on academic activism, boundary-less toil and exodus


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 28 September 2011

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Nelson Mandela.

If we don’t take action now/We settle for nothing later/We’ll settle for nothing now/And we’ll settle for nothing later

Rage Against the Machine, Settle for Nothing.

A note on institutions and power

In How to Change the World Without Taking Power, John Holloway argues that we deceive ourselves if we believe that the structures that have developed and which exist in order to reproduce capitalist social relations can be used as a means to overcome its alienating organisation of work. Holloway makes this point for the structure of the democratic state as a symbol of failed revolutionary hope.

At first sight it would appear obvious that winning control of the state is the key to bringing about social change. The state claims to be sovereign, to exercise power within its frontiers. This is central to the common notion of democracy: a government is elected in order to carry out the will of the people by exerting power in the territory of the state. This notion is the basis of the social democratic claim that radical change can be achieved through constitutional means.

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the state from its social environment: it attributes to the state an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the state 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 state 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 government 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 state territory.

Holloway is not alone in arguing that the state’s room for manoeuvre is constricted by transnational global capital, and in particular by the compression and enclosure of time and space wrought by technologically-transformed, finance capital. In this view, working to take control of the state crushes the transformatory intent of those who would fight against capitalism, because this transformation is always about manoeuvring for power. This instrumentalism always risks descending into a hierarchy of struggle for democracy or as nationalism or for a Tobin Tax or for whatever. In Paulo Virno’s terms this is not a courageous ideology, it is based on “weak thought”, or a political philosophy that “was developed by philosophers with theories that offer an ideology of the defeat [of labour movement by neoliberalism] after the end of the ‘70s”.It is a way of seeking compromise with capital, and escaping into a ‘fight’ for exclusionary or problem-solving tactics, like ‘equality of opportunity’.

Thus, Holloway argues that “The hierarchisation of struggle is a hierarchisation of our lives and thus a hierarchisation of ourselves.” What drives an alternative is the negation of hierarchical power within

a society in which power relations are dissolved. You cannot build a society of non-power relations by conquering power. Once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost.

Thus what is needed is our co-operative conquest of power as a step towards the abolition of power relations. At this point we are able to re-inscribe a different set of possibilities upon the world. At this point we are able to move beyond protest about economic power and occupations of enclosed spaces, to critique how our global webs of social relations contribute to the dehumanisation of people, where other humans are treated as means in a production/consumption-process rather than ends in themselves able to contribute to a common wealth. For Tsianos and Papadopoulos this emerges in the radicalisation of everyday life that threatens to connect a politics of events beyond the traditional forms of the party and the trades unions. As the everyday is folded into the logic of capital, and the everyday is subsumed within the discipline of debt and the apparent foreclosure of the possibilities for an enhanced standard of living for us all, then the everyday becomes a space in which revolt can emerge.

But how is this critique to be developed inside the very heart of the struggle against capitalist social relations and power? Holloway notes:

For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of the world is not whose power but the very existence of power. What is at issue is not who exercises power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations.

Holloways argues that we cannot live in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives. He argues for the positive creativity that emerges from the negativity of critique and from our “refusal of capital”. In this we must recuperate doing, as opposed to capitalist labour, and to develop our shared power-to create the world, rather than simply to maximise profit. Holloway argues that we must fight capital’s negation of our power-to create the world through its alienation of ourselves from our work, by its commodification and expropriation of our labour (in de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford’ term “boundary-less toil”), or by its denial of our sociality through enforced or enclosed individuation. We see this in our awakening to the precarious nature of labour in the face of capital’s need to reproduce increases in the rate of profit. This can be achieved for instance by the discipline of the threat of dead labour embodied in machines, or by the capture of our everyday existence in immaterial labour or cognitive work, or by increased financialisation. (Paul Mason’s blog tracks how politicians are now desperately embroiled in keeping the neoliberal show on the road.)

Thus, pace Marx, we argue for association and assembly in describing new, co-operative patch-works of social doing/creating that are not in the name of capitalist work; which challenge capitalist work and its boundary-less exploitation as the main organising principle of our lives. Following Marx, it is through association that Holloway argues for the creation and sharing of social forms that articulate our doing and making of the world, and which dissolve our current power relations into the fabric of new assemblies, and thereby work to negate our reification or fetishising of established forms and practices.

Being against established forms is central in Holloway’s argument for revolutionary activity that centres on the denial or negation of identities forged and fetishised inside capital’s structures, including Universities. The idea is to promote “creative uncertainty against-in-and-beyond a closed, pre-determined world [my emphasis].” In this we move towards a world of disjuncture, disunity, discontinuity, where doing inside capitalism becomes riskier as the repetitive, precarious nature of its alienation and dehumanisation is revealed. This revelation is a recognition that denying capital’s power-over our lives is a possibility, and that revolt against its subsumption of our lives to the profit motive and the rule of money is a possibility. At issue is a move towards “an anti-politics of events rather than a politics of organisation” based on an individual’s or a class’s subjective power-over others. As Marx argued in the Collected Works (Volume 3):

Since human nature is the true community of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce, the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth… The community of men, or the manifestation of the nature of men, their mutual complementing the result of which is species-life…

A note on higher education, higher learning and an exodus from capital

I would like to make a point about the role of higher education and those who exist within or connected to higher education in this process of creating a species-life. We might open this out by taking Holloway’s starting point about the state [quoted above], and thinking about the University.

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.

Whether or not we agree with Holloway’s point about the state’s implications in the maintenance of a capitalist order, we have seen capital’s increasing control over higher education in the United Kingdom through the Coalition Government’s shock doctrine. The ideological, political drive towards, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing means that the University has little room for manoeuvre in resisting the enclosing logic of competition and in arguing for a socialised role for higher education. This means that the internal logic of the University is prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships.

It might then be argued that within the University there is little space to contest the logic of capitalist work and its denial of possibilities; that there is little opportunity for the world turned upside down, where we can create a world that is, in Christopher Hill’s words, populated by “masterless men”. 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.

This symbolic power-to critique and negate what is denied to us, when we are sold pedagogies of student-as-consumer, is reflected by the spaces that academics take up within and against the neoliberal university. These are often incubated within the symbolic space of the University and revealed in boundary-less toil beyond the borders of higher education. In these sets of actions, incubated inside the University, the symbolic possibilities of higher education might be dissolved in the form of mass intellectuality or higher learning or excess within the fabric of society. It is in this borderless or boundary-less activity, which is overtly political in seeking an exodus from the logic of capital, where academics might contribute to a transfomatory praxis.

The notion of exodus is important here, as a form of dissent , revolt or rebellion against capital’s exploitation of the entirety of social life (witness working from home, playbor in games-based industries, Facebook and Google’s subsumption of our identities for further accumulation, or the enclosure of the open web for profit). Within this subsumption, immaterial labour forms “the labor that produces the informational, cultural, or affective element of the commodity.” Thus, the fetishisation of personalisation, of self-branding, of the technologies we connect through, risks the commodification of each and every action we take in the world. However, this connected web of social relations also offers a crack through which we might oppose the domination of capital over our existence. In Empire, Hardt and Negri argue that an association of the multitude, of interconnected oppositional groups that are able to share stories of oppression or austerity or hope or history using a variety of events and spaces, offers the opportunity for multiple protagonists to push for more democratic deployment of global resources. Virno goes further to argue that the very automation that capital develops in order to discipline and control labour makes possible an exodus from the society of capitalist work through the radical redisposal of the surplus time that arises as an outcome of that automation, alongside the ways in which different groups can interconnect in that surplus time.

Academics then have an important role in critiquing the potentialities for an exodus away from the society of capitalist work. In his work on Digital Diploma Mills, Noble argued against the conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and hence private property. In this he saw virtualisation driven by the commodification of teaching and the creation of commercially-viable, proprietary products that could be marketised. The usual capitalist processes of deskilling and automation, and proletarianisation of labour are at the core of this process. Noble argues against the surrender of pedagogic control, and for what Neary has highlighted to be a pedagogy of excess, through which academics and students might engage “in various forms of theoretical and practical activity that [take] them beyond the normal limits of what is meant by higher education. It is the notion of students becoming more than students through a radical process of revelation”. This is an attempt to fight against the compression of academic space by automated time, to widen that space for communal activity that is not driven by money and proletarianisation.

This activist engagement beyond the borders of higher education is a reminder of the history of the struggle of Italian workerism in the 1960s and 1970s. It also connects to current calls for people to stand on solid ground collectively in protest against the excesses of transnational financial capital, and the austerity measures that are catalysing protest beyond the normative structures of trades unions and labour parties. It is in this set of spaces that academics and students might have a borderless role to play, as evidenced as follows.

  1. In the people and networks participating in the 15s hub, against austerity policies that are an attack on the working class and the common wealth. Academics have taken a leading role in these networks, in inscribing and defining new possibilities.
  2. In the range of radical academic projects in the UK that are an attempt to re-inscribe the perception of higher education as higher learning within the fabric of society, so as to imagine something new. In some cases these projects are working politically to re-define issues of power. In most cases they see the institution of the school or the university as symbolically vital to a societal transformation. They form a process of re-imagination that risks fetishisation or reification of radical education, but which offers a glimpse of a different process. This glimpse shines a light on the University as one node in a global web of social relations, and one which enables borderless doing.
  3. Rethinking in public the role of academics in society, or the direct engagement of nerds, geeks, experts, mentors, whatever, in the wider fabric of society, facilitated through social media but realised in concrete experiences on solid ground. Thus:
    • Ben Goldacre argues that *we* “should be showing kids how to extract meaning from the noise of large datasets, by showing them how to do simple stuff”;
    • Tony Hirst argues for “the ‘production in presentation’ delivery of an informal open ‘uncourse’” where production-in-public is the central organising theme, and where “By embedding resources in the target community, we aim to enhance the practical utility of the resources within that community as well as providing an academic consideration of the issues involved”;
    • Dave Cormier scopes an ontological crisis in the educational system, and revisits a rhizomatic approach to learning in order to engage with “the kinds of societal questions i would like to think our education system could prepare us for”;
    • Doug Belshaw raises the possibility for badges to be potentially revolutionary through their “peer-to-peer element”;
    • Change MOOCs offer the possibility of co-operative teaching and study in public;
    • Princeton University actively promotes open access, in order to stop staff handing all copyright to journals, thus opening-up access to its research and practices, whilst Martin Weller argues for an open digital scholarship that will “allow for greater impact than traditional scholarly practices.”

