ceaselessly, that bleating starry-eyed about the revolution to come was, in very real ways, preventing us from bringing it about.

To toss the concept of ‘hope’ about might, from this perspective, seem at best a concession to sentimentality, in the same way in which I dutifully bellow ‘Merry Xmas’ back at people; at worst, like capitulation to the abscondence from the daily work of not reproducing the same systems that we (so eloquently) critique, which intellectuals of my sort are prone to, especially when we reach a certain career (st)age. I, at least, have always swatted away questions of hope or ‘exit’ (as one of my PhD examiners exasperatedly sighed towards the end of my viva: “Then there is no Aufhebung?”), in the same way in which I used to swat away questions of the sort of ‘What is to be done?’ before I decided to start doing less of knowledge production and more of…other stuff.

Why hope, then? Put simply, one of the rare justifications I find nowadays for continuing to do “academia” is that (nominally, at least) it entails two things: time to read (one might say, an obligation) and a platform to tell others so (as well as what not to read). And everyone needs a bit of hope. This is particularly important as I see growing numbers of (even educated) people fall for trash arguments along the lines of Stephen Pinker’s ‘Better Angels’ or other kinds of Pollyanna-ish optimism that usually serves to bolster capitalist, extractivist, or neocolonial approaches to ‘business as usual’. Thus, to be able to see ‘hope’ without, at the same time, ‘unseeing’ all things that render it impossible (the war in Gaza; continuous extraction; runaway climate crisis) becomes a difficult exercise in discernment and balancing – something that, in fact, academics of my sort are uniquely trained to do.

That said, not all of the books included in this list count as ‘academic’ – and most would not But they are what sustained me over the past year. I hope they can be of service to you.

Revenant ecologies: defying the violence of extinction and conservation (Audra Mitchell)

This is a book that challenges powerfully the thinking about extinction and conservation that dominates Anglo-academia. Particular points for taking a swipe at the ‘extinction industry’ of academic writing, and the books (many of which I admit I had enjoyed!) that write about extinction from a seemingly universalist perspective. On the other hand, Revenant Ecologies seems at times to take almost excessive care to avoid this. Regardless, it is a careful, engaging, and mobilising analysis that aims to avoid the po

As we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson)

I’ve admired Betasamosake Simpson’s writing for a long time (and also music! How cool it is to be a social theorist who also writes and performs music). This book is a reminder that undercurrents of resistance run deep, but also that freedom is a praxis – a constant one, at that.

Our history is the future: Standing Rock vs. the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the long tradition of Indigenous resistance (Nick Estes)

QED. Well, maybe there is a bit of a theme running through this year’s reading. But in a year that felt so long, and hopeless, and dark, I needed (printed) reminders that people have lived through (and survived) worse ordeals, and that they not only did not accept but actively challenged and fought against the colonial order and its successors, including extractivism.

Ecology of wisdom (Arne Naess)

Naess is one of those people who are larger than history gives them credit for – he is usually styled as the ‘founder of the deep ecology movement’, but Naess was a philosopher (prefiguring a lot of analytical thought), an ecologist, a spiritual thinker (a Buddhist and firmly committed to nonviolent action), and a mountaineer. ‘Ecology of wisdom’ is a compendium of his writings; thanks, in part, to masterful translation, the prose just flies off the page making it more like poetry (I’ll admit that the combination of analytic philosophy, Buddhism, and ecology is particularly likely to chime with how I feel and think about the world). Nonetheless, I find it hard to think anyone would not be charmed – at least anyone who still has a heart, and soul, in some part of the magical world we inhabit.

And if you need a reminder how to (re)discover it, these two are highly recommended: Reclaiming the wild soul (Mary Reynolds Thompson) and  Enchanted life: reclaiming the magic and the wisdom of the natural world  (Sharon Blackie). I *really* like Sharon Blackie’s writing – it manages to be equal parts environmentalist, witchy, psychoanalytic and folksy without becoming too bound by conventions of any.

Foxfire, wolfskin: and other stories of shapeshifting women (Sharon Blackie) is a wonderful retelling of some of the classical European folk tales, with a gender twist that does not come across as pedagogical. I absolutely adored it – and even got it for a few friends.

A natural history of the future (Rob Dunn)

This is a great (admittedly, popular science) book on the impacts of the ongoing climate change and other human-induced changes on the biosphere. It brings in new arguments and perspectives, even if you’re a seasoned reader of the genre, and I’d say it’s informed by deep ecology whilst retaining a pleasantly matter-of-factly tone.

Claros del Bosque (Maria Zambrano)

I used the two unforeseen trips to Serbia in springtime to delve into the rich body of non-English philosophical and theoretical works in translation, something I dearly miss in bewilderingly anglo-centric UK (even major works in French or German are increasingly translated with a delay, if at all). I chanced upon the Serbian translation of Zambrano’s Claros del Bosque (forest clearings? ) in one of my favourite (independent) bookshops, but given that 2024 was also the year in which I decided to refresh my Spanish, I also got the original (the combination proving the right level for my Spanish reading skill). Zambrano (a metaphysician, essayist, and Spanish republican) was yet another ‘forgotten’ philosopher whose work I enjoyed discovering in the past two years, alongside Anne Dufourmantelle and Mari Ruti; her writing also reminded me of Clarice Lispector, with the combination of the poetic and the philosophical.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead (Olga Tokarczuk)

I returned to reading Drive your plow…late this year, after a chance encounter on the plane this spring reminded me it was one of the (many) books I had been meaning to come back to. Let’s just say I do not regret the decision: it also linked to the research project I will be working on over the next year and a half – which just goes on to show things tend to come back at exactly the right time.

The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity (David Graeber & David Wengrow)

One of the wonderful things about my new research project was returning to the things that excited me about anthropology as an undergrad, including its ability to challenge large-scale (often Eurocentric) generalisations. In this vein, I’ve started reading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which I’m currently enjoying very much; the only downside being that I am beginning to fear they may have already written the book I had been planning to write as the outcome of this research project – but yet, it’s a good problem to have, and I am sure I will still have something to contribute.  

Fields, factories, and workshops (Peter Kropotkin)

Another wonderful corollary of this research project is that it allows me to revisit multiple traditions of writing that were foundational to my thinking as an undergrad – not only anthropology, but also (classical) anarchist political theory. In this context, I am (re)reading Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid; given how much anarchist political theory has been discounted and undervalued, not only in mainstream political theory, but also among more progressive forms of reading, this will hopefully play a small part in restoring interest in it.

We do ‘till we free us: abolitionist organizing and transforming justice (Mariame Kaba)

Kaba’s writing is by now semi-legendary, but it also makes sense to remember that it is very down-to-earth, and that it arose from the lived experience of day-to-day abolitionist organising. In the UK context, in which the absence of sustained resistance to forms of exploitation old and new can be dispiriting at best, it is a reminder that forms and practice of resistance do exist elsewhere, and that it’s possible to learn from them.

Climate strike (Derek Wall)

Wall’s book is a really good primer on the relevance of labour organizing, and industrial action, in the face of climate crisis. It is also a potent reminder that problems of climate change and extractivism cannot be addressed separately from questions of labour, which is a much-needed aid in the political context where connecting the two can sometimes feel like an uphill battle.

We are ‘Nature’ defending itself: entagling art, activism, and autonomous zones (Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan)

This is the story of the French temporary autonomous zone (ZAD) developed at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to stop a proposed airport. More than that, it’s a story about resistance and resilience. It’s a story that tells us that the machine can be stopped.

Constellations of care: anarcha-feminism in practice (Cindy Barukh Milstein)

This is a great compendium of examples, texts, and experiences from different fronts of feminist, queer, and other kinds of intersectional anarchist organising. From infoshops and free libraries to community health initiatives to bike riders, these stories remind us that the world is full of examples of communities existing otherwise, sometimes for longer, sometimes for shorter periods of time, but often all it takes is a few people, a few good ideas, and a commitment to not give up ahead of even trying, to make a lasting contribution to a different world.

Radical Intimacy (Sophie K. Rosa)

I have a long-standing interest in alternative models of relationality (‘alternative’ meaning all that do not privilege heteropatriarchal, monogamous couple-based, reproduction-oriented family) so most of the arguments Rosa writes about are familiar – from Kim TallBear’s writing about non-settler-colonial-normative Indigenous modes of relating, to Sophie Lewis’s take on family abolition – but it is refreshing to see them presented in a succinct, carefully analysed, and user-friendly format. Especially for people who are new to this angle of critique, it’s a really welcome introduction; for others, it’s a handy compendium/reminder of the plethora of the ways in which humans have been relating otherwise – and a powerful primer for ongoing and future attempts to do so.

One of the last books I came to in 2024 (am, in fact, still reading) is also one of the best – Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity. Earlier this year, prompted, in part, by the war in Gaza and, in part, by the need to explain some of the choices I made in the course of it – including the decision to redirect more of my energy into the activities, goals and values I support – I wrote two posts [1] [2]; let’s just say that reading Machado de Oliveira’s book earlier would have saved me the labour, as she wrote it much better than I ever could.

The penultimate item on the list is not a book, but a magazine – Resurgence & the Ecologist, which I eventually got a subscription for, despite trying to talk myself out of it (youdontneedfeelgoodmagazinesubscriptionsthisisjustmorepapertheworldisonfire) – after all, it is much better than buying The Economist, even if very occasionally.

The final publication of this year, however, is a pamphlet I encountered while visiting one of the student occupations in Belgrade – it was a delight to see it both because I always enjoy CrimethInc materials (returning to reading more anarchism is probably one of the most healing things I have experienced this year) and because I think they are enormously useful for succinctly reminding people why things feel very, very wrong…and what we can do about it.

Happy New Year!

Hey, it’s you in that photo

Blog, Politics, social theory


You know which photo I am talking about. Yes, the one you had seen, and are now trying to unsee.

Of course, you, I, most of the people we know are objectively much more comfortable. We have water, electricity. We are not being bombed, daily. Half of our population has not been obliterated (well, likely). We have food. We are even, probably, comparatively healthy. I mean, at the very least we are not tethered to an IV while –

I know, I know. You are going to try to accuse me of generalizing individual pain. Nothing could be further from my intention. You can find out his name; you can find all their names. You can repeat them, post them, recite them. List their individual achievements. Think – covertly or openly – about all of the ways in which they are you, and in which they are not like you: for instance, highlight that he was a good student. That she was a mother. Or think that as a white person living in the ‘Global North’ this could under no circumstances be you.

What I am saying, however, is that under that order of moral complexity, outrage, guilt, certitude – all the things that wealthy, educated people in this part of the world have as a consequence of the fact (most of) their worlds had never visibly shattered – lies a deeper sentiment, and it is this sentiment you are now trying to unfeel. That sentiment tells you, with brutal precision of the consciousness of a species, that in addition to being a specific image of a specific person in a specific war in unbelievable agony – that picture is also you. That picture is what humanity is now, and if you are human, this is you.

That picture tells you, with brutal precision, that what you probably thought constituted basic precepts of humanity – that we help the ill and the wounded, that we do not attack unarmed civilians, that we do not under any conditions incinerate people tethered to an IV in a medical tent – is being burned alive, literally and metaphorically, as if there is a difference between the two anyway. That picture tells you that the order you thought protected you – yes, even you as a badass critic of liberalism, or whatever – no longer exists. That picture tells you that common humanity – however strongly or weakly you were invested in it – has no meaning as a term anymore.

That picture tells you that you will be obliterated tethered to a support system you have no recourse but to remain attached to.

Welcome.

Some of us have known that the world looks like this for a long time. But this isn’t about who is smart(er), or priority. It is about how – indeed, if – to go on living after this image. For living is the one thing that currently separates us from the dead. Hence live we must.

Under these conditions, there are about three options:

  1. Try to ignore, or look away, as much as possible. Distract yourself with chats about culture wars, immigration, “the free speech crisis”. Talk about ceasefire, as if what has occurred was a random skirmish that can be smoothed out by some successful diplomacy.
  2. Make the most of your own privilege. Buttress your fortresses, be they Europe’s Schengen zone, the wall alongside the Mexican border, the Mediterranean or the English Channel. Remind yourself, daily, that it-may-be-very-unfortunate-but, you, yourself, have worked so hard to earn a decent living for you and your family, and you deserve a nice car and a salary and a pension and takeouts and anyway all these images are so depressing and there is nothing we can do about it.
  3. Own up to what is going on. Bid goodbye to the international order, the order that gave birth to you and whatever fiction by way of identity you are invested in – class, gender, language, nation – and the institutions that sustain them (state, church, bank, university), and remind yourself that (with few exceptions) they are making this possible. Think very carefully about how you want to live, and how you want to die. Think about the values you would stand by, even as the world bursts into flame.

I’ll see you on the other side.

Social theory and politics of knowledge syllabus

social theory, theory teaching

This is a module I taught in 21-22, 22-23, and 23-24 as a 10-credit (one term), 3rd year undergraduate elective module at Durham (in Department of Sociology, but open to other students). The module was quite popular and had a growing student enrolment; some of the student feedback I got, especially in its final year, was among the best I ever received (thank you!).

Anyway, knowing the scarcity of available resources for theory that steps outside of the ‘canonical’ way of teaching that focuses on the exegesis of (predominantly, if no longer exclusively) whitemalewestern thinkers, I decided to make some of these available publicly – note that this is a significantly different version than what was provided for Durham University students, as it omits some resources (notably presentations/slides and videos). The module has, of course, evolved over the years; if I were to continue teaching it there are things I would do differently, but this version should be good enough to support anyone looking for ways to think or learn about theory that depart from those conventionally taught.

P.S. I am also writing a book on the topic, so if you like this approach, do keep an eye out for when it’s published – and if you would like to learn more or discuss other ways to support your theory learning, feel free to contact me.

Syllabus

(note: sessions will be added on a weekly basis, allowing you to ‘follow’ the course through the term).

Intro post:

The purpose of this module is to introduce you to the ways in which we think of the relationship between social theory (theories about the society) and the production of knowledge — including its uses, applications in contemporary politics and policy, and social significance. 

Knowledge is sometimes seen as something we possess individually — it is ‘in our heads’. Yet, knowledge is also, inevitably and irreducibly, social: it is produced through collectively organized practices of transmission, innovation, circulation and certification (if you do not know what these words mean, look them up — and then think: what elements of higher education they speak to?)

The module builds on and significantly extends your knowledge of the range of contemporary social theories, in a way that enables you to understand, critically assess, and independently learn about the relationship between knowledge – including theoretical knowledge – and the social context of its production and application.

The main pedagogical objective of the module is to allow students to develop a deeper understanding of the origins, development, and contemporary discussions concerning some of the following themes:

  • What is ‘theory’?
  • The scientific status of sociology — is sociology a science? Why does this matter?
  • What is the relationship between knowledge and ignorance?
  • What does it mean to know ‘differently’?
  • How are forms of knowledge production related to governance?
  • Who owns knowledge?

Throughout the module, we will consider these themes from a sociological angle, which means emphasizing the social processes, inequalities, and relations of power underpinning their contemporary manifestations and transformations. In addition to these, we will be drawing on a broad range of readings, concepts and ideas in history, philosophy, political theory and anthropology, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary social theory.

Session 1: What is social about theory?

In this session, we introduce the module and its contents and modes of delivery, and the main topic – the relationship between social theory (and sociological knowledge more generally) and politics.

In preparation, think about what you have learned over the past two years and reflect on the following:

What is theory?

What does it mean to say that a statement is ‘theoretical’?

What is the relationship between theory and the social context of its production?

If you would like to learn more about my approach to social theory, you can read this interview.

Reading:

Mandatory (at least one):

Abend, G. (2008) The Meaning of Theory, Sociological Theory 26 (2), 173-199 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2008.00324.x

Krause, M. (2016). The meanings of theorizing’, British Journal of Sociology 67 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.12187_4 

Connell RW (1997) Why is Classical Theory Classical? American Journal of Sociology, 102(6): 1511-1557 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231125

Additional:

Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1962). The social construction of reality. Introduction: The problem of the sociology of knowledge (11-33). 

Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality: social construction and social critique. Introduction;

Connell, R., Collyer, F., Maia, J., & Morrell, R. (2017). Toward a global sociology of knowledge: Post-colonial realities and intellectual practices. International Sociology, 32(1), 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580916676913

Session 2: What is political about knowledge?

In this session, we begin to discuss different ideas about the role and purpose of theorizing and social-scientific knowledge more generally. What is the role of theory? How do we know if a theory is scientific? Is sociology a science?

Social sciences in the 20th century have mostly focused on the distinction between explanatory and interpretative approaches – one that seeks to postulate social mechanisms or universal ‘covering laws’ that should apply to all (or most) societies, equally, and the other that focuses on meanings of particular actions, institutions, and events within a social context. In some cases, these two modes of doing sociology have been associated with, respectively, objectivist and subjectivist ontologies – one that claims (social) reality exists independently of our perspectives and actions, and another that claims we are fundamentally involved in creating it: 

Does sociology (‘only’) explain social events and processes, or does it aim to do something else – and what is that? Can sociology be objective in the same sense in which ‘natural’ sciences are held to be objective?In this session, we discuss some of the origins of these debates, their present transformations and uses, and the implications for sociological theorizing. 

Preparation:

In preparation for the session, familiarize yourself (or refresh) background reading. Think about the following:

(1) What do you think is the role of sociology?

(2) How is sociological knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge – including ‘ordinary’ people’s?

(3) How do you understand the difference between explanation, interpretation, and critique?

Reading:

Background

Marx, K. (1845). Theses on Feuerbach. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Weber, M (1958 [1917]) Science as a vocation. In: Gerth, HH, Mills, CW (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 129–156.

