Tag Archives: mental health

on learning gain, academic subsumption and performance anxiety


Posted by hallymk1

Businessmen drink my blood
Like the kids in art school said they would

Arcade Fire. 2011. Ready to Start.

ONE. We are losing that University life, which bell hooks wrote about as a space and a time for self-actualisation: a capacity to live more fully and deeply. We are losing the potential to liberate the curriculum for solidarity and humanity. Our curriculum design and delivery are now kettled by new public management and an ethos of deliverology, which pivots around exchange.

Deliverology is based on the notion that traditional public-sector organizations are not geared towards delivering results—such as student learning outcomes or quality clinical care—for several reasons. The organization’s goals are too many and too diffuse. Frequently, the goals cannot be quantified. For those that can be, there is very little real-time data to monitor progress towards the goals. As a result, staff and management within the organization do not work towards these goals. Rather, they may try to maximize the size of their unit or the budget under their control.

To overcome these constraints, Deliverology proposes that a small, high-quality delivery unit be established, reporting directly to the head of the organization, that is charged with championing the delivery of a few, well-specified results. The unit will gather and report real-time data on progress towards the results; work with the line managers in the system to make mid-course corrections; and set up routines where the leader and the stakeholders can review performance and make decisions.

Suba Devarajan. 2013. Deliverology and all that.

This is our curriculum co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes. This is our curriculum subsumed under the demands of producing and circulating measurable outcomes, in the form of data, and in the form of analysis, and in the form of learning gain. Here, notions of subjectivity and of living more humanely are driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of teacher/student performance inside-and-against that curriculum. Any hope that subjectivity might emerge from the messy realities of the curriculum are lost. They are lost in the processes of abstraction that subvert the concrete work that teachers and students do inside and outside the classroom. This abstraction reduces our relationships to measurable processes. And these processes must be measured because education must be subsumed under the compulsion to create and accumulate value. As the Gates Foundation argue, education is about

ensuring that all students graduate from high school prepared for college and have an opportunity to earn a postsecondary degree with labor-market value. Our approach is to play a catalytic role—to support the development of innovative solutions in education that are unlikely to be generated by institutions working alone and that can trigger change on a broader scale.

TWO. Where then is the space to educate as the practice of freedom, when the only freedom available is that of the labour-market? Where is the space to educate as the practice of freedom when the market dominates the spaces and the times available for autonomy?

To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who also believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress, p. 13.

And through this loss of subjectivity in the face of the abstraction of our educational relationships, we are readied for the market and for the financialisation of our concrete work. And this readying takes the form of our subsumption as academics, teachers and students, under the dictates of a system that is rooted in the practice of freedom for Capital. Rooted in the freedom to produce and accumulate value. And in the process our humanity is scrubbed clean.

THREE. This idea of the subsumption of University life under the dictates of the market is critical. It contains within it an unfolding of the relationship between academic labour, the market and the production of academic commodities. Through this unfolding, academic labour is monitored and reconfigured so that it is productive of value, rather than productive of the practice of freedom.

In tracing the development of production in capitalism, Marx distinguishes what he calls the formal and real subsumption of labor under capital. In formal subsumption, although production is geared toward the production of surplus value, that goal has not yet informed the process of production itself. As capital develops, however, the process of production becomes molded materially by capital, by the goal of producing surplus value. At that point, the real subsumption of labor, the process of production, has become intrinsically capitalist.

…Marx attempts to explain several basic characteristics of capitalism. The first is that, unlike other forms of life, capitalism is marked by pressures for ongoing increases in productivity, which constantly revolutionizes production and distribution and, more generally, social life. Marx seeks to elucidate this characteristic of capitalism with his theory of value as a function of time rather than the amount of goods produced. At the same time, this theory helps explain an apparent paradox—that the invention of generations of “labor-saving devices” has not lightened the burden of labor nearly as much as might have been expected.

Many people work longer and harder than before, while others are chronically under- or unemployed. This is a complex problem, but it does indicate that, as capitalism develops, there is less and less direct correlation between the level of productivity— the amount of goods being produced—and labor time. One could imagine an inverse relationship, at least potentially, between the level of productivity and the amount people have to work. But that is not the case here. Instead, we have an incredibly productive apparatus that retains the necessity of labor. This latter necessity, which is a function of labor, comes under increasing pressure as capital develops.

Moishe Postone. 2012. Exigency of Time: A Conversation with Harry Harootunian and Moishe Postone, pp.18-20.

Across the globalised terrain of higher education, University life is restructured through technological and financial innovations, which are themselves geared around creating a competitive market as the primary mechanism for the production of value and profit. Innovation is central to the generation of competitive edge, and the ability for life at the University of Oxford or Imperial College or wherever to compete with the University life at Stanford or MIT or wherever.

Competition, innovation, production, expansion and growth forcibly destroy those individual and institutional practices that are unproductive or less efficient or slower or unfit-for-exchange. This is the self-actualisation of capital. This is never the self-actualisation of the student, unless s/he is an entrepreneur; unless s/he is recombined as a force of production. And of course, we are forced to destroy any stable sense of ourselves as self-actualised because we must be remade constantly as productive and entrepreneurial and employable. This remaking entails the subordination of our University life and of the work that goes into producing it to the self-actualisation of Capital. And as a result that University life is transformed.

The distinction between formal and real subsumption identifies the implicit distinction between two moments that we have here: capital must subordinate the labour process to its valorisation process — it must formally subsume it — if it is to reshape that process in its own image, or really subsume it.

Endnotes. The History of Subsumption.

FOUR. What is being made concrete inside higher education is not merely the formal subsumption of teaching, learning and scholarship inside a market, but the transformation of those activities. This transformation is rooted in the productivity of academic labour, so that its teaching, learning and scholarship require more than the absolute extension of the social working day. This transformation demands that teaching, learning and scholarship are grounded in competition and innovation. This drives the annihilation of any possibility that the curriculum might enable individuals or communities to become self-actualised. Instead competition and innovation drive the annihilation of the humane content of teaching, learning and scholarship, so that all which is left is proletarianised. Or so that what we are left with is anxiety as we attempt to refuse this disciplinary process.

And this anxiety is amplified as our subsumption is encouraged as a form of creative destruction by Governments that agree the disaggregation of the functions of HE courses (like content production, learning analytics, assessment and accreditation) and encourage competition at the level of those components. We are forced to creatively destroy that which we have made: our selves, always to be upskilled; our curricula, always to be labour-market ready; our scholarship, always impactful; our teaching, always innovatory; our learning, always on; our souls, always bleeding.. Our curricula relationships are creatively destroyed and remade as tradable, exchangeable components.

As costs rise and competition intensifies, there will be additional pressure for achieving administrative efficiencies. The curriculum of a university, once a prized possession developed by the faculty members for the students, is increasingly becoming a commodity. MOOCs have opened up access to tried and tested curricula for anyone in the world to use.

Rizvi, S., Donnelly, K., and M. Barber. 2013. An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead, p. 41.

There appear to be specific opportunities to create significant value for UK schools, teachers and learners. These opportunities include provision for gifted & talented students, for supporting low take-up subjects, and for exam preparation. There may be benefit in further research into one or more of these areas, to develop and test the pedagogical grounding of the proposition, to establish commercial feasibility, and to assess the real benefits by piloting with schools. We strongly urge that some of this research be focused on the commercial requirements and opportunity, to help stimulate development and investment from the private sector.

Carnegie Associates. 2014. MOOCs: Opportunities for their use in compulsory-age education, pp. 75-6.

Another set of changes is technological: incredible advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and other technologies are changing job profiles and skills demanded by labor markets, while also offering possibilities for accelerated learning and improved management of education systems.

World Bank. 2011. Education Strategy 2020. Learning for All: Investing in People’s Knowledge and Skills to Promote Development.

As academics and students labour under commodity capitalism, they have to vie for a place on the market, and this makes them vulnerable to crises related to futures-trading, or access to means of production, or to overproduction, or to market-saturation, or to an inability to access credit markets, or to more general, societal access to debt. Hence the very real impact of finance capital in creating a higher education market based on catalysing new systems of production or organisational development or technological innovation leaves universities at risk. It leaves academics at risk. It leaves students at risk. The University’s much-vaunted institutional autonomy abstracts it from a notion of public good and distances it from any socialised purpose or meaning. Autonomy prefigures marketisation and competitive restructuring. It is thus impossible to separate out Governmental policy based on funding, or Governmental support for open education, or venture capital investment in educational technology start-ups or MOOCs, or University restructuring and reorganisation, from this need to create a market. One outcome is the need to commodify and marketise y/our curriculum, and to commodify and marketise y/our relationships.

FIVE. And bell hooks’ words invite us to push-back against this, and to be engaged.

[To be engaged] invites us always to be in the present, to remember that the classroom is never the same. Traditional ways of thinking about the classroom stress the opposite paradigm—that the classroom is always the same even when students are different. To me, the engaged classroom is always changing. Yet this notion of engagement threatens the institutionalized practices of domination. When the classroom is truly engaged, it’s dynamic. It’s fluid. It’s always changing.

bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress, p. 158

Yet they want to marketise our interactions with students and staff. They want to create a market by quantifying y/our interactions with students and re-defining y/our work as data inputs and learning outcomes and impact and quality. They want to create a market because enclosing education (as a public good) for private gain depends upon the circulation of educational services as commodities. Without a market there can be no circulation. They need to create commodities and they need to create a market. Because without them money (M) cannot circulate, and without them money and its increment (M’) cannot be had. And as a by-product they will discipline the circuit of educational production, including y/our pedagogy.