This is not to state that these practices are overtly political or boundary-less, but that they offer a way of re-framing the relationships between academics and the public in an age of crisis. For example, it may be that it is the formation of social relationships, and the concomitant re-formation of value, in the process of creating and sharing badges that is transformatory. It is the critique of commodified accreditation within higher education catalysed by badges as a form o open, higher learning, which makes them important. This stands against the potential reification, privatisation and commodification of badges and their owners as things. It may be that teaching-in-public, or digital scholarship, is re-politicized as a form of active engagement between students, teachers and people in spaces of dissent or protest, in order to underpin new workerist revolts. It may be that these strands form a pedagogy of academic activism, connected to a philosophy of exodus from the daily re-enclosure of capital.

These reflections on the interstices between academic and public, and between accreditation and informal learning, and between the private and the co-operative are surrounded by political tensions, and culturally replicated structures of power. Any process of academic activism demands academic reflexivity in understanding how academic power impacts the processes of assembly and association and historical critique. One of the criticisms levelled at our understandings of the “Arab Spring”, for instance, was against academic tourists presenting as “Western ‘experts’ who jet in and jet out”, and base their work on their identity under capitalist work. The Autonomous Geographies Collective raised this challenge in engaging co-operatively with meaningful participation in social change, rather than parasitically exploiting the protest of peoples against the expropriation of their lives.

Thus, in the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity, as the neoliberal response to the latest crisis of capitalism, 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? David Harvey notes in his Companion to Capital, Volume 1, that Marx is interested in processes of transformation, and more importantly in the revolutionary transformation of society. This transformation overthrows the capitalist value-form in the construction of an alternative value-structure, and an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. At issue is “to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image.” We might, then, consider how do students and teachers dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest, in order to engage with this process of transformation?


The Paradox of Openness: the true cost of giving online


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 September 2011

At ALT-C 2011 I took part in a symposium on the Paradox of Openness: the true cost of giving online. I blogged about what I might say, as an introduction. In my five minutes and in the discussion that followed the following twelve points arose.

ONE. In his book on the Cuban Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, George Lambie argues that academia is locked into problem-solving theory. This is aimed at supporting, interacting with, and adjusting the dominant order. This leads to the artificial organisation and construction of knowledge, which in turn closes off a revelation of how society works. It depoliticises and avoids. It is not critically open. It disempowers us in our attempts to transform the world.

TWO. Thus, we need an ontological critique, as a process of analysis of how we experience the world and how we accept the elite’s interpretive myths – their hegemony over us. We need a revelation or a revealing or a revolution in our ways of thinking.

THREE. Through this revealing we need a critique of established ideological or intellectual frameworks. We need a critique of their legitimacy within higher education. This forms a set of political acts, which is itself open to critique.

FOUR. This critique, and our work and our labour are historically situated. Our critiques of what is “open” (whatever that is) within higher education are historically situated. They are situated within capitalist work as our living history and our lived experiences.

FIVE. When we develop a critique of “open”, we might consider its history as a re-ordering of business-as-usual in the years since 2006. We might consider a critique of open as a critique of formal, institutional higher education, but which has thus far been limited to a re-ordering of business-as-usual, with no deeper ontological base. Thus, in higher education we might consider “open” in light of Phase 1 of the JISC/HEA OER programme that began in 2009. We might also consider its history in light of the maturation and analysis of MOOCs since 2008. We might also consider that since 2006 we have seen global attempts at reordering business-as-usual, in the form of capitalist work, through problem-solving or enclosure, in the following spaces.

  • In the UK, the final term of the last Labour Government saw the governance and funding of higher education migrated to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the publication in 2009 of Higher Ambitions, which began a process of the neoliberal enclosure of university life.
  • In 2009 the think-tank demos published Resilient Nation and The Edgeless University, both of which were attempts to recalibrate how we think about managing disruption and the ways in which Universities might become open in their practices. At the same time, the new economics foundation published The Great Transition, which was a blueprint for its future work on de-growth and zero growth economics, and the working practices that underpin capitalist work.
  • We now know from Wikileaks’ cables that in 2007-09 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia admitted that it had been historically overstating its oil production capability by 40%, just as Richard Heinberg was writing about peak everything (2007). In 2010 the International Energy Agency’s Annual Report confirmed the reality of peak oil in that same period.
  • In 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed and governments globally were drawn into fiscal measures to maintain business-as-usual; the aftermath saw an enclosure of future life and work though austerity and indenture.
  • In 2008, the UK Government passed the Climate Change Act, which attempted to problem-solve the issue of de-carbonisation through legislation.
  • In these actions or Acts or publications, we see an array of attempts at problem-solving individual issues, or at enclosing our lives through indebtedness or the privatisation of public assets or a lack of transparency about liquid fuels and so on. This enclosing is more than closure, because enclosure implies privatisation or property rights, or power-over a space in order to seek profit (financial or rental) from it. Alternatively, spaces might be closed but operate through, for example, consensus or for reasons of safety, outside the treadmill logic of competition or profit-maximisation or accumulation or a need to increase the rate of profit. Yet, try as we might to see our discussion of “open” within education framed by issues that reveal a new ontological space, critique of that very space is closed off to us. Our discussion is framed by a specific set of crises that are symptomatic of capitalism, and that are disconnected. As a result, in the possibilities we envisage, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism.
  • In the face of the violence of the dispossession or enclosure of our futures, we need a revelatory politics of what we might call “open”.
    • Yet our politics of open is closed to the problem-solving logic of value-for-money, efficiency and productivity.
    • Yet our politics of open is closed to the proletarianisation of academic life and the appropriation of our labour.
    • Yet our politics of open is closed to the intensification and assurance of our labour.
    • Our politics of open does not allow us to critique our work in the face of the discipline of debt and the kettle.
    • And so our academic life is closed to a discussion of the politics of ”open”, and a concomitant critique of formal higher education – our politics is enclosed within the dominant logic of capitalist work, which subsumes our power-to create the world through its power-over our labour.
    • And meanwhile, as our students are attempting to re-create and re-imagine their world in occupation, and as our students are fighting for an open public higher education, we tell ourselves stories of co-production and enfranchisement enclosed by business-as-usual.
    • And as David Willetts tells us that we “use ICT for the right reasons”, we might critique what this means for our re-production of ourselves and the world. For as Marx suggests, our enculturation and use of technology is much more complex: “Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.”

SIX. And there is hope. There is hope that beyond the commodification of “open” as a resource or a course, and its subsumption under capital, we might rethink our practices and our labour through:

SEVEN. A critique of our social relationships as consumers, producers and contributors, within and beyond our networks (witness open source and the cloud and institutionalisation);

  • Transformatory engagement that attempts to dissolve higher education into the fabric of society as higher learning (witness activist academics or academic bloggers or open scholarship and data);
  • A reinvention of higher education in public, through an open critique of its historical forms that recognises its enclosure within capitalist work and its symptomatic crises.

EIGHT. Within these revelatory activities, we need the confidence to recognise that we might have to operate as infidels, rather than heretics or visitors or residents. Our roles as infidels will challenge problem-solving norms, and the established hegemonic order that defines our work. It might refuse to accept the intellectual parameters of those elites that shape the world in which higher education operates. This is not about adjusting the horizons of our world. It is about cracking and re-framing and transforming them through our activism.

NINE. Thus, we might reveal a paradox of “open”: namely that its very enclosure within business-as-usual, and our inability to think the unthinkable and step beyond it, is too often what is closes its practices to us. Through our focus on problem-solving, and our disregard for ontological critique, our “open” strategies are constrained or contained or neutered. We might ask then, in the battle of ideas, and before we define and dissect “open”, what are we for when we are for open?


The true cost of openness


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 1 September 2011

Closure and exclusion

Following his leadership of the successful Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) occupation and work-in of 1971-72, the Communist and trades unionist Jimmy Reid was elected as Rector of the University of Glasgow. In his Rectoral Address Reid argued that

Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today… it is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It’s the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making.

Since May 2010 the UK’s Coalition Government have been quickening the pace of enclosure of our public spaces; of our exclusion from the preserved, open and shared places in which our society is re-invented. Within this process of exclusion and of enclosing space and time (both the present and, collapsed into it, the future), debt presents itself as a cold and calculating means of collectivised, individual indenture. And the formal, historical University as a site of social contribution, that once lay within and yet against the calculating, coercion of accumulation and the market is closed down within that very logic.

Violence

And in that logic, the processes of exclusion, enclosure and indenture are violent. They do violence to the history of the University. They do violence to the hope and to the reality of higher learning as an escape from socio-environmental crisis. As a result they do violence to the possibility of our collective being and becoming. They do violence to us.

Incarceration (or the kettle)

It is in this violent, enclosing space that the activities of the University emerge and are re-produced. It is in this space that higher learning and its social relationships cycle and re-cycle. It is in this space then that “open” risks becoming a fetish, closed to critique and uncritically cloaked in a veneer of co-production, or sustainability, or value-for-money, or efficiency. It is as if “open” or “openness” offers us liberation or emancipation within the coercive, competitive reality of capital power-over our labour. It is as if “open” might reshape the activities of higher education, in spite of the shackling of the University to accumulation by dispossession and the dictates of the market. So “open” risks becoming a distraction; a wish that we might avoid the incarceration that capital enforces on our labour-power, through the discipline of technological surveillance, order, productivity, efficiency, debt.