Hamati-Ataya, I. 2018. “The ‘vocation’ Redux: A Post-Weberian Perspective from the Sociology of Knowledge.” Current Sociology 66 (7): 995–1012. doi:10.1177/0011392118756472.

Mandatory (two of the following):

Hedstroem, P. Dissecting the social: on the principles of analytical sociology, Chapter 2: Social Mechanisms and Explanatory Theory (11-32).

Sayer, A. (2011). Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life, Introduction: a relation to the world of concern (1-18).

Bacevic, J. (2021). No such thing as sociological excuses? Performativity, rationality and social scientific expertise in late liberalism. European Journal of Social Theory, 24(3), 394–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310211018939

Additional:

Glynos, J., Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of critical explanation in social and political theory. Routledge.

Hamati-Ataya, I. 2018. “The ‘vocation’ Redux: A Post-Weberian Perspective from the Sociology of Knowledge.” Current Sociology 66 (7): 995–1012. doi:10.1177/0011392118756472.

Hammersley, M. 2017. “On the Role of Values in Social Research: Weber Vindicated?” Sociological Research Online 22 (1): 7. doi:10.5153/sro.4197

Shapin, S. (2019). Weber’s Science as a Vocation: A moment in the history of “is” and “ought.” Journal of Classical Sociology, 19(3), 290–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X19851408

Seminar activity:

(1) Reflect and comment on the following quote:

Within the academy, the word theory has a lot of capital. I have always been interested in how the word theory itself is distributed; how some materials are understood as theory and not others. As a student of theory, I learned that theory is used to refer to a rather narrow body of work. Some work becomes theory because it refers to other work that is known as theory. A citational chain is created around theory: you become a theorist by citing other theorists that cite other theorists…

I was concerned with how statements made by the teacher, like “This is not about women,” were used to bypass any questions about how the figure of woman is exercised within a male intellectual tradition. When the essay was returned to me, the grader had scrawled in very large letters, ‘This is not theory! This is politics!’ “

Sara Ahmed, “Living a Feminist Life: Introduction”, 2017: 11

(2) Debate: “This House believes that theory is political”.

In randomly assigned teams, discuss and come up with three arguments in support of/against the motion.

Refuse, restrict, redirect

Blog, climate change, higher education, history, Philosophy of social science, Politics, social theory, Uncategorized

On stepping away from the academic treadmill

This post is written at the start of the academic year 24/5, another year that everyone in academia is approaching with a sense of dread. This is the year in which we are facing institutions’ inability or unwillingness to condemn the genocide that we’ve spent the past year witnessing; their lack of capacity to divest from companies and systems that enable and perpetrate it; their, conversely, willingness and readiness (kudos to exceptions!) to crack down on students and staff who dare to stand up and at least call out the violent collapse of all political norms. Speaking of collapses, we are also witnessing the acceleration of climate collapse, which institutions sometimes pay lip service to, but do little to stop or challenge. 

In the UK, what has been described as financial but should in fact be dubbed higher education’s crisis of legitimacy becomes apparent, as institutions introduce redundancies, including cutting the same staff whose publications, careers, or successes they proudly displayed on their home pages; burnout and what has (in another British penchant for euphemism) been dubbed the mental health crisis but in fact should be called necropolitics of academic labour continues to take those ‘lucky’ to escape the cuts; and there is no, absolutely none, conversation about what is it exactly we are doing, how and why, nor where we hope to be in 5, 10, 25 years. 

It is also the academic year I will begin working part-time. The reasons for this decision (as for any decision) are complex, but they mostly have to do with coming to terms with what I believe to be the moral, political and, if you wish, ontological implications of the above. The assumption that you should always want more – money, status, publications, prestige – goes by so unquestioned even in parts of the academia that like to think of themselves as critical that willingly and visibly choosing less of any or all of these things tends, at best, to elicit incomprehension; at worst, fantastical hypotheses. In lieu of this, I thought I could share some useful or adaptable1 ideas how to create space between yourself and this context, to enable you to survive it – and, hopefully, generate alternatives that are healing, constructive, and revolutionary, rather than harmful, destructive, and reproductive of the exact same systems of oppression. This means I hope these ideas can be repurposed for whatever circumstances you find yourself in. They are, however, generated from my specific positionality, values, and experience; this means they are unlikely to apply to your situation verbatim, even if we occupy structurally similar positions.

  • Refuse forms of recognition and validation that tie you to or make you dependent on exploitative2 institutions. 

There are reams and reams of paper written on the neoliberal techniques of measuring, (e)valuating, and fostering competition between people. Somewhat less on the degree to which academics internalize them. We are all guilty of this. I as well, despite investing a lot of effort to counter this tendency, as well as literally having written a PhD on why it happens, and why we cannot see it (yes, academia makes you stupider). The first step in moving away from the grind, then, is refusing to be judged solely or primarily by these optics and metrics, and developing alternative forms of valorisation, justification or, simply, reasons to exist (and I mean, especially for women, forms of valorisation other than care labour).

For my part, refusing institutional (de)valuation was not exactly a choice: my own institution made it perfectly clear where in their hierarchy of human beings I belonged (about 4 spine points or roughly £4,000/annum below men), and then persisted with differential (de)valuation over the next few years. In this kind of situation, you basically have two options. One, you can accept/internalize norms of the institution even when they are arbitrary and discriminatory (as my research demonstrates, intersectional bias will persist even in ‘soft’ evaluations), and either doubt your own competence, or work yourself to death by trying to overperform to reach the standard that differently-bodied, -accented, and/or -skinned (select combo) colleagues satisfy just by existing. Or you can choose to develop an internal (moral, intellectual, whatever you wish to call it) compass and decide what kinds of work, output, and engagement you truly value and find compelling; what kind of topics, causes, and individuals merit your time, and you really have something to contribute to; and, perhaps, what kind of work will make the world a better place. Of course, no-one (or close to no-one) is lucky enough to be able to do only this sort of work; but you can certainly make the decision to limit your dedication to the mechanisms of your own exploitation and channel that energy into something else. Which brings me to (2): 

  • Restrict the access of exploitative institutions (and individuals) to your time and energy.

This, for the purposes of this post, can primarily be coded as time and energy invested in intellectual labour, but the logic is transposable to emotional labour (hint: that one friend who always expects you to help them navigate life’s dramas) or cognitive labour (hint: the amount of time you spend scrolling on social media, both generating income for digital platforms and training their or third-party algorithms – hence labour – and literally expanding energy, both by directing attention and actually consuming resources, from electricity to food and water). 

As Marxist political economy teaches us, the nature of capitalism is such that it must generate profit (something it is increasingly failing at). In order to do this, it must extract more and more of your work for at least the same if not lower wage. This means that, even if nominally your working hours remain the same, you are – quite likely – working more. Furthermore, due to the nature of academic labour, it is relatively easy for this work to colonize other aspects of your life. As I’ve written before, your interest in, say, disability justice may be objectively independent of your relationship to your employer. But if a) your increasing awareness of disability justice can be converted into ‘EDI’; b) you will be using it to teach, publish, or cite in any way that reproduces academic capital (for instance, by publishing in peer-reviewed journals, or citing academic publications); c) you will be reading in your own spare time (does your workload feature an allowance for reading or ‘scholarship’?); in other words, if any or all of these apply – congratulations, your employer is benefitting from free labour. Yours.

As the example(s) above demonstrates, it is almost impossible to remain in a paid relationship and not be subject to this form of exploitation. This is why this is about restricting, not refusing entirely; of course, if you are entirely independent of paid (or waged) labour, that’s great, but is not the reality for most people. Restricting can take a variety of forms (needless to say, they are not mutually exclusive). One pretty standard form is so-called ‘working to contract’, where employees refuse to perform work or tasks outside of those specified in their contract. Members of UCU in the UK have practised working to contract as part of Action Short of A Strike in a series of recent industrial actions pertaining to pay and pensions (viciousness with which some universities have responded to ASOS is a sad reflection of how much working above contractual obligations has become normalized). Another is ‘quiet quitting’, which had become a buzzword reflecting the growing realization that, to borrow the title of Sarah Jaffe’s brilliant book, work won’t love you back (on why not to quit quietly on some other occasion).

But even just (‘just’) saying no assiduously to demands that overstep that boundary works. This isn’t about being ‘selfish’, or prioritizing own gain (academia gives you plenty of opportunities for that). Very simply, when faced with a demand, ask: who does this serve? What purpose does it serve? Is this a purpose I can get behind? What is the best way in which I can contribute to this purpose? My guess is that, in some contexts at least, you will begin to see that the purpose you believe you are contributing to – for instance, making the world a better place – is better served through other forms of engagement (if it’s not, great, you’re lucky). Which brings me to (3):

  • Redirect the labour time, resources, and energy into something else – ideally something that does not serve the reproduction of capitalism.

Now, of course, many people do work two jobs – including two full- (or close to full-) time jobs – either because this is the only way they can make ends meet or because what they are actually passionate or care about does not really pay (or not yet, or not enough). Equally revered and reviled – depending which side of neoliberalism you fall on – this approach is often contrasted with the security of a full-time job. Under traditional conditions of industrial capitalism, this, of course, makes some sense: a full-time permanent job equalled protections for pay through collective bargaining, benefits, pension and sick leave (and even health insurance, in some cases); in socialism, it even meant collective holidays or access to specific holiday sites (known as ‘corporate perks’ in capitalism); and, of course, it also meant – at least for those working in organizations that are not authoritarian or top-down – the possibility to work together for a future, in other words, to collectively decide what the organization was meant to be about (the meaning of co-op).

I certainly do not need to rehash all the reasons why this is no longer the case. But in addition to oft-repeated diagnoses like ‘neoliberalism’, “Thatcher” or “Toreeeys”, another element appears: the fact that even absent some of these conditions (neoliberalism is visibly dying, though it is hell-bent on taking you with it) few people have the energy, willingness or vision to build a world that’s more than just a dusted-off version of the old one with, you know, slightly better tech (NHS with in-app prescriptions or good pensions with access to online banking).

This has been the slowest and possibly most painful realization for me since moving permanently to the UK, some ten years ago. Most people’s imagination of alternatives is so depleted that the best it can come up with is a slightly less terrible version of the existing order, if not a return to its earlier form (something proponents of geoengineering and other technosolutions realize). Mark Fisher, who had the quirk for being a canary in the mine, encapsulated it well in the sentence “capitalist realism”. But it’s not (even) that the steady colonization of the lifeworld by forms of economic exchange has proceeded to the degree that few people are able to imagine alternatives; it’s that I strongly suspect they would not know what to do with them.

The problem with alternatives, as you learn if you grow up in (real) socialism and/or live in communities that share labour equitably, is that they are not perfect, and they also require hard work. Visions of a post-capitalist utopia where all work is performed by machines are both ludicrous and unsustainable (if nothing else, in terms of climate-wrecking resource extraction). This work, at times, can feel as uninspiring and as gruelling as in capitalism (let’s be honest, no-one likes cleaning toilets); if it is just and equitable, there are no unseen ‘others’ – migrants, women, underpaid research assistants, good citizens – to offload it to. For a lot of people, the preferred option then begins to be selectively shutting your eyes and pretending not to see your own implication in reproducing these systems, whilst making meek pronouncements about commitments to social justice or equality or even the good of non-human others, providing it can be safely done from the safety of your own home, Netflix and Amazon accounts, and Deliveroo meals.

What I want to propose as an antidote to this loss of a world-building capacity is a version of what James Scott dubbed a while ago ‘anarchist calisthenics’, but with a twist. Instead of imagining challenges to authority/status quo, I believe we must, every single day, engage in practising existing differently. I also think this need not (necessarily) take the form of ‘transgression’ or violation; many ways of existing differently are not explicitly proscribed. Perhaps we could dub this ‘existentialist calisthenics‘.

One way to start practising existing differently is engaging in simple acts of not contributing to capitalist reproduction. For instance: instead of going ‘shopping’, go for a walk, but not with an intention or purpose or to ‘exercise’ or to ‘think better’. Just walk. Or do nothing: as Jenny Oddell among others has written, not succumbing to the dictate of constant busyness can be surprisingly difficult for people who got used to being constantly plugged into the digital capitalist machinery (I recently learned that zoomers have become so unaccustomed to, as Pascal would have put it, coexisting with their own thoughts that apparently there is a term for not distracting yourself endlessly during car or plane rides – ‘rawdogging’.)

For instance: instead of spending the weekend preparing for the work ahead, or doomscrolling in an attempt to postpone this work, sleep. Or hang out with friends. Or go to a library and pick up a random book, spend ten minutes reading it, and then return it to the shelf. Do this several times over. Do not do this in order to “select one to take out” or “inform yourself about” or “see what else is new in”. Do it without purpose. The whole point is to break the cycle of ‘usefulness’ or ‘purposefulness’, which has, for most people, come to stand for ‘service to the capitalist economy’. You don’t necessarily need to go to the lengths of spending the weekend painting banners or distributing meals to the homeless or protesting the war in Palestine (though, as you learn to reclaim some of your personal time from the circuits of production, you may find out that there are more worthy ways of investing it than doomscrolling or spending money). 

Making a conscious decision not to invest your energy and time into something that feeds the system, and to redirect it into something that does not, is the first step off the treadmill. It is, of course, even better if you do something that helps other people, non-humans, and causes, even if it’s a tiny thing: plant some flowers, pet a cat, chat to a person in the street. These small acts of redirection – out and away from the circuit of capitalism and into something else – will help sustain your ‘world-building capacity’, your ability not only to dream about a different world (which we are all prone to doing, given how terrible the one we inhabit is), but to begin to create it.  

P.S. It’s important to note that I believe these three steps need to go together, and in sequence: just refusing the validation systems, methods and ceremonies of capitalism (How much do you earn? How many followers do you have? How thin, or coiffed, or made-up – by which we mean, how much money have you spent on looking it – are you? How successfully do you perform the usually unpaid labour of care, either by parenting, or cleaning, cooking, or just making capitalism look nicer?) will probably leave you feeling empty or lacking purpose (plus, possibly, deflated, once you realize how much of your life has been dedicated to them). Just restricting your expenditure on capitalist forms of (re)production will probably leave you with a much larger volume of time and energy, which is obviously fine – most of us have been so wrung out by constant competitive demands of capitalist overwork that everyone can benefit from a bit of extra time to recover, heal, and care for oneself. After that, however, you will probably feel the need to channel that energy somewhere. Old work demands will be quick to offer you relief from the shocking freedom of your own time. Redirecting this time and energy – even if it’s 10 minutes each day or one hour every month – into something that serves dismantling these oppressive systems, or helps other humans/non-humans, or the planet – will both make it easier for other people to exit them, and for you to resist being sucked back in. 

More about how to do that in some future post. For the time being, start practising. 


  1. I would ask you to suspend, if only for the time it takes you to read this post, the impulse to think about all the ways in which we are different (“easy for you, you don’t have children” or “maybe you can do that, you don’t have a student loan” or even “ah but it’s different for those in Russell Group institutions”), and focus on what we might have in common – or what, despite differences, you can use to create your own version. I move to these, however, I want to clarify two major structural affordances, which we do not discuss enough: migration status and finance.

    Migration status: migrants on Skilled Worker (Tier 2) visa in the UK are required to work full time, for a single employer. This is the visa I have been on since I started working at Durham, having switched from Tier 4 (Doctoral Extension Scheme, which has a similar set of rules). 
    On a Tier 2 visa, your right to reside in the country is dependent on your employment status, which is dependent on your employer. So, for instance, if you lose your job – or for any reason, for instance, injury or partial disability, become unable to perform it on a full-time basis – your right to exist in the UK is automatically terminated. You are also not eligible for benefits, as the little sentence “no recourse to public funds” reminds you. In the eventuality that, say, you contracted Covid in the course of doing your job, developed long Covid, and as a consequence became incapable of working full-time, you would receive a kind letter from the Home Office giving you about ten days to leave the country. This, obviously, puts migrant workers into a slightly disadvantaged position. This is in addition to financial inequality (visa application fees, which few academic employers cover, plus the Immigration Health Surcharge, which, to the best of my knowledge, none do, mean that every single migrant worker is by definition between £2,500 and £5,000 poorer than their hypothetical non-migrant counterpart hired on the same salary – and that’s if they don’t have dependents). It also, needless to say, makes the stakes in retaining our jobs – assuming they even meet the minimum income threshold for Tier 2 visas – quite high.
       
    In 2023, I switched to the Global Talent visa, which has a wider scope of flexibility in terms of employment (in itself a telling reflection of UK’s tiered immigration system), after which I became eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain, the legal resident status that gives one similar rights to full citizens. The sheer feeling of relief came as a surprise even to me – I had not realized, up until that point, how much anxiety I had carried around my immigration status; as a relatively privileged, white, highly educated and securely employed person, I always compared myself with migrants in significantly less secure positions. Now, as anyone who has worked with me will testify, I am hardly the type to not raise their voice when something is unjust or can be made more equitable. But the difference that knowing I am not legally indentured to my employer made came as a shock, not least because it really made me re-appraise the absence of agency among people who did not have the same kind of legal constraint.

