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Preservation
Category: climate change
On refusing to be a spectator
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.
- 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).
- 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.
Future of Higher Education: remarks for the 2025 British Sociological Association Presidential Event, 23 April, Manchester, UK
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
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
On books and hope (2024)
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!
Refuse, restrict, redirect
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.
- 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. ↩︎
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
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.
- Hi, philosophy of science/general philosophy/general bro! Are you looking to
explainmansplain 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. ↩︎ - 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. ↩︎
- The separation of sociology and politics in most UK degree programmes, for instance, continues to baffle me. ↩︎
Do you dream of the weather?
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?
When it ends
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.
Area Y: The Necropolitics of Post-Socialism
This summer, I spent almost a month in Serbia and Montenegro (yes, these are two different countries, despite the New York Times still refusing to acknowledge this). This is about seven times as long as I normally would. The two principal reasons are that my mother, who lives in Belgrade, is ill, and that I was planning to get a bit of time to quietly sit and write my thesis on the Adriatic coast of Montenegro. How the latter turned out in light of the knowledge of the former I leave to imagination (tl;dr: not well). It did, however, give me ample time to reflect on the post-socialist condition, which I haven’t done in a while, and to get outside Belgrade, to which I normally confine my brief visits.
The way in which perverse necro/bio-politics of post-socialism obtain in my mother’s illness, in the landscape, and in the socio-material, fits almost too perfectly into what has been for years the dominant style of writing about places that used to be behind the Iron Curtain (or, in the case of Yugoslavia, on its borders). Social theory’s favourite ruins – the ruins of socialism – are repeatedly re-valorised through being dusted off and resurrected, as yet another alter-world to provide the mirror image to the here and the now (the here and the now, obviously, being capitalism). During the Cold War, the Left had its alter-image in the Soviet Union; now, the antidote to neoliberalism is provided not through the actual ruins of real socialism – that would be a tad too much to handle – but through the re-invention of the potential of socialism to provide, in a tellingly polysemic title of MoMA’s recently-opened exhibition on architecture in Yugoslavia, concrete utopias.
Don’t get me wrong: I would love to see the exhibition, and I am sure that it offers much to learn, especially for those who did not have the dubious privilege of having grown up on both sides of socialism. It’s not the absence of nuance that makes me nauseous in encounters with socialist nostalgia: a lot of it, as a form of cultural production, is made by well-meaning people and, in some cases, incredibly well-researched. It’s that resurrecting hipsterified golems of post-socialism serves little purpose other than to underline their ontological status as a source of comparison for the West, cannon-fodder for imaginaries of the world so bereft of hope that it would rather replay its past dreams than face the potential waking nightmare of its future.
It’s precisely this process that leaves them unable to die, much like the ghosts/apparitions/copies in Lem’s (and Tarkovsky’s) Solaris, and in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In VanderMeer’s books, members of the eleventh expedition (or, rather, their copies) who return to the ‘real world’ after exposure to the Area X develop cancer and die pretty quickly. Life in post-socialism is very much this: shadows or copies of former people confusedly going about their daily business, or revisiting the places that once made sense to them, which, sometimes, they have to purchase as repackaged ‘post-socialism’; in this sense, the parable of Roadside Picnic/Stalker as the perennial museum of post-communism is really prophetic.
The necropolitical profile of these parts of former Yugoslavia, in fact, is pretty unexceptional. For years, research has shown that rapid privatisation increases mortality, even controlled for other factors. Obviously, the state still feigns perfunctory care for the elderly, but healthcare is cumbersome, inefficient and, in most cases, barely palliative. Smoking and heavy drinking are de rigueur: in winter, Belgrade cafés and pubs turn into proper smokehouses. Speaking of that, vegetarianism is still often, if benevolently, ridiculed. Fossil fuel extraction is ubiquitous. According to this report from 2014, Serbia had the second highest rate of premature deaths due to air pollution in Europe. That’s not even getting closer to the Thing That Can’t Be Talked About – the environmental effects of the NATO intervention in 1999.
An apt illustration comes as I travel to Western Serbia to give a talk at the anthropology seminar at Petnica Science Centre, where I used to work between 2000 and 2008. Petnica is a unique institution that developed in the 1980s and 1990s as part science camp, part extracurricular interdisciplinary research institute, where electronics researchers would share tables in the canteen with geologists, and physicists would talk (arguably, not always agreeing) to anthropologists. Founded in part by the Young Researchers of Serbia (then Yugoslavia), a forward-looking environmental exploration and protection group, the place used to float its green credentials. Today, it is funded by the state – and fully branded by the Oil Industry of Serbia. The latter is Serbian only in its name, having become a subsidiary of the Russian fossil fuel giant Gazpromneft. What could arguably be dubbed Serbia’s future research elite, thus, is raised in view of full acceptance of the ubiquity of fossil fuels not only for providing energy, but, literally, for running the facilities they need to work.
These researchers can still consider themselves lucky. The other part of Serbian economy that is actually working are factories, or rather production facilities, of multinational companies. In these companies, workers are given 12-hour shifts, banned from unionising, and, as a series of relatively recent reports revealed, issued with adult diapers so as to render toilet breaks unnecessary.
As Elizabeth Povinelli argued, following Achille Mbembe, geontopower – the production of life and nonlife, and the creation of the distinction between them, including what is allowed to live and what is allowed to die – is the primary mode of exercise of power in late liberalism. Less frequently examined way of sustaining the late liberal order is the production of semi-dependent semi-peripheries. Precisely because they are not the world’s slums, and because they are not former colonies, they receive comparatively little attention. Instead, they are mined for resources (human and inhuman). That the interaction between the two regularly produces outcomes guaranteed to deplete the first is of little relevance. The reserves, unlike those of fossil fuels, are almost endless.
