Author Archives: hallymk1

The University, the crisis and academic activism


Posted by hallymk1

I’ve just submitted this for the Higher Education Academy’s 2014 conference. It’s not contentious to me. But let’s see if it gets accepted…

Short abstract: The University is broken. The game is up. It is conditioned by neoliberal politics through the tenets of growth, financialisation and securitisation. Its twin contributions to society take the form of debt and privatisation. At issue is which knowledges and practices can be liberated from the University before it is too late.

Outline: This session will describe how the idea and reality of the University is conditioned through the triple crunch of peak oil (or more specifically a lack of ready access to liquid fuels), climate change and economic crisis. Collectively these form a crisis against which higher education is recalibrated and restructured. However, in the face of a global neoliberal politics that constrains what can be contested, it is increasingly difficult to see beyond the everyday realities of economic growth, the normalisation of debt-driven study that takes the form of indenture, and the disciplining of academic labour through outsourcing, privatisation, financialisation, impact measures, organisational development, and so on.

 

The concern then is that these factors become reinforcing, and that the drive for GDP and growth recalibrates the University around the rule of money. Inside this marketised space/time an agenda of privatisation based on evidential assertion or problem-solving theory is presented as de-politicised and normative, and enables private providers, working with private equity, technology firms, transnational finance, think tanks and politicians to lever open public education for profit. In this space/time, student debt becomes a key power source for this drive to privatise in the name of efficiencies, scale, value-for-money and impact, and in fact generates a pedagogic and structural view of student-as-consumer that further recalibrates higher education.

 

In the face of the triple crunch, and of the volatility imposed by the interrelationships between peak oil, our climate realities, and economic futures, what is the role of those who both labour and study in higher education? Can they say no, refuse, push-back or define alternatives? Or do acquiescence and exodus describe the only options? What kinds of conversations are academics having with society about our need for “more sophisticated financial engineering” to underpin increasing student debt? What kinds of conversations should academics be having with young people and their parents about the relationships between debt, real wage collapse, unemployment and precarity, in the face of the added volatility of access to the resources that keep the economy growing and climate change?

 

This paper will question the role of academic as activists in developing alternative methods of liberating knowing, knowledge and organisation, away from the University and into society more widely. Is it possible to liberate higher education from the space-time of debt and privatisation? The paper will briefly reference historical examples from South America, from global student/worker protests and occupations, and from the co-operatives movement, in order to ask whether it is possible for academics to describe a different space-time?

Keywords: Crisis, co-operation, neoliberalism, university, academic, liberation, space/time

Audience: This session is aimed at anyone who wishes an open discussion about the power and politics of higher education, and the ways in which critique of the organising principles for the University might be developed. In this way the session is designed to discomfort attendees, in order that a mirror can be held up to our practices as academics, and co-operative alternatives described.

Impact: The session is deliberately counter-hegemonic. My hope is that participants question the dominant narratives around higher education and find the courage to develop solidarity networks that lie inside, against and beyond the formalised university. If they do, then that is its impact.

Key messages:  

  1. The University is in crisis.
  2. Academics need to critique their role in maintaining the dominant narratives of economic growth and there is no alternative.
  3. Academic working with students have a key activist role in defining an alternative set of organising principles for higher education in society.

 

 

 


17 things about 2013


Posted by hallymk1

I wrote this whilst I listened to the tunes that defined 2013 for me.

What did I learn this year?

  1. I lost faith in myself. I am trying to find it again. Starting with my being.
  2. It is my faith in others that will enable me to recover my faith in myself. I need to understand how to earn faith in myself, reinforced by other’s faith in me.
  3. I feel like all I did in 2013 was survive. I learned that it is possible to survive. It is tiring to survive. But it is possible.
  4. There are some amazing people in my life, whose belief in me is greater than my self-doubt.
  5. Fuck hope. Remember courage.
  6. I can be a moody bastard. I apologise to you if you have suffered as a result. Please know that I am working on it.
  7. I will never abandon my 8 year old. As a result I will never abandon you. This is the truth that they could never see/hear.
  8. The University is broken. Irrevocably. Marketised. Privatised. Technologised. Entrepreneured. Out of the public sphere.
  9. The options are to say no, and to resist, and to push back, and to call people out, and to do so in solidarity. The options are to do these things collectively, using trades unions and pop-ups unions and strikes and protests and demonstrations and insurrections and refusals, in public spaces/times.
  10. The options are also to prepare for exodus from capital. To celebrate use value and not exchange value. For open and public association and solidarity, against private, indentured lives.
  11. To exodus is to pay down your debts, to learn some new, tradable skills, to access communal tools, to know and love/earn faith in your neighbours.
  12. I need/want/hope to be more involved in the Social Science Centre. Co-operation is the thing.
  13. My alienation is now at issue. How do I overcome my alienation from my labour, the products of my labour, my self/humanity and other people? There is something here about faith, courage, tolerance, and solidarity.
  14. I wonder whether it is possible to liberate academic labour from the living death of capitalist work? Is it possible to find spaces to liberate and repatriate knowledge, ways of knowing, organising principles, before they are commodified/enclosed out of our reach?
  15. I am increasingly pessimistic that society has the will to overcome the triple crunch of climate change, peak oil/resource availability, and this secular crisis of capitalism. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. See 11.
  16. I am increasingly convinced that the academic only matters as activist. See 13.
  17. What is to be done? Always.

beyond the space-time of debt and privatisation


Posted by hallymk1

In a paper from 2011 entitled Questioning Technology in the Development of a Resilient Higher Education, Joss Winn and I looked at the interrelationships between peak oil, narratives of economic growth, and the idea of the university. We argued the following (NOTE: I’ve stripped the references out, except for Hirsch, both of which you really should read).

The importance of oil to economic growth will become an increasing concern to universities, which are themselves seen as engines of growth. Hirsch (2008) has calculated that a decline in the global production of liquid fuels (i.e. unconventional and conventional oil) would lead to approximately a 1:1 ratio in the decline of global GDP. In the same article, the post-peak decline in oil production is calculated to be between 2% and 5% per year, suggesting a similar decline in GDP. By comparison, the decline in GDP during the global recession from 2008 to 2009 was 5%. In the United Kingdom, the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security has likened the effect of an imminent ‘oil crunch’, due mid-decade, to the current credit crunch. Their report also shows the ‘highly suggestive’ correlation between oil price spikes and US recessions, stating that every US recession since 1960 has been preceded by rapid oil price rises, and that when the price of oil exceeds 4% of US GNP, a recession occurs shortly afterwards. In March 2011, this equated to an oil price of around US$80 per barrel, and therefore April 2011’s price for dated Brent spot crude oil of US$118 per barrel is a threat to economic growth in oil-importing countries. Moreover, within capitalism, a threat to economic growth is a threat to social stability, as is noted whenever there is a recession or conflict, with clear implications for the role of HE.

These issues were amplified by the US Department of Energy’s ‘Hirsch report’, which stated:

The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. (Hirsch et al., 2005, p. 4)

The difficulty of moving away from the use of oil is highlighted by the Hirsch report, which states that ‘a minimum of a decade of intense, expensive effort’ is required to migrate from our current use (Hirsch et al., 2005, p. 5). Businesses have strategically targeted waste in energy usage of technology, and attempted to profit from its measurement and monitoring as part of a strategy to roll out smart technologies, which themselves are highly contentious. Relatively little has been done to address this anticipated problem within HE due to its focus on business as usual. Within the current model, business as usual extends the global demand for oil by at least 15% over the next 25 years.

If you want to see Hirsch talk about the risks of peak oil and its impact on growth, its relationship to national geopolitics and transnational corporations, and our (in)ability to mitigate the decline in oil supply, in order to maintain growth or in fact manage de-growth, I recommend this talk from 2007. One of the key risks in this scenario is of an energy crunch that suspends capitalism, in that it makes growth impossible or precarious. A US Joint Forces Command report from 2010 warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:

A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions.

The interplay of the triple crunch of peak oil (or more specifically a lack of ready access to liquid fuels), climate change and economic crisis are creating an increasingly volatile global context, against which higher education is calibrated. And that’s without talking about the geopolitical threats to a global economy underwritten by petrodollars. Moreover, as Nafeez Ahmed notes in a Guardian report on a lecture by a former BP geologist:

The fundamental dependence of global economic growth on cheap oil supplies suggests that as we continue into the age of expensive oil and gas, without appropriate efforts to mitigate the impacts and transition to a new energy system, the world faces a future of economic and geopolitical turbulence:

“In the US, high oil prices correlate with recessions, although not all recessions correlate with high oil prices. It does not prove causation, but it is highly likely that when the US pays more than 4% of its GDP for oil, or more than 10% of GDP for primary energy, the economy declines as money is sucked into buying fuel instead of other goods and services… A shortage of oil will affect everything in the economy. I expect more famine, more drought, more resource wars and a steady inflation in the energy cost of all commodities.”