    Financial. In summer of 2024, I was promoted to Associate Professor. This meant I was able to drop my working hours without a significant loss of income (though, of course, I did not know this would happen at the point when I chose to reduce my working hours). It also, of course, means I forfeited the additional salary. I had done similar things before, on several occasions; one included leaving a prestigious tenure-track postdoc (in Denmark) to pursue a second PhD (on a doctoral stipend); the other involved leaving a tenured position (in Belgrade) for, initially, a visiting fellowship (at an international university in Hungary). On how to plan for this, what to do, or what not to do, on some other occasion. At this point, one thing worth remembering is that a chunk of your expenditure is probably oriented towards mitigating the effects of (over)work. As Benjamin Franklin has said, whenever faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty; otherwise, you end up with neither. ↩︎

  2. We could spend another 10,000 words just on discussing the meaning of ‘exploitative’ (as with any other term, which I use casually, this being a blog post). If you’re interested in exegesis of concepts, try my academic work. Given that this isn’t academic work, I would say that ‘exploitative’ does not apply to just about any relationship where you give more than you receive (clearly – in some cases, such as parenting, reciprocity is impossible), but to any relationship that tries to extract more than you had committed to, are contractually obliged to, and had agreed to give (of course, ‘agreed to’ involves a lot of variation, depending whether we see choice and consent in purely liberal or a bit more nuanced terms).

    In this sense, exploitative institutions are institutions that, for instance, normalize invisible labour and keep it invisibilized (see: care). Exploitative systems are systems that make your participation in them (for instance, capitalist economy) conditional on willingness to accept some forms of exploitation, regardless of whether done by you or to you, or, frequently, both (see: white feminism and outsourcing of care to migrant, often ethnically-minoritised women, for instance).

    Let me be clear: I don’t think all forms of labour – perhaps even under capitalism, which is a system based on exploitation – need to be exploitative. But I think most are.  I also do not think (despite the academic tendency to allocate all responsibility to “management”) that exploitative relations are limited (or necessary) to explicitly hierarchical relationships. You can have non-exploitative supervisors, and you can have exploitative peers and even (though this is rare in hierarchical systems) ‘juniors’. Nor are organizations, institutions or collectives exploitative by necessity. However, under contemporary capitalism, many are. It should also, at least by now, go without saying that certain characteristics mean you are more likely to be seen as exploitable, including by people who may nurture perfectly equitable relations with others.  ↩︎

Climate change and the paradox of inaction

Blog, climate change, higher education, Politics, social theory, theory teaching, Uncategorized

One of the things I most often hear when talking to people about climate change is “but what to do?” This, in and of itself, is good news. Perhaps owing to evidently extreme weather patterns1, perhaps owing to the concentrated efforts of primary/secondary school teachers2, perhaps owing to unceasing (though increasingly brutally repressed, even in the UK & the rest of Europe) efforts of activists, it seems the question whether climate change is ‘real’ has finally taken the back seat to “and what shall we do about it?”.

While climate denialism may have had its day, challenges now come from its cousins (or descendants) in the form of climate optimism, technosolutionism, or – as Linsey McGoey and I have recently argued – the specific kind of ignorance associated with liberal fatalism: using indeterminacy to delay action until certain actions are foreclosed. In the latter context in particular, the sometimes overwhelming question “what to do” can compound and justify, even if unintentionally, the absence of action. The problem is that whilst we are deliberating what to do, certain kinds of action become less possible or more costly, thus limiting the likelihood we will be able to implement them in the future. This is the paradox of inaction.

My interest in this question came from researching the complex relationship between knowledge (and ignorance) and (collective or individual) action. Most commonsense theories assume a relatively linear link between the two: knowing about something will lead you to act on it, especially in the contexts of future risk or harm. This kind of approach shaped information campaigns, or struggles to listen to ‘the science’, from early conversations around climate change to Covid-19. Another kind of approach overrides these information- or education-based incentives in favour of behavioural ‘nudges’; awareness of cognitive processing biases (well-documented and plenty) suggested slightly altering decisional infrastructure would be more efficient than trying to, effectively, persuade people to do the right thing. While I can see sense in both approaches, I became interested instead in the ambiguous role of knowledge. In other words, under what conditions would knowing (about the future) prevent us from acting (on the future)?

There are plenty of examples to choose from: from the critique of neoliberalism to Covid-19 (see also the above) to, indeed, climate change (free version here). In the context of teaching, this question often comes up when students begin to realize the complexity of global economy, and the inextricability of questions of personal agency from what we perceive as systemic change. In other words, they begin to realize that the state of the world cannot be reduced either to individual responsibility nor to the supposedly impersonal forces of “economy”, “politics”, “power” etc. But this rightly leaves them at an impasse; if change is not only about individual agency nor about large-scale system change, how can we make anything happen?

It is true that awareness of complexity can often lead to bewilderment or, at worst, inaction. After all, in view of such extraordinary entanglement of factors – individual, cultural, economic, social, political, geological, physical, biological – it can be difficult to even know how to tackle one without unpicking all others. Higher education doesn’t help with this: most people (not all, but most) are, sadly, trained to see the world from the perspective of one discipline or field of study3, which can rightly make processes that span those fields appear impossible to grasp. Global heating is one such process; it is, at the same time, geological, meteorological, ecological, social, political, medical, economic, etc. As Timothy Morton has argued, climate change is a ‘hyperobject’; it exceeds the regular boundaries of human conceptualization.

Luckily, social theory, and in particular social ontology, is particularly good at analysing objects. Gender – e.g. the notion of ‘woman’ – is an example of such an object. This does not mean, by the way, that ‘deconstructing’ objects, concepts, or notions needs to reduce from the complexity of their interrelation; in some approaches to social ontology, a whole is always more than the sum (or any deducible interrelation) of its parts. In other words, to ‘deconstruct’ climate change is not in any way to deny its effects or the usefulness of the concept; it is to understand how different elements – which we conventionally, and historically, but not-at-all necessarily, associate with disciplines or ‘domains’ – interact and interrelate, and what that means. Differently put, the way disciplines construct climate change as an object (or assemblage) tells us something about the way we are likely to perceive solutions (or ways of addressing it, more broadly). It does not determine what is going to happen, but it points to the venues (and limitations) humans are likely to see in doing something about it.

Why does this matter? Our horizon of agency is limited by what we perceive as subjects, objects, and forms of agency. In less weighty parlance, what (and whom) we perceive as being able to do stuff; and the kind of stuff it (they) can do. This, also, includes what we perceive as limitations on doing stuff, real or not. Two limitations apply to all human beings; time and energy. In other words, doing stuff takes time. It also consumes energy. This has implications for what we perceive as the stuff we can do. So what can we do?

As with so many other things, there are two answers. One is obvious: do anything and everything you can, and do it urgently. Anything other than nothing. (Yes, even recycling, in the sense in which it’s better than not recycling, though obviously less useful than not buying packaging in the first place).

The second answer is also obvious, but perhaps less frequent. Simply, what you aim to do depends on what you aim to achieve. Aiming to feel a bit better? Recycle, put a poster up, maybe plant a tree (or just some bee-friendly plants). Make a bit of a difference to your carbon emissions? Leave the car at home (at least some of the time!), stop buying stuff in packaging, cut on flying, eliminate food waste (yes, this is fact very easy to do). Make a real change? Vote on climate policy; pressure your MP; insulate your home (if you have one); talk to others. Join a group, or participate in any kind of collective action. The list goes on; there are other forms of action that go beyond this. They should not be ranked, not in terms of moral rectitude, nor in terms of efficiency (if you’re thinking of the old ‘limitations of individual agency’ argument, do consider what would happen if everyone *did* stop driving and no, that does not mean ambulance vehicles).

The problem with agency is that our ideas of what we can do are often shaped by what we have been trained, raised, and expected to do. Social spaces, in this sense, also become polygons for action. You can learn to do something by being in a space where you are expected to do (that) something; equally, you learn not to do things by being told, explicitly or implicitly, that it is not the done thing. Institutions of higher education are really bad at fostering certain kinds of action, while rewarding others. What is rewarded is (usually) individual performance. This performance is frequently framed, explicitly or implicitly, as competition: against your peers (in relation to whom you are graded) or colleagues (with whom you are compared when it comes to pay, or promotion); against other institutions (for REF scores, or numbers of international students); against everyone in your field (for grants, or permanent jobs). Even instances of team spirit or collaboration are more likely to be rewarded or recognized when they lead to such outcomes (getting a grant, or supporting someone in achieving individual success).

This poses significant limitations for how most people think about agency, whether in the context of professional identities or beyond (I’ve written before about limits to, and my own reluctance towards, affiliation with any kind of professional let alone disciplinary identity). Agency fostered in most contemporary capitalist contexts is either consumption- or competition-oriented (or both, of course, as in conspicuous consumption). Alternatively, it can also be expressive, in the sense in which it can stimulate feelings of identity or belonging, but it bears remembering these do not in and of themselves translate into action. Absent from these is the kind of agency I, for want of a better term, call world-building: the ability to imagine, create, organize and sustain environments that do more than just support the well-being and survival of one and one’s immediate in-group, regardless how narrowly or broadly we may define it, from nuclear family to humanity itself.

The lack of this capacity is starkly evident in classrooms. Not long ago, I asked one of the groups I teach for an example of a social or political issue they were interested in or would support despite the fact it had no direct or personal bearing on their lives. None could (yes, the war on Gaza was already happening). This is not to say that students do not care about issues beyond their immediate scope of interest, or that they are politically disenchanted: there are plenty of examples to the contrary. But it is to suggest that (1), we are really bad at connecting their concerns to broader social and political processes, especially when it comes to issues on which everyone in the global North is relatively privileged (and climate change is one such issue, compared to effects it is likely to have on places with less resilient infrastructure); and (2), institutions are persistently and systematically (and, one might add, intentionally) failing at teaching how to turn this into action. In other words: many people are fully capable of imagining another world is possible. They just don’t know how to build it.

As I was writing this, I found a quote in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (excellent) As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance that I think captures this brilliantly:

Western education does not produce in us the kinds of effects we like to think it does when we say things like ‘education is the new buffalo’. We learn how to type and how to write. We learn how to think within the confines of Western thought. We learn how to pass tests and get jobs within the city of capitalism. If we’re lucky and we fall into the right programs, we might learn to think critically about colonialism. But postsecondary education provides few useful skill sets to those of us who want to fundamentally change the relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous peoples, because that requires a sustained, collective, strategic long-term movement, a movement the Canadian state has a vested interest in preventing, destroying, and dividing.

(loc 273/795)

It may be evident that generations that have observed us do little but destroy the world will exhibit an absence of capacity (or will) to build one. Here, too, change starts ‘at home’, by which I mean in the classroom. Are we – deliberately or not – reinforcing the message that performance matters? That to ‘do well’ means to fit, even exceed, the demands of capitalist productivity? That this is how the world is, and the best we can do is ‘just get on with it’?

The main challenge for those of us (still) working in higher education, I think, is how to foster and stimulate world-building capacities in every element of our practice. This, make no mistake, is much more difficult than what usually passes for ‘decolonizing’ (though even that is apparently sometimes too much for white colonial institutions), or inserting sessions, talks, or workshops about the climate crisis. It requires resistance to reproducing the relationship to the world that created and sustains the climate crisis – competition-oriented, extractive, and expropriative. It calls for a refusal to conform to the idea that knowledge should, in the end, serve the needs of (a) labour market, ‘economy’, or the state. It requires us to imagine a world beyond such terms. And then teach students how to build it.

  1. Hi, philosophy of science/general philosophy/general bro! Are you looking to explain mansplain stochastic phenomena to me? Please bear in mind that this is a blog post, and thus oriented towards general audience, and that I have engaged with this problem on a slightly different level of complexity elsewhere (and yes, I am well aware of the literature). Here, read up. ↩︎
  2. One of the recent classes I taught that engaged with the question of denialism/strategic ignorance (in addition to a session on sociology of ignorance in Social Theory and Politics of Knowledge, an undergraduate module I taught at Durham in 21-23, and sessions on public engagement, expertise and authority, and environmental sociology in Public Sociology: Theory and Practice, which is a core MSc module at Durham, I teach a number of guest lectures on the relationship between knowledge and ignorance, scientific advice, etc.) was a pleasant surprise insofar as most students were well aware of the scale, scope, and reality of climate change. This is a pronounced change from some of my experiences in the preceding decade, when the likelihood of encountering at least the occasional climate skeptic, if not outright denialist (even if by the virtue of qualifying for the addressee of fn 1 above), was high(er). When asked, most of the students told me they learned about climate change in geography at school. Geography teachers, I salute you. ↩︎
  3. The separation of sociology and politics in most UK degree programmes, for instance, continues to baffle me. ↩︎

Do you dream of the weather?

Blog, climate change, psychoanalysis

The weather, as writers on climate change from Amitav Ghosh to Jenny Offill (and many others) have been noting, hardly ever figures at the centre of the plot. Even stories that have a large climactic disaster determining the world they build (The Road, or Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam series, or Octavia Butler’s Parables), the event is usually, in a somewhat punny phrase, precipitating; it happens before, or because, it does not change, it does not change with us, and it cannot be changed.

It is weird to think that a concept so clearly defined by the tendency to change – namely, climate change – is at the same time an acknowledgment of the absolutely planetary scope of human agency (after all, it is human-induced climate change that should most concern us) and of its limits (after all, it is clear that we are locked into at least 1.5C degree warming now, with all the unpredictability that brings). To think about the weather, then, is to dwell on – and at – the very boundary of the human condition: both what we can achieve – destroy, mostly – and what we cannot (repair, mostly). It is also, as Brian Wynne brilliantly analyzed, to revisit the boundaries between observation (or phenomenology), measurement (or attempt at quantification/standardization), and indeterminacy, and thus pose the question that forms the crux of one of the strands of my work: what is the relationship between knowing about and doing something about the future? Or, to put it slightly differently, is the future something we know about or something we do?

To dream of the weather, then, adds another degree of radical indeterminacy: to the extent to which dreams are not volitional (and even for fans of lucid dreaming, that is still a large extent), the incursion of weather into dreams further refracts the horizon of agency. While in dreams we think we can choose what we do (or don’t do), but we are both in charge and not in charge; we are (again, with exceptions) not aware of the dream as we are producing it, but we are producing it; there is no-one else there, right?

It struck me some time ago that, to the best of my knowledge, not many people dream about the weather. Or, in the vein of the backdrop that Ghosh writes about, even if they do, they dream of the weather as something that just happens. True to form, I had a dream that featured a blizzard that very night; but it also featured a snow plough, or road sweeper/gritter, I am not sure which.

Last night, however, I had a dream of a storm cloud passing all over North America, and then getting to the UK. In my dream, the southwest tip of the UK – Cornwall, a bit of Dorset, Somerset – was the only part that was spared. This was strange, as I was sure that what precipitated the dream was reading the forecast about storm Nelson, which predicted high impact in the southwest, but almost none in the northeast, where I live. Yet, when I woke up, rain was lashing against my windows; a thick, low cloud hung over most of the coast.

Strange weather?

In dreams begin responsibilities

Blog, Media, Politics, psychoanalysis, Uncategorized

Dreams are dangerous places. The control and awareness we tend to ascribe to what is usually referred to as ‘dreams’ in the waking state (ambitions; aspirations) is the exact opposite of the absence of control we tend to assume of dreams in the unconscious (sleeping) state, but neither is, strictly speaking, true; we do not choose our ambitions or orientations with full awareness, much like it is ridiculous to fully outsource authoriality when we sleep.

Psychoanalysis, of course, knows this. But, much like other disciplines and traditions that take dreams seriously, it is all-too-often equated with treating dreams as epistemology; that is, using dream logic to deduce something about the person who dreams, as if exiting from the forces generating the unconscious (in Freud’s formulation, following Ariadne’s thread) is ever truly possible. Sociology, needless to say, hardly does a better job, instead placing dreams at the uncomfortable (all boundaries, for sociology, are uncomfortable) boundary between collective and individual, as if the collective (unconscious) somehow permeates the individual, but always imperfectly (everything, in sociology, is imperfect, except its own imperfections).

Bion describes pathology as the inability to dream and inability to wake up; but is this not another (even if relaxed) call for discreteness, ushering in Freud’s Reality principle through the back door? This seems relevant given the relevance of the ability to dream (and dream differently) for any progressive movement or politics. What if elements of reality become so impoverished that there is nothing to dream about? This is one of the things I remember most clearly from reading Cormac McCarthy’s’s The Road – good, happy, and peaceful dreams usually mean you are dying. Reality, in other words, has become so unbearable that there is nothing but retreat into personal, individualized fantasy as a bulwark against this (this is also, though in a more complicated tone, a motif in one of my favourite films, Wenders’ Until the End of the World).

There are several possible ways out of this. One is to see dreams as shared; that is, to conceptualize dreaming as a collective, rather than solitary activity, and dreams as a possession of more than a single individual. Yet, I fear this too-easily slips into platitudes; as much as dreams (and beliefs, and feelings, and thoughts) can be similar and communicated, it is unlikely they can literally be co-created: individual mental states remain (and, in some cases, are indistinguishable from) individual.

(I’m aware that the Australian Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime may challenge this, but I’m reserving that for a different argument).

Instead of imagining some originary dream-state in which we are connected through other minds as if via a umbilical cord, I’m increasingly thinking it makes sense to conceptualize dreams as places; that is, instances of timespace with laws, sequences, and sets of actions and relations. In this sense, we can be in others’ dream(s), as much as they can be in our(s); but within this place, we are probably still responsible to ourselves. Or are we?

How free are you to act in someone else’s dream?

Faraway, So Close

Blog, history, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory

My best friend and I used to finish every party at my place sitting by windows that were flung wide open, feet propped up on the ledge, smoking, listening to music, and waiting for the dawn to break. Staying behind to help with the dishes was, back in the day, the ultimate token of friendship: my family did not own a dishwasher (it broke down sometime in the early 1980s and it would not be until mid-2000s that political and financial stability were sufficient to buy a new one); there was always a lot of cleaning up to do after a party. These early-morning moments became our after, where we could watch the day rise, safe in the knowledge both mild ignominies and larger embarrassments of the night before were put to sleep, together with the dishes.