Serbian government does its share in ensuring that the supply of cheap labour force never runs out, by launching endless campaigns to stimulate reproduction. It seems to be working: babies are increasingly the ‘it’ accessory in cafés and bars. Officially, stimulating the birth rate is to offset the ‘cost’ of pensions, which IMF insists should not increase. Unofficially, of course, the easiest way to adjust for this is to make sure pensioners are left behind. Much like the current hype about its legacy, the necropolitics of post-socialism operates primarily through foregrounding its Instagrammable elements, and hiding the ugly, non-productive ones.
Much like in VanderMeer’s Area X, knowledge that the border is advancing could be a mixed blessing: as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro argued in a different context, end of the world comes more easily to those for whom the world has already ended, more than once. Not unlike what Scranton argued in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene – this, perhaps, rather than sanitised dreams of a utopian future, is one thing worth resurrecting from post-socialism.
Writing our way out of neoliberalism? For an ecology of publishing
[This blog post is written in preparation for the panel Thinking knowledge production without the university that I am organising at the Sociological Review’s conference Undisciplining: conversations from the edges, Newcastle, Gateshead, 18-21 June 2018. Reflections from other participants are here. I am planning to expand on this part during and after the conference, so questions and comments welcome!]
What kind of writing and publishing practices might support knowledge that is not embedded in the neoliberal university? I’ve been interested in this question for a long while, in part because it is a really tough one. As academics – and certainly as academics in social sciences and humanities – writing and publishing is, ultimately, what we do. Of course, our work frequently also involves teaching – or, as those with a love for neat terminologies like to call it, ‘knowledge transmission’ – as well as different forms of its communication or presentation, which we (sometimes performatively) refer to as ‘public engagement’. Even those, however, often rely or at least lead to the production of written text of some sort: textbooks, academic blogs. This is no surprise: modern Western academic tradition is highly reliant on the written word. Obviously, in this sense, questions and problems of writing/publishing and its relationship with knowledge practices are both older and much broader than the contemporary economy of knowledge production, which we tend to refer to as neoliberal. They may also last beyond it, if, indeed, we can imagine the end of neoliberalism. However, precisely for this reason, it makes sense to think about how we might reconstruct writing and publishing practices in ways that weaken, rather than contribute to the reproduction of neoliberal practices of knowledge production.
The difficulty with thinking outside of the current framework becomes apparent when we try thinking of the form these practices could take. While there are many publications not directly contributing to the publishing industry – blogs, zines, open-access, collaborative, non-paywalled articles all come to mind – they all too easily become embedded in the same dynamic. As a result, they are either eschewed because ‘they do not count’, or else they are made to count (become countable) by being reinserted in the processes of valorisation via the proxy of ‘impact’. As I’ve argued in this article (written with my former colleague from the UNIKE (Universities in the knowledge economy) project, economic geographer Chris Muellerleile), even forms of knowledge production that explicitly seek to ‘disrupt’ such modes, such as Open Access or publish first/review later platforms, often rely on – even if implicit – assumptions that can feed into the logic of evaluation and competition. This is not saying that restricting access to scientific publications is in any way desirable. However, we need to accept that opening access (under certaincircumstances, for certain parts of the population) does not in and of itself do much to ‘disrupt’ the broader political and economic system in which knowledge is embedded.
Publish or…publish
Unsurprisingly, the hypocrisy of the current system disproportionately affects early career and precarious scholars. ‘Succeeding’ in the academia – i.e. escaping precarity – hinges on publishing in recognised formats and outlets: this means, almost exclusively, peer-reviewed journal in one’s discipline, and books. The process is itself costly and risky. Turnover times can be ridiculously long: a chapter for an edited volume I wrote in July 2015 has finally been published last month, presumably because other – more senior, obviously – contributors took much longer. The chapter deals with a case from 2014, which makes the three-year lag between its accepted version and publication problematic for all sorts of reasons. On the other hand, even when good and relatively timely, the process of peer review can be soul-crushing for junior scholars (see: Reviewer No.2). Obviously, if this always resulted in a better final version of the article, we could argue it would make it worthwhile. However, while some peer reviewers offer constructive feedback that really improves the process of publication, this is not always the case. Increasingly, because peer review takes time and effort, it is kicked down the academic ladder, so it becomes a case of who can afford to review – or, equally (if not more) often, who cannot afford to say no a review.
In other words, just like other aspects of academic knowledge production, the reviewing and publishing process is plagued by stark inequalities. ‘Big names’ or star professors can get away with only perfunctory – if any – peer review; a series of clear cases of plagiarism or self-plagiarism, not to mention a string of recent books with bombastic titles that read like barely-edited transcripts of undergraduate seminars (there are plenty around), are a testament to this. Just in case, many of these ‘Trump academics‘ keep their own journals or book series as a side hustle, where the degree of familiarity with the editorial board is often the easiest path to publication.
What does this all lead to? The net result is the proliferation of academic publications of all sorts, what some scholars have dubbed the shift from an economy of scarcity to that of abundance. However, it’s not that more is necessarily better: while it’s difficult (if not entirely useless) to speak of scholarly publications in universal terms, as the frequently (mis-)cited piece of research argued, most academic articles are read and cited by very few people. It’s quite common for academics to complain they can’t keep up with the scholarly production in their field, even when narrowed down to a very tight disciplinary specialism. Some of this, obviously, has to do with the changing structure of academic labour, in particular the increasing load of administration and the endless rounds of research evaluation and grant application writing, which syphons aways time for reading. But some of this has to do with the simple fact that there is so much more of published stuff around: scholars compete with each other in terms of who’s going to get more ‘out there’, and sooner. As a result, people rarely take the time to read others’ work carefully, especially if it is outside of their narrow specialism or discipline. Substituting this with sycophantic shout-outs via Twitter or book reviews, which are often thinly veiled self-serving praise that reveals more about the reviewer’s career plans, than about the actual publication being reviewed.