And what is worse, they believe that this creative destruction/disruption, and the concomitant production of entrepreneurial, educational outcomes, are rooted in specific, systematic, measurable inputs. Because as the Conservative Party will tell us:

We know what works in education: great teachers; brilliant leadership; rigour in the curriculum; discipline in the classroom; proper exams.

The Conservative Party Manifesto, 2015.

And because they know what works they can enforce behaviour change on their terms.

Without radical changes to how universities were financed however it was going to be difficult to change their behaviour. Now there is an opportunity to use our funding changes to push a real cultural change back towards teaching.

David Willetts. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education.

And as McKinsey Consulting will tell you, we can only unlock innovation and performance with liquid information and open data: “we see a clear potential to unlock significant economic value by applying advanced analytics to both open and proprietary knowledge.” And where is the space/time for engaged teaching where y/our curriculum and its relationships have to be converted to liquid information?

A real cultural change.

The new normal.

Deliverology.

SIX. And we have been warned about this, in our reading about the implementation of the Early Years Foundation Stage profile. For here we see the kinds of monitoring and data-driven continuous improvement that underpin educational innovation in settings that support the labour of 4 year olds. And we are forced to consider what this will mean in terms of learning gain in higher education. The monitoring of the lives of young children is a joint venture between policy makers, educators, software suppliers and academic evaluators, so that we can identify the inputs that enable an outcome specified as ‘a good level of development’.

This specification describes the early years foundation stage profile collection 2015. It will enable local authorities, and software suppliers working on their behalf, to prepare the necessary data and processes for compliance so that data on all children aged 4 in funded education at maintained schools and private, voluntary and independent early years settings can be returned.

Department for Education. 2015. Early years foundation stage profile 2015 Technical specification, version 1.1

The revised EYFSP eradicated the 69 early learning goals and replaced them with just 17 focusing on 3 prime areas of learning: communication and language, physical development and personal, social and emotional development. Within these scales a child can gain a score of 1-3 with 1 being ‘emerging’, 2 being ‘expected’ and 3 being ‘exceeding’. These scales are also classified into prime and specific areas of learning.

Department for Education. 2014. Early years foundation stage profile 2014 return, Guide for the 2014 assessments – version 1.0

The Good Level of Development (GLD) measure is the most widely used single measure of child development in the early years. We have made significant changes to the way children are assessed at the end of the EYFS through the EYFS Profile. As a result, we have had to redefine the GLD measure

In the new EYFSP, children will be defined as having reached a GLD at the end of the EYFS if they achieve at least the expected level in the early learning goals in the prime areas of learning (personal, social and emotional development; physical development; and communication and language) and in the specific areas of mathematics and literacy.

Cotzias, E, and Whitehorn, T. 2013. Topic Note: Results of the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) Pilot Research report March 2013.

And this measuring of a good level of development enables a richer set of data to be collated, and new, tradable, enhancement and improvement services to be commodified and exchanged, and for judgements to be made based upon gender, or the socio-economics of access to free-school meals, or rooted in ethnicity, or based around local authority. And in our measuring of inputs and our obsession with learning outcomes our self-actualisation is lost once more. Our ability to deal with social justice or poverty is lost because someone with power and voice claims that “We know what works in education”.

SEVEN. And who is this “we” who measures learning gain or a good level of development? Who is this “we” who knows what works? And who is excluded from this knowing? Because what is lost in this process of measuring is the voice of those who are excluded. And the inability to voice is related to a lack of power. So we might reflect on the construction of our educational settings and who has power to voice in those spaces, and to co-author something else, and to be engaged. And we might reflect on the relationship between measuring and voice, as they are revealed in the definition of the curriculum, so that we wonder whether we can ever “co-author engaged spaces that are always changing” if we have no power to self-actualise. And in this I am forced to reflect on the struggle to overcome the alienating realities of “why is my curriculum white?”

A curriculum racialised as white was fundamental to the development of capitalism.

Capitalist expansion, as it emerged from Europe and engulfed much of the globe, was not simply an economic endeavour – it was an ideological project. By positioning the economic models which emerged from Europe at this time as the most morally and intellectually superior, capitalism defined progress, rationality and development in ways non-European economic systems could not.

It is the white curriculum which trains the bureaucrats of the Global South that the economic models they learn in Europe and its settler colonies are superior to the knowledges indigenous to their own societies. This facilitates the exploitation of labour and resources in their own countries, channelling the materials that western markets rely on for consumption. Both pre-colonial economic systems and anti-colonial critiques of capitalism (some, but not all, influenced by European criticisms of capitalism) are essential if a truly international movement against the power of global capital is to emerge.

The white curriculum thinks for us; so we don’t have to.

The curriculum is white because it reflects the underlying logic of colonialism, which believes the colonised do not own anything – not even their own experiences. The role of the colonised in knowledge production mirrored their role in economic production, where their resources were to provide raw materials that could then be consumed in the west.

Similarly, colonial societies were to serve as raw data that could be theorised, articulated, and properly understood only by Europeans, in western European languages – principally English. This is why, even if you are studying development studies or the prison industrial complex today, the curriculum will remain largely white, for only people racialised as white are able fully to explain Black suffering. Implicit in the white curriculum is irrefutable evidence of white superiority as a matter of truth and objectivity, while crafting a world-view that judges anything that it could define as ‘non-white’ or ‘other’ as inferior

‘Why is my Curriculum White?’ collective, UCL. 2015. 8 Reasons the Curriculum is White.

And I remember that this is not the commonly held view of those who have voice and power over the curriculum. Those who include educational publishers like Pearson for whom:

Africa’s educational challenges are not fundamentally different from those of the rest of the world, although they are more basic and urgent – and they can, at times, feel more overwhelming.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution revealed that more than half of the world’s out-of-school primary-aged children live in Sub-Saharan Africa and only a third of African children ever reach secondary school, let alone university. One in every two of those who make it to the classroom still reach adolescence unable to read, write, or perform basic numeracy tasks.

The universal power of education to transform lives for the better feels more urgent in Africa, too. Better education, of which literacy and numeracy are the bedrock, will be fundamental to sustaining growth and prosperity across the continent over the next decade, just as it surely will be throughout the rest of the world. For example, despite high unemployment rates on the continent, employers often struggle to fill vacancies. In a PWC survey of 1,330 global CEOs, over half report concerns about finding the right talent to reach business targets. Vast skills gaps are holding back job creation and growth in many African economies; there is a disconnect between what is being taught in schools and the knowledge and skills young people need to become engaged and productive citizens.

John Fallon. 2013. African outcomes.

Data, outcomes, efficacy, growth, learning gain, Pearson, PWC, global CEOs, the curriculum, talent, growth.

And I remember that the struggle over “why is my curriculum white?” is situated asymmetrically against those who have voice and power in the development of the global economy.

In today’s capital-abundant times, the ability to identify owners of good ideas and help them achieve their full potential will be the hallmarks of investing success. Companies and investors that will thrive in this environment will be those that are best able to identify opportunities that play to their core competencies. They also will take care to develop a repeatable model that enables them to apply their organization’s unique strengths to new contexts again and again. Those that can react with speed and adaptability will be best able to identify the winners, steer clear of the bubbles and generate superior returns.

Reflecting the strengthening of ties between the domestic and international economies, our analysis suggests that increasing gross exports will expand opportunities for the service sector to become more portable, which in turn will expand the economy’s export capacity. At a company level, the trend opens new avenues to profit from investments in services that are open to international trade.

The gains from converting nontradable services into tradable ones can be huge. The rate of return on services that are confined only to the local market is in the range of just 1% to 2%—in line with services’ productivity growth rate. Tradable services, by contrast, can yield returns that are many times higher. What makes these investments so compelling today is that they are channeled into activities the company knows best, thereby dodging the bubble risk that will plague investors that chase illusory returns in areas where they lack expertise.

The exportable services revolution will be a boon not just for companies in the developed markets, but for emerging market enterprises and economies as well. Portable services can help break through one of the biggest bottlenecks impeding development in the emerging markets—the shortage of management talent to enable them to sustain their rapid economic growth. By using distance-learning technologies to “export” higher education, leading universities in the advanced economies can accelerate the training of the home-grown specialists the emerging-market economies will need. And by “importing” the talent of engineers, managers, physicians and other highly skilled professionals from companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging markets will not need to wait a generation before their own education systems can produce the skilled workforce they require.

Karen Harris, Andrew Schwedel and Austin Kim. 2012. A world awash in money.

EIGHT. And this self-actualisation of Capital demands that y/our curriculum and y/our teaching, learning and scholarship are exchangeable, tradable, financialised and marketised, on a global scale. Because the subsumption of the University has to mirror the transformation of a labour process, which in turn mirrors “the underlying logic of colonialism, which believes the colonised do not own anything – not even their own experiences. The role of the colonised in knowledge production mirrored their role in economic production, where their resources were to provide raw materials that could then be consumed in the west.” And we might consider how our curriculum spaces reproduce that colonisation by Capital, so that the University reflects a power structure rooted in further colonisation for value production, circulation and accumulation.