One of the songs we used to listen to in such moments was U2’s ‘Stay (Faraway, So Close!’). I’m not sure whether this was before U2 Sold Out or Became Uncool, or because we were just too cut off from that iteration of the ‘culture wars’, in the country still called Yugoslavia deep in the throes of an actual war, to notice or care. Or maybe we were just a little too enamoured of Wim Wenders’ ‘Das Himmel Uber Berlin’ (‘Wings of Desire’ is its English title, sadly probably one of the worst translations ever) or its eponymous sequel, for which the song was recorded.

The period between these two films was also the period during which the events that would mark our childhoods unravelled. “Wings of Desire” was shot in 1987, in a Berlin whose dividing line will soon turn to rubble. “Faraway, So Close” premiered in 1993. Longer-brewing political conflict in what was then known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia surfaced in 1988/9, and transformed into a full-scale war in 1991.

In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence. The first anti-Milosevic protests happen in Belgrade. Almost everyone I know is at this protest.

Yugoslav army forces enter Slovenia. Two Serb secessionist entities form in Croatia and in Bosnia. All sides are armed.

In 1992, the siege of Sarajevo begins.

It will take another three years until the Dayton Peace Agreement, and another ten until the war is effectively over. I was eight when I confidently declared to my father that I think Slovenia will secede from Yugoslavia, and twenty when the war ended. I spent most of my childhood and teens alternating between peace & anti-regime protests, and navigating the networks of violence, misogyny, and hate that conflicts like these tend to kick up. In my late twenties and early thirties, part of my career will be dedicated to dealing specifically with post-conflict environments; and so, in the broader sense, was my book.

At any rate, as we sat by the window ledge sometime between the second half of the 1990s and the first half of 2000s, the lyrics of the song precipitated the whole wide world, which was in stark contrast with the fact that sanctions, visa regimes, and plummeting economy made it exceedingly difficult to travel. Those who did mostly did it in one direction.  

Faraway, so close

Up with the static and the radio

With satellite television

You can go anywhere

Miami, New Orleans

London, Belfast and Berlin

Sometimes, we would swap ‘Belfast’ for ‘Belgrade’, just for the fun of it, but also to make clear that we considered our city, Belgrade, to be part of the world. The promise of connection, of ‘satellite television’ (watching MTV through one of the local channels). The promise that there is a world out there, and that just because we could not see it did not mean it has disappeared.

In the intervening years, I would go to London, Belfast, and Berlin (I’ve still not been to Miami or New Orleans). I would live in London – briefly – and also, more permanently, in Oxford, Budapest, Bristol, Copenhagen, Auckland, Cambridge, Durham, and Newcastle. My friend, though she will travel a bit, will remain in Belgrade.

***

It is 3 May 2023 in Belgrade, 8AM Central European Time (CET). CET is one hour ahead of British Summer Time (BST), which is the time zone in the northeast of England, where I normally live. It is also six hours ahead of EDT (Eastern Daylight Time), which is where I am, in upstate New York. I am here on my research leave – that’s sabbatical in British English – from Durham University, at Bard College. It is 2AM, and I am sound asleep.

At this time, in the entrance of an elementary (primary+lower secondary) school in Belgrade, a 13-year-old opens fire from a semi-automatic rifle, hitting and killing a security guard, injuring two students, before moving down the corridor on the right to the classroom on the left, where he opens fire again, injuring a teacher and killing another eight students. The classroom is my classroom – ‘homeroom’ between 1992 and 1996. The school is the elementary school both me and my best friend attended from 1988 to 1996.

It is 7AM EDT in Red Hook; 1 PM CET. I wake up, going through the usual routine of stretching-coffee-breakfast. I go for a run. I do not check social media, because I need to focus on the talk I am giving that afternoon. The talk is part of my fellowship at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard. It is on spaces and places of thought and violence.

It is 12PM EDT, and 6PM CET. I’m having lunch with Anthony, who’s a friend and also the editor of The Philosopher, the journal whose board I’m on, and another member of the editorial board.

It is 4PM EDT, and 10PM CET. I’m giving the talk. It’s entitled ‘How to think together’, and it’s a product of anything from two months to twenty years of thinking about how to coexist with others, including across political difference. [you can watch the recording here].  

It is 10PM in Red Hook. I have just come back from the post-talk dinner, buzzing from pleasant conversation and the wine. I log on to social media – I see nothing on Twitter, and then, for some reason, I log on to Facebook, which I rarely use (mostly for friends and family in Serbia).

It is 4AM on 4 May in Belgrade. Flowers have been amassed; the candles lit; the vigils held. My friends have hugged and held each other. All of them (quick check on Facebook) are safe, also their children who go to the same school. All of them are safe: none of them are OK.

And, for that matter, neither am I.

***

What is the purpose, the value of mourning at a distance? As the week unfolds, I turn this question over and over again in my head, my ethical, normative, political and affective registers crashing and collapsing against each other.

“I have no right to mourn, I wasn’t even there” to “I wish I could have been there, and I wish I could have taken at least one of those bullets”.

“These kinds of things happen in the USA all the time, why am I suddenly so impacted by this?”

From “Fantasies of self-sacrificing heroism are a wish for immortality/covert fear of death, cut it out” to “There is nothing I can do nor any use I can be of from here, feeling this way is self-indulgent”.

From “I want to go home” to “Home is the north of England, what difference would being there make?”

What right do I have to mourn from a distance?

What does distance do to a feeling?

***

Distance, proximity, detachment and engagement have been among the key themes of my thinking, writing, and, inevitably, life (this blog, for instance, was born out of exploring these themes in both theory and practice). Away is both a mode of escape or distance, and of sustaining desire: being seen but not held (too tight), acknowledged but never (fully) known, alone but never isolated. Or at least that was the ideal. As years went on, it became less and less a moral, ethical or aesthetic choice, and more a simple fact of life. Academic mobility combined with endless curiosity meant I accepted – and, to be honest, welcomed – the constant movement. I regretted that relationships broke apart because of this; I reluctantly accepted that my dislike of heteropatriarchal, monogamous, nuclear family patterns as fundamental social units meant I was likely to struggle to form new ones, especially as more and more friends were having children. A fact of life then became an adaptation strategy: to accept the impermanence of all things; to always have one foot out of the door. Ready to detach and withdraw, there for people should they need me, but not to burden them with my presence, or needs. Or feelings.

Congruent with my other beliefs, being away quietly stopped being a location, and became an answer. 

This mode of inhabiting the world resembles what Peter Sloterdijk in The Art of Philosophy frames as being “dead on holiday”, the practice of studied detachment that first came to define the social role of professional thinkers. This position entails the denial not only of bodily functions and of mortality, but also of time itself; to take up semi-permanent residence in the realm of pure forms means exiting human time as it known. The theme of exiting human space/time is, of course, common to all ‘otherworldly’ practices and belief systems – from Greek philosophy to Christianity to mysticism and whatever happened in between (or: outside, as after all, we do not have to conform to human time). This, of course, is also what both Wenders’ films are about; distance, and desire, and time.

Hannah Arendt, who engaged with this dichotomy and its implications before Sloterdijk, notes that this position – as conducive to thinking as it is – also means we remain isolated from others:

Outstanding among the existential modes of truth-telling are the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality of the historian and the judge (…) These modes of being alone differ in many respects, but they have in common that as long as any one of them lasts, no political commitment, no adherence to a cause, is possible. (…) From this perspective, we remain unaware of the actual content of political life – of the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public.

(Arendt, ‘On Politics’, 2005: 62).

Arendt argues that this is what makes the realm of thought – ‘pure speculation’ – separated from politics. Theorizing rests on the ability to distance oneself not only from the immediacy of reality (something Boltanski explores in On Critique), but also on the ability to suspend judgment; that is, to retain a sufficient degree of distance/detachment from the object (of contemplation) so as to be able to comprehend them in their entirety.

The PhD I wrote in 2019 explored this complex operation insofar as it is involved in the production of critical social theory, in particular the critique of neoliberalism as concept [a concise version, in article form, is here; I drew on Boltanski, Chiapello, Arendt, and Sloterdijk but also went beyond them]. I called it ‘gnossification’ for the tendency to turn complex, ambiguous, and affectively-loaded phenomena into objects of knowledge. This isn’t simply to ‘rationalize’ or ‘explain away’ one’s feelings: we can be blindest about our own feelings when we confront them, as it were, head-on. The point is that gnossification also performs the affective work of creating and maintaining that distance, for the mere fact that it locates our field of vision in our own interiority. It literally produces (affective, perceptive, cognitive) space. And because space is relational (or, as Einstein would have put it, relative), it both requires other objects and cannot but treat them as such.

(If you’d like to hear more about this, I’m always happy to expand 😊).

But doing theory or philosophy is not the only way one can take up semi-permanent residence in the realm of the dead. We can do it through relationship choices (or avoidance of choices). In On Not Knowing, Emily Ogden encapsulates this beautifully and succinctly:  

It is not only in death itself that we encounter the temptation to prescind from life. What it means for death to claim us is that the sterile round of our routines claims us. We no longer see the point or the possibility of a pleasant surprise…Death claims us in the passion some of us have for disposing of our lives, equally in the taking of excessive risks and the settling of marriages. And those two things are not even incompatible: it is possible to ‘sow one’s wild oats’ in the name of settling down. Put me, I beg you, in a rut.

Ogden draws extensively on the work of psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. In In Praise of Risk, Dufourmantelle characterizes this kind of strategy as concerned with avoiding the inevitable ambiguity of existence:

the risk of ‘not yet dying’, this gamble that we will always lose in the end, but only after traversing life with more or less plenitude, joy, and most of all, intensity.

Or, of course, pain.

***

To mourn from a distance: to recognize that no amount of distance – linguistic, conceptual, geographical, emotional – can protect us from the pain of others.

To love at a distance: to know that feeling has no natural connection to proximity, and that this is not the answer but the beginning of a question or, more likely, the question: how to care for others – and to let them care for us – even if we have chosen not to be physically close to them.

To feel at a distance: to understand that it is possible to want to feel the pain, joy, and fear of others, not as a spectator, seer, or helper/healer, but because this is what love – and friendship – is.

***

Friendship, Derrida writes, is a contract with time. In friendship, we make a pact of lasting beyond death. We know our friends will remember us even after we die. And, reciprocally, we accept not only the cognitive but also the emotional task of keeping their memory alive: in simpler terms, we accept we will both remember and miss them.

To love is to accept that there are objects whose presence is felt regardless whether we have chosen them as objects of contemplation. It is to receive the reminder that things can’t be ‘switched off’, even for those of us with significant training, capacity, and experience in doing so. To love means to, essentially, live with others even if we choose not to live together. For someone whose probably most successful and effectively longest relationship was predominantly long-distance, but who was also taught to associate this tendency with narcissism and avoidance of intimacy, this is a difficult lesson.

Back in the early oughts, on a website called everything2 (think like anarchist – no, chaotic – Wikipedia, but with stories, poetry and fiction interspersed with information), there was a post written from the perspective of someone who is spending the winter in one of the research stations in the Antarctica (yes, this was a job I’d considered, and were it not for the unfortunate fact of Serbian passport, would have still very much liked to do). I can’t reproduce much of the post – I didn’t save it, and repeat attempts over the years have failed to resurface it – but I remember the line on which it ends: “I still see you, and I love you very, very much”. The point being that distance, at the end of the day (or the end of the world?), makes very little difference at all.

Being dead on holiday officially over, I begin to pack to go back to the UK, and thus also to leave – even if temporarily – the US, which now holds most of these realizations for me. Not screaming ‘Behold, I am Lazarus’, because this is not a miracle, not even a tiny one. It is more of a coincidence, a set of circumstances, though thanks will be given where thanks are due, because I owe this to so, so many people. You know who you are, and I love you.

Public talks, invited lectures, media engagements

Uncategorized

(note that these are only updated occasionally and often retrospectively, so easiest to check my Twitter and/or Mastodon for upcoming event announcements)

Keynotes & invited lectures

2023

Talking across political divisions (breakout room with Angel Adams Parham), Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities’ annual conference “Friendship and Politics“, October 2023

How to think together: the social life of the mind, Bard College, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, May 2023 (Youtube)

2022

Epistemic what? Positioning, injustice, and political economy of knowledge production, Political Epistemology Network, Amsterdam, December 2022 (keynote lecture)

Epistemic positioning and the Merton Effect, School of Sociology and Social Policy, Leeds University, October 2022 (invited lecture)

Where is a university? Praxis Symposium IV: Post-pandemic higher education, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2022 (keynote)

What is theory for? Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg, January 2022 (invited lecture)

2021

Epistemic positioning and epistemic injustice, University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology seminar series, October 2021 (invited lecture) (Youtube)

Doing (with) theory: beyond theory and practice, Hannover University, Leibniz Center for Science and Society, September 2021 (keynote)

In science we trust? Fatalistic liberalism, public risk, and ‘following the science’, Harvard University, July 2021 (guest lecture)

Authority and the politics of expertise (with Federico Brandmayr), The Philosopher seminar series, May 2021 (invited talk) (Youtube)

Identifying the unprecedented: knowledge production “in these unprecedented times”, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, May 2021 (invited talk)

Covid-19 and systemic risk, Cambridge Disasters Research Network series, March 2021 (invited talk) (Youtube)

On not knowing the future, Stanford University, Yugosplaining and Beyond, February 2021 (invited talk)

2020

On ‘following the science’, Imperial College, Network of Science Communication Professionals, August 2020 (invited talk)

Performing social science? Disciplines, expertise, and the Corona crisis, Politics of Economics seminar series, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, July 2020 (invited lecture) (Youtube)

What was neoliberalism and what comes next? A political economy of predicting the end, European Sociological Association’s Critical Political Economy mid-term conference, June 2020 (invited presentation)

2019

Who knows? Positioning and epistemic judgment in knowledge production, Centre for Discourse Analysis Seminar Series, University of Essex, December 2019 (invited talk)

Political economy of academic mobility in a post-carbon world, Academic Institutions and Communities in the Times of Ecological and Climate Disruption, Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences, October 2019 (invited talk)

Neoliberalism and the limits of critique in contemporary universities, Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) seminar series, Institute of Education, University of London, May 2019 (invited lecture)

More than a feeling? Neoliberalism and the emotional logic of critique, Critical Theory seminar series, University of Nottingham, April 2019 (invited talk)

2018

Writing our way out of neoliberalism?, Undisciplining: conversations at the edges, Gateshead, June 2018 (invited panel)

Reclaiming collective spaces for academic resistance, BSA Early Career Event, University of Newcastle, May 2018 (keynote lecture)

How to use social media, UCU Activists Day School, London, April 2018 (invited talk)

Who acts and what matters in the neoliberal university?, Department of Education Research Seminar Series, University of Lancaster, January 2018 (invited talk) (Youtube)

2015-17

Who Acts and What Matters in the Neoliberal University? Digital University in a Neoliberal Age, Contemporary Philosophy of Technology seminar series, University of Birmingham, November 2017 (invited talk) (Youtube — note that only the first half of the talk is recorded!)

Feminist epistemology, Philosophy of social science graduate course, Manchester Metropolitan University, November 2017 (guest lecture)

What does a university do? From purposes to uses of the university, and back, Central European University, Budapest, September 2017 (keynote lecture)

Neoliberalism on the periphery? Higher education and knowledge production after Yugoslavia, University College London (UCL), February 2016 (invited talk)

Higher education, conflict, and social justice beyond the neoliberal university, School of Social Justice seminar series, University College Dublin, May 2015 (invited talk)

Tár, or the (im)possibility of female genius

Blog, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, theory teaching, Uncategorized

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius;”, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex; “and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”

Of course, the fact that the book, and its author, are much better known for the other quote on processual/relational ontology – “one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman” – is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the first. A statement about geniuses cannot be a statement about women. A woman writing about geniuses must, in fact, be writing about women. And because women cannot be geniuses, she cannot be writing about geniuses. Nor can she be one herself.

I saw Tár, Todd Field’s lauded drama about the (fictional) first woman conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, earlier this year (most of this blog post was written before the Oscars and reviews). There were many reasons why I was poised to love it: the plot/premise, the scenario, the music (obviously), the visuals (and let’s be honest, Kate Blanchett could probably play a Christmas tree and be brilliant). All the same, it ended up riling me for its unabashed exploitation of most stereotypes in the women x ambition box. Of course the lead character (Lydia Tár, played by Blanchett) is cold, narcissistic, and calculating; of course she is a lesbian; of course she is ruthless towards long-term collaborators and exploitative of junior assistants; of course she is dismissive of identity politics; and of course she is, also, a sexual predator. What we perceive in this equation is that a woman who desires – and attains – power will inevitably end up reproducing exactly the behaviours that define men in those roles, down to the very stereotype of Weinstein-like ogre. What is it that makes directors not be able to imagine a woman with a modicum of talent, determination, or (shhh) ambition as anything other than a monster – or alternatively, as a man, and thus by definition a ‘monster’?

To be fair, this movement only repeats what institutions tend to do with women geniuses: they typecast them; make sure that their contributions are strictly domained; and penalize those who depart from the boundaries of prescribed stereotypical ‘feminine’ behaviour (fickle, insecure, borderline ‘hysterical’; or soft, motherly, caring; or ‘girlbossing’ in a way that combines the volume of the first with the protective urges of the second). Often, like in Tár, by literally dragging them off the stage.