According to another study in the Royal Society journal special edition by professor David J. Murphy of Northern Illinois University, an expert in the role of energy in economic growth, the energy return on investment (EROI) for global oil and gas production – the amount of energy produced compared to the amount of energy invested to get, deliver and use that energy – is roughly 15 and declining. For the US, EROI of oil and gas production is 11 and declining; and for unconventional oil and biofuels is largely less than 10. The problem is that as EROI decreases, energy prices increase. Thus, Murphy concludes:

“… the minimum oil price needed to increase the oil supply in the near term is at levels consistent with levels that have induced past economic recessions. From these points, I conclude that, as the EROI of the average barrel of oil declines, long-term economic growth will become harder to achieve and come at an increasingly higher financial, energetic and environmental cost.”

This volatility in geopolitics, access to energy, and global GDP is important for those who work and study in higher education, because we are entering a phase of increasingly complex financial mechanisms for indenturing study, which tie both institutions that are leveraged in the financial markets and students whose futures are sold through loans to the myth of infinite growth (or business-as-usual). This is a risk because as I note elsewhere:

it is private (rather than public) debt, and excessive leveraging of debt that tends to push capital into structural crises. The leveraging of private debt through excessive student loans, whilst giving a short-term financial fix for some leaves a deeper structural legacy related to crises of demand. So we end up with an inflated set of financial assets that bear no resemblance to the value of real assets in the real economy, and in the process of deleveraging the ponzi scheme leaves those individuals with high levels of debt at most risk.

This space of high-levels of individuated risk and of futures defined by individual and institutional debt is the world that defines the work of educators and students. Where bailouts meet austerity, where the realities of a quadrillion dollars of debt underpin politics in the United States, where student debt and therefore student education forms part of a coming sub-prime crisis, and where in spite of the rhetoric about higher education and employability, the realities are youth unemployment and long-term falls in real wages, or precarious employment.

And I haven’t even mentioned a future framed by oil, rising oil prices, or carbon. Yet, these matter because as Roger Pielke Jr argues:

We can simplify these four factors even further. Population and income together are simply GDP, or aggregate economic activity, and the production and consumption of energy reflect the technologies of energy supply and demand. The resulting Kaya Identity — as his equation has come to be called — simply says:

Emissions = GDP x Technology

With this simple equation before us, we can see the fundamental challenge to reducing emissions: A rising GDP, all else equal, leads to more emissions. But if there is one ideological commitment that unites nations and people around the world in the early 21st century, it is that GDP growth is non-negotiable. Right now, leaders on six different continents are focused on efforts to grow GDP, and with it jobs and wealth. They’re not as worried about emissions.

The concern then is that these factors become reinforcing. That the drive for GDP and growth recalibrates the University around the rule of money. That inside this space an agenda of privatisation based on evidential assertion or problem-solving theory is presented as de-politicised and normative, and enables technology firms, working with private equity, transnational finance, think tanks and politicians to lever open public education for profit. That student debt becomes a key power source for this drive to privatise in the name of efficiencies, scale, value-for-money and impact, and in fact generates a pedagogic and structural view of student-as-consumer that further recalibrates higher education and the use of technologies inside that sector.

And things continue to worsen, as Andrew McGettigan writes in his notes to the transcription of the Project Hero report of the Rothschild Investment Bank to the Coalition Government of 2011, designed to facilitate a sale of existing student loan debt starting in 2013. McGettigan states that:

One of the most interesting aspects of the Rothschild review is the detail provided on the rejected models, not least because of the centrality of the suggestion that universities could be encouraged to underwrite the risk of poor graduate repayments through debt issues or equity stakes in special purpose vehicles.

Rothschild conclude their report with a new suggestion in relation to all loans: that the government look further into the possibilities offered by ‘tranching’ the loan book in order to attract a better price. In effect, suggesting that the product to be sold is broken down into smaller sizes than whole cohorts. This has significance for assessing whether the much riskier ‘coalition loans’ can be sold (as David Willetts appears to be suggesting as a future funding solution). As each of these cohorts will enter the repayment system with £12billion of debt in total, any feasible sale requires more sophisticated financial engineering.

There are two approaches to tranching outlined by Rothschild: the first relates to a structuring of repayments and risk according to different ‘seniorities’; the second to structuring the product by the ‘underlying characteristics’ of the individual loans themselves.

In the face of the triple crunch, of the volatility imposed by the interrelationships between peak oil, our climate realities, and economic futures, is business as usual really possible for those who labour and study in higher education? What kinds of conversations are we having with society about our need for “more sophisticated financial engineering” to underpin increasing student debt? What kinds of conversations should we be having with young people and their parents about the volatile relationships between debt, real wages, unemployment and precarity, in the face of the added volatility of access to the resources that keep the economy growing? Volatility heaped upon volatility, so that indentured study itself underpins an increasingly precarious promise of a valuable and value-laden working life.

Precarity and volatility, as Ilargi notes at The Automatic Earth, underpins the transfer of resources to those with power and the accumulation of wealth by an elite, which threatens a clash of social forces. This clash is already happening in student/worker occupations, indignations, demonstrations, strikes, and so on, that are aimed against neoliberalism and austerity across the globe. Ilargi notes:

If we presume that a connection exists between the increase in debt on one side and the increase in “asset value” on the other, then I would say chances are we’re looking at both a gigantic wealth transfer from the poor towards the rich and a huge bubble that allows that to happen, and that will make the poor even poorer when it bursts. Which seems inevitable, because debt by itself cannot create value.

And if I’m right, what we’re seeing is not the incredible resiliency of the markets, and no real increase in asset value, but an increase in the threat to the social cohesion of our communities, cities and nations.

The Automatic Earth has long argued that in the coming revaluation, individuals and communities need: to pay down their debts (unless you wish to lose your lives as indentured student/worker or your homes as mortgagee, which are someone else’s assets); to learn some new, tradable and communal skills; to buy some communal tools; and get to know your neighbours. As we career towards an increasingly volatile energy/economic outlook, with the realities of devaluation and debt looming, and increasingly complex mechanisms being sought for locking down and making precarious the future of both higher education institutions and its students/academics, I wonder whether the only response that academics have is that there is no alternative? Or whether academics can develop alternative methods of liberating knowing and knowledge and organisation, and which are beyond the space-time of debt and privatisation.

Addendum: in a piece on the UK’s jobs crisis, Ha-Joon Chang argues that work insecurity, the collapse in real wages, unemployment, mental health problems and a lack of well-being, are hidden from serious discussion. He states that “this wider crisis – perhaps we can call it the “general living crisis” – is not seriously discussed because over the last few decades we have come to neglect work as a serious issue.” This is certainly true of higher education, which has been re-geared around entrepreneurial education and the Government’s growth agenda. Inside the University there is no alternative to an education for the living death of capitalist work. As Marx notes in volume 1 of Capital:

The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus-labour), produces thus, with the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself. It extends the labourer’s time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life-time.

As Chang notes, we need to talk about the reality of this as we expect our students as scholars to consume and produce more debt.


The co-operative university against indenture


Posted by hallymk1

Martin McQuillan has argued that the Coalition Government is placing borrowing at the heart of the UK’s higher education system. He notes that:

Against all expectations George Osborne’s Autumn statement announced that the cap on student numbers in England would be abolished from 2015-16. As an interim measure an additional 30,000 places would be made available for the next academic year 2014-15. The initial numbers would be available for universities; private providers would be able to access the unlimited market from 2015. This expansion, costed at £700million per year, would be funded by the estimated £12billion sale of income-contingent repayment loans taken out between 2003 and 2010, before the Coalition’s reforms.

For McQuillan, as for so many of us who struggle with this neoliberal, entrepreneurial turn, this has given a green light to further private involvement in the delivery and assessment of higher education, alongside the Russell Group’s increasingly aggressive lobbying for the removal of the cap on fees. This is education as bourgeois consumption for an elite that sits asymmetrically against those driven towards universities which are forced to compete via riskier, more volatile engagements in the finance (bond) markets. A life predicated on and disciplined by personal or institutional debt; the socialisation of production for the market rather than for society through debt and indenture; education indentured forever.

Either way, McQuillan argues that:

It would seem that Osborne has decided that it is more important to secure the ideological legacy of the Coalition’s reforms by creating an unlimited market funded by borrowing than by balancing the BIS budget.  However, with UCAS reporting that university applications are currently 4% down on this time last year, it is not entirely clear that the demand exists for increased higher education provision at £9,000 per year.

Andrew McGettigan has also been very clear about the balance between risk, demand and volatility in the near future, and the (deliberate?) unsustainability of current Coalition policy. He argued that:

How will the planned expansion of undergraduate places will be funded after 2015/16? We don’t have the details yet: setting out policies using gross, rather than net, proceeds is incompetent. If you sell the loans, you no longer receive the associated income stream. That should be obvious.

Beyond 2019/20, there are no more sale proceeds, but income will continue to be £1billion lower than previously estimated. What happens then? This is hit-and-hope policy making.

Higher Education deserves better – a clear, sustainable financing solution without gimmickry.