For an ecology of knowledge production
So, how is it possible to work against all this? Given that the purpose of this panel was to start thinking about actual solutions, rather than repeat tired complaints about the nature of knowledge production in the neoliberal academia, I am going to put forward two concrete proposals: one is on the level of conceptual – not to say ‘behavioural’ -change; the other on the level of institutions, or organisations. The first is a commitment to, simply, publish less. Much like in environmental pollution where solutions such as recycling, ‘natural’ materials, and free and ethical trading are a way less effective way to minimise CO2 emissions than just reducing consumption (and production), in writing and publishing we could move towards the progressive divestment from the idea that the goal is to produce as much as possible, and put it ‘out there’ as quickly as possible. To be clear, this isn’t a thinly-veiled plea for ‘slow’ scholarship. Some disciplines or topics clearly call for quicker turnover – one can think of analyses in current affairs, environmental or political science. On the other hand, some topics or disciplines require time, especially when there is value in observing how trends develop over a period of time. Recognising the divergent temporal cycles of knowledge production not only supports the dignity of the academic profession, but also recognises knowledge production happens outside of academia, and should not – need not – necessarily be dependent on being recognised or rewarded within it. As long as the system rewards output, the rate of output will tend to increase: in this sense, competition can be seen not necessarily as an outcome as much as a byproduct of our desire to ‘populate’ the world with the fruits of our labour. Publishing less, in this sense, is not that much a performative act as the first step in divesting from the incessant drive of competitive logic that permeates both the academia and the world ‘outside’ of it.
One way is to, simply, publish less.
Publishers play a very important role in this ecology of knowledge production. Much has been made of the so-called ‘predatory’ journals and publishers, clearly seeking even a marginal profit: the less often mentioned flipside is that almost all publishing is to some degree ‘predatory’, in the sense in which editors seek out authors whose work they believe can sell – that is, sell for a profit that goes to the publisher, and sometimes the editors, while authors can, at best, hope for an occasional drip from royalties (unless, again, they are star/Trump academics, in which case they can aspire to hefty book advances). Given the way in which the imperative to publish is ingrained in the dynamics of academic career progression – and, one might argue, in the academic psyche – it is no surprise that multiple publishing platforms, often of dubious quality, thrive in this landscape.
Instead of this, we could aim for a combination of publishing cooperatives – perhaps embedded in professional societies – and a small number of established journals, which could serve as platforms or hubs for a variety of formats, from blogs to full-blown monographs. These journals would have an established, publicly known, and well-funded board of reviewers and editors. Combined, these principles could enable publishing to serve multiple purposes, communities and formats, without the need to reproduce a harmful hierarchy embedded in competitive market-oriented models. It seems to me that the Sociological Review, which is organising this conference, could be going towards this model. Another journal with multiple formats and an online forum is the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I am sure there are others that could serve as blueprints for this new ecology of knowledge production; perhaps, together, we can start thinking how to build it.
Between legitimation and imagination: epistemic attachment, ontological bias, and thinking about the future
A serious line of division runs through my household. It does not concern politics, music, or even sports: it concerns the possibility of large-scale collapse of social and political order, which I consider very likely. Specific scenarios aside for the time being, let’s just say we are talking more human-made climate-change-induced breakdown involving possibly protracted and almost certainly lethal conflict over resources, than ‘giant asteroid wipes out Earth’ or ‘rogue AI takes over and destroys humanity’.
Ontological security or epistemic positioning?
It may be tempting to attribute the tendency towards catastrophic predictions to psychological factors rooted in individual histories. My childhood and adolescence took place alongside the multi-stage collapse of the country once known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. First came the economic crisis, when the failure of ‘shock therapy’ to boost stalling productivity (surprise!) resulted in massive inflation; then social and political disintegration, as the country descended into a series of violent conflicts whose consequences went far beyond the actual front lines; and then actual physical collapse, as Serbia’s long involvement in wars in the region was brought to a halt by the NATO intervention in 1999, which destroyed most of the country’s infrastructure, including parts of Belgrade, where I was living at the time*. It makes sense to assume this results in quite a different sense of ontological security than one, say, the predictability of a middle-class English childhood would afford.
But does predictability actually work against the capacity to make accurate predictions? This may seem not only contradictory but also counterintuitive – any calculation of risk has to take into account not just the likelihood, but also the nature of the source of threat involved, and thus necessarily draws on the assumption of (some degree of) empirical regularity. However, what about events outside of this scope? A recent article by Faulkner, Feduzi and Runde offers a good formalization of this problem (the Black Swans and ‘unknown unknowns’) in the context of the (limited) possibility to imagine different outcomes (see table below). Of course, as Beck noted a while ago, the perception of ‘risk’ (as well as, by extension, any other kind of future-oriented thinking) is profoundly social: it depends on ‘calculative devices‘ and procedures employed by networks and institutions of knowledge production (universities, research institutes, think tanks, and the like), as well as on how they are presented in, for instance, literature and the media.
Unknown unknowns
In The Great Derangement (probably the best book I’ve read in 2017), Amitav Gosh argues that this can explain, for instance, the surprising absence of literary engagement with the problem of climate change. The problem, he claims, is endemic to Western modernity: a linear vision of history cannot conceive of a problem that exceeds its own scale**. This isn’t the case only with ‘really big problems’ such as economic crises, climate change, or wars: it also applies to specific cases such as elections or referendums. Of course, social scientists – especially those qualitatively inclined – tend to emphasise that, at best, we aim to explain events retroactively. Methodological modesty is good (and advisable), but avoiding thinking about the ways in which academic knowledge production is intertwined with the possibility of prediction is useless, for at least two reasons.