Alienation

Thus the institutionalisation of open education risks becoming yet another alienating practice precisely because, as Winn argues, “it is just another way of creating capital out of immaterial labour”. A formalised, institutionalised, “open” education threatens us with: proletarianisation and deskilling through mass-production, automation and standardisation; the totem of efficiency and an increase in the rate of profit; the reification of the resource as product; and pedagogy-as-production, curricula-as-distribution and learning-as-consumption. In our apolitical discourse about the free movement and regeneration of reified things, we risk amplifying the commodification of “open” education through liberal property laws (Creative Commons) that guarantee a level of autonomy to digital objects over and above the rights of teaching (labour) and learning (apprenticeship) from which they are abstracted, and which is placed under the control and supervision of quality assurance, productivity and impact measures.

Crisis

And yet we see the crisis all around us. Our environment is polluted. Our environment is despoiled. Our technologies are underpinned by corporate imperialism, war and human rights atrocities. Our technologies are a mechanism for profit and enclosure and the re-inscription of power. Our world-in-the-cloud is increasingly parcelled off into clearly demarcated, outsourced, privatised applications. And through our outsourced connection to the operation and production of technologies, and our consumption of them within a history of capitalist work, we are displaced from contributing towards worldly wisdom. We are increasingly separated, in part by by the disarming disguise of technology, from the reality of our being. This is our ongoing crisis.

Association

A critique of “open” stands against business-as-usual. It offers “open” as a public concern – a form of contribution that is against what the University is becoming. Its realisation offers safe spaces where associations can be developed. And that is closed to monitoring and ordering and control and profit. And that is against the social re-ordering of our lives for enclosure, the extraction of surplus value and of capitalist valorisation. And that is messy in its social re-formations, in its consumption and in its production, and in how individual contributions are assembled. For as Marx wrote:

only in association with others has each individual the means of cultivating his talents in all directions. Only in a community therefore is personal freedom possible… In a genuine community individuals gain their freedom in and through their association.

And so we might ask what the hacker ethic, and what Lulzsec and Anonymous, offers us? We might ask what open source development offers us? We might ask what a more nebulous, less ordered and monitored and modelled form of “open” offers us? What does openness at the margins, beyond the formally-enclosed institution offer us?

Commons

Dyer-Witheford offers us hope in the histories of the Commons:

A twenty-first century communism must also be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons, which opens possibilities for new combinations of planetary planning and autonomous association.

These histories offer a critique of the ahistorical truisms of our being, that technology and education can only meaningfully serve capitalist expansion, through discourses of order and finance capital that are related to value-for-money, efficiency/productivity/profit, private/public, and the market. The global contribution of skills, alongside stories in which they might be situated, exists in spaces that remain as yet unenclosed. These spaces might be harnessed collaboratively for more than profiteering, or the extraction of surplus value or further accumulation or financialisation, or alienation or violence.

In and beyond technology we teach and re-think these practices and these ways of thinking every day with other staff and students and within our communities of practice. But they need to be politicised in the face of the crisis, because they flow through our being and our power-to create the world. As Marx highlighted

Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.

Autonomy

We need the confidence to imagine that our skills might be shared and put to another use. We need the confidence to defend our physical and virtual commons as spaces for contribution, through production and consumption. We need the confidence to think ethically through our positions. We need the confidence to live and tell a different, overtly political story of “open”.

This might mean less of a focus on “open” and more on “autonomy” against capital. For Tiqqun has argued that

“Autonomy” means that we make the worlds that we are grow. The Empire, armed with cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it alone, as the unitary system of the totality: it is thus forced to annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous. We say that autonomy is for everyone and that the fight for autonomy has to be amplified. The present form taken on by the civil war is above all a fight against the monopoly on autonomy. That experimentation will become the “fecund chaos,” communism, the end of the cybernetic hypothesis.


Stories of custom-in-common: history, power and the internet


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 12 July 2011

Brian Lamb has highlighted two quotes that made me think about politics, power, consensus and the web, and most importantly, about History.

David Eaves, Learning from Libraries: The Literacy Challenge of Open Data

Charges of “frivolousness” or a desire to ensure data is only released “in context” are code to obstruct or shape data portals to ensure that they only support what public institutions or politicians deem “acceptable”. Again, we need a flood of data, not only because it is good for democracy and government, but because it increases the likelihood of more people taking interest and becoming literate.

It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.

Paul Mason, Murdoch: the network defeats the hierarchy:

Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made “all propaganda instantly flammable”. It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers, are now also flammable.

Where all this leaves Noam Chomsky’s theory I will rely on the inevitable wave of comments from its supporters to flesh out.

But the most important fact is: not for the first time in 2011, the network has defeated the hierarchy.

These two quotes have emphasized some questions for me.

  1. Against the neoliberal constraint on what can legitimately be fought for, how do we tell stories that reclaim our common history and our social relationships? How do we protect the richness of the technological ecosystems that help us to do this work?
  2. In the rush for technology-as-progress, can we identify how that progress is shaped in our stories of struggle? How do we recognise struggle in our use of technology?
  3. How do we struggle-in-common against the enclosure of our networked public spaces? How do we develop a politics of digital literacy? How do we develop a political digital literacy?

Over a period of six years I wrote about property, the common and political power in Augustan Yorkshire. Revisiting that helps me to identify struggle-in-common over access to resources, be that physical land/cultural rights or immaterial spaces/rights held in common. In the early eighteenth century county elections were an important means by which the political stability and legitimacy of the Augustan and Hanoverian political structures could be ensured. The significance of voters in County [as opposed to Borough] elections in the political system was recognised by contemporaries who saw these ‘forty shilling freeholders’ as the guardian of the nation’s liberty.

To the historian, the importance of the voters hinges upon whether they had any measure of independent political action and power, and how they struggled for their collective rights. Analysis shows that a substantial subset of the electorate had the socio-economic standing, individually or in common, to show a great degree of political independence. Thus, once the politicians forced an election they became involved in a wider nexus of responsibilities which gave the forty shilling freeholders a measure of political power.

Power in networks: a note on shire elections and political power in early-modern England

Notionally the enfranchised county freeholder was a man who voted by right of freehold property that was worth forty shillings per annum clear of all taxes. This also encompassed the possession of a particular office, for example a clerical benefice, as well as annuities, leases for lives, or the control of a mortgage. These men were the bedrock of the county community precisely because of the eighteenth-century elevation of property to a sublime position within society. The marquis of Halifax stated that ‘the interest of the county is best placed in the hands of such as have some share in it’. A share in the land of the county would show a higher political consciousness and entail a recognition of the importance of property and liberty. The importance of shire elections in giving property the opportunity to legitimise or oppose a political outlook meant that any shire election became crucial to the political nation.

The importance of the voters in the political system hinges upon whether they had any independent political action or impact. Were they relatively free to vote as they wanted, or were they subservient to the needs of their social superiors? These issues depend upon the amount of pressure which could be placed upon an individual voter. Investigations related to power and agency help to rescue the voters and the unenfranchised from an impotent limbo, to stress their importance in the political process, and to emphasise the view held by many among the eighteenth century political nation that the ‘forty-shilling freeholder’ was the guardian of the nation’s liberty against over-bearing hegemonies.

A story of struggle in common: power, agency and networked resistance

The importance of local cultural considerations was nowhere stronger than at Hatfield, a lowland agricultural township eight miles north-east of Doncaster. It bordered on Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, and had a large area of common land which had been drained by Dutch immigrants in the seventeenth century. The town numbered between 20 and 31 voters at each election in the early eighteenth century. Whilst the Hearth Tax records of 1672 noted 211 households, there were 350 families in Archbishop Herring’s visitation returns of 1743. Thus, a crude approximation gives Hatfield 1 voter for every 22 families at the 1742 county by-election.

The lords of the manor of Hatfield, which included 8 other townships, were the viscounts Irwin and the manorial framework was important to the functioning of local society. These men were strong in the Whig cause throughout the period and were active at every election except that of 1708 when the new lord was a minor. However, only in 1742 did the Government Whig party achieve a majority of votes in the township. [N.B. at each election there were generally 2 parties with 2 candidates for the 2 shire MPs. Each voter had 2 votes at each election.]

This fractured voting may have had much to do with the franchise in this town which developed through common right. The independence which this gave bolstered the widespread antipathy in the area towards the interference of Irwin in social and economic matters. Prior to the 1695 election Abraham de la Pryme noted that the common at Hatfield ‘is freehold unto us, and the Lord has nothing to do with it’. Moreover, ‘the common-free inhabitants that made above forty shillings a year of their common did, according as formerly, swear themselves worth above forty shillings a year freehold and accordingly polled.’ In a case of trespass which occurred in 1737 it was noted that ‘time out of mind [there] hath been an antient custom to wit that the respective Tenants and occupiers in west field…have inclosed and separated such of their part of the s[ai]d common field…and to hold and enjoy the same…free from any common of pasture.’ In their eyes it gave them rights in common and as political actors.

Local electoral right had emerged from resistance and struggle, and had its basis in the drainage of the area in the late 1620s and early 1630s. In May 1626 the crown and Cornelius Vermuyden came to an agreement about draining the level. By 1629, after a series of disputes and riots, which indicate that the area had a history of direct action against and opposition towards the local landlord, Vermuyden covenanted ‘that he will convey to the tenants of the said manors such portions of the recovered lands as had been assigned to them in respect of their common’.

This acrimonious history of fighting for common rights continued in the eighteenth century. In an argument running from 1726 until 1758, which focused upon the common land, Irwin questioned the landholding rights of the inhabitants. He had a turnpike erected on the common at Stainforth, which provoked a riot and subsequent prosecution that exacerbated the splits within the township. Thomas Perkins after certain inhabitants of the manor signed a submission to Irwin. He wrote, ‘What power he may now have I can’t tell…His Majesty K[ing]: Charles ye 1st w[oul]d not at least…have done a contrary thing.’ This was a powerful analogy to make in comparing the major local landowner to a perceived tyrant.