Hit-and-hope, gimmickry, or ideology posing as evidence-based policy. It is worth watching McGettigan at the House of Commons BIS Committee (17/12/13), not only for the points made about volatility and the sustainability of funding mechanisms when linked to marketization, but also for the notable absence of the Minister, David Willetts MP, and the Select Committee’s apparent lack of clarity on the detail of the mechanics of HE funding. Their questions to Toni Pearce of the NUS on why this matters for current students mapped out a terrain where indenture was seen by those in-power to be almost natural; almost a state of grace. So we witness complexity plus volatility plus risk plus hedging plus an inability to see beyond the inevitable shift of funding/risk from society to the entrepreneurial individual. This is the critical point that Pearce made at the start of her evidence to the Select Committee. This is the fundamental rupture between the market and the entrepreneurial individual, and the possibilities and hope that emerge from socialised, co-operative practice.

This is the ideological rupture that is everywhere to be seen.

On challenging this on the terms of money capital, or the rule of money, the Times Higher Education reported the Institute for Fiscal Studies, stating that current short-term policy-making based on secondary legislation:

“[] may work in the near-term fiscal numbers, but economically it makes little sense”.

“Selling the loan book will be broadly fiscally neutral in the long run, bringing in more money now at the expense of less money later on. Lifting the cap on numbers will cost money every year.”

Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the IFS, said that scrapping the cap on student numbers will increase the “long run cost to the public finances of student loans”.

The transfer of the risks of failure, debt and indenture to the individual in her contract with private providers raises the spectre of debtors prisons, like these in Colorado, or these in Alabama, or in this report from Harvard about student debt, where:

somebody literally asked the internet if they could go to jail to pay off their debts. That’s desperation. And I’m neither laughing nor impressed.

And we might collectively look at what is happening to our social relationships in this ideological quickening. As we read reports of students saddled with debts and whose assumed incomes have not met expectations or the assumptions made by their Colleges or peers. The collapse in real wages and the rise in inflation; the full economic impact of devaluation as the realities of paying down quantitative easing bite; the exponential growth in student debt as an investment vehicle in the face of the falling rate of profit; the lack of growth in de-developing nations like the UK; each of which impact these real-life student stories of debt-ridden hell.

These real-life stories of an indentured life covered in the project on student debt, and in 5 stories on student debt, and in Australia, and in South Africa, and in transnational banks targeting students in India, or the complex interrelationships between debt and mental health and well-being. As Marx wrote in Volume 3 of Capital, these stories reveal how interest-bearing capital is the most fetish-like form of social relations. Marx wrote:

In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, are brought out in their pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself. Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content.

Thus we get the fetish form of capital and the conception of fetish capital. In M — M’ we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree, the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction — which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form.

In its capacity of interest-bearing capital, capital claims the ownership of all wealth which can ever be produced, and everything it has received so far is but an instalment for its all-engrossing appetite.

Debt, money and time, inextricably linked and inextricably dislocated from the realities of production of commodities, labour-power, and humanity in the present, in order to inexplicably subsume the future.

And what we are left with inside higher education are a set of keywords that enclose/describe the time and space, and space-time, of the University: debt; indenture; financialisation; hedge; entrepreneurship; consumer; customer-service excellence; securutisation; policing; competition; privatisation; marketization; organisational development; performativity; impact. These keywords in this space-time represent the chronic failing of intellectual leadership.

It is in the spirit of recovery then that Joss Winn has written about a co-operative universities mailing list, as one tactic in arguing for an alternative, and in defining an alternative set of keywords that might hold us as we work for something different. As we try to write and think about what it means to be co-operative, in-and-against a higher education that is increasingly kettled, we urgently need a conversation about the organising principles for collective work and for social solutions rather than for coercion and competition.

We need to talk about a university-life that is not framed by debt but by justice, and that is against business-as-usual in the form of indenture. As Joss notes:

If you are interested in discussing, researching, keeping up-to-date and even creating a co-operative university, there is a mailing list you can join.

https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/co-op-universities

The list was first set up by a group of us who attended the Co-operative Education Against the Crises conference earlier in the year. Since Dan Cook published his report and the Institute of Education hosted a seminar, people have been in touch via this blog, Twitter and email, asking me how to stay involved.

Please join the mailing list and introduce yourself.

The mailing list is hosted by Mayfirst/People Link, a politically progressive member-run collective of technologists.


On the University, protest and a post-capitalist imagination


Posted by hallymk1

Marx was clear that given the nature of capitalist social relations, there can be no balanced growth or equilibrium reached inside production for the market. The history of crises, and of both State and transnational responses to those crises, crystallises that reality further. Unfortunately for those living and working inside higher education this is being realised as the University moves from its formal subsumption under capitalist social relations to its real subsumption. This process involves the restructuring of higher education as a terrain for exchange value, rather than simply for the production of use values, and as a site for the expanded reproduction of capital.

This restructuring is painful bordering on the excruciating for many, and it is imposed in-part through measures like: the announcement in the Autumn Statement of 30,000 extra university places next year and the abolition of all number controls in 2015-16; the calls for the removal of the cap on fees; increased privatisation and outsourcing; encouraging alternative providers; the sale of the student loan book; the use of REF/impact measures for academic labour, and so on. Each of these tactical arrangements furthers the deterritorialisation of the idea that the public/social might underpin the organising principles for higher education. As a result we are left in asymmetrical opposition the State’s use of force to impose marketization. Market forces, indeed.

On the sale of the loan book, Andrew McGettigan has questioned:

why would you sell this asset class at the bottom of the market? that is, when the economy is only just beginning to recover from recession. If you believe in ‘the growth to come’, wouldn’t you be better holding on to an income steam [sic.] tied to graduate earnings?

So one is left to question whether this tactic is simply a deeply political move that is designed for the purpose of fundamentally restructuring the future direction and organising principles of higher education? One result is that it becomes impossible to go back. Moreover, each provider becomes a competing capital in a system of expanded reproduction, and is forced to become part of an association of capitals rather than simply a provider of education.

The potential for higher education to be folded inside a broader system of expanded reproduction is important for reinvestment or reallocation purposes across a global economy. However, this potentiality is disciplined by credit and debt and that bears its own risks. As the mainstream economist Jeremy Sachs recently argued, “The U.S. economy, and the world economy, cannot recover sustainably by propping up consumers for yet another binge.” Yet Phoenix Capital continue to argue that debt-related binges are exactly what is fuelling any semblance of growth:

So, we have investor sentiment showing record bullishness, investors are piling into stocks at a pace not seen since 1999-2000: at the height of the Tech Bubble, earnings are generally falling, the global economy is contracting, and the Fed is already buying $85 billion worth of assets per month.

We all know how this bubble will burst: badly. It’s just a question of when. The smart money is either selling into this rally (Fortress and Apollo Group) or sitting on cash (Buffett). They know what’s coming and are waiting.

In this view, Governments need to generate reinvestment and productive capacity, in order to reinstate meaningful growth that is not simply based on consumption and mortgage-debt. However, as Michael Roberts notes, corporations are increasingly unwilling to make productive investments, preferring to hold financial assets like bonds, stocks and cash. This would indicate that the returns on productive investment are too low relative to the risk of making a loss. Thus, investment in new technology or research and development, which requires considerable upfront funding for no certainty of eventual success, is stalling. In spite of limited venture capital involvement in MOOCs and the engagement of some universities in bond markets, as Audrey Watters queries, at issue are both the business model for higher learning and how its providers will make money in the medium-term.

Roberts amplifies the importance of understanding this problem for higher education, because “In order to compete, companies increasingly must invest in new and untried technology rather than just increase investment in existing equipment.” This is riskier because R&D is costlier to finance and requires firms to hold a greater cash buffer against future shocks. Thus, says Roberts, “companies have to build up cash reserves as sinking fund to cover likely losses on research and development.” As universities are restructured as competing capitals or businesses, the relationships between investment, capital intensity, labour productivity and profitability or the ability at least to service debts through surpluses, become critical.

A central issue in judgements that will need to be made about these interrelationships and especially investment opportunities will be appetite for risk. In a speech on profitability and investment in the UK private sector, Ben Broadbent from the Bank of England noted:

Even if the crisis originated in the banking system there is now a higher hurdle for risky investment – a rise in the perceived probability of an extremely bad economic outcome… In reality, many investments involve sunk costs. Big FDI (foreign direct investment) projects, in-firm training, R&D, the adoption of new technologies, even simple managerial reorganisations – these are all things that can improve productivity but have risky returns and cannot be easily reversed after the event.

This matters for academics and students in an increasingly opened-up UK higher education market, not just because the Government is cracking the public sector for the extraction for value and profit, and as a space inside which excess surplus value can be invested, but also because secondary legislation and customary practices are becoming mechanisms for the creative destruction of capital. As Michael Roberts notes in a separate blog-post, levels of corporate debt and poor rates of return on investment mean that:

According to research by the ‘free market’ Adam Smith Institute, 108,000 so-called zombie businesses in the UK are only able to service the interest on their debt, preventing them from restructuring. In a way, this is holding back a recovery in overall profitability and new investment because “Zombie firms stop workers and money being redeployed to more productive uses, they prevent new, better firms entering the market, they undermine competitiveness, reduce productivity and slow the growth of the whole economy.” In other words, they slow ‘creative destruction’ of capital by the liquidation of the weak for the strong.