One is that, as reflected in the (by now overwrought and overdetermined) crisis of expertise and ‘post-truth’, social researchers increasingly find themselves in situations where they are expected to give authoritative statements about the future direction of events (for instance, about the impact of Brexit). Even if they disavow this form of positioning, the very idea of social science rests on (no matter how implicit) assumption that at least some mechanisms or classes or objects will exhibit the same characteristics across cases; consequently, the possibility of inference is implied, if not always practised. Secondly, given the scope of challenges societies face at present, it seems ridiculous to not even attempt to engage with – and, if possibly, refine – the capacity to think how they will develop in the future. While there is quite a bit of research on individual predictive capacity and the way collective reasoning can correct for cognitive bias, most of these models – given that they are usually based on experiments, or simulations – cannot account for the way in which social structures, institutions, and cultures of knowledge production interact with the capacity to theorise, model, and think about the future.
The relationship between social, political, and economic factors, on the one hand, and knowledge (including knowledge about those factors), on the other, has been at the core of my work, including my current PhD. While it may seem minor compared to issues such as wars or revolutions, the future of universities offers a perfect case to study the relationship between epistemic positioning, positionality, and the capacity to make authoritative statements about reality: what Boltanski’s sociology of critique refers to as ‘complex externality’. One of the things it allowed me to realise is that while there is a good tradition of reflecting on positionality (or, in positivist terms, cognitive ‘bias’) in relation to categories such as gender, race, or class, we are still far from successfully theorising something we could call ‘ontological bias’: epistemic attachment to the object of research.
The postdoctoral project I am developing extends this question and aims to understand its implications in the context of generating and disseminating knowledge that can allow us to predict – make more accurate assessments of – the future of complex social phenomena such as global warming or the development of artificial intelligence. This question has, in fact, been informed by my own history, but in a slightly different manner than the one implied by the concept of ontological security.
Legitimation and prediction: the case of former Yugoslavia
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had a relatively sophisticated and well developed networks of social scientists, which both of my parents were involved in***. Yet, of all the philosophers, sociologists, political scientists etc. writing about the future of the Yugoslav federation, only one – to the best of my knowledge – predicted, in eerie detail, the political crisis that would lead to its collapse: Bogdan Denitch, whose Legitimation of a revolution: the Yugoslav case (1976) is, in my opinion, one of the best books about former Yugoslavia ever written.
A Yugoslav-American, Denitch was a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. He was also a family friend, a fact I considered of little significance (having only met him once, when I was four, and my mother and I were spending a part of our summer holiday at his house in Croatia; my only memory of it is being terrified of tortoises roaming freely in the garden), until I began researching the material for my book on education policies and the Yugoslav crisis. In the years that followed (I managed to talk to him again in 2012; he passed away in 2016), I kept coming back to the question: what made Denitch more successful in ‘predicting’ the crisis that would ultimately lead to the dissolution of former Yugoslavia than virtually anyone writing on Yugoslavia at the time?
Denitch had a pretty interesting trajectory. Born in 1929 to Croat Serb parents, he spent his childhood in a series of countries (including Greece and Egypt), following his diplomat father; in 1946, the family emigrated to the United States (the fact his father was a civil servant in the previous government would have made it impossible for them to continue living in Yugoslavia after the Communist regime, led by Josip Broz Tito, formally took over). There, Denitch (in evident defiance of his upper-middle-class legacy) trained as a factory worker, while studying for a degree in sociology at CUNY. He also joined the Democratic Socialist Alliance – one of American socialist parties – whose member (and later functionary) he would remain for the rest of his life.
In 1968, Denitch was awarded a major research grant to study Yugoslav elites. The project was not without risks: while Yugoslavia was more open to ‘the West’ than other countries in Eastern Europe, visits by international scholars were strictly monitored. My mother recalls receiving a house visit from an agent of the UDBA, the Yugoslav secret police – not quite the KGB but you get the drift – who tried to elicit the confession that Denitch was indeed a CIA agent, and, in the absence of that, the promise that she would occasionally report on him****.
Despite these minor throwbacks, the research continued: Legitimation of a revolution is one of its outcomes. In 1973, Denitch was awarded a PhD by the Columbia University and started teaching at CUNY, eventually retiring in 1994. His last book, Ethnic nationalism: the tragic death of Yugoslavia came out in the same year, a reflection on the conflict that was still going on at the time, and whose architecture he had foreseen with such clarity eighteen years earlier (the book is remarkably bereft of “told-you-so”-isms, so warmly recommended for those wishing to learn more about Yugoslavia’s dissolution).
Did personal history, in this sense, have a bearing on one’s epistemic position, and by extension, on the capacity to predict events? One explanation (prevalent in certain versions of popular intellectual history) would be that Denitch’s position as both a Yugoslav and an American would have allowed him to escape the ideological traps other scholars were more likely to fall into. Yugoslavs, presumably, would be at pains to prove socialism was functioning; Americans, on the other hand, perhaps egalitarian in theory but certainly suspicious of Communist revolutions in practice, would be looking to prove it wasn’t, at least not as an economic model. Yet this assumption hardly stands even the lightest empirical interrogation. At least up until the show trials of Praxis philosophers, there was a lively critique of Yugoslav socialism within Yugoslavia itself; despite the mandatory coating of jargon, Yugoslav scholars were quite far from being uniformly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about socialism. Similarly, quite a few American scholars were very much in favour of the Yugoslav model, eager, if anything, to show that market socialism was possible – that is, that it’s possible to have a relatively progressive social policy and still be able to afford nice things. Herein, I believe, lies the beginning of the answer as to why neither of these groups was able to predict the type or the scale of the crisis that will eventually lead to the dissolution of former Yugoslavia.