And we witness an opening-up and connecting of datasets around academic performance, retention and progression, the repayment of student fees, and future earnings profiles. So that new financial mechanisms can be created, and so that markets can be created that enable exportable services that mitigate poor performance, and that enable that performance to become a tradable commodity. And think of the opportunities for value creation if we can compare performance and earnings across programmes of study and institutions and cohorts. And think of the opportunities for value creation if we can re-engineer curriculum inputs so that we can reduce the risk of futures trading in educational outcomes and earnings. And we understand why deliverology is so important.

In Higher Education we already have the Key Information Statistics, however, the passing of the Small Business Enterprise and Employment Bill, being discussed in the Houses of Parliament ahead of March 2015, will allow student records to be linked with HMRC tax records to provide a potentially richer pool of information. There will be added benefits for the Further Education sector such as improved access to self-employment data.

The linking up of datasets and preparation of relevant and reliable data will take many years, but the passing of the bill will be a positive leap forward. Only in time, as this information is worked through, will we understand the full extent of what can be achieved as a result of the bill and see the full potential of the FEER.

Enterprise for All. 2014. Recommendation one: The Future Earnings and Employment Record (FEER).

NINE. And this is the new normal of growth and competition and the market, and new financial instruments that are rooted in exchange. Here there can be no reinvestment in an engaged curriculum. No divestment from technologies and processes that subsume teaching, learning and scholarship and which transform those into educational commodities. And where the market normalises inputs and sponsors creative destruction, and where the outcome is academic anxiety.

And one outcome of this subsumption is a rebranding of our work as learning gain. And we might wonder if this is an example of the University’s functions being redesigned so that they reproduce a sense of anxiety as a permanent state of exception. I wonder whether the focus on productive labour, on the socially necessary labour time of abstract academic work, and the entrepreneurial turn across higher education, each create an atmosphere of anxiety. I wonder whether the reproduction of an ambiance of anxiety is a co-operative endeavour that emerges from inside the University as a means of production that is governed by metrics, data and debt, and out of which value is scraped through the alienation of time. This reminds me of persistent inferiority and internalised responsibility, and of the shock doctrine that recalibrates what is possible.

And we might consider this issue of divestment, and of how we are invested in the anxiety immanent to this obsession with learning gain, and this deliverology, and this knowing what works. And we might consider that in the struggle over fossil fuel divestment Harvard University have stated:

I also find a troubling inconsistency in the notion that, as an investor, we should boycott a whole class of companies at the same time that, as individuals and as a community, we are extensively relying on those companies’ products and services for so much of what we do every day. Given our pervasive dependence on these companies for the energy to heat and light our buildings, to fuel our transportation, and to run our computers and appliances, it is hard for me to reconcile that reliance with a refusal to countenance any relationship with these companies through our investments.

Drew Faust. 2013. Harvard University Fossil Fuel Divestment Statement

And that in the struggle for divestment one researcher writes:

I worry that the very funding I received from Harvard for this [ethnographic inquiry] to collect stories about water and climate change could be supported by Harvard’s investments in the oil and gas industry. I worry that Harvard is both invested in the future of its students, and in a reckless industry intent on destroying that same future.

The fossil fuel divestment movement has now been active at universities across the United States for more than four years. Stanford partially divested. Syracuse divested just last week. But Harvard still holds onto millions and millions in direct holdings of the fossil fuel industry, spread across the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies. Frankly, I find this alarming.

I care deeply where my university invests its money.

Devi K. Lockwood ’14. 2015. A Cognitive Dissonance: On Harvard & Divestment.

And we might refer to the feeling of anxiety and the dissonance of worry. And we might wonder whether the struggle over fossil fuel divestment and the activities of teaching, learning and scholarship might enable us to consider how we question our investment in the system of production that got us here in the first place. A system of educational production that is using learning gain and deliverology and data and performance anxiety to force us into new forms of cognitive dissonance rooted in narratives of labour-market readiness. Might we build something that is engaged and full of care, and where we no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage our own alienation?

Wall street jumps in the Hudson

With gold in their bathing suits

Then we send in the miracle ferries

That’s all we do

The National. 2010. Sin-Eaters.


on academic hopelessness


Posted by hallymk1

It has always seemed strange to me… The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

Steinbeck, J. 1945. Cannery Row. New York: Viking.

My friend Jon told me that he was grappling with how to scale kindness. That he wondered whether the question of “how do we scale kindness?” was the most important issue that we face. This question chimes in-part because increasingly we face an intense sense of Weltschmertz; a world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or ennui, and which perhaps reflects our deeper sense of hopelessness. Our recognition that the world we hoped for may never be. That the concrete world abstracted for value may never embody our deeper humanity. That the struggle we face to enact kindness is made in the face of those traits that we detest and that we are forced to internalise, lest we be abandoned or worse.

And part of our struggle is our coming face-to-face with sin. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard connects this hopelessness to a loss of autonomy/freedom that is itself rooted in our inability to escape from sin. We act, we behave, we are compromised. As the commentator, D. Anthony Storm notes:

Sinfulness brings about a loss of freedom. The anxiety of freedom becomes translated into the anxiety over sin. This anxiety increases as the sinful individual contemplates his entrapment in sinfulness.

The choices that we face are personally sinful for the individual attempting to become humane or moral or ethical, because those very choices are compromised and limit either our own or other’s freedom and agency. And so our choices inside a system of structural domination increasingly alienate us both from ourselves and from our place in the social and natural world. We are increasingly alienated from our practices and ourselves. Our freedom in choosing is between increasingly poor alternatives. Is being kind simply reduced to doing the least worst thing?

For Haiven and Khasnabish (p. 33) the politics of austerity has generated qualitatively new levels of uncertainty and anxiety, and increasing alienation. They note that:

[This] fosters a vindictive politics of punitive cuts, surveillance and loathing. All this permits and enables the displacing of the crisis of capitalism onto the social realm, making the systemic crisis of accumulation a general crisis of social reproduction.

And as we project onto the University new ideas of good and bad, rooted in the public and the private, we develop a new depressive position through which despair restricts our autonomy. Because we incorporate their performativity and control, or we internalise the loss of what we hoped the University might become. And all we can hope for is that we can recover the public university through solidarity. Yet at times we refuse to accept that the overwhelming feeling is one of hopelessness, which itself requires a different level of grief and mourning to be internalised, so that we can address our alienation and lack of autonomy in an authentic manner. Pushing back against these twins demands that we sit with them a while rather than defensively lament what we think we have lost. As Martha Crawford notes: “I mourned for all of those I had to let go.”

I mourned for all of those I had to let go.

Still we are unable to let go because our alienation is rooted in enforced compliance and coercion, and in their refusal to accept that those with whom we might identify or find solidarity have relevance or social meaning. So we are unable to let go, and instead we align ourselves to that which refuses our academic autonomy/freedom. Instead of loss or grief, we internalise their competition and entrepreneurial activity, and the induced behaviour is only made congruent with our inner beings through sanctions, surveillance or performance management. Whether or not it aligns with a deeper set of personal values is a very live issue for those who refuse or who need to mourn what is being taken or lost. As I write in a post on the proletarianisation of the University:

Thus, we witness reports of adjunct professors who “don’t even earn the federal minimum wage”; and we witness postgraduate researcher-led committees that “have been pushing the[ir] University to honour the essential role that teaching assistants play in University life in the form of fair pay and treatment.”; and we witness self-imposed overwork as a form of self-harm; and we witness a documenting of the processes and pains of casualisation. As students and adjuncts are forced to sell themselves piecemeal they are forced to contend and compete globally. These proletarianised labourers are forced to compete as technological, entrepreneurial, and impactful.

As increasingly proletarianised academic labourers, we become an “article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto) Where is the space for grief and the acceptance of hopelessness, so that we may begin again?

Our hopelessness is rooted in the loss of our labour, as it is brought into the service of value. As our labour is commodified our sense that it is a service to ourselves and others is scrubbed clean and handed to Capital. Marx knew that this is the logic of capitalism, that defenestrates labour, in order that it can accumulate autonomy:

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

This is a world that Werner Bonefeld notes is reduced to an atomised, hopeless existence as labour-under-capitalism, in which our spaces, places, identities, and relationships are all means of extracting value or hoarding wealth. In the process our Selves are denied, and in trying to recover our lost humanity we are forced to ask, how do we scale-up kindness? And in-part this is because, as Jehu argues:

If history tells us anything, it is that people will do everything in their power to avoid resolving the contradictions of capitalism.

Pace David Harvey, we might then argue that our sense of hopelessness is our witnessing just how far the limits to our alienation from space, society and nature can be pushed. The limits to our alienation expanded time and again. And against this we witness an academic life rooted in hopelessness that lies beyond anxiety. This is the world weariness of the traveller who knows that the concrete world she moves through can never be that for which she hoped, for it is too abstracted. That as the limits to the creation of value can only be overcome spatially or via intensification, we witness Capital changing the very terrain on which we operate. That our reality is Capital’s intensifying our very alienation in this abstracted, concrete world. As Biffo Berardi argues (p. 73):

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

This world of data-driven performance anxiety drives academic commodification as alienation, and leads to plaintive cries in the name of the public good or intellectual autonomy or “the intellectual value of British academia as a whole.”