It is too easy to see how the creative destruction of certain institutions and the reappropriation of their capital assets will flow from marketization.

We might therefore usefully question how Government higher education reforms are situated against a critical political economy of the restructuring of the idea of higher education. Whilst we may argue that there is an ideological hatred of the public or the poor or the disadvantaged by those in-power that is visceral and neoliberal, we also need to recognise, as Roberts does, that reforms are driven by the “dominance of the capitalist sector” and in particular by finance capital. The sale of the loan book, outsourcing, MOOCs, precarious academic labour, are all refracted through this reality. To call for public re-investment for higher education, as Roberts again highlights, “does not ensure a rise in profitability for the capitalist sector as a whole… [and] As long as the capitalist sector is dominant in the major economies, that is what matters.”

Thus, for universities, the opening-up of the sector to the coercive laws of competition is likely to mean more outsourcing and association with the private providers of services and commodities, more engagement in finance (bond) markets, limited use of venture capital for technological innovation, and a faster pace of organisational development and restructuring, each focused on capital or labour intensity, and the production of surplus value. However, this will simply expand the contradictions inherent to capital into the sector, rather than enabling those contradictions to be overcome.

One result is likely to be the removal of the fee cap for indentured study, in order to raise effective demand. For the Russell Group this will provide an opportunity to service the global, bourgeois consumption of “high-class”, expensive educational products. For the rest there will be a fight for low-cost consumers or for a foreign trade in international students/labour that is a form of arbitrage. One of the problems in all this is that market-forces tend to be anarchic (witness Phoenix Capital’s statement noted above about the looming bear market) and incoherent, and a poor guide to managing production and abundance/scarcity of resources. This is as true of academic labour as of any other form as it is subsumed under the dictates of competition and the production/accumulation of surplus value.

One of the critical questions in this restructuring relates to the response of academics and students inside the system. In a reflection on the Autumn Statement, Andrew Westwood argued:

After all of the arguments about both the affordability and the desirability of a mass higher education system, George Osborne has come down firmly and decisively in favour of both. I thought we had lost that debate – that faith in mass human capital and the knowledge economy had been irreparably damaged. I was wrong and I’m pleased about that.

That should be something to celebrate.

This statement is distasteful because it reduces humanity to “mass human capital”. As I note elsewhere, it is actually a “flagrantly despicable term to reduce people to”. However, economically it is also deeply flawed. The argument is that the worker’s labour power is her capital in the commodity form, and that education will help her to build that capital and deliver a return. As David Harvey notes, this might work in artisan/craft societies, but in the transition from craft to capitalist work this level of autonomy is restricted to capital alone as the automatic subject. The craftsman or artisan can only survive as she is able to sell her labour power in the market for a price, and to purchase her own means of reproducing that labour power. Her labour power is only capital in the hands of the capitalist. The worker is not able to make use of her skills, but sees these subsumed under the means of production of the capitalist class. She is therefore alienated from both her own labour power, which is used by the capitalist to extract surplus value, and from herself. The academic’s/student’s/worker’s skills are never their own autonomous capital. If they were human capital then they would be capable of returning interest. However, the academic/student/worker has to labour; she cannot live off the revenue that accrues from her alleged human capital.

There is no choice for the academic/student/worker but to labour as a form of coercion, and to upskill as an entrepreneur as a form of coercive practice. It is in-part as a negation of this coercion that we witness new “site[s] of occupations, strikes, road blocks and picket lines as students and workers rally against privatization.” Whilst these are related to specific issues to do with 3cosas, outsourcing, the privatisation and enclosure of university space, or cops off campus, as NovaraMedia note this is a specific reaction to the political management of austerity that is aimed as the dispossession of public, free space and time. It is designed to mobilise lives around the search for money. As Joseph Kay notes, this has ramifications for the idea of the University:

the choice to be inside the university is disappearing. Whether by escalating indebtedness, involuntary outsourcing, or indeed, summary suspension for political activity, exclusion from the university is making a comeback. At the same time, whether to be against the university is also becoming less of a choice, since the university, at least in its present form, is increasingly against us.

We confront the university less and less as a place of an idealised ‘Education’, and more and more as an exploitative boss, a spendthrift landlord, a creditor, and an instigator of violent repression. The blood on the pavement at UCL symbolises this shift.

Blood on the pavements of our universities is a marker that the State and its institutions will impose acceptance of indenture and a shift in incomes from the poor to the rich, and from the UK to London, and an attrition on real wages, and precarious employment, and ballooning unemployment, and the overcoming of stagnation through financial asset booms, credit-fuelled property ownership and exorbitant bourgeois consumption.

This reminds me that I wrote two years ago, pace John Holloway, about exodus either by Capital from any University that was in opposition to the dictates of the market, or by academics from the University as it was reinscribed for value:

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the [University] from its social environment: it attributes to the [University] an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

In the face of this reality, and that of cops on campus, I went on to state that:

Yet the University remains a symbol of places where mass intellectuality, or knowledge as our main socially-productive force, can be consumed/produced and contributed to by all. The University remains a symbol of the possibility that we can create sites of opposition and ontological critique, or where we can renew histories of denial and revolt, and where new stories can be told, against states of exception that enclose how and where and why we assemble, associate and organise.

Increasingly I doubt that this is the case. Increasingly I believe that the game is up, and that the crucial actions now is liberating participatory knowledge, practice, skills and organising principles, and forming co-operative associations that can begin to describe alternative forms of value beyond the market. As I wrote at the time of the last set of occupations:

academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. How do students and teachers contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction? How do students and teachers contribute to workerist and public dissent against domination and foreclosure?

As Kay notes: “we need to take the rage, and direct it into agitating and organising in our everyday lives.”

In this, Michael Roberts argues that we need to discuss value and organisation:

we must replace a system of production for profit and a society based on greed and self-interest with one that is commonly owned and planned for the needs of all and based on cooperation and support.

Academics need to consider how they contribute to a discussion about social reproduction that is post-capitalist co-ordination. That enables a “postcapitalist imagination”. The social is clearly possible, and we have countless examples of dissent and alternatives to neoliberalism, like: that currently being worked through in Ecuador; or in the ALBA grouping of nations; or in the Mondragon Co-operative; or in the Paris Commune; or in solidarity economies; or in the Social Science Centre; where the social relations of production might be refocused around associated workers rather than associated capitals. These examples, and those of students in occupation, offer hope that new social mechanisms or organising principles, which in turn enable solidarity networks to manage direct decision-making, might enable a transition to a different institutional structure as part of a transition to a complex, post-capitalist society.

In managing co-ordination, we might look at co-opting the principles of the very organisations in which we work, namely universities as pivots for associations of capitals. These associations not only produce means of production but also organise other means of production as inputs in a larger, networked production process. How might those principles, and in fact those means of production be co-opted and traded for use rather than exchange? The capitalist organisation of the University as an association of capitals addresses co-operation in terms of command and control. How might we co-opt this for co-operative ends and to create solidarity networks that might help us to manage issues of energy availability, climate change, poverty and so on, and more broadly the transition to a post-capitalist world? Where and how might academics and students recover their labour as a “postcapitalist imagination”?


On rage (as an empowered and productive member of society)


Posted by hallymk1

This blog is autobiographical. But then you knew that, right? You knew that when I talk about emancipation or the struggle for communism as the negation of my negation or against my alienation or for a world beyond false consciousness, that this was deeply personal as well as political. That I am against my/your/our life’s subsumption under someone else’s rules; against my/your/our alienation inside someone else’s structuring realities. That I am for the world made concrete and useful through co-operation, rather than its restructuring for exchange and the market.

That you can trace the tropes I talk about on here to my life in-against-and-beyond therapy.

That being in-and-beyond therapy is the most deeply political act of my life because it is emancipatory.

And in this process and in this moment, one of the things that is surfacing is anger at the world. Anger at our collective subsumption under the dictates of the market, which is enforced by the disciplinary hand of an increasingly securitised State. Anger that demands that I/we say no, and push-back, and refuse, and look for alternatives that are increasingly outside of the institutionalised realities of competitive, marketised higher education.

And this is also anger at the realities of my past. Framing this present.

And a boy left alone in the corner of a room. With fear framing his ever-present.

And that is one of my critical realisations; that the cognitive and emotional and past and present are interwoven; and that I can trust to this and have faith in it. That who am I now depends on who I was then. And that I need to integrate that eight year-old boy inside my adult-self. And that I cannot understand my adult-self that is presently in-and-against Capital and capitalist social relations, unless I understand my adult/boy-self that is equally in-and-against my/his past.

And although systemically academics are restructured against feeling and for critical thinking or critical reasoning or whatever neoliberal ideal will deliver REF-able, impactful outcomes, my struggle for integration and against further alienation reveals a struggle for a life that is much more qualitative. And so every time I hear about quantified time, or outcomes, or impact, I bleed a little. And I feel the screw turn. And this feeling of bleeding or constriction or enclosure is critical because it threatens to be disciplinary. It threatens to dis-integrate the emotional from the cognitive in me/us, or to map or codify or commodify our affective existence. To put our souls to work and to quantify them.