Simply put, both groups of scholars depended on Yugoslavia as a source of legitimation of their work, though for different reasons. For Yugoslav scholars, the ‘exceptionality’ of the Yugoslav model was the source of epistemic legitimacy, particularly in the context of international scientific collaboration: their authority was, in part at least, constructed on their identity and positioning as possessors of ‘local’ knowledge (Bockman and Eyal’s excellent analysis of the transnational roots of neoliberalism makes an analogous point in terms of positioning in the context of the collaboration between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ economists). In addition to this, many of Yugoslav scholars were born and raised in socialism: while, some of them did travel to the West, the opportunities were still scarce and many were subject to ideological pre-screening. In this sense, both their professional and their personal identity depended on the continued existence of Yugoslavia as an object; they could imagine different ways in which it could be transformed, but not really that it could be obliterated.
For scholars from the West, on the other hand, Yugoslavia served as a perfect experiment in mixing capitalism and socialism. Those more on the left saw it as a beacon of hope that socialism need not go hand-in-hand with Stalinist-style repression. Those who were more on the right saw it as proof that limited market exchange can function even in command economies, and deduced (correctly) that the promise of supporting failing economies in exchange for access to future consumer markets could be used as a lever to bring the Eastern Bloc in line with the rest of the capitalist world. If no one foresaw the war, it was because it played no role in either of these epistemic constructs.
This is where Denitch’s background would have afforded a distinct advantage. The fact his parents came from a Serb minority in Croatia meant he never lost sight of the salience of ethnicity as a form of political identification, despite the fact socialism glossed over local nationalisms. His Yugoslav upbringing provided him not only with fluency in the language(s), but a degree of shared cultural references that made it easier to participate in local communities, including those composed of intellectuals. On the other hand, his entire professional and political socialization took place in the States: this meant he was attached to Yugoslavia as a case, but not necessarily as an object. Not only was his childhood spent away from the country; the fact his parents had left Yugoslavia after the regime change at the end of World War II meant that, in a way, for him, Yugoslavia-as-object was already dead. Last, but not least, Denitch was a socialist, but one committed to building socialism ‘at home’. This means that his investment in the Yugoslav model of socialism was, if anything, practical rather than principled: in other words, he was interested in its actual functioning, not in demonstrating its successes as a marriage of markets and social justice. This epistemic position, in sum, would have provided the combination needed to imagine the scenario of Yugoslav dissolution: a sufficient degree of attachment to be able to look deeply into a problem and understand its possible transformations; and a sufficient degree of detachment to be able to see that the object of knowledge may not be there forever.
Onwards to the…future?
What can we learn from the story? Balancing between attachment and detachment is, I think, one of the key challenges in any practice of knowing the social world. It’s always been there; it cannot be, in any meaningful way, resolved. But I think it will become more and more important as the objects – or ‘problems’ – we engage with grow in complexity and become increasingly central to the definition of humanity as such. Which means we need to be getting better at it.
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(*) I rarely bring this up as I think it overdramatizes the point – Belgrade was relatively safe, especially compared to other parts of former Yugoslavia, and I had the fortune to never experience the trauma or hardship people in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, or Croatia did.
(**) As Jane Bennett noted in Vibrant Matter, this resonates with Adorno’s notion of non-identity in Negative Dialectics: a concept always exceeds our capacity to know it. We can see object-oriented ontology, (e.g. Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects) as the ontological version of the same argument: the sheer size of the problem acts as a deterrent from the possibility to grasp it in its entirety.
(***) This bit lends itself easily to the Bourdieusian “aha!” argument – academics breed academics, etc. The picture, however, is a bit more complex – I didn’t grow up with my father and, until about 16, had a very vague idea of what my mother did for a living.
(****) Legend has it my mother showed the agent the door and told him never to call on her again, prompting my grandmother – her mother – to buy funeral attire, assuming her only daughter would soon be thrown into prison and possibly murdered. Luckily, Yugoslavia was not really the Soviet Union, so this did not come to pass.
Critters, Critics, and Californian Theory – review of Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble
[This review was originally published on the blog of the Political Economy Research Centre as part of its Anthropocene Reading Group, as well as on the blog of Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity]
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Duke University Press, 2016)
From the opening, Donna Haraway’s recent book reads like a nice hybrid of theoretical conversation and science fiction. Crescendoing in the closing Camille Stories, the outcome of a writing experiment of imagining five future generations, “Staying with the trouble” weaves together – like the cat’s cradle, one of the recurrent metaphors in the book – staple Harawayian themes of the fluidity of boundaries between human and variously defined ‘Others’, metamorphoses of gender, the role of technology in modifying biology, and the related transformation of the biosphere – ‘Gaia’ – in interaction with human species. Eschewing the term ‘Anthropocene’, which she (somewhat predictably) associates with Enlightenment-centric, tool-obsessed rationality, Haraway births ‘Chthulucene’ – which, to be specific, has nothing to do with the famous monster of H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination, instead being named after a species of spider, Pimoa Cthulhu, native to Haraway’s corner of Western California.
This attempt to avoid dealing with human(-made) Others – like Lovecraft’s “misogynist racial-nightmare monster” – is the key unresolved issue in the book. While the tone is rightfully respectful – even celebratory – of nonhuman critters, it remains curiously underdefined in relation to human ones. This is evident in the treatment of Eichmann and the problem of evil. Following Arendt, Haraway sees Eichmann’s refusal to think about the consequences of his actions as the epitome of the banality of evil – the same kind of unthinking that leads to the existing ecological crisis. That more thinking seems like a natural antidote and a solution to the long-term destruction of the biosphere seems only logical (if slightly self-serving) from the standpoint of developing a critical theory whose aim is to save the world from its ultimate extinction. The question, however, is what to do if thoughts and stories are not enough?