The very fact that the commons were crucial to the economies of the small farmer, and the feeling that the local balance of power lay with the community rather than the lord, fostered a strong sense of community action and local loyalty. In 1739, Jonathan Parish, who hoped to be made the local schoolmaster, had written to Irwin asking for his favour. Parish reported that ‘by making Lord Irwin my friend [I] had made all my Neighbours my enemies’. Concerning the schoolmaster’s appointment, the local curate Marmaduke Drake, hoped that ‘they were wiser than to be led by ye nose by a Lord’. These men seemed unlikely to defer to any man shy of the monarch; thus, political control may have been illusory at best for a man like Irwin.

This confident air was induced by the strength of the community’s common right. One seventeenth-century commentator noted, ‘by often iteration and multiplication of the Act, it becomes a custom: and being continued without interruption time out of mind, it obtaineth the force of a law’. Similarly, one agrarian historian has written that common field government ‘held the village together’, so that the support for local common rights gave the community a sense of security. In the case of Hatfield this common usage was a form of social, and potentially political cement. Agrarian usage impinged upon the shire franchise and would have added to the difficulties and differences of political control. This would have been more so if those who enjoyed the vote by common right saw a landowner’s actions as an attempt to impoverish them.

The commons were crucial for rearing sheep, oxen horse and pigs, as well as providing thatch, bricks, and sundry extras which bolstered the local economy. Neeson has written that ‘at the local level, custom had the force of the law’. Moreover, if the commons were crucial to the psychological and personal well-being of the individual and the community, then its defence was all-important no matter whom the attacker. The commons gave the individual and the community a chance to live of their own and to survive a dearth. They also gave the chance to have an economic independence that may have fed political autonomy. All this stemmed from what appeared to be enclosure and enfranchisement by consent. There was the strength of custom and usage in terms of the variations in the franchise. As Langford has pointed out ‘faith in local procedures was deeply entrenched’.

Struggle for the common in cyberspace

Which brings me back to my third question:

How do we struggle-in-common against the enclosure of our networked public spaces? How do we develop a politics of digital literacy? How do we develop a political digital literacy?

In Eighteenth century Hatfield, that so many political voters (agents) owned their own lands, and that landownership was so fractured made political control awkward. It simply was not possible for local landowners to brow-beat a majority of men to the polls. The relationship between the politicians and a large subset of the electorate was fragile and conditional. Once the politicians drew the battle lines they were involved in a wider nexus of responsibilities. With this in mind it is hardly surprising that the politicians had to expend so much energy and money to gain an election and maintain some form of control.

I am wondering what this offers in terms of the institutionalisation/enclosure of the internet and the web as a subset of it.

  • How do we struggle to acknowledge and nurture the disparate local contexts and activities born of custom that exist online?
  • How do we recognise power and privilege in networked communities? How does one avoid the real subsumption of the individual within common spaces?

You have not been paying attention: putting students at the heart of the system


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 29 June 2011

Nervously, and without any real need whatever, Franny pushed back her hair with one hand. ‘I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while — just once in a while — there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word “wisdom” mentioned! Do you want to hear something funny? Do you want to hear something really funny? In almost four years of college — and this is the absolute truth — in almost four years of college, the only time I can remember ever even hearing the expression “wise man” being used was in my freshman year, in Political Science! And do you know how it was used? It was used in reference to some nice old poopy elder statesman who’d made a fortune in the stock market and gone to Washington to be an adviser to President Roosevelt. Honestly, now! Four years of college, almost! I’m not saying that happens to everybody, but I just get so upset when I think about it I could die.’

J.D Salinger, Franny and Zooey

It’s the devil’s way now/There is no way out/You can scream and you can shout/It is too late now/Because you have not been/Payin’ attention

Radiohead, 2+2=5 (The Lukewarm)

Preamble: the rule of money

We have already seen a rush to dissect the Coalition Government’s White Paper for Higher Education in the UK, interestingly entitled “students at the heart of the system”.

  1. David Kernohan has picked up on both assumption-based risk management and government funding exposure, in order to highlight inconsistencies or concerns that underpin the detail of the proposals in terms of costs.
  2. The Campaign for the Public University has focused on the public/private binary and has argued that “A public higher education system that is internationally acclaimed for its excellence is being dismantled”.
  3. This public/private focus has been nuanced in a Times Higher report on the benefits to ‘for-profit’ institutions, as “all providers, regardless of their status, would be subject to the same oversight if they have loan-funded students.”
  4. The Education Activist Network has taken a more trenchant stance highlighting “increased interference from government, on the one hand, and exposure to the caprices of the market on the other, this cynical, morally bankrupt move by the government threatens to dismantle the H.E. system and tender it out to the highest bidder”.
  5. Research Fortnight Today has argued that the Coalition has used off-quotas, the place of for-profits, de-regulation, efficiency etc. as wedges to drive HE to the market: “the government’s ambitions may be important for the long-term development of the sector and the further market-oriented reforms that may follow”.
  6. In his White paper fury, Plashing Vole states that “It’s not the private sector coming to the rescue of the public sector: it’s the taxpayer being forced to hand over money to the private sector (just like the banking bailout) with the students as collateral damage.”

What is clear from these analyses is the rule of money in higher education, with this White Paper standing as a marker for what will follow. This marker focuses upon for-profit-maximisation, competition, the removal of state subsidies for shared, public goods, individualisation of experience, and commodification of learning. The Times Higher has gone on to claim that this is a half-cocked plan, and yet planning is not the issue: ideology is at the heart of the paper, with detail to emerge in practice later. Consumption and the rate of profit are central to this structural readjustment policy, and the crises that this approach will provoke, allows capital to further subsume our public goods into its cycles and circuits. [Note that marketisation will not be questioned by the Labour Party – Higher Ambitions in 2009 taught us this, and I note the lack of HE news on their site.] The threat of subsumption is therefore a critical moment in civic society, for as John Holloway argues:

As long as money rules, injustice and violence prevail – money is the breach between the starving and the food, the gap between the homeless and the houses. As long as money rules we are trapped in a dynamic that nobody controls and that is visibly destroying the possibility of human existence.

We are systematically disciplined

In the ethos and idea of the White Paper all of our social relationships for learning are commodifed. This is a world of quotas, margins, efficiency but above all of consumption and of business. We now know that it is now the economy that drives our learning, and that our learning must be exchanged as a specific use-value in the economy. There is no space and no time for developing and nurturing and experiencing wisdom. That is the cold, brutal, disciplinary logic of the Coalition’s HE White Paper. Your learning, whether you regard it as a process or not, is now a thing; it is an object, with a clear and explicit link to future earning capacity. Your learning and your future are objectified for sale. Your-self is an object in a market where your learning, akin to the downloads Neo receives in The Matrix, are simply imparted to you through training mechanisms. This is higher education as system, not higher learning as struggle and process.

This is the outcome of a process of systemic corporatisation within the public sphere described by Williams in the USA:

Universities are now being conscripted as a latter kind of franchise, directly as training grounds for the corporate workforce; this is most obvious in the growth of business departments but impacts English, too, in the proliferation of more ‘practical’ degrees in technical writing and the like. In fact, not only has university work been redirected to serve corporate-profit agendas via its grant-supplicant status, but universities have become franchises in their own right, reconfigured according to corporate management, labor, and consumer models and delivering a name brand product.

This systemic corporatisation is embedded in the White Paper. Whilst its title is “students at the heart”, DBIS are very clear that “The White Paper comes as part of the wider government agenda to put more power in the hands of the consumer.” Let’s repeat that:

 The White Paper comes as part of the wider government agenda to put more power in the hands of the consumer.

Thus, one might argue that it is student-as-consumer that is at the heart of the system, and not student-as-human. Higher education is opened-up as a training and development space for business, and for economic growth. As the White Paper reveals, HE “should evolve in response to demand from students and employers, reflecting particularly the wider needs of the economy.”

Higher education is explicitly a commodity now. It is explicitly open to market forces and for-profiteering. This exposes it to risk, hedging, venture capitalism, and the treadmill of competition. This means that all of the social relationships we develop and nurture within higher education are subject to the rule of money. There is no outside this exchange mechanism that frames how we relate, as Capital turns back in on what it terms ‘the developed world’, in order to accumulate [our mutual futures] by dispossession through debt-driven consumption. As a result, and amongst other issues:

  • our sustainability agendas and Green IT projects are subject to the rule of money and the market;
  • our focus on student-as-producer is subject to the rule of money and the market;
  • our engagement in social inclusion and widening participation is subject to the rule of money and the market;
  • our use of technologies for social learning is subject to the rule of money and the market; and
  • our nationally-negotiated pay and conditions are subject to the rule of money and the market, and indeed we are now threatened by the casualisation of our labour within the Coalition’s “system”.

Moving the previous Government’s privatisation agenda forward, Vince Cable notes that “Higher Education is a successful public-private partnership; combining Government funding with institutional autonomy.” This is a public-private partnership that is now for-profit. This is the enclosure of higher learning within the calculating logic of capital’s need to increase the rate of profit through financialisation. As Simon Clarke notes “The sense of a world beyond human control, of a world driven to destruction by alien forces, is stronger today than it has ever been”. This is why the Coalition’s White Paper might be seen as a flag in the ground for further marketisation of our higher learning. There is no turning-back. The end-game is structural adjustment and the discipline of the shock doctrine throughout our lived, public experiences, whether imposed by the IMF and the EU in Greece, or by the Coalition’s austerity agenda.