The sad thing is that it does not have to be this way. The opening scene of Tár is a stark contrast with the closing one in this regard. In the opening scene, a (staged) interview with Adam Gopnik, Lydia Tár takes the stage in a way that resists, refuses, and downplays gendered stereotypes. Her demeanor is neither masculine nor feminine; her authority is not negotiated, forced to prove itself, endlessly demonstrated. She handles the interview with an equanimity that does not try to impress, convince, cajole, or amuse; but also not charm, outwit, or patronize. In fact, she does not try at all. She approaches the interviewer from a position of intellectual equality, a position that, in my experience, relatively few men can comfortably handle. But of course, this has to turn out to be a pretense. There is no way to exist as a woman in the competitive world of classical music – or, for that matter, anywhere else – without paying heed to the gendered stereotypes.

A particularly poignant (and, I thought, very successful) depiction of this is in the audition scene, in which Olga – the cellist whose career Tár will help and who will eventually become the object of her predation – plays behind a screen. Screening off performers during auditions (‘blind auditions’) was, by the way, initially introduced to challenge gender bias in hiring musicians to major orchestras – to resounding (sorry) success, making it 50% more likely women would be hired. But Tár recognizes the cellist by her shoes (quite stereotypically feminine shoes, by the way). The implication is that even ‘blind’ auditions are not really blind. You can be either a ‘woman’ (like Olga, young, bold, straight, and feminine); or a ‘man’ (like Lydia, masculine, lesbian, and without scruples). There is no outside, and there is no without.

As entertaining as it is to engage in cultural criticism of stereotypical gendered depiction in cinemas, one question from Tár remains. Is there a way to perform authority and expertise in a gender-neutral way? If so, what would it be?

People often tell me I perform authority in a distinctly non-(stereotypically)-feminine way; this both is and is not a surprise. It is a surprise because I am still occasionally shocked by the degree to which intellectual environments in the UK, and in particular those that are traditionally academic, are structurally, relationally, and casually misogynist, even in contexts supposedly explicitly designed to counter it. It is not a surprise, on the other hand, as I was raised by women who did not desire to please and men who were more than comfortable with women’s intellects, but also, I think, because the education system I grew up in had no problems accepting and integrating these intellects. I attribute this to the competitive streak of Communist education – after all, the Soviets sent the first woman into space. But being (at the point of conception, not reception, sadly) bereft of gendered constraints when it comes to intellect does not solve the other part of the equation. If power is also, always, violence, is there a way to perform power that does not ultimately involve hurting others?

This, I think, is the challenge that any woman – or, for that matter, anyone in a position of power who does not automatically benefit from male privilege – must consider. As Dr Autumn Asher BlackDeer brilliantly summarized it recently, decolonization (or any other kind of diversification) is not about replacing one set of oppressors with another, so having more diverse oppressors. Yet, all too frequently, this kind of work – willingly or not – becomes appropriated and used in exactly these ways.

Working in institutions of knowledge production, and especially working both on and within multiple intersecting structures of oppression – gender, ethnicity/race, ability, nationality, class, you name it – makes these challenges, for me, present on a daily basis in both theoretical and practical work., One of the things I try to teach my students is that, in situations of injustice, it is all too appealing to react to perceived slight or offence by turning it inside out, by perpetuating violence in turn. If we are wronged, it becomes easy to attribute blame and mete out punishment. But real intellectual fortitude lies in resisting this impulse. Not in some meek turning-the-other-cheek kind of way, but in realizing that handing down violence will only, ever, perpetuate the cycle of violence. It is breaking – or, failing that, breaking out of – this cycle we must work towards.

As we do, however, we are faced with another kind of problem. This is something Lauren Berlant explicitly addressed in one of their best texts ever, Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy: most people in and around institutions of knowledge production find authority appealing. This, of course, does not mean that all intellectual authority lends itself automatically to objectification (on either of the sides), but it does and will happen. Some of this, I think, is very comprehensively addressed in Amia Srinivasan‘s The Right to Sex; some of it is usefully dispensed with by Berlant, who argues against seeing pedagogical relations as indexical for transference (or the other way around?). But, as important as these insights are, questions of knowledge – and thus questions of authority – are not limited to questions of pedagogy. Rather, they are related to the very relational nature of knowledge production itself.

For any woman who is an intellectual, then, the challenge rests in walking the very thin line between seduction and reduction – that is, the degree to which intellectual work (an argument, a book, a work of art) has to seduce, but in turn risks being reduced to an act of seduction (the more successful it is, the more likely this will happen). Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory, which I’m reading at the moment (shout out to Phlox Books in London where I bought it), is a case in point. Despentes argues against reducing women’s voices to ‘experience’, or to women as epistemic object (well, OK, the latter formulation is mine). Yet, in the reception of the book, it is often Despentes herself – her clothes, her mannerisms, her history, her sexuality – that takes centre stage.

Come to think of it, this version of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ applies to all women’s performances: how many times have I heard people say they find, for instance, Judith Butler’s or Lauren Berlant’s arguments or language “too complex” or “too difficult”, but on occasions when they do make an effort to engage with them reduce them to being “about gender” or “about sexuality” (hardly warrants mentioning that the same people are likely to diligently plod through Heidegger, Sartre or Foucault without batting an eyelid and, speaking of sexuality, without reducing Foucault’s work on power to it). The implication, of course, is that writers or thinkers who are not men have the obligation to persuade, to enchant readers/consumers into thinking their argument is worth giving time to.

This is something I’ve often observed in how people relate to the arguments of women and nonbinary intellectuals: “They did not manage to convince me” or “Well, let’s see if she can get away with it”. The problem is not just the casualized use of pronouns (note how men thinkers retain their proper names: Sartre, Foucault, but women slip into being a “she”). It’s the expectation that it is their (her) job to convince you, to lure you. Because, of course, your time is more valuable than hers, and of course, there are all these other men you would/should be reading instead, so why bother? It is not the slightest bit surprising that this kind of intellectual habit lends itself too easily to epistemic positioning that leads to epistemic erasure, but also that it becomes all too easily perpetuated by everyone, including those who claim to care about such things.

One of the things I hope I managed to convey in the Ethics of Ambiguity reading group I ran at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 is to not read intellectuals who are not white men in this way. To not sit back with your arms folded and let “her” convince you. Simone Weil, another genius – and a woman – wrote that attention is the primary quality of love we can give to each other. The quality of intellectual attention we give to pieces we read has to be the same to count as anything but a narrow, self-aggrandizing gesture. In other words, a commitment to equality means nothing without a commitment to equality of intellectual attention, and a constant practice and reflection required to sustain and improve it.

Enjoyed this? Try https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00113921211057609

and https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/philosophy-herself

Books this year

Blog, Reviews, social theory, Sociological fiction

At the end of 2021, I published a list of & short commentary on the books I had read during that year, partly to amplify books written by women (and non-binary) authors, partly to highlight the persistent (and intersectional) process of devaluing, ‘forgetting’, or unknowing work written by women. This list is shorter; not all books are by women/NB authors (though most are), and I also wrote several blog posts (and articles) that engage with some of the work listed here in more detail (if you’re after that sort of thing). Judging by the length of the list, I read less (some of this has to do with general exhaustion/burnout, and some with other stuff that was happening in the year, including funding deadlines, running a new project, and leading EDI in my Department). I also like to think I read deeper.

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

This eagerly anticipated book not only covers some of my favourite philosophers (Anscombe; Murdoch) but also presents a carefully executed study of the social and historical setting of Oxford (‘ordinary-language’) philosophy, so 10/10.

Oh, I’ve also read the other book on the Anscombe/Foot/Midgley/Murdoch ‘quartet’ that came out, only to check whether there was any accuracy in (multiple) reviewers’ perennial tendency to ascribe analytical acumen to books written by men, and ‘biographical’ and ‘descriptive’ detail to books written by women (which is in and of itself a kind of epistemic injustice/epistemic positioning, by the way). There isn’t. Thought so.

Christine Korsgaard, Self-constitution: agency, identity, integrity

It is perhaps a truism that if you start doing moral philosophy you never stray too far from Kant. True or not, this book was probably one of the best ways to come back to it. As I’ve written in a blog post that engages with the book in slightly more detail, over the past couple of years I have become increasingly interested in problems of normative theory – something I’ve been strongly opposed to most of my career thus far (I even wrote a PhD on why we’re prone to confuse epistemic with moral and/or political sentiments). Korsgaard’s approach to theories of identity and agency is decisively contemporary and has significant implications for how we think about the ability to choose, so it fit the bill perfectly. It is also one of the books that confirm the rule that women philosophers tend to write better than most people.

Sheila Jasanoff et al, Uncertainty

Disclaimer: I actually have a chapter in this volume, initially developed as a forum response in Boston Review (the text is part of my broader work on agency, unknowing, and resistance). I think all contributions are worth reading because they reflect the general debate about knowledge, prediction, and what science can do – and thus both its highs and its lows.

Michelle Murphy, Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty

Speaking of uncertainty: I think I initially started re-reading Michelle Murphy’s famous monograph last year because of my work on Covid-19 and institutional forms of ‘unknowing’ when it comes to things such as airborne spread. Reading it, I was reminded not only how brilliant, well-written, and pioneering Murphy’s work was, but also how institutional ways of ‘unknowing’ function when it comes to access to knowledge: namely, none of the libraries of the institution I work for have this book in physical form (it is accessible in online form), despite its pioneering status in the fields of public health, STS, and policy studies, all of which the institution specializes in. The availability of physical books in the library means students may encounter it just by browsing the shelves; books available online only get discovered if already assigned to the syllabus, which already requires someone (someone in a position of power, at that) to recognize and validate the book as key, mandatory, or at least relevant. Really makes you think about the materiality of objects, that.     

Michelle Murphy, Economization of life

Once on a Murphy roll I kept going, so I bought and started reading (for the first time) Murphy’s 2017 Economization of life. It chimed well with the piece on ‘slow death’ (building on Berlant), as well as with a few other pieces on bio- and necro-politics I was writing at the time, but its emphasis on reproductive rights and reproductive justice was also a 10/10 in the year in which the US Supreme Court struck down Roe vs. Wade.

Max Liboiron, Pollution is colonialism

OK, full disclosure: I read most of this book in 2021 but it is so good I wanted to feature it again and in more detail. Actually, detail aside: this is simply the best book to read if you are doing any sort of scientific work. Or activism. Or politics. Or just, you know, living in the vicinity of institutions of knowledge production. Just read it. Seriously.

Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy

This is a really good example of a careful engagement with arguments in history, political economy, and sociology/anthropology of science to make a simple but often overlooked point: the construction of much of contemporary world required the translation of different sources – raw materials, human labour, and knowledge – into energy. In addition to the reproductive politics in Murphy’s book, it was also a reminder of how much of everyday existence depends on humans just willing themselves (or being willed to?) do something.

Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of desire: the theory and practice of Hellenistic ethics

Nussbaum was one of the first philosophers I grew to like on the question of morals and ethics; this book was, in a manner of speaking, a stand-in – I wanted to buy Upheavals of Thought, which I had started reading in the (first) winter break of my (second) PhD, but couldn’t afford it in 2015, so went for this one instead. Revisiting it recently was both an uncanny experience – I was reading marginalia from my 7-years-ago-self – and a reminder of the origin of some of the key theoretical questions I grappled with and would go on to shape my subsequent intellectual project, including the role of theory in relation to practice.

Joanne Barker, Red Scare: the state’s indigenous terrorist

Thanks to Sakshi who I think first mentioned this book on Twitter. I’ve always had an interest in settler-colonial histories, including that of United States (this was, by the way, part of my undergraduate training in anthropology 2000-2004 at the University of Belgrade – you can imagine my surprise at the realization that histories of colonization are still considered ‘controversial’ and/or are not taught in many ‘Western’ universities); Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks was a formative influence on my book on politics of class and identity in former Yugoslavia, and Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native is one of the best books I’ve read (and keep reading) in the past three years. Barker’s book joins this lineup with a thorough take on the criminalization of indigenous resistance – something that has profound implications not only for how we think about projects of decolonizing, but also about ecological activism.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Speaking of reading via friends: I know and like Nelson’s work (I started reading On Freedom in 2021 despite forgetting to include it in the blog post!, and have started reading The Red Parts last year), and I’ve wanted to read Bluets in a while. The opportunity finally presented itself when I visited Marina Veličković’s flat in Newcastle, where I found it on the shelf (yes, sorry, I know I have said this already, but having me in your flat means I will read your books). Promptly purchased my own copy and read it after moving to a (rather blue) house on the North Sea coast.

I have read William Gass’ On Being Blue in 2014; blue, and versions of, are effectively the only colour palette I like (the rest of my choices, both in terms of wardrobe and in terms of environment, oscillate in the triangle of black, white, and [shades of] grey). But I love almost all shades of blue; and, of course, the sea. Though, of course, that could just be a trick of the light, st(r)uck in the same triangle between white, black, and grey.

Adam Phillips, On Getting Better and On Wanting to Change

Adam Phillips is my sort of guilty pleasure (and, of course, one of my favourite books by Phillips – in addition to On Flirtation – is Unforbidden Pleasures). In other words, Adam Phillips is what I read when I feel in need of a self-help book. Last year he published two, and although short (and meant to be read in tandem), I found them quite different – On Wanting to Change seemed like a not-too-deeply developed iteration/repetition of much of his earlier work; On Getting Better was much better (sorry), which came as a surprise as the theoretical focus of the first is generally closer to my sphere of interest than that of the second. Oh, we change.

Adam Phillips, On Flirtation

This is not only one of my favourite books by Phillips, it is also one of my favourite books in general. I was re-reading it after about five or six years – my copy is the specimen some good soul left in the ‘books to adopt’ section in the old Cambridge Sociology PhD attic – and marvelling at how little I remembered of the original reading.

Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

What can I say, I needed a lot of self-help this year.

Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

I eagerly anticipated Berlant’s last book (technically, finished and published after they had already passed) and so far it does not seem to disappoint. The last couple of years have been, for me, marked to a rather significant degree by reading (and teaching) Berlant’s work, and since this special issue on ‘Encountering Berlant’came out towards the end of the year, I am looking forward to continuing to engage it in the things I am writing at the moment.

Simone De Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity

During a particularly dark period last year, I started re-reading de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, which I’ve first read during my PhD (in which ambiguity features rather prominently). Back then, of course, I read it primarily as an argument in existentialist ontology; this time around, I paid more attention to the ethics aspect, which is exceptional – but, as I kept thinking, also relevant for contemporary discussions, somewhat archaic language aside. Given that I’ve spent years entreating people to read Ethics of Ambiguity (the usual response, of course, being “oh I haven’t read it” – most people who claim to have ‘read’ de Beauvoir have barely made it past the first 20 pages of Second Sex; this form of sidelinining/domaining is something I’ve explored here), I decided to bite the bullet and asked online if anyone would be interested in a reading group – so far it’s at its third iteration, so you are more than welcome to join!

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where are you?

I’ve written about Rooney’s third book (as well as a related novella, Mr Salary) in more detail here. Given I really liked Conversations with Friends (a book I picked up on a whim, based solely on its cover and the fact I was given some book tokens in exchange for keynoting at a conference, and was determined, deep in the throes of writing my PhD, to spend them on fiction rather than theory) before Rooney became A Name, and given I did not really like Normal People after it, I was apprehensive about this one. I really struggled with the first three quarters (or more like 5/6ths), but it picked up towards the end, making me think that there might have been something about my own pace of reading/processing at the time that it mimicked or repeated.

Margaret Atwood, Penelopiad

Atwood *and* Classics, furthermore Odyssey? Yes.

Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic

“The past shapes the present—they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past—ours, our family’s, our culture’s—wields in the present?”

‘Axiomatic’ was the first of two books I picked up in Durham’s newest independent bookshop (outstanding collection of books plus a reading nook, coffee/tea and cake). Obviously, I was drawn by the title, but it turned out I couldn’t have picked better – Tumarkin is an Eastern European living in Australia (in her memorable phrase, from ‘Eastern European elsewheres’), and reflecting on commonplaces of moving, learning, knowing, and forgetting (including trauma), in a mix of fiction, reportage, and analysis. Let’s just say I left the book with my therapist.  

Radmila Zygouris, Pasji život u bundi od samurovine i drugi psihoanalitički slučajevi (L’Ordinaire, symptome)

Speaking of both psychoanalysis and immigrant trajectories, I also read this book, translated into Serbian by one of my mum’s oldest friends. It is composed of articles and interviews with a prominent French Lacanian analyst – now in her 1980s – Radmila Zygouris, whose story (and career) combines Greece, Serbia, Argentina, Paris and Germany (!!). The book is sadly not available in English, but the closest edition is in French, here.  

Jelena Nolan Roll, O blokovima se priča (Storytelling from New Belgrade Blocks)

It’s great when one of your best friends publishes a book; it’s even better when it turns out that the book is really good, a half-magic-realist allegory of growing up in New Belgrade’s equivalent of council house flats in 1990s and early 2000s. The book is so far in Serbian only; there are book launches scheduled for Bristol (where Jelena resides) and London, so perhaps the English translation is not too far off…?

Hella Pick, Invisible Walls: A Journalist in Search of Her Life

This is the other book I picked up from Collected on a late-November strike-day attempt to recover from the combined pressures of Autumn darkness and term-time exhaustion. Pick was, for a significant part of the second half of the 20th century, The Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent. She was also on the Kindertransport from Austria. The story in between weaves together some of the most interesting parts of contemporary history (including early stages of decolonization, the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Cold War) and reminded me again – as I discovered in 2021, when reading Deborah Levy – that biographies are only boring if written by men.