This is why communism, or the fight for the commons, or for co-operation, becomes qualitatively meaningful, in the face of the incremental objectification of our everyday existence, through cops on campus, or precarious labour, or the privatisation of public space, or the indenturing of our young people’s futures, or whatever. This is a qualitative turn of the screw in an anti-social or inhumane direction that is to be resisted. Everywhere. In this life.

This secular crisis of capitalism reveals the inhumanity of the objectification of my/your/our time and space, or space-time. And this is why I struggle against the living death of capitalist work. It is why I struggle for faith in humanity rather than the market. Because the loss of so much of my past makes me recoil at the threat to our collective futures imposed by austerity or debt or climate change or Fukushima or whatever. And which anaesthetises academia to the external realities of this world, in the name of money/impact.

And this qualitative turn of the screw is only amplified by the reification of critical reasoning or thinking. This reification that denies our need to integrate the cognitive and the emotional (and there is a reason that Bloom wrote about the affective domain although it was almost an afterthought), and that argues that I might think myself well. That critical thinking about depression and anxiety, or some other (cognitive) behavioural stricture or neuro-linguistic re-programming or coaching manualisation, might lead to recovery. That there might be a pill that will make me better/happy. That there might be a download from the Matrix that cures me. For the market. An empowered and productive member of society.

And it has taken me over five years in therapy to learn to listen to my feelings. To know that qualitatively my gut knows, and that I should trust it. Through experience and survival it knows, and I know. So when my chest is gripped with anxiety but my gut is calm, I know there is another way. When they are both in seizure, then we have a problem.

And this feels important because I am trying to reflect on what Clementine writes, in relation to her rage at her Mom’s impending surgery:

As I sit here in my chair in dads office, crying for the first time about all this shit, I want to just sit here and scream. But I don’t want anyone to hear me. I don’t want to be what they think that I ought to be. I’m not. I’m not crying because I’m sad or I’m breaking. I’m crying because I am so fucking mad. I am so mad that there’s nothing that can calm me down. There is nothing I can’t deal with but just because I can deal with it doesn’t mean that it’s not painful as fuck holding it back.

It took me years to realise that this was/is me, in this life at work and at home, searching for something and not knowing that what I desired was an integrated self. That I spent so long holding my rage back that it consumed me as depression and anxiety, although as it happens this was also formed through shame. And that I spent forever trying to cope with the anger that spilled out as a fight against injustice or marginalisation or power-over, of students or those without homes or those with no voice, and for a different set of organising principles. And that deep-down this was a fight against my own historical and social marginalisation.

And the more I think about Clementine’s pain in holding back her fucking mad-ness, the more I wonder about the ways in which as an academic I am trying to find mechanisms to integrate my fucking mad-ness and my rage at the world as it is, inside my life as a whole. And this stands against critical thinking and against medicating my emotions. And this, I think, is where critique emerges for me as a powerful, political and therapeutic tool for the systemic analysis of the ways in which I and my self are alienated in this world. And this prefigures the emergence of my focus on sociability and on co-operative alternatives. It is the interplay between rage, courage and critique that reveals and then co-opts the fucking mad-ness. For something different. Enabling me to feel it and live it and understand it, and put it to use.

For love.


Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university


Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting at the the CAPPE Neoliberalism and Everyday Life conference next September, at the University of Brighton. My abstract is below.

Abstract: Neoliberalism is a global pedagogical project aimed at the dispossession of free time so that all of life becomes productive, and education is a central institutional means for its realisation. This project aims at marketising all of social life, so that life becomes predicated upon the extraction of value. In part the deployment of technologies, technical services and techniques enables education to be co-opted as an institutional means for production and control. This occurs inside both formal and informal educational institutions and spaces, like universities and MOOCs, as one mechanism to offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to re-establish accumulation. This pedagogic project also tends to recalibrate and enclose the roles of staff and students as entrepreneurial subjects, whose labour is enabled through technology. This is achieved through learning analytics, big data, mobility and flexibility of provision, and so on. This paper will analyse the relationships between technology, pedagogy and the critical subject in the neoliberal University, in order to argue for the use of technology inside a co-operative pedagogy of struggle. This demands that we ask what education is, before we ask what it is for, or the place of technology-enhanced learning in the university. The article considers whether it is possible to uncover stories of how and where education might be used for co-operation rather than competition, and what technology-enhanced co-operative education might look like?


on depression and alienation


Posted by hallymk1

 There is no us, there is only I,

Dropped like a tear from my mother’s eye.

Mother do you know your son at all?

Looking for the things he’ll never find,

Talks too much about suicide,

Who can tell what’s on his mind?

The Wonder Stuff. 1991. Here Comes Everyone.

 

“Then the boy realised, the penguin wasn’t lost, he was just lonely.”

Oliver Jeffers. 2005. Lost and Found.

 

I wrote this whilst I listened to this Spotify playlist that I made for my Mom.

This post is dedicated to Jo and to Tracey. For everything.

It was inspired by Joss and Lucy, who point me towards life.

A note

I originally posted this on Wednesday 4 December. Then, 15 minutes later and in the middle of the worst panic attack I have had for a decade I took it down. And that’s the reality of this illness; that crippled by self-doubt and an utter feeling of dread, I would descend into an anxiety attack that would last for 24 hours. The reality was that I would be sitting in meetings wondering what excuse I could use for leaving: sickness, headache, whatever. Only if I did leave, then what? Go insane? Self-harm? Run until I dropped? So, as I sat in an interview with a PVC, another Professor and a member of senior management, I survived the rage in-between my temples. They would not have known how close I was to screaming.

And then I had a conversation with my wife, and my friends dropped into place.

Preamble

There is a story that is not for telling here. It is about a boy who was abandoned, and abandoned, and abandoned again. A boy who refused to let anyone else be abandoned in-turn. A boy who raged against the injustice of it all. A boy with a beautiful ferocity of purpose. A boy who was relentless, focused, militant. A boy who fought so hard that he forgot himself, and who broke his self, and who spent a lifetime trying to recover. But that story is for another day.

On depression

In February 2009, seven years after I had exited therapy for the second-time I picked-up the phone. Five months of battling, living with and being scarred by the deepest depression left me in the worst of places. Given that I had spent most of the preceding nine years recovering from a physical and emotional breakdown, and in trying to manage panic and anxiety and their cloying sibling depression, I knew this was the worst of places. Unforgivingly bleak.

The inability to think straight for more than a few minutes. The moments of time dragging on for ever. The effort it takes to get out of bed. To eat well. To think well. The tinnitus. The fucking tinnitus, scarifying my mind. The crippling fatigue punching its way into my psyche, and coating my muscles in lactic borne of exhaustion. My black core telling me that I am nothing; that I am pathetic; that I am worthless; that I am a fuck-up; that I am one hair-trigger from failure; that all my relationships are broken and it’s all my fault; and that when I stumble then everyone will know; and when I stumble then I am fucked.

“Give up or go on, doesn’t matter. Because sooner or later, they will see you for what you are and then you will be fucked.”

Because I had no self. No safe space inside. Just despair. And this time it was back with a vengeance.

And this had happened pretty constantly from 2000-05, and it was accompanied by chronic fatigue. Body and mind working in tandem. Failing in tandem. No respite.

And then I forgot about it for a while. And I kidded myself that I had worked through it. And that the blackness and the bleakness that infected every waking moment would pass.

Only I forgot. I forgot that we may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us. And in despair I searched the bacp website for person-centred/gestalt/integrative therapists. And then I picked-up the phone.

A failure to cope?

On Monday 25 October, in the wake of Jonathan Trott leaving the England party during the Ashes, Stan Collymore spoke to Mark Saggers about his debilitating battle with depression. He spoke of the need to be tested for a range of physical illnesses like ME and chronic fatigue, because mental health was poorly understood and taboo, and his fatigue could never be psychological, could it? He spoke of the need to support men and women in their access to mental health professionals. He spoke of how the club doctor at Aston Villa FC told him he would be okay if he just scored a couple of goals in the next game. He asked a man who had claimed that those with depression were just weak and should get on with life, whether he would like to compete in any physical or mental task with him, so we could see who was “stronger or fitter.”

And he spoke about humanity.

And he spoke about care.

And he spoke of the long and very painful road to recovery.

Then Stan Collymore wrote this.

And he spoke of the need for more people to have the courage to stand-up and speak about their on-going battles with their mental health.

And before I go on, you might want acquaint yourself with some myths about clinical depression. Or you might want to acquaint yourself with some stories from highly-functioning people coping with mental health problems. Or you might want to acquaint yourself with some stories of highly-functioning people attempting to recover. Or you might want to hear the voices from coalitions of service-users fighting for solidarity and to be heard. Because this is about points of solidarity.

So here we are. A failure to cope?

Since February 2009, I have spent over 450 hours in therapy. I have been in therapy three times a week for a year. Before that I was in therapy twice a week for two years. Before that once a week for two years. I have had countless extra phone-calls, in order to get me through specific days. My therapist is amazing. And only human.