Vesuvius/I am here/You are all I have/Fire of fire/I’m insecure/For it is all/Been made to plan/Though I know/I will fail/I cannot/Be made to laugh/For in life/As in death/I’d rather be burned/Than be living in debt

Sufjan Stevens, Vesuvius

Cybernetics, order and risk

We might usefully note the cybernetic imagery embedded in the technocratic, informatic use of language in the White Paper, and in particular its view of HE and University life as a system. This highlights the dominant view that Universities are now tools of capital, which must use information flows and dashboards, alongside embedded, corporate technologies, to predict, manage and commodify performance and risk in learning. This system is funded by individualised debt, in order to discipline our lives and livelihoods for economic growth and efficiency. Thus, David Kernohan has analysed the White Paper as a form of assumption-based risk management, where technocratic strategies prompt Universities to engage in hedging risk, and there are ties here to the neoliberal focus on using cybernetics to manage risk and impose order as a prerequisite for capitalist accumulation. This is exemplified in both Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (episode 1), and Paul Mason’s Meltdown, which demonstrates the financial system’s structural inability to control risk through mechanisms like credit default options, fiscal modelling (based on societies in which order and law have been imposed), and market deregulation. As Mason notes:

technologies led to automated models that excluded possibilities of crisis and so amplified risk-taking, so that higher stakes and higher outcomes are taken based on assumptions of order and control of information flows.

This hedge-based position in the finance sector is being extended into the sphere of public goods, including higher education. Just as there is no critique of this position from within Parliament, there is limited critique from within the sector’s own associations, which have generally been subsumed within the broader neoliberal definition of what is required of higher education. Here there is no space for alternatives to be created and implemented.

It is only Million+ that criticizes, noting that there is “absolutely no evidence that the competition Ministers are trying to inject will actually improve the quality of the student experience.” Moreover, this focus on business-as-usual is echoed by organisations like DEMOS, whose libertarian choice agenda does not reflect on the evidence that ‘choice’ as a concept linked to consumption of goods and services is contested, whether as part of broader public policy or NHS reform, and that it tends to undermine mutualism, co-operation and trust.

In the face of competition and a lack of mutuality, I don’t wish to restate my position here on the place of higher education in developing resilient approaches to global disruption, but it is worthwhile noting the broader economic context for the White Paper. The input-output model is broadly debt-incentivised education and training based on higher incomes, in spite of declining real wages since 1980 and an on-going attack on labour rights. Both Zerohedge and The Automatic Earth are clear that the global economic recovery is at best fragile and at worst a myth. When we factor in issues over energy availability [witness the International Energy Agency’s reports on liquid fuel] and resource depletion [increasingly around water], guaranteed economic growth and a real return on investment for graduates is a risk that may need hedging in some way. Even those who are less fatalistic, like Faisal Islam and Paul Mason, demonstrate how the politics of austerity makes for an uncertain future. This uncertain future is one that is individualised, non-co-operative and driven by debt.

In this brave new world, where the student is at the heart of the system, the academic is missing, and this represents their functionary status, which will increasingly be driven by precarity. The dominant logic is attrition on labour rights, decreased real wages, performance-related pay, increased contact hours, techno-surveillance, efficiency, more-for-less, and attrition on trust, openness and sharing. In this cybernetic system there is no ‘us’. There is no ‘you’ and ‘me’. There is only value and profit. Thus, perhaps trades unions are key as this becomes more-and-more about capital/labour and the extraction of surplus value. It is possibly this real subsumption of our public, non-commodified spaces to capital and its exploitation, where staff are subsumed within the logic of consumption, that offers us a crack for an alternative narrative around commons, co-operation, sharing, and openness, which is not framed by the separation and alienation of money, price, quality, and competition.

What is to be done?

In a recent blog posting, Tony Hirst wrote about ‘Public understanding – data on whose terms? Understanding on whose terms?’ He argued that dialogue between the public and academics is essential in developing meaningful public policy. In a second posting on academia and demand education Hirst argues for “a consideration of how academics can make content available to the media to add depth and deepened engagement to a story”. This is about academic activism in the public space, away from the spectacle and academic performativity, and towards a dialogue and a critique of the problems we face. For Hirst this is around policy, for others this may be about networked activism and informal politics.

This approach to public engagement has been amplified by Bob Brecher is his attack on the AHRC and their involvement in the neoliberal takeover of the academy, through their engagement with the Coalition Government’s ‘big society’ agenda. Brecher argues that this attack on the autonomy of academia, placing its agendas at the heart of government policy, demands the following.

  1. Critique of the ideological impulse of the government’s attack on universities [that is not] sidelined by the cost-cutting disguise;
  2. Students, administrators and academics need to take themselves seriously as members of a university and to join forces with all the other workers, paid and unpaid, whom the fundamentalists around the Cabinet table regard as so much dross.
  3. Most pressingly of all, academics have to understand, realise and use the power we have. We must refuse to act as the self-interested egoists too many of us have become and whom the neo-liberals would have us all become; refuse to compete with one another within and across institutions, or with other groups of workers; and make a new reality of what was once known as solidarity.

This is a clarion call for academic activism, which itself is Gramscian in tone and sentiment. Detailed critique is important but it needs a history that enables alternatives to be developed in public and with a range of partners organisations. It demands that we move away from playing on the Coalition’s public/private turf. There is no public. There is no private. Universities have been both-and-more forever. We need to quit the outsourcing of our hope and expectations to politicians or sector-wide groupings, whose demands are based on power. This is not about resetting the clock. It is about taking action to recast and re-create something different in the public sphere. This is as much about what the University has become as what it might be.

Gramsci argued that to achieve ongoing domination a social class had to complement its material and political power with the power of ideas: ideological power. In this, both political and civil society are battlegrounds – the former in imposing order and law, the latter in exposing the wider public sphere to cultural hegemony. The role of organic intellectuals is to process ideas in the public sphere through a scholastic programme that enables those ideas to become accepted as general conceptions of life. Thus hegemony can lead to exploitation and alienation through ideological manipulation and domination, and in our neoliberal world, through cybernetic regimes.

Thus, what is key for us now is the role of academics as organic intellectuals in enabling a new form of consciousness either within or beyond the academy, in the battle of ideas. In developing a counter-hegemony that challenges the dominant, neoliberal ideological codes. Transformation demands alternative ideas framed by critique. In delivering those in practice, whether in a social science centre, an autonomous centre, a free university or a commune, we need the courage to act.

  • This activity must take place within the University: in struggling for content and curricula that are a form of production against the neoliberal turn in our lives.
  • This activity must take place within the University: in struggling for technologies and processes and systems that are not outsourced but which are mutually described.
  • This activity must take place within the University: in struggling for open engagement with communities of practice against business ethics.
  • This activity must take place within the University: in struggling for a narrative that is not public/private and which is not driven by the rule of money, but which is framed by higher learning in the face of global disruption.
  • This activity must take place within our higher education communities of practice: in struggling for association and opposition to governmental interference in teaching and research agendas.
  • This activity must take place beyond the University: in struggling for higher learning in the fabric of society in the face of global disruption.

We must remember that capital struggles to shackle and control labour, within its cycles and circuits. We need to focus on co-operation against the rule of money. In the face of the discipline of debt and the kettle, this is tough, but what is the alternative? There is no fairy-godmother. There is no political white knight on a charger. There is only struggle for the alternative.

In the right light, study becomes insight/But the system that dissed us/Teaches us to read and right/So called facts are fraud/They want us to allege and pledge/And bow down to their God/Lost the culture, the culture lost/Spun our minds and through time/Ignorance has taken over/Yo, we gotta take the power back!

Rage Against the Machine, Take the Power Back


Reflections on the politics of dashboards and Green IT


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 June 2011

Howard Noble from the JISC Open to Change project has blogged about the recent energy dashboards event held in Oxford. This event focused upon a number of emerging themes.

  1. How to represent/visualise energy data so that those who use institutional infrastructure can see the impact of their work? An outcome of the work on dashboards was that whilst some are seeking to reveal cost in terms of everyday activities that make sense to individuals, like the equivalent number of cups of tea that could be made, users of energy generally think about [are encouraged to think about?] their energy use as a cost in cash-terms. Money is the dominant metric in this approach to visualisation.
  2. Much of the focus appears, as yet, to be focused on individual behaviour change, rather than seeing this as a mutual, co-operative endeavour. There are plenty of examples of how networks or communities coming together can engage in a discussion about resilience, rather than sustainability, for example, Transitions Towns, Dark Mountain, the Co-operative College. However, this involves a focus, less on personalisation, which is a driving characteristic of societal and educational “value”, and more on mutualism, negotiation and collaboration.
  3. This need to re-focus discussion upon shared use of space and energy within it demands meaningful, long-term, public engagement. This is one of the outcomes of the DUALL project at DMU, and its successor GreenView, which wishes to enter into negotiation with people about “the impacts of our individual and collective actions, notably our increasing energy use and consumption of goods and services.” This includes technologies that are locally-hosted, but also those which are out-sourced to the cloud. Exactly where are we shifting our carbon commitments, so that we can shift any medium-term environmental risk off our short-term balance sheets?
  4. Thus, I think it is important to see energy dashboards in the context of a deliberative process that surrounds the discussion and opening up of visualisation data as a crack in our accepted norms of energy use. The process of opening-up our energy data, and opening up the production process that underpins those data needs to drive a wider discourse around our socio-technical activities within higher education. We need to move away from seeing dashboards as an end in themselves, as a set of data to be turned into a commodity that can be traded, exchanged or quantified in a league table. We need to use those data and their representation as a way to unpick the activities we engage in within Universities. In a draft article [under review], Joss Winn and I look at such activities in light of emissions and peak oil, and argue for a higher education where:
  • educational technology is a public rather than a private or institutionalised good with an acceptance of less energy-intensive, individualised access to processing power;
  • there is prioritisation of digital technologies in strategies for community consensus-building;
  • Universities are networks that act as hubs for local, community-level engagement with technologies, and high-level digital processes;
  • individual access to the web is less of a right than community access, based on a literacy of openness. Open is central;
  • outsourcing decisions are based on community need related to a critical analysis of environmental impact, rather than on a discourse of cost-effectiveness;
  • persistent and on-going procurement and renewal of hardware and software is rejected, in favour of re-use and re-purposing; and
  • students and staff produce and share their open curricula and artefacts, through trans-disciplinary approaches to global crises, like peak oil and climate change.