It would have been great to close this year (and post) in oh-so-circular a fashion, with a biography (Pick), but sadly neither is Metaphysical Animals (only) a biography (it is, indeed, philosophy) nor are lives, blog posts, or books ever (fully) circular, so here’s instead a meta-reference to this – as well as to the book with which I closed 2020 and started 2021, A Tale for the Time Being:   

Ruth Ozeki, Book of Form and Emptiness

I have (really) started Ozeki’s newest earlier in 2022, and have (really) picked it up again only in the last days of 2022, and I (really) so far like it less than A Tale, but given that (I hope) it is – in addition to a book that is also about itself – a meta-reference to Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, here’s to…well, not forgetting.

You can’t ever go back home again

Blog, history, Politics, psychoanalysis, social theory, Sociological fiction

At the start of December, I took the boat from Newcastle to Amsterdam. I was in Amsterdam for a conference, but it is also true I used to spend a lot of time in Amsterdam – Holland in general – both for private reasons and for work, between 2010 and 2016. Then, after a while, I took a train to Berlin. Then another, sleeper train, to Budapest. Then, a bus to Belgrade.

To wake up in Eastern Europe is to wake up in a context in which history has always already happened. To state this, of course, is a cliché; thinking, and writing, about Eastern Europe is always already infused with clichés. Those of us who come from this part of the world – what Maria Tumarkin marks so aptly as “Eastern European elsewheres” – know. In England, we exist only as shadow projections of a self, not even important enough to be former victims/subjects of the Empire. We are born into the world where we are the Other, so we learn to think, talk, and write of ourselves as the Other. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about this; Frantz Fanon wrote about this too.

To wake up in Berlin is to already wake up in Eastern Europe. This is where it used to begin. To wake up in Berlin is to know that we are always already living in the aftermath of a separation. In Eastern Europe, you know the world was never whole.

I was eight when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember watching it on TV. Not long after, I remember watching a very long session of the Yugoslav League of Communists (perhaps this is where my obsession with watching Parliament TV comes from?). It seemed to go on forever. My grandfather seemed agitated. My dad – whom I only saw rarely – said “Don’t worry, Slovenia will never secede from Yugoslavia”. “Oh, I think it will”, I said*.

When you ask “Are you going home for Christmas?”, you mean Belgrade. To you, Belgrade is a place of clubs and pubs, of cheap beer and abundant grilled meat**. To me, Belgrade is a long dreadful winter, smells of car fumes and something polluting (coal?) used for fuel. Belgrade is waves of refugees and endless war I felt powerless to stop, despite joining the first anti-regime protest in 1992 (at the age of 11), organizing my class to join one in 1996 (which almost got me kicked out of school, not for the last time), and inhaling oceans of tear gas when the regime actually fell, in 2000.

Belgrade is briefly hoping things would get better, then seeing your Prime Minister assassinated in 2003; seeing looting in the streets of Belgrade after Kosovo declared independence in 2008, and while already watching the latter on Youtube, from England, deciding that maybe there was nowhere to return to. Nowadays, Belgrade is a haven of crony capitalism equally indebted to Russian money, Gulf real estate, and Chinese fossil fuel exploitation that makes its air one of the most polluted in the world. So no, Belgrade never felt like home.

Budapest did, though.

It may seem weird that the place I felt most at home is a place where I barely spent three years. My CV will testify that I lived in Budapest between 2010 and 2013, first as a visiting fellow, then as an adjunct professor at the Central European University (CEU). I don’t have a drop of Hungarian blood (not that I know of, at least, thought with the Balkans you can never tell). My command of language was, at best, perfunctory; CEU is an American university and its official language is English. Among my friends – most of whom were East-Central European – we spoke English; some of us have other languages in common, but we still do. And while this group of friends did include some people who would be described as ‘locals’ – that is, Budapest-born and raised – we were, all of us, outsiders, brought together by something that was more than chance and a shared understanding of what it meant to be part of the city***.

Of course, the CV will say that what brought us together was the fact that we were all affiliated with CEU. But CEU is no longer in Budapest; since 2020, it has relocated to Vienna, forced out by the Hungarian regime’s increasingly relentless pursuit against anything that smacks of ‘progressivism’ (are you listening, fellow UK academics?). Almost all of my friends had left before that, just like I did. In 2012, increasingly skeptical about my chances to acquire a permanent position in Western academia with a PhD that said ‘University of Belgrade’ (imagine, it’s not about merit), I applied to do a second PhD at Cambridge. I was on the verge of accepting the offer, when I also landed that most coveted of academic premia, a Marie Curie postdoc position attached to an offer of a permanent – tenured – position, in Denmark****.

Other friends also left. For jobs. For partners’ jobs. For parenthood. For politics. In academia, this is what you did. You swallowed and moved on. Your CV was your life, not its reflection.

So no, there is no longer a home I can return to.

And yet, once there, it comes back. First as a few casually squeezed out words to the Hungarian conductors on the night train from Berlin, then, as a vocabulary of 200+ items that, though rarely used, enabled me to navigate the city, its subways, markets, and occasionally even public services (the high point of my Hungarian fluency was being able to follow – and even part-translate – the Semmelweis Museum curator’s talk! :)). Massolit, the bookshop which also exists in Krakow, which I’ve visited on a goodbye-to-Eastern-Europe trip from Budapest via Prague and Krakow to Ukraine (in 2013, right before the annexation). Gerlóczy utca, where is the French restaurant in which I once left a massive tip for a pianist who played so beautifully that I was happy to be squeezed at the smallest table, right next to the coat stand. Most, which means ‘bridge’ in Serbian (and Bosnian, and Croatian) and ‘now’ in Hungarian. In Belgrade, I now sometimes rely on Google maps to get around; in Budapest, the map of the city is buried so deep in my mental compass that I end up wherever I am supposed to be going.

This is what makes the city your own. Flow, like the Danube, massive as it meanders between the city’s two halves, which do not exactly make a whole. Like that book by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is a Hungarian name, btw. Like my academic writing, which, uncoupled from the strictures of British university term, flows.

Budapest has changed, but the old and the new overlay in ways that make it impossible not to remember. Like the ‘twin’ cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma in the fictional universe of China Miéville’s The City and the City (the universe was, of course, modelled on Berlin, but Besźel is Budapest out and out, save for the sea), the memory and its present overlap in distinct patterns that we are trained not to see. Being in one precludes being in the other. But there are rumours of a third city, Orciny, one that predates both. Believing in Orciny is considered a crime, though. There cannot be a place where the past and the future are equally within touching distance. Right?

CEU, granted, is no longer there as an institution; though the building (and the library) remains, most of its services, students, and staff are now in Vienna. I don’t even dare go into the campus; the last time I was there, in 2017, I gave a keynote about how universities mediate disagreement. The green coffee shop with the perennially grim-faced person behind the counter, the one where we went to get good coffee before Espresso Embassy opened, is no longer there. But Espresso Embassy still stands; bigger. Now, of course, there are places to get good coffee everywhere: Budapest is literally overrun by them. The best I pick up is from the Australian coffee shop, which predates my move. Their shop front celebrates their 10th anniversary. Soon, it will be 10 years since I left Budapest.

Home: the word used to fill me with dread. “When are you going home?”, they would ask in Denmark, perhaps to signify the expectation I would be going to Belgrade for the winter break, perhaps to reflect the idea that all immigrants are, fundamentally, guests. “I live here”, I used to respond. “This is my home”. On bad days, I’d add some of the combo of information I used to point out just how far from assumed identities I was: I don’t celebrate Christmas (I’m atheist, for census purposes); if I did, it would be on a different date (Orthodox Christian holidays in Serbia observe the Julian calendar, which is 10 days behind the Gregorian); thanks, I’ll be going to India (I did, in fact, go to India including over the Christmas holidays the first year I lived in Denmark, though not exactly in order to spite everyone). But above and beyond all this, there was a simpler, flatter line: home is not where you return, it’s the place you never left.

In Always Coming Home, another SF novel about finding the places we (n)ever left, Ursula LeGuin retraces a past from the point of view of a speculative future. This future is one in which the world – in fact, multiple worlds – have failed. Like Eastern Europe, it is a sequence of apocalypses whose relationship can only be discovered through a combination of anthropology and archaeology, but one that knows space and its materiality exist only as we have already left it behind; we cannot dig forwards, as it were.

Am I doing the same, now? Am I coming home to find out why I have left? Or did I return from the future to find out I have, in fact, never left?

Towards the end of The City and the City, the main character, Tyador Borlú, gets apprehended by the secret police monitoring – and punishing – instances of trespass (Breach) between two cities, the two worlds. But then he is taken out by one of the Breach – Ashil – and led through the city in a way that allows him to finally see them not as distinct, but as parts of a whole.

Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up. Sound and smell came in: the calls of Besźel; the ringing of its clocktowers; the clattering and old metal percussion of the trams; the chimney smell; the old smells; they came in a tide with the spice and Illitan yells of Ul Qoma, the clatter of a militsya copter, the gunning of German cars. The colours of Ul Qoma light and plastic window displays no longer effaced the ochres and stone of its neighbour, my home.

‘Where are you?’ Ashil said. He spoke so only I could hear. ‘I . . .’

‘Are you in Besźel or Ul Qoma?’

‘. . . Neither. I’m in Breach.’ ‘You’re with me here.’

We moved through a crosshatched morning crowd. ‘In Breach. No one knows if they’re seeing you or unseeing you. Don’t creep. You’re not in neither: you’re in both.’

He tapped my chest. ‘Breathe.’

(Loc. 3944)

Breathe.

*Maybe this is where the tendency not to be overtly impressed by the authority of men comes from (or authority in general, given my father was a professor of sociology and I was, at that point, nine years old, and also right).

** Which I also do not benefit from, as I do not eat meat.

*** Some years later, I will understand that this is why the opening lines of the Alexandria Quartet always resonated so much.

**** How I ended up doing a second PhD at Cambridge after all and relocating to England permanently is a different story, one that I part-told here.

‘Ethics of Ambiguity’ Reading Group

Philosophy of social science, Reviews, social theory

This is a reading group for all those who wish to come together to discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s “Ethics of Ambiguity” (1947).

The group runs in (Northern hemisphere) winter 2022-3, mostly coinciding with the winter break, and is designed to give space for open reflection and discussion of ideas concerning ethics, responsibility, and ambiguity in relation to contemporary circumstances.

The group is open to all. Philosophical training or detailed background knowledge are not required. For specs, see FAQ (1) below.

The group runs in weekly sessions on Zoom, Fridays 1-2PM (BST, London time), starting from 16 December until 27 January inclusive of Xmas/New Year’s break. This time is chosen both for accessibility purposes and, in some cases, to accommodate the academic term. If the timing does not suit you, please see FAQ (2) below.

For instructions on how and when to join, as well as how to participate, see FAQs (3) and (4). For schedule, see bottom of page.

FAQs (or, please read this before joining):

(1) Who can participate?

The group is open to all. You do not need to have a philosophical background, detailed knowledge of existentialist (or any) philosophy, or an interest in Simone de Beauvoir to participate. The group welcomes all people regardless of gender, ethnicity, ability, or any other aspect of identity; that said, the conversation is designed to be respectful and equal, so bullying, racism and transphobia will not be tolerated.

There is no formal leadership and no assumption of authority in the group. The emphasis in the discussion is on personal impressions, thoughts, and questions that the text raises for you. That said, be mindful of the background of participants when contributing; do not use references (as in, ‘in her other work, de Beauvoir…’) or name-drops (as in, ‘as Foucault said..’) without explaining what you mean in a language accessible to everyone (or, best, skip name-dropping altogether).

(2) What if the timing does not suit me?

The group is run on an entirely informal and voluntary basis. You are free to join any of the sessions at any time between 1 and 2 PM, without expectation of continuation or repeat participation. If the timing does not suit you, you are welcome to start another reading or discussion group at a timing that suits you better.

(3) How can I join?

Below is the schedule, Zoom link, and details for each session.

16 December, 1-2PM (BST)

Chapter 1: Ambiguity and Freedom (pages 5-35 in 2015 English edition by Open Road Integrated Media)

Join


23 December, 1-2PM (BST)

Chapter 2: Personal Freedom and Others (pp. 37-78, as above)

Join

[Winter break]

6 January, 1-2PM (BST)

Chapter 3: The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity, Sections I (The Aesthetic Attitude) and II (Freedom and Liberation), pp. 79-103

Join

13 January, 1-2PM (BST)

Chapter 3: The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity, Sections III and IV (The Antinomies of Action & The Present and the Future), pp. 103-139

Join

20 January, 1-2PM (BST)

Chapter 3, Section IV (The Present and the Future), cont’d, and beginning of Chapter V: Ambiguity (pp. 139-168).

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27 January, 1-2PM (BST)

Conclusions (pp. 169-174) and wrap-up/further plans

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On reparative reading and critique in/of anthropology: postdisciplinary perspectives on discipline-hopping

Blog, Conference presentations, Philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, social theory

*This is a more-or-less unedited text of the plenary (keynote) address to the international conference ‘Anthropology of the future/The Future of Anthropology‘, hosted by the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in Viminacium, 8-9 September 2022. If citing, please refer to as Bacevic, J. [Title]. Keynote address, [Conference].

Hi all. It’s odd to be addressing you at a conference entitled ‘Anthropology of the Future/The Future of Anthropology’, as I feel like an outsider for several reasons. Most notably, I am not an anthropologist. This is despite the fact that I have a PhD in anthropology, from the University of Belgrade, awarded in 2008. What I mean is that I do not identify as an anthropologist, I do not work in a department or institute of anthropology, nor do I publish in anthropology journals. In fact, I went so far in the opposite direction that I got another PhD, in sociology, from the University of Cambridge. I work at a department of sociology, at Durham University, which is a university in the north-east of England, which looks remarkably like Oxford and Cambridge. So I am an outsider in two senses: I am not an anthropologist, and I no longer live, reside, or work in Serbia. However, between 2004 and 2007 I taught at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology of the University of Belgrade, and also briefly worked at the Institute that is organizing this very conference, as part of the research stipend awarded by the Serbian Ministry of Science to young, promising, scientific talent. Between 2005 and 2007, and then again briefly in 2008-9, I was the Programme Leader for Antropology in Petnica Science Centre. I don’t think it would be too exaggerated to say, I was, once, anthropology’s future; and anthropology was mine. So what happened since?

By undertaking a retelling of a disciplinary transition – what would in common parlance be dubbed ‘career change’ or ‘reorientation’ – my intention is not to engage in autoethnography, but to offer a reparative reading. I borrow the concept of reparative reading from the late theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay entitled “On paranoid reading and reparative reading, or: You’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you”, first published in 1997 and then, with edits, in 2003; I will say more about its content and key concepts shortly.

For the time being, however, I would like to note that the disinclination from autoethnography was one of the major reasons why I left anthropology; it was matched by the desire to do theory, by which I mean the possibility of deriving mid-range generalizations about human behaviour that could aspire not to be merely local, by which I mean not apply only to the cases studied. This, as we know, is not particularly popular in anthropology. This particular brand of ethnographic realism was explicitly targeted for critique during anthropology’s postmodern turn. On the other hand, Theory in anthropology itself had relatively little to commend it, all too easily and too often developing into a totalizing master-narrative of the early evolutionism or, for that matter, its late 20th– and early 21st-century correlates, including what is usually referred to as cognitive psychology, a ‘refresh’ of evolutionary theory I had the opportunity to encounter during my fellowship at the University of Oxford (2007-8). So there were, certainly, a few reasons to be suspicious of theory in anthropology.

For someone theoretically inclined, thus, one option became to flee into another discipline. Doing a PhD in philosophy in the UK is a path only open to people who have undergraduate degrees in philosophy (and I, despite a significant proportion of my undergrad coursework going into philosophy, had not), which is why a lot of the most interesting work in philosophy in the UK happens – or at least used to happen – in other departments, including literature and language studies, the Classics, gender studies, or social sciences like sociology and geography. I chose to work with those theorists who had found their institutional homes in sociology; I found a mentor at the University of Cambridge, and the rest is history (by which I mean I went on to a postdoctoral research fellowship at Cambridge and then on to a permanent position at Durham).  

Or that, at any rate, is one story. Another story would tell you that I got my PhD in 2008, the year when the economic crisis hit, and job markets collapsed alongside several other markets. On a slightly precarious footing, freshly back from Oxford, I decided to start doing policy research and advising in an area I had been researching before: education policies, in particular as part of processes of negotiation of multiple political identities and reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Something that had hitherto been a passion, politics, soon became a bona fide object of scholarly interest, so I spent the subsequent few years developing a dual career, eventually a rather high-profile one, as, on the one hand, policy advisor in the area of postconflict higher education, and, on the other, visiting (adjunct) lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest, after doing a brief research fellowship in its institute of advanced study. But because I was not educated as a political scientist – I did not, in other words, have a degree in political science; anthropology was closer to ‘humanities’ and my research was too ‘qualitative’ (this is despite the fact I taught myself basic statistics as well as relatively advanced data analysis) – I could not aspire to a permanent job there. So I started looking for routes out, eventually securing a postdoc position (a rather prestigious Marie Curie, and a tenure-track one) in Denmark.

I did not like Denmark very much, and my boss in this job – otherwise one of the foremost critics of the rise of audit culture in higher education – turned out to be a bully, so I spent most of my time in my two fieldwork destinations, University of Bristol, UK, and University of Auckland, New Zealand. I left after two years, taking up an offer of a funded PhD at Cambridge I had previously turned down. Another story would tell you that I was disappointed with the level of corruption and nepotism in Serbian academia so have decided to leave. Another, with disturbing frequency attached to women scholars, would tell you that being involved in an international relationship I naturally sought to move somewhere I could settle down with my partner, even if that meant abandoning the tenured position I had at Singidunum University in Serbia (this reading is, by the way, so prominent and so unquestioned that after I announced I had got the Marie Curie postdoc and would be moving to Denmark several people commented “Oh, that makes sense, isn’t your partner from somewhere out there” – despite the fact my partner was Dutch).