I have been taking anti-depressants under the guidance of my GP since June 2011. My GP is a rock.

In November 2012, after helping care for my Mom for four months as she battled early-onset dementia, I was forced to leave work for six weeks with depression and anxiety. I had always battled to be at work, because if I could not be there I was a failure, right? Without my labour, what was I? What am I? What is my point? Alienated at and through capitalist work, which demands that we are resilient, efficient, productive, whatever.

Never underestimate the importance of admitting that you cannot cope alone. We are conditioned to rely on the rugged, resilient individual. To develop the rugged, resilient individual. And in the process we are all demeaned. In the process we are all alienated from our humanity. Recovery is imbued with sociability just as the history that brought us to this point is a social failure on some level.

During the next five months with my Dad and my sister I learned more about care pathways and the prognosis for dementia patients than I ever thought I would. I attended a carers’ course run by the wonderful CLASP the Carers’ Centre in Leicester. And then in April 2013, another singularity. My Mom died.

My Mom died. And she broke my heart.

And since then I have battled vertigo, recurrent respiratory tract viruses, and headaches. And I have not missed a day of work, except through strike action. And just like in 2000, I have to live with daemons running wild in my mind and a body that just shut-down. A body and a mind that shut-down to stop me running, and that forced me to think about courage and faith and just trying to be.

And this is what failure looks like, right? The lazy depressive. The guy who just couldn’t cope with a bit of pressure. I just want to man-up, right?

And since I went back into therapy some other things have happened.

In June 2009 I was awarded a UK National Teaching Fellowship.

In June 2010 I was awarded a Readership in Education and Technology.

In June 2011 I formed and lead a new Centre for Enhancing Learning through Technology at De Montfort University.

In May 2013 I was made Professor of Education and Technology.

In September 2013 the digilit Leicester Project that I co-manage won an international award.

I have given 66 conference presentations, and had published 25 peer-reviewed papers since I went into therapy.

I have project-managed or worked on 13 HE projects. And I have mentored six Ph.D. candidates, and countless colleagues going for teacher/national teaching fellowships.

Since 2011, I’ve written 125 blog-posts consisting of around 150,000 words.

And I was a school governor/deputy-chair of governors; and a trustee of a homeless shelter; and a co-worker at a homeless shelter; and the Chair of a football club supporters’ trust; and a co-operator at a social science centre; and a trades union committee member; and a serial protestor on demonstrations; and a husband; and a friend; and a client; and a son; and a brother.

Always running; always busy; always a mess.

And I have thought about suicide more often than I care to remember.

And I have spent more nights awake drenched in panic-driven sweat than I care to remember.

And I have psychologically self-harmed more times than I care to remember.

And the jack-hammer in my head tells me that I am going insane more often than I care to remember.

And the visceral dread in my stomach as I sit in meetings from time-to-time, looking for the escape route. Wondering at what point in the meeting I will crack.

And sometimes the effort it takes to get out of bed rather than just wait for it all to end is suffocating.

And the jack-hammer in my head tells me that I am a fraud. That nothing I have ever achieved is worth anything. That nothing I have ever written has any point. That it is only a matter of time before I am found out when I speak. So I might as well shut-the-fuck-up.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

And yet…

The boy tells me that I need to write and that I need to speak, in order to be heard. Because we need to be heard. Because marginalised voices need to be heard.

And I speak for the boy who needs to be heard. Who was lost and who wants to be found. And we fight the fear that if we fail we will be abandoned. Again. And we fight the fear that we have nothing of interest to say, and that we are useless, pointless, nothing, alone, pathetic. Nothing. No thing at all.

And together we take courage and faith, and we fight to sit and to be. And to recognise our humanity.

So here we are

There is no neverland. There is no redemption or salvation. Except from the blackness and the bleakness. But there is the on-going search for solidarity with myself, and through that a solidarity with other people. The search for my own humanity. And the recognition that in getting-up and in going to work, and in managing a team, and in working co-operatively, and in writing, and in speaking, that I might recognise the courage it takes to stop doing stuff and just be. To stop and to find faith in me.

That my route away from crippling depression lies in my caring for me.

And this is an on-going battle that will end with my ability to cope with a few emotional problems. To learn to like and love and find faith in myself. And in you, too.

And right now this matters because yesterday Simon Hughes tried to rubbish Jonathan Trott on Twitter. And I remembered that Trott’s England Test career encompasses 49 tests at an average of 46 runs with a top-score of 226. And that Hughes’ England Test career was non-existent but that he has found a successful media voice. And that doesn’t make Trott better or worse than Hughes. It just makes him different. If only Hughes could have recognised that, and could have cared about the humanity in all of us.

Caring about our shared humanity.

#solidarity


On circuits of affect and resistance


Posted by hallymk1

This post was written whilst listening to LCD Soundsystem’s last concert at Madison Square Garden.

ONE. Circuits of affect and resistance

Yesterday I attended an ESRC seminar series on Digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights. The seminar was on Affective Digital Economy: Intimacy, Identity and Networked Realities. One of the key points that emerged from the day was the need to reconnect a political critique into the lived realities of social spaces like the Allsorts Youth Project, or in work related to transnational communications amongst a diaspora, or where we are thinking about the relationships between spaces, surveillance and mental health. In particular the event had me considering how we abstract the specificities of our individual or community-based struggles, in order:

  1. To find sites of solidarity that enable us to push back against the alienation of capitalist work and the marginalisation or labelling of our identities;
  2. To recognise how we might resist capital as the automatic subject, from the standpoint of labour;
  3. To understand and analyse the relationships between affects, cognition and kinaesthetics, and how they are captured and then subsumed under the circuit of production.

One outcome of this is the extent to which we might see the social circuits of affect or emotion, not as a means for converting immaterial labour into the commodity form, but as a mechanism for refusing and then interrupting the circuits of production, commodity or money capital. This might be done by revealing our systemic alienation from the products of our labour, from our labour itself, from ourselves and from our species-being. Or it might be done by opening-out spaces for sharing rather than trading, and for use-value rather than exchange-value. Or it might be done by redefining the organising principles on which technological systems, technologies and data are used, so that they are co-operative rather than marketised and securitised. Or resistance and pushing-back might be something else entirely.

TWO. Some notes on affect, immaterial labour and cognitive capital

One of the points of contention during the day was whether affect or emotion was a commodity or could be commodified. From my perspective, there was a large amount of confusion around this point, and it connects affect, cognitive capital and immaterial labour. For Beradi, a focus on affect or emotion reveals the mechanisms through which the human soul is commodified through data, databases, being always-on, perceived speed-up, network-centrism and so on, and can thereby be put to work. In this Autonomist tradition, the autonomy or ability of globalised labour to develop its own self-awareness and to utilise technology to act for-itself is critical. Thus, feeling is critical. Here there is no outside of capitalism, and overcoming the alienation of capitalist work demands mechanisms that push back against it, and structures that are beyond its value-form. This idea of negating capital from the point-of-view of the working class as revolutionary social subject is revealed in the epithet in-against-beyond, and predicates critiques of the structures that reproduce capitalism’s domination, like the State and its educational institutions. It is important to recognise that in this view capital needs labour in order to be valorised, but labour does not need capital and is therefore potentially autonomous. This self-awareness or subjectivity is not automatic and demands a co-operative species-being that is cognitively, affectively and kinaesthetically aware.

In classical Marxism, material production forms the basis of all social life and drives the objective history of capitalist social relations. However, radical shifts in technology are important because they revolutionise the valorisation process. For Marx, the magnitude of the value of labour is driven by the labour-time that is socially necessary to produce a specific commodity ‘under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society’ (Marx 2004, p. 129). Thus, academic labour is particularly valuable as a result of the amount of socially-necessary labour-time embedded in its products, which integrate specialised cognitive and material means of production. This promises the capitalist high rates of surplus value extraction or rental income from patents or licenses. However, the people and skills that support such high-end commodity capitalism, are both menial and leverage, and can be made precarious or be outsourced. One outcome of this cognitive work is a view that the material, objective world is replaced by a subjective immateriality that is increasingly inscribed digitally, and which suggests a limitless expansion of the system across the social factory.

Therefore, inside education a focus on immateriality encourages an analysis of the struggle between labour and capital in the creation and commodification of what is termed cognitive capital. Technology is a critical force in the production and accumulation of cognitive capital because it as Žižek notes, it ‘reduces everything to functions and raw materials’, with the result that individual emotions and affects, cultural cues and mores, and the construction of the relations between individuals ‘are themselves the very material of our everyday exploitation’. Educational contexts are vital in enabling capital to find circuits for extracting value from socio-emotional or personalised learning, using technologies like smartphones or personal learning networks. These mechanisms enable capital to enclose and commodify an increasingly fluid and identity-driven set of social relations, which themselves form the basis of further exchange. These processes of exchange are catalysed by, for example, the sharing of personal information on cloud-based social networks that can be aggregated and data-mined. Thus, all activity or work inside the social factory, including the processes of learning serve as the basis for developing new services and applications. For Beradi (2009, p. 90) this construct emerges across the length, breadth and depth of cyberspace from the immaterial labour of knowledge-workers who

move to find signs, to elaborate experience, or simply to follow the paths of their existence. But at every moment and place they are reachable and can be called back to perform a productive function that will be reinserted into the global cycle of production. In a certain sense, cellular phones realize the dream of capital: that of absorbing every possible atom of time at the exact moment the productive cycle needs it. In this way, workers offer their entire day to capital and are paid only for the moments when their time is made cellular. Info-producers can be seen as neuro-workers. They prepare their nervous system as an active receiving terminal for as much time as possible. The entire lived day becomes subject to a semiotic activation which becomes directly productive only when necessary.