Engaging with a critique of the Triple Crunch and developing meaningful alternatives means that we need to think beyond business-as-usual, as realised through investments in a Green New Deal or long-term investments or out-sourcing risk and impact, in order to engage socially with the work, tasks and activities of our everyday, educational lives.

This means that we need to move away from a focus on values and attitudes to engaging with the deep, structural issues that are revealed by the work we undertake. How do the teaching, administrative and research processes of the University bind us into unsustainable practices [in terms of peak oil and carbon emissions], and make our communities less resilient? I am thinking of this in terms of our instant, recurrent, personalised, intensive use of energy-through-high-technology. How might energy dashboards and the information they project, help us to open up a dialogue about the ways in which we live our educational lives?

One lesson from the workshop is that we have a tendency to outsource, and that this makes us less well able to engage in a discussion of responsibility at scale. This might be in terms of institutional outsourcing of our carbon, or personal outsourcing of solutions to Government. This point has been reiterated in terms of corporate influence of public policy making and a withering of democratic engagement, in opposition to the social uses of technologies that should enable communities to share in “collaboration, process, experience, expertise, and knowledge”.

This is, of course, more difficult in a space where the rule of money and the invisibility/ubiquity of energy dominate the landscape, and where there is little discussion of complexities like the Jevons Paradox or alternative ways of working. We need to re-think our educational activities, in order to think about dashboards not as the next commodity or means of acquiring research funding, but as indicators of our shared consumption and production. We need fewer futuristic, positivist stories of green technologies, or green energy, and more focus upon our histories of adapting to energy shortages across communities. Meaningful public engagement is critical here, because Universities are located in time and space, and through community activity, external income generation, distance learning and outsourcing, they have a considerable carbon/energy footprint/requirement.

Clearly, this work demands a politics of energy use within and across higher education, which does not just engage students and staff with energy-as-money, but with issues and ideas of peak oil and consumption/production, and with their necessary activities/technologies. Until we have such a deliberative policy, dashboard-related work risks being the next commodity, or end-point, that salves our liberal, democratic consciences about energy use, but which actually change nothing. Hope lies in the dashboard and its production as a cipher for deliberation and socio-cultural change.


The politics of educational technology


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 9 June 2011

Last week Joss Winn reminded me of the urgency of the work that he and I have been doing in the last year around resilience, tied to the impacts of liquid fuel availability/costs, peak oil, climate change and the treadmill logic of capitalism. Reflecting on the triple crunch of energy, economy and emissions, Joss ended his piece by stating that:

“It’s time that a co-ordinated effort was made by the sector to examine these issues in detail, involving academics from across disciplines as well as business continuity managers and VCs. We really do need to start ‘thinking the unthinkable‘…”

Whilst both he and I have been blogging about resilient education for a while, five issues have begun to pinch, which ought to re-focus those of us in higher education and in educational technology, on the politics of our position. These are big issues that threaten to overwhelm us. But they cannot be ignored.

1.    Global socio-political disruption: the media has focused in on what has been termed the Arab Spring, with an overt focus on Libya [see below on oil], and has tended to overlook analyses of tensions in either the United States based on unemployment figures and the deficit, or across Europe in Greece and Spain. This is then connected to issues around youth unemployment, which in turn has implications for discussions of what our higher education is for, and for whom our higher education exists, and who is abandoned by us. We might usefully reflect on the New College of the Humanities farrago, in light of our educational approach to social justice and inclusion. More importantly, in Western economies struggling under the weight of fiscal stimulus, needing to reduce deficits and structural debt, with pensions and an ageing population to consider, the inter-relationship between higher education and the politics of austerity need to be critiqued and alternatives developed. This is especially important in our current political space, because, as Paul Mason notes: “At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future”.

2.    Local socio-political disruption: the emerging neoliberal higher education project is contested. However, we exist in a space where the routine brutalisation of our young people on our campuses is tolerated, where those who dare to criticise established positions of power are termed terrorists, and where our use of social media for local and national organising comes under attack. Neocleous argues that “the logic of ‘security’ is the logic of an anti-politics in which the state uses ‘security’ to marginalize all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, the debates and discussions that animate political life, suppressing all before it and dominating political discourse in an entirely reactionary way.” Higher education should be the battle of ideas. If we truly believe in the transformatory power of social media, then we need to use itto contest these hegemonic positions.

3.    The economy: our framing of higher education rarely considers either the politics of our work or global economic outlook, for example in terms of the threat of a technical US default on its debt or China’s emerging lack of resources. Our planning and our thinking are around business-as-usual, as if higher education existed in a global, political economic bubble, in which the contradictions of capitalism remain someone else’s problem. That’s before we stop to think about the impact on other people of our consumer-driven lifestyles and work and higher education.

4.    Personal and institutional debt: Williams has noted that, in the move from education as a public good to becoming an individual commodity: “student debt, in its prevalence and amounts, constitutes a pedagogy, unlike the humanistic lesson that the university traditionally proclaims, of privatization and the market.” This is reiterated in the development and focus of the New College of the Humanities. However, it also refocuses the future of higher education and its funding mechanisms [in a world that faces the disruptions noted above], and the fear that middle of the road universities will soon be in the middle of a funding crisis. Paul Mason has also highlighted how finance capital in the West repackaged debt and risk in the sub-prime crisis. Are we about to see the same in the form of commodity-trading in student-driven debt? How does a pedagogy of debt enable the resilience of communities-of-practice or individuals?

5.    Energy and climate change: liquid energy is the key issue that we choose to ignore, and which is inextricably tied to the economic issues noted above. This ranges from the impact of geopolitical instability in Libya, to our desperate rush for tar sands in Madagascar, to the problems of energy policy and climate change objectives. So we focus upon green league tables or Masters degrees in the Economics of Transition, and do not consider them within a deeper critique of our dominant political-economic paradigms. Our debt-fuelled higher education is about to be driven by consumption of learning as a commodity. What will be the impact of that increase in economic spending on emissions and energy use? How will that frame resilience?

Technology is implicated throughout these issues, from governmental control/abuse of social media use and data, to feeding fears of anti-intellectualism, and through carbon emissions and the use of liquid energy. More importantly, it also fuels a myth of progress, tied to economic growth and libertarian utility, set apart from a deeper engagement in the history of struggle and the politics of its development and use. We tend to forget our history, in a rush for the future, and where we do remember our memories only stretch as far as Web 1.0. We might use the term Luddite related to technology, but we have no idea of the history of that term and what the Luddites were fighting for, and how technology was implicated through its non-neutrality in that story. The term is pejorative of those deemed anti-progress, and yet the real issue, as Feenberg has argued, is that ” technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle.”

Yet the historian Ellen Meiksins-Wood has noted that:

‘we’re living in a moment when, for the first time, capitalism has become a truly universal system…. Capitalism is universal also in the sense that its logic – the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximisation, competition – has penetrated almost every aspect of human life and nature itself’.

Our education and our use of technologies are implicated. In order to understand our present position, and to develop alternatives that matter, we need stories and metaphors and critiques of where we are. There are elements of this, for example in the work of Feenberg, but we need a coherent, contextualised history and a politics of educational technology more than ever.

This is emering elsewhere, outside the formalised educational institution. On Sunday night a UKUncut conversation on Twitter opened up a possibility for discussing a history of direct action, using the #DAHistory hashtag. We also have clear examples of where technology has been critiqued and is being developed politically in the form of oppositional spaces. We also have examples of hacktivism and network movements in opposition to the global incorporation of networked technologies. Critiquing power relationships within our use of technology is important because, as DSG have noted “Governments are responding with a conscious and concerted effort to reframe cyber activity and activism as criminality against state and capital, which, no doubt, will soon be upgraded to a form of terrorism. This bears analogies to similar reframing of narratives around workers movements throughout the 19th and 20th Century, not least the “strategy of tension” in Italy in the 1970s.”

In the face of disruptions, and the return of politics in an era of austerity, those of us who work in education and technology might usefully ask: what is to be done?

Postscript: the importance of metaphors and stories of technology-in-education

We have a narrative emerging about the contradictions in the cycles and circuits of capitalism, and the place of technology in those contradictions. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter raise this in terms of games and the creative industries, arguing that the commodification and exploitation of “creatives”, gamers and hacker culture, is a form of “playbor”, which subsumes the desire to play games within the profit-motive. They argue that we need to understand this process of subsumption, in order to find ways around it, and to challenge it. These challenges might echo the revelations about of Sony’s attempts to silence speech that reveals security flaws about its PlayStation hardware, or they might echo the emergent history of hacktivism against Sony. Both de Peuter and Dyer Witheford argue that the dominant narratives of educational technology, for example of Web 2.0 technology as user-generated and hence emancipatory, or of learning analytics as allegedly leading to efficient, personalised teaching and learning, or of technology as implicitly progressive, need to be critiqued within a more substantive history of capitalism and the western, liberal state.

In doing this, Dyer Witheford argues for an alternative narrative, one of possibility, framed by the revitalisation of the commons:

“A twenty-first century communism must also be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons, which open possibilities for new combinations of planetary planning and autonomous association.”

This narrative of the insertion of global networks of capital within higher education feeds a second metaphor, that of the shock doctrine. Klein’s work on shock opens up a way of viewing what Hardt and Negri call Empire and what those who follow Deleuze and Guattari frame as immaterial labour within a networked reimagining of our global social relationships. We might now usefully work in common to reveal the impact of this shock within UK higher education, on issues of debt as a form of indentured labour, and of the discipline of the kettle and order, and of the ways in which states attempt to utilise technologies to impose order and control. Such a revelation demands rhizomatic or permeable working across disciplinary boundaries, in ways which develop resilient alternatives to dominant, powerful narratives of the purposes of our lives.