Yet we are witnessing the privatisation of the private as well as the public, and for academics and students this includes their cognitive work. This is the alienation and subsequent hopelessness of intellectual dispossession that Stiegler (pp. 125-6) argued forms

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

Our atomisation and automisation cannot enable liberation or agency or the reassertion of academic autonomy. The technological system that valorises Capital itself co-opts and reproduces social relationships that it then attempts to modify or destroy. We are constantly torn between social (re)combination and individual atomisation/entrepreneurialism. The social relations of production extend their domination beyond the space-time of our work, into the space-time of our life, in order to occupy and valorise our humanity and our kindness. For Marcuse in One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, our hopelessness is a function of our technological instrumentalisation: “The liberating force of technology – the instrumentalization of things – turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of man.” (p. 159) For Berardi (p. 101, 153, 162), this technological context is rooted in constant, global acceleration of consuming and producing the world that itself intensifies Capital’s capacity for rapid deterritorialization. Control enacted through the internalisation and adoption of automatic operational systems forces us to incorporate negative internal objects. The anxieties of the machine, and the anxieties of the University as a node in the machine, are incorporated and projected onto others. Competition, entrepreneurialism, data-driven performance, the academic super-ego are all incorporated as forms of self-harm. Incorporated as behavioural norms that shape the tempo of our hopelessness.

And to scale-up kindness we have to find spaces on the edges of the machine. And this reminds me that Matt Rendall, in writing about the death of the professional cyclist Marco Pantani (p. 4), showed how those edges were defined through the chronic self-harm of the over-performer/entrepreneur/competitive super-ego:

Marco, however, specialised in the impossible. He’d train for eight hours, then, on the final climbs, the final fifty, sixty kilometres, he’d take himself to the limit, push himself to the edge of the abyss, gauging just how far he could lurch, how much his body could take. And that was how he won, free-diving within himself to greater depths and darknesses than others dared, surfacing barely alive, testing blood, from the great apnoea. There was self-mutilation in these performances, a shedding of everything worldly.

What this entails for the academic/student is an end to self-care; of hopelessness in the face of overwhelming odds; of the apparent impossibility of scaling-up kindness. Because to survive, the academic/student has to shred and shed everything concrete and worldly, and become abstracted. This, as Rendall notes for professional cycling demands a culture both of dietrologia, or the desperate search for hidden dimensions to surface reality, and of omertà, the silence of those in the know. This is a culture that makes absolute demands of its participants. For Rendall (p. 7):

The soul is its raw material, no less than the body. “Nothing goes to waste,” as Marco’s adversary Lance Armstrong put it. “You put it all to use; the old wounds and long-ago slights become the stuff of competitive energy.”

Increasingly, in these spaces of dietrologia and of omertà, a set of productive relations rooted in the valorisation process and the expansion of Capital gives other’s systemic claims over the academic and student. And Rendall has a second analogy that is useful in discussing academic hopelessness. As he noted in A Significant Other (pp. 7, 11):

This is the paradox at the heart of [academia]: to compete, even rivals must cooperate. In doing so, the play of accommodation and opposition creates complex systems never quite in equilibrium, yet rarely chaotic for long, oscillating around limits defined by shared interest.

[The academic] embodies the uncertainties encoded in the very structure of [academia] – human, social, even philosophical questions about the division of labour, the limits of altruism and the extent to which even the most fortunate of lives must fail to realise its potential for happiness.

And we note that it is the politics of austerity and the foreclosing on academic/student freedom/autonomy that amplifies the failure to realise our potential for happiness. This is the hopelessness that we must face and move beyond. Not to resist and turn from, but to sit with and hold, so that our grief can be internalised. So that we can move beyond it, and so that we can recover hope as an authentic moment of freedom. In her thesis on Contesting Illusions: History and Intellectual Class Struggle in Post-Communist Romania, Florin Poenaru argues (p. 44) that:

The question of the meaning of life is always posed with greater acuity in moments of great ruptures and transformation in people’s lives. The 1989 moment in Eastern Europe was such a moment, when “everything that seemed forever, was no more”. This entailed a dramatic shift in the perceptions and understandings of the communist regimes that, in turn, generated highly emotional biographical reappraisals of the past. This raises a series of interconnected questions that an anthropology of being in time can investigate, such as: what is to live a good life in turbulent times and world-transforming transitional periods? What does it mean to act politically? How to capture such elusive feelings of optimism, enthusiasm, pessimism, Weltschmerz that are not simply personal, but generational? How are justifications about one’s life decisions and actions are formulated, expressed and represented? How do feelings of resignation, disappointment, renunciation and despair take shape amid the course of one’s life and how do they gather meaning and political relevance? The ontological level that depicts life as a transition through time is compounded by the level of transition through particular political and economic realities, with breaks and continuities.

And this isn’t simply an anxiety-driven catastrophism, which we hope will announce the inevitable post-capitalism. It is engaging with hopelessness as a way of understanding this secular crisis, and the contradictions that emerge from and flow into it. The contradictions of a world dominated by value, against which we wish to reclaim our entitlement to happiness, kindness, humane values. How is it that we allow Capital to dominate? How is it that through our choices we liberate value in motion? We see this in the environment and nature, in questions about Why should we even bother? We see this in the reproduction of authoritarianism across the State, and in the internalisation of brutalism in our social relationships. We see this in the endless reproduction of inequalities that deny so many their lives, and instead instil only hopelessness.

We might remember that Bloch saw this as a form of confusion, fed upon by hopelessness and which incorporated anxiety and later, as that anxiety coalesced, fear:

Many only feel confused. The ground shakes, they do not know why and with what. Theirs is a state of anxiety; if it becomes more definite, then it is fear.

Here sitting with and then teaching hopelessness, as an authentic pedagogic moment that can be worked upon and moved past, becomes so important. For Bloch, engaging with the internalisation of anxiety and its projection into the world as fear is a means to work through this hopelessness, and to recover a more authentic sense of what the Self might be in the world. Yet this demands that we reveal what frames our abstracted concrete reality, and that we accept and engage with what exactly is generating our life beyond our anxiety; our Weltschmerz. And what, exactly we are internalising and then projecting onto the world.

It is a question of learning hope. Its work does not renounce, it is in love with success rather than failure. Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them, cannot know nearly enough of what it is that makes them inwardly aimed, of what may be allied to them outwardly. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong. It will not tolerate a dog’s life which feels itself only passively thrown into What Is, which is not seen through, even wretchedly recognized. The work against anxiety about life and the machinations of fear is that against its creators, who are for the most part easy to identify, and it looks in the world itself for what can help the world; this can be found. How richly people have always dreamed of this, dreamed of the better life that might be possible. Everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has hoping at its core, and is teachable. It can be extricated from the unregulated daydream and from its sly misuse, can be activated undimmed. Nobody has ever lived without daydreams, but it is a question of knowing them deeper and deeper and in this way keeping them trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right. Let the daydreams grow even fuller, since this means they are enriching themselves around the sober glance; not in the sense of clogging, but of becoming clear. [emphasis added]

Only with the farewell to the closed, static concept of being does the real dimension of hope open. Instead, the world is full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something, and this intended something means fulfilment of the intending. It means a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness.

If only we can learn to sit with our hopelessness. To internalise it. To grieve for it. To move beyond it. To teach it.

Postscript

A friend asked me to question whether I was talking about a hopelessness that is rooted in an inability, or whether instead it was grounded in a lack of an ability – an ability that was latent, hidden or undeveloped. And I think that the former, an inability, uncovers defences and anxieties and fears made concrete because we have incorporated too many experiences and relationships that were bad enough. This inability is then reflected in our powerlessness to face down abstraction that is rooted in the financialisation of the University and that amplifies our subsequent alienation from ourselves. The latter, our latent or undeveloped ability, offers a different route away from hopelessness, and one that can enable us to reflect on (and accept or reject or reform) what we have incorporated, so that we can instead internalise the grief of what is and what cannot be, and to emerge renewed through mourning. This is Bloch’s idea that a life that sits authentically with hopelessness moves towards hope because “it looks in the world itself for what can help the world.” This isn’t a melancholic or despairing hope for a return to an idealised “what was”. In Bloch’s idea, it is an active “becoming”.

I know you leave, it’s too long overdue
For far too long I’ve had nothin’ new to show to you
Goodbye dry eyes, I watched your plane fade off west of the moon
And it felt so strange to walk away alone

There’s no regrets
No tears goodbye

Rush, T. 1968. No Regrets.


Notes from a place of resistance


Posted by hallymk1

These notes were written whilst listening to Rave Tapes by Mogwai and this alt-J performance on npr.

I attended a seminar in Brighton on Thursday called Resisting Neoliberal Education: Alternative Systems, Discourse and Practice. My notes and thoughts from the event follow.

ONE. In the round-table introductions I realised that of the 15 attendees, I only knew three people. That means there are 11 other stories of resistance in the room. That’s a lot of new potential energy and possibility for #solidarity and association, and also hope.