Yet another story, of course, would join the precarity narrative with the migration/exile and decoloniality narrative, stipulating that as someone who was aspiring to do theory I (naturally) had to move to the (former) colonial centre, given that theory is, as we know, produced in the ‘centre’ whereas countries of the (semi)periphery are only ever tasked with providing ‘examples’, ‘case-‘, or, at best, regional or area studies. And so on and so on, as one of the few people who have managed to trade their regional academic capital for a global (read: Global North/-driven and -defined) one, Slavoj Žižek, would say.

The point here is not to engage in a demonstration of multifocality by showing all these stories could be, and in a certain register, are true. It is also not to point out that any personal life-story or institutional trajectory can be viewed from multiple (possibly mutually irreconcilable) registers, and that we pick a narrative depending on occasion, location, and collocutor. Sociologists have produced a thorough analysis of how CVs, ‘career paths’ or  trajectories in the academia are narratively constructed so as to establish a relatively seamless sequence that adheres to, but also, obviously, by the virtue of doing that, reproduces ideas and concepts of ‘success’ (and failure; see also ‘CV of failures‘). Rather, it is to observe something interesting: all these stories, no matter how multifocal or multivocal, also posit master narratives of social forces – forces like neoliberalism, or precarity, for instance; and a master narrative of human motivation – why people do the things they do, and what they desire – things like permanent jobs and high incomes, for instance. They read a direction, and a directionality, into human lives; even if – or, perhaps, especially when – they narrate instances of ‘interruption’, ‘failure’, or inconsistency.

This kind of reading is what Eve Kosofsky Segdwick dubs paranoid reading. Associated with what Paul Ricoeur termed ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and building on the affect theories of Melanie Klein and Silvan Tomkins, paranoid reading is a tendency that has arguably become synonymous with critique, or critical theory in general: to assume that there is always a ‘behind’, an explanatory/motivational hinterland that, if only unmasked, can not only provide a compelling explanation for the past, but also an efficient strategy for orienting towards the future. Paranoid reading, for instance, characterizes a lot of the critique in and of anthropology, not least of the Writing Culture school, including in the ways the discipline deals with the legacy of its colonial past.

To me, it seems like anthropology in Serbia today is primarily oriented towards a paranoid reading, both in relation to its present (and future) and in relation to its past. This reading of the atmosphere is something it shares with a lot of social sciences and humanities internationally, one of increasing instability/hostility, of the feeling of being ‘under attack’ not only by governments’ neoliberal policies but also by increasingly conservative and reactionary social forces that see any discipline with an openly progressive, egalitarian and inclusive political agenda as leftie woke Satanism, or something. This paranoia, however, is not limited only to those agents or social forces clearly inimical or oppositional to its own project; it extends, sometimes, to proximate and cognate disciplines and forms of life, including sociology, and to different fractions or theoretical schools within anthropology, even those that should be programmatically opposed to paranoid styles of inquiry, such as the phenomenological or ontological turn – as witnessed, for instance, by the relatively recent debate between the late David Graeber and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on ontological alterity.

Of course, in the twenty-five years that have passed from the first edition of Sedgwick’s essay, many species of theory that explicitly diverge from paranoid style of critique have evolved, not least the ‘postcritical’ turn. But, curiously, when it comes to understanding the conditions of our own existence – that is, the conditions of our own knowledge production – we revert into paranoid readings of not only the social, cultural, and political context, but also of people’s motivations and trajectories. As I argued elsewhere, this analytical gesture reinscribes its own authority by theoretically disavowing it. To paraphrase the title of Sedgwick’s essay, we’re so anti-theoretical that we’re failing to theorize our own inability to stop aspiring to the position of power we believe our discipline, or our predecessors, once occupied, the same power we believe is responsible for our present travails. In other words, we are failing to theorize ambiguity.

My point here is not to chastise anthropology in particular or critical theory in more general terms for failing to live up to political implications of its own ontological commitments (or the other way round?); I have explained at length elsewhere – notably in “Knowing neoliberalism” – why I think this is an impossibility (to summarize, it has to do with the inability to undo the conditions of our own knowledge – to, barely metaphorically, cut our own epistemological branch). Rather, my question is what we could learn if we tried to think of the history and thus future of anthropology, and our position in it, from a reparative, rather than paranoid, position.

This in itself, is a fraught process; not least because anthropology (including in Serbia) has not been exempt from revelations concerning sexual harassment, and it would not be surprising if many more are yet to come. In the context of re-encounter with past trauma and violence, not least the violence of sexual harassment, it is nothing if not natural to re-examine every bit of the past, but also to endlessly, tirelessly scrutinize the present: was I there? Did I do something? Could I have done something? What if what I did made things worse? From this perspective, it is fully justified to ask what could it, possibly, mean to turn towards a reparative reading – can it even, ever, be justified?

Sedgwick – perhaps not surprisingly – has relatively little to say about what reparative reading entails. From my point of view, reparative reading is the kind of reading that is oriented towards reconstructing the past in a way that does not seek to avoid, erase or deny past traumas, but engages with the narrative so as to afford a care of the self and connection – or reconnection – with the past selves, including those that made mistakes or have a lot to answer for. It is, in essence, a profoundly different orientation towards the past as well as the future, one that refuses to reproduce cultures – even if cultures of critique – and to claim that future, in some ways, will be exactly like the past.

Sedgwick aligns this reorientation with queer temporalities, characterized by a relationship to time that refuses to see it in (usually heteronormatively-coded) generationally reproductive terms: my father’s father did this, who in turn passed it to my father, who passed it to me, just like I will pass it to my children. Or, to frame this in more precisely academic terms: my supervisor(s) did this, so I will do it [in order to become successful/recognized like my academic predecessors], and I will teach my students/successors to do it. Understanding that it can be otherwise, and that we can practise other, including non-generational (non-generative?) and non-reproductive politics of knowledge/academic filiation/intellectual friendship is, I think, one important step in making the discussion about the future, including of scientific discipline, anything other than a vague gesturing towards its ever-receding glorious past.

Of course, as a straight and, in most contexts, cis-passing woman, I am a bit reluctant to claim the label of queerness, especially when speaking in Serbia, an intensely and increasingly institutionally homophobic and compulsorily heterosexual society. However, I hope my queer friends, partners, and colleagues will forgive me for borrowing queerness as a term to signify refusal to embody or conform to diagnostic narratives (neoliberalism, precarity, [post]socialism); refusal or disinvestment from normatively and regulatively prescribed vocabularies of motivation and objects of desire – a permanent (tenured) academic position; a stable and growing income; a permanent relationship culminating in children and a house with a garden (I have a house, but I live alone and it does not have a garden). And, of course, the ultimate betrayal for anyone who has come from “here” and ‘made it’ “over there”: the refusal to perform the role of an academic migrant in a way that would allow to once and for all settle the question of whether everything is better ‘over there’ or ‘here’, and thus vindicate the omnipresent reflexive chauvinism (‘corrupt West’) or, alternatively, autochauvinism (‘corrupt Serbia’).

What I hope to have achieved instead, through this refusal, is to offer a postdisciplinary or at least undisciplined narrative and an example of how to extract sustenance from cultures inimical to your lifeplans or intellectual projects. To quote from Sedgwick:

“The vocabulary for articulating any reader’s reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it’s no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives. The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.“

All of the cultures I’ve inhabited have been this to some extent – Serbia for its patriarchy, male-dominated public sphere, or excessive gregarious socialisation, something that sits very uncomfortably with my introversion; England for its horrid anti-immigrant attitude only marginally (and not always profitably) mediated by my ostensible ’Whiteness’; Denmark for its oppressive conformism; Hungary, where I was admittedly happiest among the plethora of other English-speaking cosmopolitan academics, which could not provide the institutional home I required (eventually, as is well-known, not even to CEU). But, in a different way, they have also been incredibly sustaining; I love my friends, many of whom are academic friends (former colleagues) in Serbia; I love the Danish egalitarianism and absolute refusal of excess; and I love England in many ways, in no particular order, the most exciting intellectual journey, some great friendships (many of those, I do feel the need to add, with other immigrants), and the most beautiful landscapes, especially in the North-East, where I live now (I also particularly loved New Zealand, but hope to expand on that on a different occasion).

To theorize from a reparative position is to understand that all of these things could be true at the same time. That there is, in other words, no pleasure without pain, that the things that sustain us will, in most cases, also harm us. It is to understand that there is no complete career trajectory, just like there is no position , epistemic or otherwise, from which we could safely and for once answer the question what the future will be like. It is to refuse to pre-emptively know the future, not least so that we could be surprised.

Sally’s boys, Daddy’s girls

Blog, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, Sociological fiction

I’ve finished reading Sally Rooney’s most recent novel, Beautiful World, Where are you? It turned out to be much better than I expected – as an early adopter of Conversations with Friends (‘read it – and loved it – before  it was cool’), but have subsequently found Normal People quite flat – by which I mean I spent most of the first half struggling, but found the very last bits actually quite good. In an intervening visit to The Bound, I also picked up one of Rooney’s short stories, Mr Salary, and read it on the metro back from Whitley Bay.

I became intrigued by the ‘good boy’ characters of both – Simon in Beautiful World, Nathan in Mr Salary. For context (and hopefully without too many spoilers), Simon is the childhood friend-cum-paramour of Eileen, who is the best friend of Alice (BW’s narrator, and Rooney’s likely alter-ego); Nathan, the titular character of Mr Salary, is clearly a character study for Simon, and in a similar – avuncular – relationship to the story’s narrator. Both Simon and Nathan are older than their (potential) girlfriends in sufficient amounts to make the relationship illegal or at least slightly predatory when they first meet, but also to hold it as a realistic and thus increasingly tantalizing promise once they have grown up a bit. But neither men are predatory creeps; in fact, exactly the opposite. They are kind, understanding, unfailingly supportive, and forever willing to come back to their volatile, indecisive, self-doubting, and often plainly unreliable women.

Who are these fantastic men? Here is an almost perfect reversal of the traditional romance portrayal of gender roles – instead of unreliable, egotistic, unsure-about-their-own-feelings-and-how-to-demonstrate-them guys, we are getting more-or-less the same, but with girls, with the men providing a reliable safe haven from which they can weather their emotional, professional, and sexual storms. This, of course, is not to deny that women can be as indecisive and as fickle as the stereotypical ‘Bad Boys’ of toxic romance; it’s to wonder what this kind of role reversal – even in fantasy, or the para-fantasy para-ethnography that is contemporary literature – does.

On the one hand, men like Simon and Nathan may seem like godsend to anyone who has ever gone through the cycle of emotional exhaustion connected to relationships with people who are, purely, assholes. (I’ve been exceptionally lucky in this regard, insofar as my encounters with the latter kind were blissfully few; but sufficient to be able to confirm that this kind does, indeed, exist in the wild). I mean, who would not want a man who is reliable, supportive of your professional ambitions, patient, organized, good in bed, and does laundry (yours included)? Someone who could withstand your emotional rollercoasters *and* buy you a ticket home when you needed it – and be there waiting for you? Almost like a personal assistant, just with the emotions involved.

And here, precisely, is the rub. For what these men provide is not a model of a partnership; it’s a model of a parent. The way they relate to the women characters – and, obviously, the narrative device of age difference amplifies this – is less that of a partner and  more of a benevolent older brother or, in a (n only slight) paraphrase of Winnicott, a good-enough father.

In Daddy Issues, Katherine Angel argues that feminism never engaged fully with the figure of the father – other than as the absent, distant or mildly (or not so mildly) violent and abusive figure. But somewhere outside the axis between Sylvia Plath’s Daddy and Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto is the need to define exactly what the role of the father is once it is removed from its dual shell of object of hate/object of love. Is there, in fact, a role at all?

I have been thinking about this a lot, not only in relation to the intellectual (and political) problem of relationality in theory/knowledge production practices  – what Sara Ahmed so poignantly summarized as ‘can one not be in relation to white men?’ – but also personally. Having grown up effectively without a father (who was also unknown to me in my early childhood), what, exactly, was the Freudian triangle going to be in my case? (no this does not mean I believe the Electra complex applies literally; if you’re looking to mansplain psychoanalytic theory, I’d strongly urge you to reconsider, given I’ve read Freud at the age of 13 and have read post-Freudians since; I’d also urge you to read the following paragraph and consider how it relates to the legacies of Anna Freud/Melanie Klein divide, something Adam Philips writes about).

In the domain of theory, claims of originality (or originarity, as in coining or discovering something) is nearly always attributed to men, women’s contributions almost unfailingly framed in terms of ‘application or elaboration of *his* ideas’ or ‘[minor] contribution to the study’ (I’ve written about this in the cases of Sartre/de Beauvoir and Robert Merton/Harriet Zuckerman’s the ‘Matthew Effect’, but other examples abound). As Marilyn Frye points out in “Politics of reality”, the force of genealogy does not necessarily diminish even for those whose criticism of patriarchy extends to refusing anything to do with men altogether; Frye remarks having observed many a lesbian separatist still asking to be recognized – intellectually and academically – by the white men ‘forefathers’ who sit on academic panels. The shadow of the father is a long one. For those of us who have chosen to be romantically involved with men, and have chosen to work in patriarchal mysoginistic institutions that the universities surely are, not relating to men at all is not exactly an option.

It is from this perspective that I think we’d benefit from a discussion on how men can be reliable partners without turning into good-enough daddies, because – as welcome and as necessary as this role sometimes is, especially for women whose own fathers were not – it is ultimately not a relationship between two adults. I remember reading an early feminist critique of the Bridget Jones industry that really hit the nail on the head: it was not so much Jones’ dedication to all things ‘60s and ‘70s feminism abhorred – obsession with weight loss and pursuit of ill-advised men (i.e. Daniel Cleaver); it was even more that when ‘Mr Right’ (Mark Darcy, the barely disguised equivalent of Austen’s Mr Darcy) arrives, he still falls for Bridget – despite the utter absence of anything from elementary competence at her job to the capacity to feed herself in any form that departs from binge eating to recommend her to a seemingly top-notch human rights attorney. Which really begs the question: what is Mr Darcy seeing in Bridget?

Don’t get me wrong: I am sure that there are men who are attracted to the chaotic, manic-pixie-who-keeps-losing-her-credit-card kind of girl. Regardless of what manifestation or point on the irresponsibility spectrum they occupy, these women certainly play a role for such men – allowing them to feel useful, powerful, respected, even perhaps feeding a bit their saviour complex. But ultimately, playing this role leaves these men entirely outside of the relationship; if the only way they relate to their partners is by reacting (to their moods, their needs, their lives), this ultimately absolves them of equal responsibility for the relationship. Sadly, there is a way to avoid equal division of the ‘mental load’ even while doing the dishes.

And I am sure this does something for the women in question too; after all, there is nothing wrong in knowing that there *is* going to be someone to pick you up if you go out and there are no taxis to get you back home, who will always provide a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on, seemingly completely irrespectively of their own needs (Simon is supposed to have a relatively high-profile political job, yet, interestingly, never feels tired when Ellaine calls or offers to come over). But what at first seems like a fantasy come true – a reliable man who is not afraid to show his love and admiration – can quickly turn into a somewhat toxic set of interdependencies: why, for instance, learn to drive if someone is always there to pick you up and drop you off? (honestly: even among the supposedly-super-egalitarian straight partnerships I know, the number of men drivers vastly outstrips that of women). The point is not to always insist on being a jack-of-all-trades (nor on being the designated driver), as much as to realize that most kinds of freedom (for instance, the freedom to drink when out) embed a whole set of dependencies (for instance, dependence on urban networks of taxis/Ubers or kind self-effacing mensaviours there to pick you up – in Cars’ slightly creepy formulation, drive you home).

Of course, as Simone de Beauvoir recognized, there is no freedom without dependency. We cannot, simply, will ourselves free without willing the same for others; but, at the same time, we cannot will them to be free, as this turns them into objects. In Ethics of Ambiguity – one of the finest books of existentialist philosophy – de Beauvoir turns this into the main conundrum (thus: source of ambiguity) for how to act ethically. Acknowledging our fundamental reliance on others does not mean we need to remain locked into the same set of interdependencies (e.g., we could build safe and reliable public transport and then we would not have to rely on people to drive us home?), but it also does not mean we need to kick out of them by denying or reversing their force – not least because it, ultimately, does not work.

The idea that gender equality, especially in heterosexual partnerships, benefits from the reversal of the trope of the uncommitted, eternally unreliable bachelor in the way that tips the balance in an entirely opposite direction (other than for very short periods of time, of course) strikes me as one of the manifestations of the long tail of post- or anti-feminist backlash – admittedly, a mild and certainly less harmful one than, for instance, the idea that feminism means ‘women are better than men’ or that feminists seek to eliminate men from politics, work, or anything else (both, worryingly, have filtered into public discourse). It also strikes me that the long-suffering Sacrificial Men who have politely taken shit from their objects of affection can all-too-easily be converted into Men’s Rights Activists or incels if and when their long suffering fails to yield results – for instance, when their Manic Pixie leaves with someone with a spine (not a Bad Boy, just a man with boundaries) – or when they realize that the person they have been playing Good Daddy to has finally grown up and left home.

When it ends

Blog, climate change, Philosophy of social science, Politics, Reviews, social theory, Sociological fiction

In the summer of 2018, I came back to Cambridge from one of my travels to a yellowed, dusty patch of land. The grass – the only thing that grew in the too shady back garden of the house me and my partner were renting – had not only wilted; it had literally burnt to the ground.