Each of these stories offers hope. Hope in that we might use them as metaphors to help us explain our world, in light of global crises; in order to understand how our behaviours and our cognitive dissonance impacts consumption and production in this world. As a result we might try to build something different. In the worst case scenario, these stories might help us work with others to become more resilient at scales and in networks that matter to us.

These stories enable us to critique in common the ahistorical truisms of liberal democracy, that technology and education can only meaningfully serve capitalist expansion, through discourses of finance capital that are related to value-for-money, efficiency, private/public, and the market. A global range of skills, alongside stories in which they might be situated, exist in spaces that remain as yet unenclosed. These spaces might be harnessed collaboratively for more than profiteering, or the extraction of surplus value or further accumulation or financialisation, or alienation. We teach and re-think these skills and these ways of thinking every day with other staff and students and within our communities of practice. We need the confidence to imagine that our skills might be shared and put to another use. We need the confidence to defend our physical and virtual commons as spaces for production and consumption. We need the confidence to think ethically through our positions. We need the confidence to live and tell a different story of the purpose of technology-in-education.


Towards a critique of mobile learning


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 20 May 2011

Mobile and wireless technologies are often described in terms of efficiency and productivity, or in terms of their provision of “flexible and timely access to learning resources, instantaneous communication, portability, active learning experiences and the empowerment and engagement of learners, particularly those in dispersed communities.” (JISC, 2011) Given the research and funding agenda, pedagogic case studies tend to focus upon outcomes for learners and teachers. They rarely critique these technologies beyond: the pedagogies deployed; technical issues; and the spaces and places in which they are deployed (Traxler and Wishart, 2011).

Such a pedagogically-driven analysis risks describing mobile technologies as socio-culturally neutral, against their absorption within social relationships and networks of power, based on their enculturation (Feenberg, 1999). In developing a more critical view of mobile learning there are three areas that might be developed: firstly, against pedagogies of consumption; secondly, for social justice and ethical imperatives; and thirdly, within analysis of energy availability. We might then ask, what is to be done?

Against a pedagogy of consumption. The pervasiveness of mobile hardware and software, and the persistent desire to upgrade, risks further privatising our education. Thus, educators might usefully ask whether a focus on mobile Apps, as opposed to the mobile web, reinforces a pedagogy of consumption through the commodification of content (Jarvis, 2010). This is based in-part on transnational software and hardware corporations driving content-based innovations that encloses and threatens the idea of the open web (Rupley, 2010; Silver, 2010), within the context of their brand and procurement processes, and the dominance of their cultural perspectives (Dyer Witheford and de Peuter, 2009). Moreover, we risk leveraging education into the almost constant need to search for the latest technological innovation or handset upgrade. This obsession with chasing the next innovative tablet or handset or application and therefore with power-over our access to resources, rather than on producing or enhancing or challenging or reforming our social relationships, needs to be critiqued.

For social justice and ethical imperatives. The labour rights, resource accumulation, geographical dispossession and supply-chains in which our uses of mobile technologies are implicated also need critique. Factories in which the iPad, iPod and iPhone are made in China have seen an abuse of workers’ rights and disturbing levels of suicide (Coonen, 2010; Hickman, 2010). Closer to home, there are also reports of alleged tax avoidance by mobile phone operators against the common good (UKUncut, 2011). More disturbingly, Hari (2011) has recently looked historically and materially at the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In over a decade of fighting, more than 5 million people have been killed, and Amnesty International (2011) have documented human rights’ abuses including gang-rape, mutilation, enforced disappearances and the militarisation of young boys and men. In this war, Hari emphasises the material importance of the DRC’s mineral deposits, and in particular Coltan, which

“is essential for the power-storing parts of cell phones, nuclear reactors, Play Stations, and computer chips. Coltan is increasingly exploited in the mountains in the conflict torn eastern part of the country… As coltan is necessary for the high-tech industry and as demand increases, motivation to pull out of the DRC by Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi decreases.” (Ware, 2001)

So, it is argued that these minerals are the driving forces for war, and that those who benefit are multi-national corporations involved in western high-tech innovation and development. A UN Experts’ Report (2008) argued that

“exporters and consumers of Congolese mineral products should step up their due diligence efforts by publicly disclosing evidence that would demonstrate that they are not knowingly purchasing tainted minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The place of energy availability and climate change. There is an emerging critique of the issue of sustainability tied to the viability of capitalist work within the context of reduced liquid resource availability, and a lack of control over carbon emissions (Greer, 2011; Pielke, 2010). Consideration of these implications is a reminder that higher education (HE) does not operate in a vacuum (Thrift, 2010). In particular, peak oil, or the point at which the maximum rate of oil production is reached, is a critical issue. Following this peak, oil production declines due to exponentially falling supply. Oil and coal are embedded in the production processes for the tools that we consume (Winn, 2010), with the production of carbon emissions as one outcome. Is our constant renewal of a range of personal technologies sustainable? In the production process for mobile technologies we also outsource our production of carbon to “developing economies”, without bearing the full cost. Is this morally acceptable? To what extent do we dissociate ourselves and our use of our tools from their global outcomes (Greer, 2011; The Oil Drum, 2010).

Each of these three critical domains implicates and enmeshes our use of mobile technologies within the web of a global market (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004; Hardt and Negri, 2000). Yet these webs of capitalism and transnational power-relationships keep those of us who notionally benefit from mobile technologies at a distance from the effects of our consumption. Hardt and Negri (2000) note that “Machines and technologies are not neutral and independent entities. They are biopolitical tools deployed in specific regimes of production, which facilitate certain practices and prohibit others.” Dyer Witheford and de Peuter (2009) argue that whilst devices are enslaving, this is not to deny that they are pleasurable, but we need to recognise how that pleasure itself channels power. We need to critique the realities of our uses of technology, in order to imagine alternatives.

What is to be done? Clearly global solutions are required to the catastrophes outlined above. However, educators might think about the following in their lives and practices.

  • How do we lobby vendors, providers, re-sellers, commissioners, in order that they justify the extraction of the materials, and the production processes, that they use for their products? How do we do this in association with others and in our daily work?
  • How do we work for technological decisions, like procurement, outsourcing etc., to be based on community need related to a critical analysis of socio-environmental impact and human rights, rather than on a discourse of cost-effectiveness, monetisation, economic value, and efficiency?
  • How do we lobby for consensus in open systems architectures, focused upon open-sourced, community designed and implemented technologies?
  • How do we work for a digital or technological literacy that is ethical? How do we work up an ethics of mobile learning?

In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad (1963) wrote about the social and material history of the Congolese, as their land was despoiled and as they were colonised in the nineteenth century:

“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”

Our current use of mobile technologies needs to be recast in light of a critical history of their production and consumption to imagine alternatives beyond the rule of efficiency and money, in order to reclaim our humanity.

References

Amnesty International (2011). Democratic Republic of Congo. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/6MKA6u

Conrad, J. (1963) Nostromo: a tale of the seaboard. London: Dent.

Coonen, C. (2010b).Two more suicide bids at iPad plant hours after media tour. Retrieved from http://ind.pn/d3YuNq

Deleuze,G., and Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus : capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone.

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

Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning Technology. London: Routledge.

Greer, J.M. (2011). The onset of catabolic collapse. Energy Bulletin. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/fm2nEL

Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Hari, J. (2011). Dying for a mobile phone. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/jZ8U1n

Hickman, M. (2010). Concern over human cost overshadows iPad launch. Retrieved from http://ind.pn/bx9tgn

Jarvis, J. (2010). iPad danger: app v. web, consumer v. Creator. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/bKkuG6

JISC (2011). Mobile Learning. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/9RTh3N

The Oil Drum. (2010). The Science of Oil and Peak Oil Revisited. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/aabvUq

Pielke, R. Jr. (2010). The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming. Lyndhurst, NJ: Barnes and Noble.

Rupley, S. (2010). Mobile Apps: The Ultimate Threat to Search Engines? Retrieved from http://bit.ly/8xxbwP

Silver,J. (2010). Google-Verizon Deal: The End of The Internet as We Know It. Retrieved from http://huff.to/cSEfjr

Thrift, N. (2010). A question (about universities, global challenges, and an organizational-ethical dilemma). GlobalHigherEd. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/b8uGpz

Traxler, J., and Wishart,J. (eds 2011). Making mobile learning work: case studies of practice. Bristol: Escalate.

UKUncut (2011). Vodafone. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/g5bHvZ

UN Security Council (2008). Final report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Retrieved from http://scr.bi/b0fAEA

Ware, N. D. (2001). Congo War and the Role of Coltan. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/aDBaSD

Winn, J. (2010). Resilient Education. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/9sexuE


The Empire of things: our mobile and our dehumanisation


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 12 May 2011

“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”

Joseph Conrad in Nostromo

 On BBC Radio 4 last night, Johann Hari spoke about the devastating war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hari looked historically and materially at this war, which has seen more than 5 million people killed in over a decade of fighting, along with human rights’ abuses including gang-rape, mutilation, and enforced militarisation of young boys and men. Moreover, Amnesty International have consistently argued that those seeking to protect and enhance human rights in the DRC suffer threats and intimidation, and that the public administration has also utilised “excessive use of lethal force, arbitrary arrest and detention and enforced disappearances”.

Hari’s historical point critiques the dominant western narrative about this conflict, which has tended to view the war as connected to the Rwandan civil war and genocide, and which has post-colonial overtones framed by moral, ethical and cultural development. Instead, Hari emphasized the material importance of the DRC’s mineral deposits, and in particular Coltan, which

“is essential for the power-storing parts of cell phones, nuclear reactors, Play Stations, and computer chips. Coltan is increasingly exploited in the mountains in the conflict torn eastern part of the country. The Rwanda and Uganda backed rebels have primary control over the ore and are reaping huge profits which maintain and finance the protracted war. It is estimated that the Rwandan army made $20 million per month mining coltan in 2000. As coltan is necessary for the high-tech industry and as demand increases, motivation to pull out of the DRC by Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi decreases.”