TWO. In the roundtable Stephen O’Brien from Cork spoke about how he had written a triptych on learning outcomes, and made a point about how certain language and meaning and ways of working in the world get written into culture so that resistance becomes difficult. Contesting the hegemonic power of learning outcomes in educational practice and theory situates us asymmetrically against Pearson Education and their absolute obsession with learning outcomes as an educational business model. It situates us against the idea that aligning high stakes testing and educational improvement is a form of economic patriotism. It situates us against the commodification of educational relationships through data-mining and learning analytics. It situates us with Walter Stroup and his “rebellion” against standardisation. In this I am reminded that the detail is really important, and that life histories of specific technologies (follow the technology), fiscal innovations (follow the money), and pedagogical innovations (follow the technique), enable us to see who has voice and power. Pace Marx (footnote 4, Chapter 15, Volume 1 of Capital), we might note:

[a specific innovation] reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.

Critical in understanding and critiquing capitalist social relations and alternatives to it, is a focus on how learning appears to us, and how it appears to those with power [or their power-over our power-to-do].

TWO. In the roundtable, someone, and it’s remiss of me to forget who, spoke of the “unattractive nature of academic life” in its current anxiety-hardened, precarious form. I think that collectively we were questioning the representation and formation of the University and the consequences for learning and teaching (as opposed to the student experience).

THREE. Several people spoke about the idea of the public good. Rarely did we mention co-operativism or the Commons. I think that in re-imagining the University inside a new form of sociability, this is a rich space of potential and possibility. Joss Winn’s blog-post on re-imagining pulls a lot of this together, including Mike Neary’s work on student-as-producer and the genesis of the Social Science Centre. There is also work to be done for us in thinking through and living the possibilities for transitional alternatives. I think that it is important to see alternative forms as transitional and pedagogic, and not to be fetishized. I reconsidered this in the face of Nadia Edmond’s (firm-but-fair) challenge to me about whether spaces like the Social Science Centre were alternatives that were sustainable or whether they are (my words) simply academic philanthropy. I also reconsidered this in light of remembering that the Really Open University had deliberately used the phrase “re-imagining the University.” The critical thing for me about the Social Science Centre is that it forms a laboratory for co-operative production, consumption and distribution that is about democratic organising principles (governance) for both the Centre and its activities, and its content (e.g. childcare arrangements, curricula, events). Whilst the current Know-How course might be represented inside some universities and through some courses, there are some “scholars” who do not wish to/cannot undertake such a course inside. Equally, the content and curriculum is co-negotiated and produced in a way that is different from the bulk of curricula inside. Finally, the production, consumption and distribution of the curriculum circulates inside-and-through the organisation of the Social Science Centre and informs its governance.

FOUR. A sense of work inside/outside the University was seen as pivotal in resisting or defining something different. This reminded me of Elise Thorburn’s brilliant article on autonomy and the Edufactory, in which she writes about the power-to-do that is situated in three strands: first, inside general assemblies as democratic governance and organisation; second, through militant research done in partnership; finally, through work done in public. I think this is the key to much of our re-imagining; that it is done in public as a democratic act of militant research. Someone at the seminar spoke of activist knowledge that “rows in behind”, as an act of solidarity and love. Through such acts, as a kind of solidarity economy, we might enable the amplification of alternatives as an asymmetrical definition of possible forms of sociability beyond the market. Here we might engage with the idea that no alternative is beyond the structural domination of capitalist social relations, but that we might take them to be transitional through a pedagogic appreciation of what it is to be in/against/beyond. But this takes courage and faith. Not to fetishise the institution, which is itself alienating, but to look for points of solidarity.

FIVE. Over lunch Steve O’Brien used the word monastic to describe much of his recent academic work. I love that term. I feel that in the aftermath of the moments of rage and impotence in the academic (staff and student) protests of 2010-11, for personal and academic reasons I became monastic, returning to theory and harvesting historical and material and global stories of resistance and alternatives and mending myself. There is something here about asking whether it is possible to rebuild oneself in the face of systemic alienation, as a brutal form of therapy, in order to embody one’s position. In order to return to a room where people can meet to listen and speak and voice effective demands.

SIX. Throughout I was reminded of fellowship and the links between fellowship, liberation and de/legitimation. This made me reconsider why I keep returning to this quote about liberation, the individual, the community and association, from Marx in The German Ideology:

The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one’s mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.

This is about collective and invisible work in the name of counter-narratives and not fixed alternatives.

SEVEN. Ciaran Sugrue spoke about the defence mechanisms that individuals have as “multiple scripts” that are played out differentially depending on context. Steve O’Brien reminded me that F Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” These two interventions made me reconsider our defences against a world that is increasingly abstract and polarised around inequality and agony. This is especially so where Her Majesty’s Opposition in the UK, the Labour Party, accept an hour-glass economy and the fact that some people will be losers in a globalised economy. Here we might again ask what does it mean to be inside/outside and how are our multiple scripts or defences, acts of self-harm or self-care? The work of Frantz Fanon on cognitive dissonance is important for me here, especially in Black Skin, White Masks.

EIGHT. Throughout I had the work of Anselm Jappe on my mind, and the asymmetry between humane values and the production and accumulation of value. In spite of my knowing that sociability, solidarity, fidelity, courage, hope, whatever, are produced and reproduced inside-and-against private property and value, I am reminded that Jappe wrote:

The difficulty of living in a society dominated by value necessarily leads to the creation of all sorts of ideologies to explain the suffering caused by such a society and that enable the subjects of labour to project onto others the qualities that they are forced to expel from themselves (e.g., “laziness,” “emotions”). (p. 11)

But that in spite of this historically, material formation of values:

even value itself is not a “total” structure. It is “totalitarian” in the sense that it aspires to turn everything into a commodity. But it will never be able to because such a society would be completely unliveable (there would no longer, for example, be friendship, love, the bringing up of children, etc.). The necessity for value to expand pushes it towards destroying the entire concrete world and at every level, economic, environmental, social and cultural. The critique of value does not only foresee an economic crisis of unprecedented dimensions but also the end of an entire “civilisation” (if one can call it that). Even so, human life has not always been based on value, money and labour, even if it seems that some kind of fetishism has existed everywhere. (p. 12)

NINE. It feels important to me to have access to what someone called “resources for resistance”, to situate my work fixed in space-time, against those of others. I hope we can create such a collective thing. Someone else spoke of sharing stories and building life histories as a means of “keeping each other’s fire burning.” These are forms of Luddism. Forms of hacking. Forms of re-imagining.

TEN. I was reminded of Allyson Pollack’s work on an NHS Reinstatement Bill, as an act of courage, public justice and hope. I wondered about the possibility less for a manifesto, and more for a free, public Higher Education Re-instatement Bill.

ELEVEN. I read of Chris Hedges’ work on capitalism’s sacrifice zones, and the idea that “There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed.” Moreover, these zones are deliberately sacrificed in the pursuit of profit: “These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed”. This reminded me that as Ellen Meiksins-Wood argued:

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.

In this she saw hope because:

the universalization of capitalism not just as a measure of success but as a source of weakness… It can only universalize its contradictions, its polarizations between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. Its successes are also its failures… Now capitalism has no more escape routes, no more safety valves or corrective mechanisms outside its own internal logic… the more it maximizes profit and so-called growth – the more it devours its own human and natural substance.

This forced me to re-think:

  • Are there other ways of producing knowing? What authority does HE/do universities have?
  • In a knowing world, rather than a knowledge economy, what does the curriculum mean?
  • Does a pedagogy of production need to start with the principle that we need to consume less of everything? What does this mean for ownership of the institution at scale [local, regional, global]?
  • How can student voices help in the struggle to re-invent the world?
  • What is to be done?

TWELVE. I don’t think I used the word neoliberalism once. I realised that I have dropped it from my vocabulary as inappropriate. For me the issue is Capital and Labour, and neoliberalism was just a global, political economic, phase we were going through. This is about hegemony and counter-narratives. Here the work of William Robinson on global capitalism is important to me. Equally important is finding ways in which we can take the energy of the dominant discourse and (akin to a form of t’ai chi) displace it or use it against itself, by revealing stories of inhumanity and inequality and courage. Through an appeal to what it is to be a concrete human rather than an abstraction.


On my inaugural


Posted by hallymk1

So. Here we are.

It was my Professorial Inaugural yesterday. There is a slides/audio recording of it here (my jibber-jabber starts around 5 minutes in, but there is a rolling slideshow beforehand. If you watch this, do so whilst listening to Airbag by Radiohead). There is a recording of the audio on SoundCloud here.

Emma Dyer, Ian Pettit, Mark Hulett and David Kernohan made all this possible, and I am immensely grateful to them.

I am also immensely grateful to all those who travelled from far-and-wide to listen to me. This has been a difficult few years and to see so many people I love in the same space was wonderful, amazing, hopeful. I hope you all know how much you mean to me.

There is a collection of stuff related to the idea of 2+2=5.

ONE. I asked for people to contribute to a Spotify playlist, rooted in the words: education; faith; mass intellectuality; courage; solidarity; love; University; crisis. The final-cut playlist is at 225lols, but the collaborative Spotify playlist is still live at prof_lols.

My friend Richard Snape wrote a lovely piece about his music choices here.

TWO. My friend Andrew Clay created a teaser trailer at 225lols.

THREE. There are some tweets captured at the hashtag #225lols. I have Storified these here.