The problem with a political philosophy founded on belief in the power of discourse is that it remains dogmatically committed to the idea that only if one can change the story, one can change the world. The power of stories as “worlding” practices fundamentally rests on the assumption that joint stories can be developed with Others, or, alternatively, that the Earth is big enough to accommodate those with which no such thing is possible. This leads Haraway to present a vision of a post-apocalyptic future Earth, in which population has been decimated to levels that allow human groups to exist at sufficient distance from each other. What this doesn’t take into account is that differently defined Others may have different stories, some of which may be fundamentally incompatible with ours – as recently reflected in debates over ‘alternative facts’ or ‘post-truth’, but present in different versions of science and culture wars, not to mention actual violent conflicts. In this sense, there is no suggestion of sympoiesis with the Eichmanns of this world; the question of how to go about dealing with human Others – especially if they are, in Kristeva’s terms, profoundly abject – is the kind of trouble “Staying with the trouble” is quite content to stay out of.
Sympoiesis seems reserved for non-humans, which seem to happily go along with the human attempts to ‘become-with’ them. But it seems easier when ‘Others’ do not, technically speaking, have a voice: whether we like it or not, few of the non-human critters have efficient means to communicate their preferences in terms of political organisation, speaking order at seminars, or participation in elections. The critical practice of com-menting, to which Haraway attributes much of the writing in the book, is only possible to the extent to which the Other has equal means and capacities to contribute to the discussion. As in the figure of the Speaker for the Dead, the Other is always spoken-for, the tragedy of its extinction obscuring the potential conflict or irreconcilability between species.
The idea of a com-pliant Other can, of course, be seen as an integral element of the mythopoetic scaffolding of West Coast academia, where the idea of fluidity of lifestyle choices probably has near-orthodox status. It’s difficult not to read parts of the book, such as the following passage, as not-too-fictional accounts of lived experiences of the Californian intellectual elite (including Haraway herself):
“In the infectious new settlements, every new child must have at least three parents, who may or may not practice new or old genders. Corporeal differences, along with their fraught histories, are cherished. Throughout life, the human person may adopt further bodily modifications for pleasure and aesthetics or for work, as long as the modifications tend to both symbionts’ well-being in the humus of sympoiesis” (p. 133-5)
The problem with this type of theorizing is not so much that it universalises a concept of humanity that resembles an extended Comic-Con with militant recycling; reducing ideas to their political-cultural-economic background is not a particularly innovative critical move. It is that it fails to account for the challenges and dangers posed by the friction of multiple human lives in constrained spaces, and the ways in which personal histories and trajectories interact with the configurations of place, class, and ownership, in ways that can lead to tragedies like the Grenfell tower fire in London.
In other words, what “Staying with the trouble” lacks is a more profound sense of political economy, and the ways in which social relations influence how different organisms interact with their environment – including compete for its scarce resources, often to the point of mutual extinction. Even if the absolution of human woes by merging one’s DNA with those of fellow creatures works well as an SF metaphor, as a tool for critical analysis it tends to avoid the (often literally) rough edges of their bodies. It is not uncommon even for human bodies to reject human organs; more importantly, the political history of humankind is, to a great degree, the story of various groups of humans excluding other humans from the category of humans (colonized ‘Others’, slaves), citizens (women, foreigners), or persons with full economic and political rights (immigrants, and again women). This theme is evident in the contemporary treatment of refugees, but it is also preserved in the apparently more stable boundaries between human groups in the Camille Stories. In this context, the transplantation of insect parts to acquire consciousness of what it means to inhabit the body of another species has more of a whiff of transhumanist enhancement than of an attempt to confront head-on (antennae-first?) multifold problems related to human coexistence on a rapidly warming planet.
At the end of the day, solutions to climate change may be less glamorous than the fantasy of escaping global warming by taking a dip in the primordial soup. In other words, they may require some good ol’ politics, which fundamentally means learning to deal with Others even if they are not as friendly as those in Haraway’s story; even if, as the Eichmanns and Trumps of this world seem to suggest, their stories may have nothing to do with ours. In this sense, it is the old question of living with human Others, including abject ones, that we may have to engage with in the AnthropoCapitaloCthulucene: the monsters that we created, and the monsters that are us.
Jana Bacevic is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Belgrade. Her interests lie at the intersection of social theory, sociology of knowledge, and political sociology; her current work deals with the theory and practice of critique in the transformation of higher education and research in the UK.
Zygmunt Bauman and the sociologies of end times
[This post was originally published at the Sociological Review blog’s Special Issue on Zygmunt Bauman, 13 April 2017]
“Morality, as it were, is a functional prerequisite of a world with an in-built finality and irreversibility of choices. Postmodern culture does not know of such a world.”
Zygmunt Bauman, Sociology and postmodernity
Getting reacquainted with Bauman’s 1988 essay “Sociology and postmodernity”, I accidentally misread the first word of this quote as “mortality”. In the context of the writing of this piece, it would be easy to interpret this as a Freudian slip – yet, as slips often do, it betrays a deeper unease. If it is true that morality is a functional prerequisite of a finite world, it is even truer that such a world calls for mortality – the ultimate human experience of irreversibility. In the context of trans- and post-humanism, as well as the growing awareness of the fact that the world, as the place inhabited (and inhabitable) by human beings, can end, what can Bauman teach us about both?
In Sociology and postmodernity, Bauman assumes the position at the crossroads of two historical (social, cultural) periods: modernity and postmodernity. Turning away from the past to look towards the future, he offers thoughts on what a sociology adapted to the study of postmodern condition would be like. Instead of a “postmodern sociology” as a mimetic representation of (even if a pragmatic response to) postmodernity, he argues for a sociology that attempts to give a comprehensive account of the “aggregate of aspects” that cohere into a new, consumer society: the sociology of postmodernity. This form of account eschews the observation of the new as a deterioration, or aberration, of the old, and instead aims to come to terms with the system whose contours Bauman will go on to develop in his later work: the system characterised by a plurality of possible worlds, and not necessarily a way to reconcile them.