So, it is argued that these minerals are “the driving forces for war”, and that those who benefit are multi-national corporations involved in western high-tech innovation and development. A recent UN Experts’ Report argued that

“exporters and consumers of Congolese mineral products should step up their due diligence efforts by publicly disclosing evidence that would demonstrate that they are not knowingly purchasing tainted minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Too many comptoirsare exploiting the legal distinction between themselves and negociants to claim they do not know the origin of the minerals they purchase, when clearly they often do, and, if they do not, it would be fairly easy to find out.”

This implicates me in that war and in that gang-rape and in that child labour, and demands that, at the very least, I ask the multinational company from which I buy my next device from where they source the minerals that are extracted for its production.

Yet I am also implicated and enmeshed within the web of a global market, in which the commodification of subjectivity is paramount, and in which my power is limited. One of the issues here is the functioning of what Hardt and Negri have called Empire, a new planetary regime in which the economic, military, administrative and communicative components combine into a system of power “with no outside”. Empire is a twenty-first century critique of global capital, which now taps its subjects as labour-power and also as consumers, learners and raw materials. Deleuze and Guattari have also argued the case that capitalism is now a planetary “production machine”, assembled from flows of labour, finance and technology, where the quest for profit drives new technical machines, new products and practices, cracks old habits, and throws all bounded domains or territories (that are geographic, social and subjective) into upheaval. It then reterritorialises these domains through enclosure, policing and commodification.

For Hardt and Negri, Empire is a regime of Foucauldian biopower, exploiting social, subjective and biological life in its entirety, for profit. So Empire and the transnational corporations that form nodes of power within it, and whose networks are circuits for accumulation and profit, covers all of our lives, though marketing, game-play, work, privatisation of public assets, data mining, advertising, the constant renewal and upgrades of technologies etc.. Critics like Virno, Tronti, Hardt and Negri have related the power of Empire to what is termed “immaterial labour” that is “the labor that produces the informational, cultural, or affective element of the commodity.” Our desire for play or for the latest device feeds Empire and the commoditisation of everyday life. This is the Empire of Things, supported by a socially diffuse intellectuality and set of desires, which is in turn generated by a vast educational apparatus.

It is not just in the DRC where these issues of high-tech needs feeding alienating behaviours are being uncovered. There are reports of workers’ rights being abused in FoxConn factories in China, which supply Apple, of game-farming in virtual sweatshops for western clients, of alleged tax avoidance by mobile phone operators against the common good. Yet the webs of Empire, its transnational circuits of raw materials, value and power keep those of us who notionally benefit from the immiseration of others at a distance from the effects of our consumption. We are disconnected from the implications and outcomes of our actions in queuing for and consuming the iPad2 or whichever new technology we favour. Instead, our discourse and our spectacle is about whether this new Chinese corporation might threaten Apple’s iPhone dominance, or the implications of that fragmentation of Android as a platform for App development, and its concomitant threat to Google’s business model. More occasionally it is about how our western, liberal data-rights are being infringed, or about how the police are using mobile technology to target protesters, or upon the impact of mobilles on bee populations. It is almost never about gang-rape and vaginal mutilation in Africa.

Virno argued that Empire keeps truths in the world at a safe distance, so that excessive consumption, equivocation over morality and ridicule of marginalised voices can enable endless, repetitive practices of commodification in a world where there are seen to be no alternatives. Cynicism becomes the defining feature of the emotional situation of our politics today – what on earth can we do about such powerlessness and distress? There is one final point that illuminates this cynicism, and that is the attack on humanities and critical theory by western governments. We are seeing UK Universities radically restructuring their academic portfolios in the name of business and the market. We are seeing a political attack on the nature and meaning of history. We are seeing a world in which the future is collapsed into the present, in order that we chase progress and development and the next upgrade. We are seeing what Marx called the annihilation of space by time. We do not stop to consider what we are doing, and alternative narratives are subject to ridicule.

At the CAL11 conference, when I presented a paper on the political economy of educational technology [slide 30], I was asked “just what are you expecting us to do”? My answer at the time was that I am not expecting you to do anything. But that I am expecting you to critique your position; to think about the ramifications of your activities and consumption; to think about your humanity. So, what is to be done by individuals and educators? Virno argues that the dominant order is destroyed “not by a massive blow to the head, but through a mass withdrawal from its base, evacuating its means of support”. This exodus also constructs a new alternative. It is defection as reconstruction, and relates to what Hardt and Negri have termed the Multitude. The multitude refers to new movements opposing global capital. It is a refusal to submit to the rule of money. The multitude refers to subjective capacity, social movement and political protest. Where these coalesce they point beyond Empire, through the realisation of alternatives.

However, we need to develop places to discuss what might be “beyond”, and how that might function. This demands that we critique the realities of our uses of technology. Hardt and Negri note that “Machines and technologies are not neutral and independent entities. They are biopolitical tools deployed in specific regimes of production, which facilitate certain practices and prohibit others.” Our engagement with devices leads Hardt and Negri to argue that “the multitude not only uses machines to produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic itself, as the means of production are increasingly integrated into the minds and bodies of the multitude.” This is developed by Dyer Witheford and de Peuter, who argue that whilst devices are enslaving, this is not to deny that they are pleasurable, but we need to recognise how that pleasure itself channels power.

Clearly global solutions are required to the catastrophes outlined by Hari in the DRC. However, I need to think about the following in my life and in my practice.

  • How do I lobby vendors, providers, re-sellers, commissioners, in order that they justify the extraction of the materials, and the production processes, that they use for their products? How do I do this in association with others and in my daily work?
  • How do I work for technological decisions, like procurement, outsourcing etc., to be based on community need related to a critical analysis of socio-environmental impact and human rights, rather than on a discourse of cost-effectiveness, monetisation, economic value, and efficiency?
  • How do I work for the use of technology in open education, rather than in a post-colonial discourse focused upon new markets?
  • How do I lobby for consensus in open systems architectures, focused upon open-sourced, community designed and implemented technologies? How do I argue that educational technology is a global and public, rather than a private or institutionalised, good?
  • How do I work for a digital or technological literacy that is ethical? How do I work up an ethics of digital literacy?
  • How do I think about the history and not the future of educational technology, so that I understand the ramifications of my actions and consumption?
  • How do I campaign for alternatives, within our everyday capitalist reality, in order to look beyond it? Where does social technology fit in that revolutionary space?

Joseph Conrad wrote about the social and material history of the Congolese, as their land was despoiled and as they were colonised in the nineteenth century. He referred to the broader colonization of Africa in an essay as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration”. As an educational technologist I need to rediscover my history, in order to reclaim my humanity.


on spaces for dissent and resistance


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 April 2011

Sarah Amsler has recently asked:

Why aren’t more academics speaking and acting out in greater earnest against the destructive policies of privatization, marketization and corporatization now being imposed on and from within universities?

Sarah pursues possible reasons why.

  1. Ideological: enough academics desire this, or that we don’t believe in the promises of critical education enough to fight.
  2. Prosaic: perhaps this majority hopes for the introduction of costly tuition fees, seizing upon them as a long-denied source of private investment.
  3. Disciplined: many are also convinced that alternatives are impossible, and that challenging the policies is therefore hopeless or pointless or both. She makes the case for performative consent.

Sarah then opens-up a space for the battle of ideas, founded on resistance and dissent that takes the form of activity, within and beyond the academy.

We are also learning that such serious attacks on public education, critical disciplines and research, non-hegemonic epistemologies and democratic life, can only be met with equally as serious acts of resistance – which may of course take a plurality of different forms.

I have argued elsewhere about the discipline of the kettle and debt, and about alternative responses to the Coalition’s ideology. However, Sarah’s argument has reiterated for me the power of technocracies within the academy, and the struggles of academics in a University system that serves as a functionary of neoliberalism within the social factory. The Coalition’s agenda has quickened the pace of the marketised, dehumanising, administrative suffocation of our formal educational existence.

The issues with which I am grappling follow.

  1. Do we need to critique and integrate the possibilities of the four theses of the invisible university?

Thesis 0.1: The University is a Machine in the Network of Capitalism & Empire.

Thesis 0.2: There is No Crisis. It is all Business as Usual.

Thesis 0.3: The University Cannot be Saved.

Thesis 0.4: Defect to the Invisible University!

  1. How do we integrate oppositional spaces within the academy with the raft of autonomous spaces, institutions and associations for higher learning that exist beyond it.

The Really Open University: an ongoing process of transformation by those with a desire to challenge the higher education system and its role in society.

The University of Utopia: to provide convincing alternatives to ‘academic capitalism’.

The University for Strategic Optimism: we have a magnificent opportunity, a multiplication of possibilities, the opening of a space in which we might think about, and bring about, a fairer and wealthier society for all. In short: Many good reasons for strategic optimism!

The Education Activist Network: to take control of campus for another kind of education.

  1. How do we develop the honour and the courage to become dissenting or dissident, in order to melt our higher learning into the fabric of the social factory? So that we can imagine something different? In this, how do we use our histories of resistance to inform our approaches? We have forgotten our collective histories and the Coalition would like to expunge counter-hegemonies from our memory. We need to reclaim our histories.

So maybe Sarah flags that in institutionalised spaces, where we are disciplined by profit-and-loss accounts and NSS scores and reviews of our practice and external income generation and state control of research agendas, and where trust is subsumed within hegemonies of private consumption rather than shared production, it is in our associations that we have hope. Marx argued:

only in association with others has each individual the means of cultivating his talents in all directions. Only in a community therefore is personal freedom possible… In a genuine community individuals gain their freedom in and through their association.

Is it now only beyond the University, in the multitude, in the autonomous collective, in the social science centre, in the really free school, that we are free to resist and dissent and re-imagine? Do we have to become dissident? Do we have to re-imagine higher education as higher learning beyond the institution, dissolved into community? In the face of the crisis, where do we find hope?