In this view, social relations are increasingly structured by technically-mediated organisations like schools and the University, which then re-inscribe socio-political hierarchies that are increasingly technological, coercive and exploitative. This coercive and exploitative set of characteristics is driven by the competitive dynamics of capitalism, and especially the ways in which the socially necessary character of the labour-power expended in producing a particular commodity or innovation or technology is diminished over-time. This reduces the value of knowledge and specific immaterial skills in the market, resulting in a persistent demand to innovate, to become entrepreneurial or to hold and manage proprietary or creative skills.

Thus, constant innovation becomes a central pedagogic project, for instance in: monitoring and stimulating cognition through pervasive technology and mobility; enforcing private property rights through intellectual property and patent law so that a knowledge-rent economy can take hold; opening-up public data and knowledge so that new cloud-based services based on learning analytics can be developed and marketised; amplifying innovations around internationalisation like MOOCs and open educational resources so that world markets of consumption and production of commodities and cognitive capital are opened-up; and organising, disciplining and exploiting an immaterial workforce, or ‘cognitariat’. This is a terrain of conflict, especially as the processes that deliver cognitive capital involve the development of cyborgs or the fusing of objectivised, fixed machinery and human subjects. Instead of the promised technologically-fuelled reduction in toil and labour-time, technology ‘suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorisation’ (Marx, 1993, p. 532).

In the Autonomist tradition, the concept of immateriality is tied to the production of living knowledge, or the general intellect, which offers a theoretical tool to analyse the transformation of labour and knowledge production through the integration of science and technology across society. Thus, it is important that the immaterial world of capital, in which it is believed that accumulation can occur without material production, is inverted so that the fetishised myth of technology as the creator of value is replaced by an analysis of co-operative, socialised labour-power. This can be revealed through a critique of Marx’s (1993) concept of the general intellect, inside-and-against a networked, globalised production/consumption process, as it emerges as mass intellectuality.

THREE. Some criticisms of immateriality or affective capital

Criticisms of Autonomist Marxism have focused on its apparent network-centrism and its concomitant disconnection from the hierarchical, globalised forces of production that shape our objective social reality. The same is also true of those who would make claims for affect or emotion as commodity, or themselves as the source of value (see below Camfield, 2007; Davies, 2011; Robinson, 2004). In particular, there is a tendency to forget the realities of privatisation and outsourcing to the global South, and for the accumulation of natural resources, like rare earth metals, oil and coal, and human capital from that same space, alongside cataclysmic environmental despoilation. Thus, as Camfield (2007, p. 31) argues

biopolitical labour… fails to make distinctions between the different forms of production involved in the production of all that falls within the scope of ‘social life itself ’. In a highly abstract sense, it is possible to talk of labour producing goods, services, social relations, and human subjectivities. Yet it is essential to be able to distinguish the production of ourselves as human subjects through our relationships with nature and each other in determinate socio-material conditions and particular historical moments from the production by humans of, say, microprocessors. Very different kinds of production processes and products are involved. Labour is at the heart of them all, but at different levels of abstraction and in different social forms.

Moreover, entrepreneurial education and the promise of technology in the global North support precarious work and hyper-exploitation for those without proprietary skills, alongside reinforcing transnational hierarchies. Thus King (2010, p. 287) notes that ‘From a structural perspective, even with the transformative powers of digital technology, we are not moving into a post-capitalist age. The fundamental property relationships that underpin the class structure remain intact and have sharply intensified.’ The question is whether and how the connections between sites of exploitation including education and technology can be made.

What might be noted of the Autonomist approach is that its broader categories enable a critique of capitalist work in the networked society, which point to how the whole of human life is systemically enclosed and mined for new services. The connections between immaterial or affective labour in the production of cognitive capital, and their connections to the broadening and deepening of the accumulation of value across the whole of society restructured as a factory, point towards the mechanisms through which technology-rich educational settings are co-opted for work.

When we use the term capital, we might reflect on how it is not only value-in-motion, but also an alienating social relation based on specific, totalising organising principles that are themselves coercive. Any notion of choice, ethics, morals, identity, empowerment, agency and so on, can only emerge as objectified or alienated inside and subjugated through this totality. So affective capital points to asymmetrical power relations, separation, alienated labour and being, and fetishized relations. For example, for a community forced out of its homeland by war, that maintains contact via a synchronous technology like skype, we might ask how they and those of us who tolerate this state-of-being are alienated at each point by capital: in the geographical struggles for means of production that drive war; in the struggle for self-worth and betterment that force us to migrate to earn a wage to subsist; in the promise of a better life that can only exist as capitalist work and the entrepreneurial or neoliberal self; in the fetish of familial or communal connection through the use of technology. In each case, those communities are separated from the land, from their labour, from their society and ultimately from themselves.

One problem of the use of terms like affective capital is that it risks reducing people to human capital or means of production, which are themselves dehumanising. We risk accepting our alienation through its temporary and marginal technological amelioration. Perhaps what is needed is a critique of the forms of political economy/political debate/politics of austerity/war that force us to view human lives and society as restricted by the idea of economic/exchange value. What is certainly needed is a recognition that the forces of production across capitalist society, which are increasingly restructuring all of life as means of production, are also increasingly ranged asymmetrically against the everyday experiences of young people. The question for academics is how to support both critique and the development/nurturing of alternative forms of society that in-turn push-back against the neoliberal agenda that commodifies humanity, including through the co-option and subsumption of affect or emotion or “the subject”.

FOUR. Some references on Autonomia or affect or immateriality

Amsler, S., and M. Neary. 2012. Occupy: a new pedagogy of space and time? The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 106-38.

Arviddson, A. 2007. Ethical Economy. P2P News 156. http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2p156.

Beradi, F. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Transl. F. Cadel and G. Mecchia, with preface by J.E. Smith. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Bonefeld, W. 2010. What is the alternative? Shift Magazine 11. http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=400.

Burston, J., N. Dyer-Witheford, and A. Hearn. 2010. Digital labour: Workers, authors, citizens. ephemera 10, no. 3/4: 214-221

Camfield, D. 2007. The Multitude and the Kangaroo: A Critique of Hardt and Negri’s Theory of Immaterial Labour. Historical Materialism 15: 21-52.

Casarino, C. and A. Negri. 2008. In Praise of the Common: a conversation on philosophy and politics. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press.

Cleaver, H. 1992. The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation. In Open Marxism, Vol. 2, Theory and Practice, ed. W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, and K. Psychopedis, 106-44. London: Pluto Press.

Cleaver, H. 2002. Reading capital politically. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Davies, J.S. 2011. Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony. London: Policy Press.

Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus. London: Penguin.

Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum.

Dyer-Witheford, N. 1999. Cyber-Marx: cycles and circuits of struggle in high-technology capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N. 2004. Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society. Canberra: Treason Press. http://libcom.org/library/autonomist-marxism-information-society-nick-witheford.

Dyer-Witheford, N. 2010. Digital labour, species-becoming and the global worker. ephemera 10, no. 3/4: 484-503.

Dyer-Witheford, N., and G. de Peuter. 2009. Games of empire: global capitalism and video games. Minnesota, MI: University of Minnesota Press.

EduFactory (2013). EduFactory. http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/.

Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, M. 1990. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon.

Guattari, F., and A. Negri. 1985. Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

Hall, R., and B.C. Stahl. 2012. Against Commodification: The University, Cognitive Capitalism and Emergent Technologies. tripleC: Cognition, Communication and Co-operation 10, no. 2: 184-202.

Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin.

Holloway, J. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press.

King, B. On the new dignity of labour. ephemera 10, no. 3/4: 285-302.

The London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group. 1980. In and against the state. London: Pluto Press.

Marazzi. 2008. Capital And Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext.

Manzerolle, V. 2010. The Virtual Debt Factory: Towards an Analysis of Debt and Abstraction in the American Credit Crisis. tripleC: Cognition, Communication and Co-operation 10, no. 2: 221-36.

Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

Miller Medina, J.E. 2005. The State Machine: politics, ideology, and computation in Chile, 1964-1973. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, MIT. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39176.

Neary, M. 2010. Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde? Learning Exchange, 1 (1). http://learningexchange.westminster.ac.uk/index.php/lej/article/view/15.

Neary, M. 2012. Teaching Politically: Policy, Pedagogy and the New European University. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 233-57.

Negri, A. 1988. Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-83, trans. E. Emery and J. Merrington. London: Red Notes.