The point in time in which he writes lends itself fortuitously to the argument of the essay. Not only did Legislators and interpreters, in which he reframes intellectuals as translators between different cultural worlds, come out a year earlier; the publication of Sociology and postmodernity briefly precedes 1989, the year that will indeed usher a wholly new period in the history of Europe, including in Bauman’s native Poland.
On the one hand, he takes the long view back to post-war Europe, built, as it was, on the legacy of Holocaust as a pathology of modernity, and two approaches to preventing its repetition – market liberalism and political freedoms in the West, and planned economies and more restrictive political regimes in Central and Eastern parts of the subcontinent. On the other, he engages with some of the dilemmas for the study of society that the approaching fall of Berlin Wall and eventual unification of those two hitherto separated worlds was going to open. In this sense, Bauman really has the privilege of a two-facing version of Benjamin’s Angel of History. This probably helped him recognize the false dichotomy of consumer freedom and dictatorship over needs, which, as he stated, was quickly becoming the only imaginable alternative to the system – at least as far as imagination was that of the system itself.
The present point of view is not all too dissimilar from the one in which Bauman was writing. We regularly encounter pronouncements of an end of a whole host of things, among them history, classical distribution of labour, standards of objectivity in reporting, nation-states, even – or so we hope – capitalism itself. While some of Bauman’s fears concerning postmodernity may, from the present perspective, seem overstated or even straightforwardly ridiculous, we are inhabiting a world of many posts – post-liberal, post-truth, post-human. Many think that this calls for a rethinking of how sociology can adapt itself to these new conditions: for instance, in a recent issue of International Sociological Association’s Global Dialogue, Leslie Sklair considers what a new radical sociology, developed in response to the collapse of global capitalism, would be like.
As if sociology and the zeitgeist are involved in some weird pas-de-deux: changes in any domain of life (technology, political regime, legislation) almost instantaneously trigger calls for, if not the invention of new, then a serious reconsideration of old paradigms and approaches to its study.
I would like to suggest that one of the sources of continued appeal of this – which Mike Savage brilliantly summarised as “epochal theorising” – is not so much the heralding of the new, as the promise that there is an end to the present state of affairs. In order for a new ‘epoch’ to succeed, the old one needs to end. What Bauman warns about in the passage cited at the beginning is that in a world without finality – without death – there can be no morality. In T.S. Eliot’s lines from Burnt Norton: If all time is eternally present, all time is irredeemable. What we may read as Bauman’s fear, therefore, is not that worlds as we know them can (and will) end: it is that, whatever name we give to the present condition, it may go on reproducing itself forever. In other words, it is a vision of the future that looks just like the present, only there is more of it.
Which is worse? It is hard to tell. A rarely discussed side of epochal theorising is that it imagines a world in which social sciences still have a role to play, if nothing else, in providing a theoretical framing or empirically-informed running commentary of its demise, and thus offers salvation from the existential anxiety of the present. The ‘ontological turn’ – from object-oriented ontology, to new materialisms, to post-humanism – reflects, in my view, the same tendency. If objects ‘exist’ in the same way as we do, if matter ‘matters’ in the same way (if not in the same degree) in which, for instance, black lives matter, this provides temporary respite from the confines of our choices. Expanding the concept of agency so as to involve non-human actors may seem more complicated as a model of social change, but at least it absolves humans from the unique burden of historical responsibility – including that for the fate of the world.
Human (re)discovery of the world, thus, conveys less a newfound awareness of the importance of the lived environment, as much as the desire to escape the solitude of thinking about the human (as Dawson also notes, all too human) condition. The fear of relativism that postmodern ‘plurality’ of worlds brought about appears to have been preferable to the possibility that there is, after all, just the one world. If the latter is the case, the only escape from it lies, to borrow from Hamlet, in the country from whose bourn no traveller has ever returned: in other words, in death.
This impasse is perhaps felt strongest in sociology and anthropology because excursions into other worlds have been both the gist of their method and the foundations of their critical potential (including their self-critique, which focused on how these two elements combine in the construction of epistemic authority). The figure of the traveller to other worlds was more pronounced in the case of anthropology, at least at the time when it developed as the study of exotic societies on the fringe of colonial empires, but sociology is no stranger to visitation either: its others, and their worlds, delineated by sometimes less tangible boundaries of class, gender, race, or just epistemic privilege. Bauman was among theorists who recognized the vital importance of this figure in the construction of the foundations of European modernity, and thus also sensitive to its transformations in the context of postmodernity – exemplified, as he argued, in contemporary human’s ambiguous position: between “a perfect tourist” and a “vagabond beyond remedy”.
In this sense, the awareness that every journey has an end can inform the practice of social theory in ways that go beyond the need to pronounce new beginnings. Rather than using eulogies in order to produce more of the same thing – more articles, more commentary, more symposia, more academic prestige – perhaps we can see them as an opportunity to reflect on the always-unfinished trajectory of human existence, including our existence as scholars, and the responsibility that it entails. The challenge, in this case, is to resist the attractive prospect of escaping the current condition by ‘exit’ into another period, or another world – postmodern, post-truth, post-human, whatever – and remember that, no matter how many diverse and wonderful entities they may be populated with, these worlds are also human, all too human. This can serve as a reminder that, as Bauman wrote in his famous essay on heroes and victims of postmodernity, “Our life struggles dissolve, on the contrary, in that unbearable lightness of being. We never know for sure when to laugh and when to cry. And there is hardly a moment in life to say without dark premonitions: ‘I have arrived’”.