FOUR. The event was framed around the idea of collective work. I wanted to argue that we are persistently told that this abstract world, defined by capitalist social relations, is all we have. That in the face of environmental and social despoliation and degradation, all we can have is rooted in a marketised world. That all we can have or aspire to is rooted in a world of limited, value-driven commodities. That our common humanity is irrelevant in the face of the need to produce and accumulate value. This is a world that is defined through labour, but which negates the humanity of those who labour. This idea, that we have to believe that 2+2=5, irrespective of what our common sense tells us, is psychologically damaging. As we fall under the rule of money, we are told that all we can have is not a commons. I wanted to ask, in the face of this dissonance, how might we re-imagine the University? Can we reclaim our power-to-do in this world, against their power-over us?

After the fact, I was asked two key questions. The first was what can we/a lecturer do? My answer, simply, is to seek spaces for solidarity inside/outside the University. To look for cracks and spaces for solidarity and to associate around that solidarity. To push-back against the market, which is in fact about the accumulation and expansion of their power-over the world. Inside, I stated that people should join the union, because collective labour is a space of strength and safety. Inside, I asked people to work with students and colleagues as academic labourers or scholars, on producing rather than simply consuming the world. Work collectively and care about that work.

Courage in being for ourselves.

Faith in each other, and our concrete realities.

Justice in an unjust world.

This emerges from the idea of collective work. Collective work, rather than individuated, entrepreneurial, technologized work that leaves us vulnerable and at risk, is critical. If you want to read more about collective work, consider reading this on collective empowerment, or this on Hong Kong’s umbrella movement, or this on Autonomy in Brazil, or this on the Zapatista Little Schools or this on the Social Science Centre, or this on the Digilit Leicester Project, or this on DMU’s Policy Commission.

The second question was about the nature of the rupture in the fabric of space/time that I referred to as the secular crisis. I see the recalibration of capitalism after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, with the subsequent restructuring of the idea of all-meaningful-life-as-work and all-life-as-the-production-of-value, and the inevitable re-structuring of the University that followed, as a rupture. However, I see this as hopeful, because it forces us to see through the charade of there is no alternative. Because for a majority of people, it is a charade. A form of living death. At once, the rupture in the fabric of space/time enables us to see the inequities that emerge, and to question whether collectively we need to outsource our lives to the market, or whether there might be another way. A way for us to take ownership of the production of this world and our lives. A way for us to push back or refuse the dissonance of 2+2=5. A way to use the secular, systemic crisis of capitalism to look for an alternatives. To look for a transition through co-operation.

And that possibility is a truly beautiful thing.

Hope that we might make something different.

Peace.

 


on chronic fatigue and being increasingly anxiety-hardened


Posted by hallymk1

You do it to yourself, you do/And that’s what really hurts

Is that you do it to yourself/Just you and no one else

You do it to yourself

Radiohead. 1995. Just.

 

That there/That’s not me

I go/Where I please

I’m not here/This isn’t happening

I’m not here/I’m not here

Radiohead. 2000. How to Disappear Completely.

Since my Mom passed in April 2013 the tinnitus has been dreadful. The tinnitus, and the sinuses scarified. From my ears across my cheeks, and running above my eyebrows. My sinuses feeling like someone had been scraping at them with a rusty spoon. And so fucking, cripplingly full of something. Pressure. Unnaturally full and irritated. So that the something, the pressure in my sinuses and the tinnitus and the soreness merged. Merging in my sinuses with a constant ringing in my ears. And a desperate, cloying, black fatigue in my soul.

A desperate fatigue in my soul that made living and surviving a trial. Because when you are used to being a bit manic, in always moving and never sitting and never being but always doing, fatigue is the very worst thing. The inability to do and to prove myself over-and-over again. The forced labour of sitting with myself, and imagining my bodily failure, the realisation of my uselessness, rather than the joy of being still. The end of days.

And I remembered that my breakdown of September 2000 was preceded and signalled by a virus, and triggered by the fury of living and working too fast, and accompanied by an acute attack of vertigo, with terrible chronic fatigue and sinusitis following in its wake. The days spent bedridden and railing at my mortality and the weakness of my flesh. The days when walking across the bedroom to the toilet was exhausting. And the panic that followed and swarmed from December 2000 to, well, now. The insidious panic that swarmed and found the cracks in my psyche, and found a home in the cracks inside, and refused to leave. And the panic that was always there inside; until the inside cracked under the pressure of a manic life; so that the panic leached out from the cracks and into the pores; so that no amount of running could sweat it out; and no amount of scrubbing could remove the stain.

And I forgot that I spent five years recovering. That I spent five years trying to reboot my health and my life. A kind of forced recovery to be what I had been, only minus the panic and the dark thoughts and the brooding. Five years of trying to recover my fitness; by walking and t’ai chi; never knowing whether this five mile walk would leave me bedridden for days or just okay. The apparently intermittent nature of the fatigue meaning that today’s walk up five flights of stairs might leave me feeling fine tomorrow; but tomorrow’s walk up five flights of stairs might leave me unable to work or think or do or be for days on end.

Bedridden. Russian Roulette every day. Every. Desperate. Day.

And always, I now realise, the tinnitus and the scarified sinuses were a signal in amongst the noise of the fatigue. But I treated them all as separate and compartmentalised. The body and the mind compartmentalised. So I saw an acupuncturist for my sinuses. And I saw a counsellor and a therapist for my panic. And I saw a GP for my vertigo. And I did t’ai chi and I read self-help books and I walked in order to find the solution. The one thing that would reboot me; the one thing that would heal me; the solution that would help me to start over again.

And it took until the Saturday of the Edgbaston test in the 2005 Ashes before I knew I would recover and be okay. A walk on Moel Siabod. Falling into a peat bog up to my middle; then going in up to my neck; then being pulled out by Wheelist Wheels and Jane and Jo; then refusing to turn around but climbing the mountain. Fuck you. And the next day being able to get up and watch England draw level with Australia; with no ill-effects. Just patched up enough to go on my way. Although maybe I thought this was less a puncture repair than a full service and ready-to-go. Warier for sure, but back. Back.

And I swore to myself that I would never drive myself to a breakdown again. That if I broke again, I simply couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to cope with the psychological damage again. That if I broke again then I would kill myself. Because the effort it had taken to rebuild myself; to live again; had been my everything. For five long years. And frankly it was too much.

The scars were so deep so that my truth was that another breakdown equalled game over. I couldn’t face those inner daemons running feral again. I was not. I am not. Strong enough.

And in Sick and Tired, Nick Read argues that chronic fatigue, accompanied by tinnitus, irritable bowel, sinusitis and whatever else

is another personal strategy to cope with the contradictions and complexities of contemporary life… to give up the struggle altogether… a state of sheer exhaustion, apathy and inertia, like somebody has pulled the plug and drained out the very essence of life.

He argues that patient histories reveal the extraordinarily-driven nature of sufferers’ everyday lives, focused upon exacting personal standards for performance and high levels of responsibility throughout a life. The result is an overextended, overcommitted lifestyle that is breathless and manic and focused on perfection. And in that period up to September 2000 I had been running an education and technology project in 11 universities, and living in Darlington, and trying to write and to publish, and setting-up and chairing the Walsall football supporters’ trust, a six-hour round trip away, and trying to maintain an active life beyond. Too much responsibility; with everything having to be 100 per cent and perfect; or I was a failure. And my body having asked politely for a while, through increasing levels of tiredness and that inner voice that says “slow down” and the occasional bouts of dizziness, eventually shut down. Apparently out-of-the-blue. Like being hit by a bus.

Only the warning signs were there all along. But I ignored them and my inner voice and kept running. Because what else was there to do? As Read argues

Such people often sleep poorly and seem quite literally to work themselves to a standstill, but instead of being able to negotiate some help or relief in some of their roles, they let their illness do the negotiation for them.

And in the aftermath I had blood tests for the fatigue. I sat for hours with a towel over my head breathing in a steam bath to try to clear my sinuses. And I wondered why I was breathless, and never considered that it was the weight of responsibility and despair settled in my chest. And I waited for the dust to settle and my soul to recover. Just enough.

And recently I have been thinking so much about that time of my life. As I tried to reboot. Because the aftermath of my Mom’s passing was accompanied by such awful vertigo, and such dismal tinnitus, and such pressure in my face, and the cloying fatigue that makes existing a trial and survival from day to day the only thing. So that hope was gone; run out of town by the return of chronic fatigue. And the frustration was that I had forgotten the lessons of the last time/the first breakdown.

I had forgotten that the responsibility of sorting power of attorney and end-of-life decisions for my Mom, and working our whether my Dad and sister were okay, and liaising with consultants, and communicating with a disparate family, and driving 50 miles twice a week to visit a critically ill relative, and writing project bids, and managing a team, and presenting at conferences, and preparing an application for a Chair, and being a National Teaching Fellow, and writing, and being in therapy, and living my life, and riding my bike, and being a husband, and everything else, would rub my soul until it bled. Rub my soul and the fabric of my being until they bled.

And in the bleeding the hope and meaning bled out too. As Read argues of “Jack”

He had worked all his life to compensate for the feeling that he was never good enough, but in doing so he created a false sense of self that had no real meaning. Confronted with that dreadful realisation, he suffered a physical, emotional and spiritual collapse.