Negri, A. 1989. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Negri, A. 1991. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. New York, NY: Autonomedia.

Newfield, C. 2010. The structure and silence of Cognitariat. EduFactory webjournal 0: 10-26. http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/webjournal/n0/Newfield.pdf.

Novara Media. 2013. Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working. NovaraFM 2 (38). http://novaramedia.com/2013/04/immaterial-labour-isnt-working/.

Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press.

Roggero, G. 2011. The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Thorburn, E. 2012. Actually Existing Autonomy and the Brave New World of Higher Education. Occupied Studies. http://bit.ly/xzcPRO.

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Vercellone, C. 2007. From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect. Historical Materialism 15: 13-36

Virno, P. 2001. General Intellect. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm.

Virno, P. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Wendling, A. E. 2009. Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Winn, J. 2012. Open Education: From the Freedom of Things to the Freedom of People. In Towards Teaching in Public, ed. M. Neary, H. Stevenson, and L. Bell, 133-47. London: Continuum.

Winn, J. 2013. Tag Archive: Immaterial Labour. http://josswinn.org/tag/immaterial-labour/.


On courage that is in-and-against work


Posted by hallymk1

“It isn’t for the moment that you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

“You have to carry the fire.”

“I don’t know how to.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Is the fire real? The fire?”

“Yes it is.”

“Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”

“Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Cormac McCarthy. 2006. The Road.

I hate hope. I hate the neoliberal sound of it. It’s the kind of bullshit that enables celebrity academics to bang on about hope’s bastard twin, “equality of opportunity”, when what they should be struggling for is equality.

It never used to be this way. I read Jonathan Sachs’ The Politics of Hope, and I connected to the idea that academics might push back against the perceived libertarian revolution, and thereby defend and renew the social structures and institutions on which our growth as individuals and our cohesiveness as a society depend. At one point Sachs argues (Vintage, 2000, p. 137) that:

A strong civil society protects liberty because it diffuses the centres of power. It creates fraternity because it encourages people to work together as neighbours and friends. It promotes equality because it tempers self-help with help to others, and because the help given to others is such as to encourage their participation and eventually independence. Most importantly, civil society constitutes a moral domain, a world of covenants rather than contracts, in which duty, obligation, loyalty and integrity restrain the pursuit of self-interest, in which I learn to value others and win their trust because that is the only way families and communities can be maintained.

I liked this. It connected. It made hope feel important. But the older I get, the more I figure that in addressing the Right’s colonisation of libertarian ideals, tied to a morality framed by specific versions of autonomy and hard-work, and the collapse of privilege into entitlement, and the drive for the private and the contract, hope is never enough. In fact it simply cannot carry the power to renew anything on its own.

Reducing our existence to hope risks creating an everlasting apprenticeship for those externalised liberal virtues or traits or conceits or whatever through which we outsource responsibility for our selves and ourselves, to this corporation or that political party or that drug firm or this University. It leads us to focus on humility, justice, selflessness, participation, accountability to rules which we did not create. If we were just better neoliberal subjects, and redistributed opportunity. If only.

I’m not arguing for an amorality of living, but I’m trying to understand how we might fight to critique the rules that govern shackle our lives. It’s about questioning the hope that things will turn out satisfactorily or that someone or something else might make us happy. Or that it is what it is, but that hard-work and merit will work for you. Hope risks reproducing the worst kind of fatalism that subsumes each moment of our lives. In simply hoping for the best, we risk giving others what John Holloway would call power-over our lives, rather than our fighting for spaces in which we can develop the power-to recreate our lives, or to live for our selves and ourselves.

And this is about justice and it is about community and it is about co-operation and it is about solidarity and it is about faith and it is about morality. And most of all it is about courage. And in this Stephanie Dowrick argues (Viking edition, 1997, p. 13) that:

Courage comes out of and expresses love. This love may be intensely personal or individual, but it is just as likely to express and commitment to the belief that life itself is something marvellous, precious, worth having, worth living fully and, in ten thousand ways, worth fighting for…. courage offers something that can balance fear, draw the sting from it, put it in its place, open us to life, and set us free.

She goes on to connect courage and consciousness; courage and life in the face of acts and behaviours and emotions and uncertainty and complexity. That courage is an attitude that “allows you to learn that even when life has apparently betrayed you life is itself still present.” Hope does not make life possible without the courage to persist, to exist, to be, to be rebuilt with others, to trust and find faith. And it does this moment by moment. Dowrick (p. 24) says:

Courage is love’s miraculous face. It achieves its miracles through transformation. It allows the impossible to become possible; the unendurable to be endured; trust to be renewed; and the unexpected to become the inevitability that opens you to unprecedented insights about who you are, about what life is. When courage stirs, it delivers the strengths you need but didn’t know you had.

The things that we face don’t change through courage, but our relationship to them and to life does. And through courage maybe hope is rekindled against hopelessness; and maybe faith and trust; and maybe tolerance and forgiveness. Built upon daily acts that are personal and social and responsible (in that we are responsible for them), we might take courage to accept and care for ourselves and our lives. And face down those who speak of opportunity or meritocracy or justice or autonomy or hard-working or deserving, without critique. To face-down those who actively dissociate, in our outsourced lives, abstracted by money and productive work, and the tyranny of the clock, and the poverty of capital.

Those in-power who wish to punish those who become “instantly and terrifyingly sick”, by cutting the work-related group of the ESA. Those in-power, who will punish those claiming the Access to Learning hardship fund. Those in-power, who reinforce social divisions by wailing about scrounging. Those in-power who do nothing to reduce child poverty. Those in-power who continually impose the brutalisation of time as it is revealed through work. Those in-power who continually punish others, in order to discipline the rest. And who take not only our time and our labour, but also our humanity.

In this Dowrick argues (p. 67):

Courage is what it takes to be fully human. It’s what pushes us to survive the daily navigation between the known and the not-known; to deal with the inevitable; to create useful distinctions between what we can change and what we cannot. It is what will allow us to go into our own particular versions of hell. It is what will give us the strength and the grace to emerge, and still find life worth living.

And I’m writing this because I need to say something about the moment that courage is needed. The ongoing, seemingly endless moments when courage is needed. And girded by the courage of Kate Bowles, who wrote the following about her life and her family and her crisis, and about the way that our work compresses what is valued and valuable, until it is either stolen or neglected. She wrote:

on Go Home on Time Day this year, I was sitting in a surgeon’s office. It turns out that I have breast cancer, and I found out that very day. And here’s the thing: I first thought about getting something checked out exactly 12 months ago. I found time at the end of 2012 to take a day off work, got a referral from my GP, and then the vague unease passed. So I didn’t chase it up.

Over a busy year being both a full-time worker and a parent to three school-age children, I noticed now and then that the unease came back, and I fought with it in the middle of the night, along with to-do lists and unsent emails and ideas for projects and the anxieties of my co-workers and all of my misgivings about working for an institution whose driving mission is to be in the top 1% of world universities, which seems to me as shallow and demoralising an idea as any I’ve heard since I started working in higher education.

And now here we are.

And now here we are. And for all sorts of reasons I read those five words with an intense scream against the pain that this life has become and the choices we are forced to make, in order to justify our lives as hard-working and worthy of justice. And I scream against the pain of the compromises that are contained in those five words. And I recognise that it is in the moment of a crisis that the things that we do, and the compromises that we make, to be a manager or a co-worker or for the clock or for impact or for efficiency or for whatever, resolve.

The moment of the crisis is the singularity. The moment when everything becomes crystal clear; when timelines collapse and we have some resolution. When the world makes sense. Our lives, our loves, our families, our fears and dreams, the things and the people that we refused or put off, how we lived our lives; resolved in-and-against work. This precious moment in our lives standing in deep, qualitative contrast to the clock that measures our life’s purpose quantitatively.

Kate goes on to talk about courage, based upon the premise that following the singularity or the resolution of the Moment of crisis “you don’t have my consent to use my remaining time in this way.” What a thing to say. What a courageous thing to say about work and about life, and about self-care and self-love, and about what it means to live. She states:

why had it come to me so strongly that it was important to speak back to this kind of dispiriting and divisive [team-building, work] activity, however well-intentioned it might be?

I’ve come to this conclusion: I really have a problem with the culture of work in higher education. Having this diagnosis doesn’t make me special, because it doesn’t make me differently mortal than anyone else.  We are neither vampires nor zombies, whatever the craze for playing with these ideas: we are humans, and we are all here together for a very short time, historically speaking. And so that being the case, the question facing us all is this: what do we do about work?

what we need is the courage to put work itself at risk.

The courage to put work itself at risk.

And to live our lives, rather than outsourcing them.

To find solidarity. And maybe some faith and trust, in ourselves and others.

To resist and push-back, against the quanta and the clocks that diminish us.

To expose and explode the moments in time that form our singularities, in order to highlight how some resolution can be found.

To witness the courage we have to recover ourselves. In every moment.

[NOTE: this post is dedicated to Kate. It, like so much of my life these past few years, reflects the perseverance and the compassion of my friends. It’s amazing how the solidarity of others enables courage to be rekindled.]