I burst into tears. As I sat in the garden crying, to (I think) the dismay of my increasingly bewildered partner, I pondered what a scene of death so close to home was doing – what it was doing in my back yard, and what it was doing to me. For it was neither the surprise at nor the scale that shook me – I had witnessed both human and non-human destruction much vaster than a patch of grass in Cambridge; I had spent most of the preceding year and some reading on the politics, economics, and – as the famed expression goes – ‘the science’ of climate change (starting with the excellent Anthropocene reading group I attended while living in London), so I was well-versed, by then, in precisely what was likely to happen, how and when. It wasn’t, either, the proximity, otherwise assumed to be a strong motivator: I certainly did not need climate change to happen in my literal ‘back yard’ in order to become concerned about it. If nothing else, I had come back to Cambridge from a prolonged stay in Serbia, where I have been observing the very same things, detailed here (including preparations for mineral extraction that will become the main point of contention for the protests against Rio Tinto in 2022). As to anyone who has lived outside of the protected enclaves of the Global North, climate change has felt very real, for quite some time.

What made me break down at the sight of that scorched patch of grass was its ordinariness – the fact that, in front, besides, and around what for me was quite bluntly an extinction event, life seemed to go on as usual. No-one warned me my back garden was a cemetery. Several months before that, at the very start of the first round of UCU strikes in 2018, I raised the question of pension funds invested in fossil fuels, only to be casually told one of the biggest USS shares was in Royal Dutch Shell (USS, and the University of Cambridge, have reluctantly committed to divestment since, but this is yet to yield any results in the case of USS). While universities make pompous statements about sustainability, a substantial chunk of their funding and operating revenue goes to activities that are at best one step removed from directly contributing to the climate crisis, from international (air) travel to building and construction. At Cambridge, I ran a reading group called Ontopolitics of the future, whose explicit question was: What survives in the Anthropocene? In my current experience, the raising of climate change tends to provoke uncomfortable silences, as if everyone had already accepted the inevitability of 1.5+ degree warming and the suffering it would inevitably come with.

This acceptance of death is a key feature of the concept of ‘slow death’ that Lauren Berlant introduced in Cruel Optimism:

“Slow death prospers not in traumatic events, as discrete time-framed phenomena like military encounters and genocides can appear to do, but in temporally labile environments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are often identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself” (Berlant, 2011: 100).

Berlant’s emphasis on the ordinariness of death is a welcome addition to theoretical frameworks (like Foucault’s bio-, Mbembe’s necro- or Povinelli’s onto-politics) that see the administration of life and death as effects of sovereign power:

“Since catastrophe means change, crisis rhetoric belies the constitutive point that slow death—or the structurally induced attrition of persons keyed to their membership in certain populations—is neither a state of exception nor the opposite, mere banality, but a domain where an upsetting scene of living is revealed to be interwoven with ordinary life after all” (Berlant, 2011: 102).

Over the past year and some, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of ‘slow death’ in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic (see e.g. my contribution to the special issue on Encountering Berlant in Geography Journal). However, what brought back the scorched grass in Cambridge as I sat at home during UK’s hottest day on record in 2022 was not the (inevitable) human, non-human, or infrastructural cost of climate change; it was, rather, the observation that for most academics life seemed to go on as usual, if a little hotter. From research concerns to driving to moaning over (the absence of) AC, there seemed to be little reflection on how our own modes of knowledge production – not to mention lifestyles – were directly contributing to heating the planet.

Of course, the paradox of knowledge and (in)action – or knowing and (not) doing – has long been at the crux of my own work, from performativity and critique of neoliberalism to the use of scientific evidence in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. But with climate change, surely it has to be obvious to everyone that there is no way to just continue business as usual, that – while effects are surely differentially distributed according to privilege and other kinds of entitlement – no-one is really exempt from it?

Or so I thought, as I took an evening walk and passed a dead magpie on the pavement, which made me think of birds dying from heat exhaustion in India earlier in May (luckily, no other signs of mass bird extinction were in sight, so I returned home, already a bit light-headed from the heat). But as I absent-mindedly scrolled through Twitter (as well as attended a part of a research meeting), what seemed obvious was that there was a clear disconnection between modes of knowing and modes of being in the world. On the one hand, everyone was too hot, commenting on the unsustainability of housing, or the inability of transport networks to sustain temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius. On the other, academic knowledge production seemed to go on, as if things such as ‘universities’, ‘promotions’, or ‘reviews’ had the span of geological time, rather than being – for the most part – a very recent blip in precisely the thing that led to this degree of warming: capitalism, and the drive to (over)produce, (over)compete, and expand.

It is true that these kinds of challenges – like existential crises – can really make people double-down on whatever positions and identities they already have. This is quite obvious in the case of some of political divisions – with, for instance, the death spirals of Covid-denialism, misogyny, and transphobia – but it happens in less explicitly polarizing ways too. In the context of knowledge production, this is something I have referred to as the combination of epistemic attachment and ontological bias. Epistemic attachment refers to being attached to our objects of knowledge; these can be as abstract as ‘class’ or ‘social structure’ or as concrete as specific people, problems, or situations. The relationship between us (as knowers) and what we know (our objects of knowledge) is the relationship between epistemic subjects and epistemic objects. Ontological bias, on the other hand, refers to the fact that our ways of knowing the world become so constitutive of who we are that we can fail to register when the conditions that rendered this mode of knowledge possible (or reliable) no longer obtain. (This, it is important to note, is different from having a ‘wrong’ or somehow ‘distorted’ image of epistemic objects; it is entirely conceivable to have an accurate representation on the wrong ontology, as is vice versa).

This is what happens when we carry on with academic research (or, as I’ve recently noted, the circuit of academic rituals) in a climate crisis. It is not that our analyses and publications stop being more or less accurate, more or less cited, more or less inspiring. On the other side, the racism, classism, ableism, and misogyny of academia do not stop either. It’s just that, technically speaking, the world in which all of these things happen is no longer the same world. The 1.5C (let alone 2 or 2.5, more-or-less certain now) degrees warmer world is no longer the same world that gave rise to the interpretative networks and theoretical frameworks we overwhelmingly use.

In this sense, to me, continuing with academia as business as usual (only with AC) isn’t even akin to the proverbial polishing of brass on the Titanic, not least because the iceberg has likely already melted or at least calved several times over. What it brings to mind, instead, was Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy, and the way in which professional identities play out in it.

I’ve already written about Area X, in part because the analogy with climate change presents itself, and in part because I think that – in addition to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and Octavia Butler’s Parables – it is the best literary (sometimes almost literal) depiction of the present moment. Area X (or Southern Reach, if you’re in the US), is about an ‘event’ – that is at the same time a space – advancing on the edge of the known, ‘civilized’ world. The event/space – ‘Area’ – is, in a clear parallel to Strugatskys’ The Zone, something akin to a parallel dimension: a world like our own, within our own, and accessible from our own, but not exactly hospitable to us. In Vandermeer’s trilogy, Area X is a lush green, indeed overgrown, space; like in The Zone, ‘nature is healing’ has a more ominous sound to it, as in Area X, people, objects, and things disappear. Or reappear. Like bunnies. And husbands.

The three books of Area X are called Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. In the first book, the protagonist – whom we know only as the Biologist – goes on a mission to Area X, the area that has already swallowed (or maybe not) her husband. Other members of the expedition, who we also know only by profession – the Anthropologist, the Psychologist – are also women. The second book, Authority, follows the chief administrator – who we know as Control – of Area X, as the area keeps expanding. Control eventually follows the Biologist into Area X. The third book – well, I’ll stop with the plot spoilers here, but let’s just say that the Biologist is no longer called the Biologist.

This, if anything, is the source of slight reservation I have towards the use of professional identities, authority, and expertise in contexts like the climate crisis. Scientists for XR and related initiatives are both incredibly brave (especially those risking arrest, something I, as an immigrant, cannot do) and – needless to say – morally right; but the underlying emphasis on ‘the science’ too often relies on the assumption that right knowledge will lead to right action, which tends not to hold even for many ‘professional’ academics. In other words, it is not exactly that people do not act on climate change because they do not know or do not believe the science (some do, at least). It is that systems and institutions – and, in many cases, this includes systems and institutions of knowledge production, such as universities – are organized in ways that makes any kind of action that would refuse to reproduce (let alone actually disrupt) the logic of extractive capitalism increasingly difficult.

What to do? It is clear that we are now living on the boundary of Area X, and it is fast expanding. Area X is what was in my back garden in Cambridge. Area X is outside when you open windows in the north of England and what drifts inside has the temperature of a jet engine exhaust of a plane that had just landed. The magpie that was left to die in the middle of the road in Jesmond crossed Area X.

For my part, I know it is no longer sufficient to approach Area X as the Sociologist (or Theorist, or Anthropologist, or whatever other professional identity I have – relucantly, as all identities – perused); I tried doing that for Covid-19, and it did not get very far. Instead, I’d urge my academic colleagues to seriously start thinking about what we are and what we do when these labels – Sociologist, Biologist, Anthropologist, Scientist – no longer have a meaning. For this moment may come earlier than many of us can imagine; by then, we’d have better worked out the relationship between annihilation, authority, and acceptance.  

They’ll come for you next

Blog, higher education, Politics, Reviews

I saw ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ tonight, probably the best film I’ve seen this year (alongside The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, but they’re completely different genres – I could say ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing is the best political film I saw this year, but that would take us down the annoying path of ‘what is political’). There was only one other person in the cinema; this may be a depressing reflection of the local audiences’ autofocus (though this autofocus, at least in my experience, did tend to encompass corners of the former Empire), but given my standard response to the lovely people at Tyneside‘s ‘Where would you like to sit?’ – ‘Close to the aisle, as far away from other people’ – I couldn’t complain.

The film is part-documentary, part fiction, told from the angle of an anonymous woman student (who goes by ‘L.’) whose letters document the period of student strikes at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), but also, more broadly, the relationship between the ascendance of Modi’s regime and student protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi in 2016, as well as related events – including violent attacks of masked mobs on JNU and arrests at Aligarh Muslim University in 2020*.

Where the (scant) reviews are right, and correct, is that the film is also about religion, caste, and the (both ‘slow’ and rapid) violence unleashed by supporters of the nationalist (‘Hinduttva’) project in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

What they don’t mention, however, is that it is also about student (and campus) politics, solidarity, and what to do when your right to protest is literally being crushed (one particularly harrowing scene – at least to anyone who has experienced police violence – consists of CCTV footage of what seem like uniformed men breaking into the premises of one of the universities and then randomly beating students trying to escape through the small door; according to reports, policemen were on site but did nothing). Many of the names mentioned in the film – both through documentary footage and L’s letters – will end up in prison, some possibly tortured (one of L’s interlocutors says he does not want to talk about it for fear of dissuading other students from protest); one will commit suicide. Throughout this, yet, what the footage shows are nights of dancing; impassioned speeches; banners and placards that call out the neo-nationalist government and its complicity not only with violence but also with perpetuating poverty, casteism, and Islamophobia. And solidarity, solidarity, solidarity.

This is the message that transpires most clearly throughout the film. The students have managed to connect two things: the role of perpetuating class/caste divisions in education – dismissiveness and abuse towards Dalit students, the increase of tuition meant to exclude those whose student bursaries support their families too – and the strenghtening of nationalism, or neo-nationalism. That the right-wing rearguard rules through stoking envy and resentment towards ‘undeserving’ poor (e.g. ‘welfare scroungers’) is not new; that it can use higher education, including initiatives aimed at widening participation, to do this, is. In this sense, Modi’s supporters’ strategy seems to be to co-opt the contempt for ‘lazy’ and ‘privileged’ students (particularly those with state bursaries) and turn it into accusation of ‘anti-nationalism’, which is equated with being critical of any governmental policy that deepens existing social inequalities.

It wouldn’t be very anthropological to draw easy parallels with the UK government’s war on Critical Race Theory, which equally tends to locate racism in attempts to call it out, rather than in the institutions – and policies – that perpetuate it; but the analogy almost presents itself. Where it fails, more obviously, is that students – and academics – in the UK still (but just about) have a broader scope for protest than their Indian counterparts. Of course, the new Bill on Freedom of Speech (Academic Freedom) proposes to eliminate some of that, too. But until it does, it makes sense to remember that rights that are not exercised tend to get lost.

Finally, what struck me about A Night of Knowing Nothing is the remarkable show of solidarity not only from workers, actors, and just (‘normal’) people, but also from students across campuses (it bears remembering that in India these are often universities in different states and thousands of miles away from each other). This was particularly salient in relation to the increasingly localized nature of fights for both pensions and ‘Four Fights’ of union members in UK higher education. Of course, union laws make it mandatory that there is both a local and a national mandate for strike action, and it is true that we express solidarity when cuts are threatened to colleagues in the sector (e.g. Goldsmiths, or Leicester a bit before that). But what I think we do not realize is that that is, eventually, going to happen everywhere – there is no university, no job, and no senior position safe enough. The night of knowing nothing has lasted for too long; it is, perhaps, time to stop pretending.

Btw, if you happen to live in Toon, the film is showing tomorrow (4 May) and on a few other days. Or catch it in your local – you won’t regret it.

*If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of these, my guess is they were obscured by the pandemic; I say this as someone who both has friends from India and as been following Indian HE quite closely between 2013 and 2016, though somewhat less since, and I still *barely* recall reading/hearing about any of these.

On doing it badly

Blog, Philosophy of social science, Politics, Reviews, social theory

I’m reading Christine Korsgaard’s ‘Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity‘ (2009) – I’ve found myself increasingly drawn recently to questions of normative political philosophy or ‘ideal theory’, which I’ve previously tended to analytically eschew, I presume as part-pluralism, part-anthropological reflex.

In chapter 2 (‘The Metaphysics of Normativity’), Korsgaard engages with Aristotle’s analysis of objects as an outcome of organizing principles. For instance, what makes a house a house rather than just a ‘heap of stones and mortar and bricks’ is its function of keeping out the weather, and this is also how we should judge the house – a ‘good’ house is one that fulfils this function, a bad house is one that does not not, or at least not so much.

This argument, of course, is a well-known one and endlessly discussed in social ontology (at least among the Cambridge Social Ontology crowd, which I still visit). But Korsgaard emphasizes something that has previously completely escaped my attention, which is the implicit argument about the relationship between normativity and knowledge:

Now, it is entirely true that ‘seeing what things do’ is a pretty neat description of my work as a theorist. But there is an equally important one, which is seeing what things can or could do. This means looking at (I’m parking the discussion about privileging the visual/observer approach to theory for the time being, as it’s both a well-known criticism in e.g. feminist & Indigenous philosophy *and* other people have written about it much better than I ever could) ‘things’ – in my case, usually concepts – and understanding what using them can do, that is, looking at them relationally. You are not the same person looking at one kind of social object and another, nor is it, importantly, the same social object ‘unproblematically’ (meaning that yes, it is possible to reach consensus about social objects – e.g. what is a university, or a man, or a woman, or fascism, but it is not possible to reach it without disagreement – the only difference being whether it is open or suppressed). I’m also parking the discussion about observer effects, indefinitely: if you’re interested in how that theoretical argument looks without butchering theoretical physics, I’ve written about it here.

This also makes the normative element of the argument more difficult, as it requires delving not only into the ‘satisficing’ or ‘fitness’ analysis (a good house is a house that does the job of being a house), but also into the performative effects analysis (is a good house a house that does its job in a way that eventually turns ‘houseness’ into something bad?). To note, this is distinct from other issues Korsgaard recognizes – e.g. that a house constructed in a place that obscures the neighbours’ view is bad, but not a bad house, as its ‘badness’ is not derived from its being a house, but from its position in space (the ‘where’, not the ‘what’). This analysis may – and I emphasize may – be sufficient for discrete (and Western) ontologies, where it is entirely conceivable of the same house being positioned somewhere else and thus remaining a good house, while no longer being ‘bad’ for the neighbourhood as a whole. But it clearly encounters problems on any kind of relational, environment-based, or contextual ontologies (a house is not a house only by the virtue of being sufficient to keep out elements for the inhabitants, but also – and, possibly, more importantly – by being positioned in a community, and a community that is ‘poisoned’ by a house that blocks everyone’s view is not a good community for houses).

In this sense, it makes sense to ask when what an object does turns into badness for the object itself? I.e., what would it mean that a ‘good’ house is at the same time a bad house? Plot spoiler: I believe this is likely true for all social objects. (I’ve written about ambiguity here and also here). The task of the (social) theorist – what, I think, makes my work social (both in the sense of applying to the domain of interaction between multiple human beings and in the sense of having relevance to someone beyond me) is to figure out what kind of contexts make one more likely than the other. Under what conditions do mostly good things (like, for instance, academic freedom) become mostly bad things (like, for instance, a form of exclusion)?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in relation to what constitutes ‘bad’ scholarship (and, I guess, by extension, a bad scholar). Having had the dubious pleasure of encountering people who teach different combinations of neocolonial, right-wing, and anti-feminist ‘scholarship’ over the past couple of years (England, and especially the place where I work, is a trove of surprises in this sense), it strikes me that the key question is under what conditions this kind of work – which universities tend to ignore because it ‘passes’ as scholarship and gives them the veneer of presenting ‘both sides’ – turns the whole idea of scholarship into little more than competition for followers on either of the ‘sides’. This brings me to the question which, I think, should be the source of normativity for academic speech, if anything: when is ‘two-sideism’ destructive to knowledge production as a whole?

This is what Korsgaard says:


Is bad scholarship just bad scholarship, or is it something else? When does the choice to not know about the effects of ‘platforming’ certain kinds of speakers turn from the principle of liberal neutrality to wilful ignorance? Most importantly, how would we know the difference?