The focus on spiritual is critical. My chronic fatigue was more than physical exhaustion. It was and is the exhaustion of my soul. My tinnitus is my soul ringing in my ears. My soul singing at the pain of it all. And my sinuses, inflamed, are a brutal reminder of my despair at and in the world. Forcing me in combination to ask, who am I? Do any of the things I have achieved or done or been really matter? And in the midst I lost hope. Laid bare, all that was left was the courage of an eight year-old boy to get up each day and to try to be. The courage of an eight year-old forcing the forty-three year-old to confront his lack of faith in himself. Courage and faith before hope. And maybe courage and faith before justice and hope. The hope that peace will follow.

And there have been a series of qualitative shifts. As I read Sick and Tired and realised that until my emotional and spiritual health was rebalanced I would not and could not be well. The recognition that I needed a better solution than this pill or that nasal irrigation or this nasal spray. That maybe it wasn’t about what I put into me but what I removed. And about how the forty-three year-old could ask for what he needed so that the eight year-old could be released.

So I realised that my NHS Doctor is amazing but that medication and rest were not a viable, long-term prescription. That chronic fatigue and sinusitis needed a more holistic treatment. And that I needed to stop outsourcing my health and welfare to various doctors or therapists, and to stop fetishizing the NHS or doctors or therapists in the process. That I have been ill for 14 years, or maybe for 43, and I am at one end of the bell curve, and need to own that for myself.

So here was the prescription and the thinking and the plan of action.

I need the anti-depressants (I think) and I trust my NHS Doctor, and the Flixonase seems to work, so let’s keep that for a while.

I was recommended to see another NHS Doctor who didn’t think that my sinus problems were food related. This didn’t seem to be right. My gut was telling me that this was not right. But I decided that I needed to push for an ear, nose and throat referral, so that I could get a scan of my sinuses, so that I could eliminate any physical/anatomical issues. So I pushed.

I was recommended to see a private GP about potential food intolerance. And she took a history and listened and recommended some IgG tests. And she told me about the lack of peer-reviewed double-blind research. And she told me to go away and read about it. And she told me to talk to peers. And she treated me like an intelligent man. And she told me that none of this would work if I wasn’t working on my core relationships, including with myself. And she told me that we needed to stop putting things in and consider taking things out. And the interesting thing is that my gut was telling me to stop eating wheat and dairy, and the tests told me the same, plus soya. And my gut was telling me that after 25 years as a vegetarian, I needed meat. Organic, high-quality meat. And it interests me that all along my gut told me these things, and that Joss Winn gave me the courage to back my gut, when he told me to see the GP and to get the tests done “because you’ve been ill for 14 fucking years Richard, and this way you’ll have some more information to make decisions about your life.”

And I found a new faith in my friends.

And I found a new faith in my therapist. A qualitatively new faith in my therapist.

And I found the beginnings of a new faith in myself. That I could ask for help and be assertive in asking for what I need.

And within two weeks of my wheat-free, dairy-free, soya-free, egg-free, beer-free, organic meat-and-fish loaded, fresh fruit and vegetables, oat-cake/rice-cake and hummus diet, my sinuses are 70 per cent better. And I’m riding again. And the tinnitus is so much better.

And what I am left with is the pain in my sinuses when I overdo it. And this happened this week. When I rode for the third time and then ignored the eight year-old who said “we’re tired. No more for now. Stretch and a bath.” So I did some weights and had a bath, and then walked too far the next day. And then was hit with fatigue and someone/me scraping at my sinuses and the ringing in my ears. Hit full-on by the same bus. So that I struggled to get out of bed. I ignored the voice and was made to pay. Bedridden, just for a day.

And my therapist told me that I sounded manic. To calm down. And she was right. I could feel my circuitry being overloaded, so that the wrong music on the radio threatened panic. So that the drilling outside threatened overload in my cortex. So that my own internal relations were stretched and skewed. So that I almost lost faith in myself as the daemons ran feral in my mind. Because I had never sat with my fatigue. I had never respected the inner voice of the eight year-old; to care for him; to self-care. I had always run and run and run and broken. The drive to proceed and exceed tripping an urge to be always-on.

And now, 24 hours later, the panic and the overload has subsided because I have found the courage to reassert faith in myself. To get some justice for the eight year-old by honouring his voice in the future, and to give myself some hope that even in the darkest moments there might be some peace. I had thought about what I do to myself, and how that hurts. How that is a form of self-harm. So that if I trust my gut and the inner voice I might avoid foreclosing on the future.

<breathe>Courage, faith, justice, hope, peace <breathe>.

And I realised that I am increasingly anxiety-hardened. This is my wisdom. In the midst of the renewed panic of “fuck, fuck, fuck, what if I break again?” I realised that I would survive, and that it would not be the end of my days.

This I see afresh how this recent fatigue is a form of self-harm. A witnessing of my own self-harm. The realisation of my own inability to self-care, at times. And it has shown me that I need to listen and respect my self. That I need to stop repeating my past in my present. That my fatigue and sinusitis and the fucking ringing in my ears are reminders of past trauma that I don’t have to reproduce time-and-again.

And I begin to wonder, as I am anxiety-hardened, what it means to be anxious inside a system that reproduces and actively encourages anxiety. What does it mean to be already anxious inside the anxiety-machine? What does it mean to suffer with chronic fatigue inside a system that encourages and demands and accumulates overwork and always-on and “fitter, happier and more productive”?

I feel that this is increasingly about values and humanity and our innate human usefulness and solidarity, in open and politicised opposition to the universe of value production and accumulation. And the recognition that this is itself about/a manifestation of power and powerlessness. Fatigue and sinusitis and tinnitus as a concrete manifestation of despair and powerlessness and abstraction. As Maggie Turp argues in Hidden Self-Harm, the issue pivots around enabling voice, and voices in association, to be found and heard and respected. Respected in faith and with courage. And this is a spiritual reckoning, and one that is less about outsourcing the power-to create our lives so that living becomes survival, and more about taking ownership for the decisions and realities of our own self-care.

And yet this self-care has to happen inside a system that reproduces our powerlessness over our own use or worth or value or time or activities. A system that reflects and echoes past traumas, which are rooted in our previous powerlessness. And these acts of powerlessness are repeated ad nauseam until our souls bleed. Our anxieties around our performance and our labour and our value are a symptom of our distress at being and doing inside this systemic anxiety machine.

Here I return to the emotional dissonance in our souls, between our wish for a concrete, useful life, and the abstraction of everyday work.

The constancy of the destruction of our concrete world in the face of our enforced and enclosed abstracted lives for work, make those lives “increasingly muted”. How is it possible to become for ourselves, as opposed to being for the abstract destruction of our concrete selves in the countless self-harming activities we witness and reproduce and ignore every single day? How is it possible to end these culturally-acceptable self-harming acts, every, single day?

And Donald Winnicott writes in the Concept of the Healthy Individual that

Health here includes the idea of tingling life and the magic of intimacy. All these things go together and add up to a sense of feeling real and being, and of the experiences feeding back into the personal psychical reality, enriching it and giving it scope.

This is not my manic overload, or my medicated sinuses, or my outsourced intervention, so that I can be productive in an abstract sense. It is my concrete, humane power-to listen to my gut instinct and to stop poisoning my body with processed and refined foods. To listen to my eight year-old as my governor, and to respect and have faith in what he needs. To attempt self-care as an anxious person inside the anxiety machine, by practising being true, necessary and kind to myself. To take a more wise, anxiety-hardened path that accepts my good enough nature and my usefulness and my worth, and refuses the clamour to abstract and foreclose on my future. That seeks to produce another kind of life. Productive of values rather than value. Productive of courage and faith and justice and peace, rather than the ringing of my soul in my ears.

To stop scarifying my sinuses. As an act of self-care. A pedagogical act rooted in self-care.

To stop. As an act of self-care. A pedagogical act rooted in self-care.

To be. As an act of self-care. A pedagogical act rooted in self-care.

You can try the best you can. The best you can is good enough.

Radiohead. 2000. Optimistic.


On the non-sense of an abstracted higher education


Posted by hallymk1

There is a chapter in Eugene Lyons’ Assignment in Utopia, in which he argued that the processes of industrialisation that underpinned Stalin’s five-year plans were used to recalibrate the world so that two plus two could be said to equal five. Lyons argues that in the apparent social and economic scarcity, enforced ideologically through production in a (State) capitalist system, a war mentality emerges that forces the pace of life for production. In this space, collectivised efficiency in economic production becomes the compelling motive, and one that was reinforced culturally, every single day and in every single act.

Optimism ran amuck. Every new statistical success gave another justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved. Every setback was another stimulus to the same policies. The slogan “The Five Year Plan in Four Years” was advanced, and the magic symbols “5-in-4” and “2 + 2 = 5” were posted and shouted throughout the land.”

The preliminary triumphs which evoked the slogan 2 + 2 = 5 were in many ways disastrous. They corroborated the taskmasters’ inherited conviction that any miracles could be worked through the sorcery of naked force.

For Lyons this was catastrophic in its implications for everyday life and for everyday sociability. A meaningful life is all but ended, as existence is structured around work to the point where even our very connection to our humanity and those of other human beings is mediated technologically or stripped from us as a commodity. Our very humanity is scrubbed out of our pores through the dehumanisation of labour and ideology, as we are told that there is no alternative.