Against academic labour: foraging in the wildlands of digital capitalism
I am reading a book called “The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy”, by two Canadian professors, Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber. Published earlier in 2016, to (mostly) wide critical acclaim, it critiques the changing conditions of knowledge production in the academia, in particular those associated with the expectation to produce more and at faster rates (also known as ‘acceleration‘). As an antidote, as the Slow Professor Manifesto appended to the Preface suggests, faculty should resist the corporatisation of the university by adopting the principles of Slow Movement (as in Slow Food etc.) in their professional practices.
While the book is interesting, the argument is not particularly exceptional in the context of the expanding genre of diagnoses of the ‘end’ or ‘crisis’ of the Western university. The origins of the genre could be traced to Bill Readings’ 1996 ‘University in Ruins’ (though, of course, one could always stretch the lineage back to 1918 and Veblen’s ‘The Higher Learning in America’; predecessors in Britain include E.P. Thompson’s ‘Warwick University Ltd.’ (1972) and Halsey’s ‘The Decline of Donnish Dominion’ (1982)). Among contemporary representatives of the genre are Nussbaum’s ‘Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities’ (2010), Collini’s ‘What Are Universities For’ (2012), and Giroux’s ‘Neoliberal Attack on Higher Education’ (2013), to name but a few; in other words, there is no shortage of works documenting how the transformation of the conditions of academic labour fundamentally threatens the role and function of universities in the Western societies – and, by extension, the survival of these societies themselves.
I would like to say straight away that I do not, for a single moment, dispute or doubt the toll that the transformation of the conditions of academic labour is having on those who are employed at universities. Having spent the past twelve years researching the politics of academic knowledge, and most of those working in higher education in a number of different countries, I encountered hardly a single academic or student not pressured, threatened, or at the very least insecure about their future employment. What I want to argue, instead, is that the critique of the transformation of knowledge production that focuses on academic labour is no longer sufficient. Concomitantly, the critique of time – as in labour time – isn’t either.
In lieu of labour, I suggest we could think of what academics do as foraging. By this I do not in any way mean to trivialize union struggles that focus on working conditions for faculty or the position of students; these are and continue to be very important, and I have always been proud to support them. However, unfortunately, they cannot capture the way knowledge has already changed. This is not only due to the growing academic ‘precariat’ (or ‘cognitariat’): while the absence of stable or full-time employment has been used to inform both analyses and specific forms of political action on both sides of the Atlantic, they still frame the problem as fundamentally dependent on academic labour. While this may for the time being represent a good strategy in the political sense, it creates a set of potential contradictions in the conceptual.
For one, labour implies the concept of use: Marx’s labour theory of value postulates that this is what it allows it to be exchanged for something (money, favours). Yet, we as academics are often the first to point out that lot of knowledge is not directly useful: for every paradigmatic scientist in a white lab coat that cures cancer, there is the equally paradigmatic bookworm reading 18th-century poetry (bear with me, it’s that time of the year when clichés abound). Trying to measure their value by the same or even similar standard risks slipping into the pathologies of impact, or, worse, vague statements about the necessity of social sciences and humanities for democracy, freedom, and human rights (despite personal sympathy for the latter argument, it warrants mentioning that the link between democratic regimes and academic freedom is historically contingent, rather than causal).
Second, framing what academics do as labour makes it very difficult to avoid embracing some form of measurement of output. This isn’t always related to quantity: one can also measure the quality of publications (e.g., by rating them in relation to the impact factors of journals they were published in). Often, however, the ideas of productivity and excellence go hand in hand. This contributes to the proliferation of academic writing – not all of which is exceptional, to say the very least – and, in turn, creates incentives to produce both more and better (‘slow’ academia is underpinned by the argument that taking more time creates better writing).
This also points to why the critique of the conditions of knowledge production is so focused on the notion of time. As long as creating knowledge is primarily defined as a form of labour, it depends on socially and culturally defined cycles of production and consumption. Advocating ‘slowness’, thus, does not amount to the critique of the centrality of time to capitalist production: it just asks for more of it.
The concept of foraging, by contrast, is embedded in a different temporal cycle: seasonal, rather that annual or REF-able. This isn’t some sort of neo-primitivist glorification of supposed forms of sustenance of the humanity’s forebears before the (inevitable) fall from grace; it’s, rather, a more precise description of how knowledge works. To this end, we could say most academics forage anyway: they collect bits and scraps of ideas and information, and turn them into something that can be consumed (if only by other academics). Some academics will discover new ‘edible’ things, either by trial and error or by learning from (surveying) the population that lives in the area, and introduce this to other academics. Often, however, this does not amount to creating something entirely new or original, as much to the recombination of existing flavours. This is why it is not abundance as such as much as diversity that plays a role in how interesting an environment a university, city, or region will become.
However, unlike labour, foraging is not ‘naturally’ given to the creation of surplus: while foraged food can be stored, most of it is collected and prepared more or less in relation to the needs of those who eat it. Similarly, it is also by default somewhat undisciplined: foragers must keep an eye out for the plants and other foodstuffs that may be useful to them. This does not mean that it does not rely on tradition, or that it is not susceptible to prejudice – often, people will ignore or attribute negative properties to forms of food that they are unfamiliar with, much like academics ignore or fear disciplines or approaches that do not form part of their ‘tribe’ or school of thought.
As appealing as it may sound, foraging is not a romanticized, or, worse, sterile vision of what academics do. Some academics, indeed, labour. Some, perhaps, even invent. But increasing numbers are actually foraging: hunting for bits and pieces, some of which can be exchanged for other stuff – money, prestige – thus allowing them to survive another winter. This isn’t easy: in the vast digital landscape, knowing how to spot ideas and thoughts that will have traction – and especially those that can be exchanged – requires continued focus and perseverance, as well as a lot of previously accumulated knowledge. Making a mistake can be deadly, perhaps not in the literal sense, but certainly as far as reputation is concerned.
So, workers of all lands, happy New Year, and spare a thought for the foragers in the wildlands of digital capitalism.
Jana Bacevic 