But under the roar of industrialization life was increasingly muted. The modest indulgences of the year before seemed long, long ago and rather incredible. A full meal became life’s central preoccupation for the mass of the population. Overhead the heavy artillery thundered and spat fire; in the trenches of everyday existence people stepped cautiously, doused their lights and spoke in whispers. The laconic announcements of executions lost their power to interest, let alone move people.

And for Lyons, this was the nature of power viewed through the lens of scarcity rather than of humanity and humane values viewed as abundance. This was the triumph of a social life rooted in the accumulation of value, where the market, planning, efficiency, the collectivised individual and the individual collectivised, were mechanisms for the circulation and expansion of power. In this space, socialisation becomes an abstracted form of psychosis.

The communist millennium seemed to a few faithful just over the horizon—but they were the few who wielded the power of the state and could enforce their distortions upon a sixth part of the globe. It was a mood which stopped at nothing to attain its objectives.

The production of everyday life defined, legislated and regulated, in order to reproduce power for the few. The organising principles for this life, culturally, politically, legally structured and reproduced in every single moment of every single day, in order to make the abstract definition and domination of a particular worldview, our collective, everyday, concrete reality.

And Orwell echoed this dystopian logic; this despairing logic; the logic of anti-hope and anti-humanism; the logic that is their power-to reproduce the world in order to maintain their power-to reproduce the world; the logic of scarcity and not abundance; the logic of the use of technology and information to create a harmonious society.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable — what then?

And I feel this as cognitive dissonance every single day. When I am told that our work and our everyday needs to focus on finding ways to help staff to monitor and intervene in learning. To monitor and intervene in learning. Like it’s a dispute. Or a technique. Or a piece of fine-tuning. When I read that education might help us in “determining whether technology can be used to engineer a more harmonious society”. The recalibration of labour inside education as an industry, rooted in the production of value, and through corporate paradigms that are defined around scarcity of resources and the reiteration of intervention and monitoring, so that students and academics can bear their individuated roles as entrepreneurs. The self-harming, entrepreneurial behaviour rooted in scarcity and the expansion of value, and the forgetting of values.

And all the while this drip-feeds itself into my social life. What feels like a desperate attempt to cling on to an abstract perception of normal. What we hoped and believed might come to pass. To make #learnervoice, #edtech, #highered, #digitalliteracy, #yourhashtaghere, more than normal. To make #whatever matter. To make #whatever count. For it to be more than #meh, because our educational labour might set us free, if only we worked hard enough and raised enough debt and accepted that their past and their present foreclosed on our future. And never to question what #whatever counts for, when all sociability forces us to conform or be monitored and intervened. And never to question what is the point exactly of a hegemonic view of #highered in the face of #savegaza. Never to push for an alternative, counter-narrative of #highered, which might be made less abstract because of the concrete reality of #savegaza.

So I read of a new Project that “aims to inspire young girls to enter male dominated careers, by featuring women who can act as role models alongside neat news stories and other features”, whilst I recognise that this just leaves us feeling depleted because “True solidarity cannot pay lip service to feminist, de-colonial, anti-racist projects while maintaining individual investments in a system that works for only the most privileged bodies”. And I wonder if this the best that we can do? To prepare our lives for better or more efficient work through #whatever? And here I feel a deep echo of what Josh Ellis describes as being broken-hearted.

Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I clicked on a video in my Twitter feed that showed mutilated children being dragged from the streets of Gaza. And I started sobbing — just sobbing, sitting there in my bed with the covers around my waist, saying “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” over and over to the empty room. Dead children, torn to bits. And then it was time for…what? Get up, eat my cereal, go about my day? Every day?

This feels like the worst kind of dissonance. Two worlds set apart as abstract and concrete, as value and values, revealed as a deeply-held grief that I always knew was in my heart, but that has ruptured so that no amount of papering over can hide the fact. That I get up and do the things that the totalitarian system demands of me, in order to exist, because trying not to is overwhelmingly marginalising. Because I see that 2+2 equals something. But what? And this totalitarianism morphs and flows into every crevice of life, attempting to reassemble not just my labour, but my humanity, and my friendship, courage, fidelity, respect, dignity, solidarity, faith, love, into a structure that accumulates power-over. This is the destruction of how I view my concrete world through its abstraction inside capitalist work; the attempt to hold in place the reality that our hegemonic view of #whatever trumps our actual ability to save Gaza or Aleppo, or to close Gitmo, or to understand the oil and gas implications of the Ukraine, or to address fears about the leaking of methane from under the Arctic. This is the world in which the power of the rule of value can be used to try to intimidate academics to remain silent. Because hegemonic narratives reinforced as power-over, force us to self-harm in our silence. The abstraction of everyday life under the rule of value makes us complicit in the destruction of our collective concrete world.

And we witness and reproduce this everyday in the reality that we cannot save anything really, and anyway there is a cricket Test Match to play, and a Commonwealth to game, and because we must have #lightsout for the war to end all wars. And if only social life could be more efficient because there is not enough to go around, unless we continually expand the abstracted way that we view the world. And dominate others in the process. And deny the concrete reality of our relationships. So that, as Tiqqun wrote in the cybernetic hypothesis, this becomes “the most consequential anti-humanism, which pushes to maintain the general order of things, all the while bragging that it has transcended the human.”

And so all we are left with is the kettle or lamentation or accepting, as Winston Smith must in 1984, that 2+2=5.

Unconsciously, he traces “2+2=5” in the dust on the table, and thinks of Julia. They saw each other once after being released, purely by chance. He followed her on her walk, always a few feet behind. Eventually she stopped and he put his arm around her waist, but felt revulsion at the thought of making love to her. She did not respond; her body felt rigid and lifeless. They sat down on a bench with some distance between them. After some time, she told him, “I betrayed you.” He told her the same. They agreed, through a distant conversation, that there are some things they can do to you that make you think and care only about yourself. After that, it is impossible to ever feel the same way towards one who you loved.

A scarcity of value, or an abundance of love? Josh Ellis writes that

I don’t believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech, or even awareness. I think the only thing that can save us is us. I think we need to find ways to tribe up again, to find each other and put our arms around each other and make that charm against the dark. I don’t mean in any hateful or exclusionary way, of course. But I think like minds need to pull together and pool our resources and rage against the dying of the light. And I do think rage is a component that’s necessary here: a final fundamental fed-up-ness with the bullshit and an unwillingness to give any more ground to the things that are doing us in. To stop being reasonable. To stop being well-behaved. Not to hate those who are hurting us with their greed and psychopathic self-interest, but to simply stop letting them do it. The best way to defeat an enemy is not to destroy them, but to make them irrelevant.

The constancy of the destruction of our concrete world in the face of our enforced and enclosed abstracted lives for work, make those lives “increasingly muted”. How is it possible to become for ourselves, as opposed to being for the abstract destruction of our concrete selves in the countless self-harming activities we witness and reproduce and ignore every single day? How is it possible to end these culturally-acceptable self-harming acts, every, single day? How do we refuse the reduction of our humanity to just another commodity in the market, or to #whatever? How is it possible to make sense of an abstracted #highered in the face of the concrete reality of #savegaza?


Notes on the University as anxiety machine


Posted by hallymk1

There is a point that Joss Winn and I make in a critique of academic labour that is against hypostatizing labour as ‘identity’ because this can only lead either to learned helplessness in the face of governmentality or performativity, or to resistance based on recapturing a golden age of labour. The argument here is that inside the University as it is restructured for value, and as it is recalibrated as a means of production, academics and students are separated and exploited through their abstract labour. Even worse, this separation afflicts and undermines the relationships that emerge between those with tenure (who are transformed into the impacted), and the precariously employed graduate student or post-doc, or the undergraduate who is forced into a precarious existence rooted in unpaid academic labour that is disciplined through a financialised existence. This precarious, unpaid academic labour is grounded in the abstract production of first, notes, coursework, exams, projects, groupwork, and second, of entrepreneurial skills and capacities, and digital literacies. This precarious work takes the monitoring that is internalised inside universities through the growth of student satisfaction and future earnings and employability data, and around league tables, and around research impact, and force feeds the same levels of performance anxiety to its students. This is realised in the normalised surveillance of performance in class through attendance monitoring, learning analytics, retention dashboards and text-based reminders about work/labour/doing, and in the entrepreneurial demands of attending careers fairs and employability workshops and cv clinics, and in attempting to find the money to eat and live.

And all the while the labour of the professoriate is unhelpfully reified and acts not as a conduit for hope or courage, but as a container for disappointment and anxiety. This reminds me that Kate Bowles wrote a while back about why academics overwork. She compared the recalibration inside the university as an anxiety machine to that inside the peloton in pro-cycling as it is recalibrated around the leading cyclist, who maybe doping or have a better, quicker machine, or better nutrition, or better whatever. She wrote the following.

This is the story academics tell ourselves as we flip open the laptop on Sunday mornings: we tell ourselves that the boundarylessness of our time and service is a privilege and even a practice of freedom. Over and over I have heard academics say that they couldn’t bear to punch the electronic time clock as our professional colleagues do. But the alternative is the culture of deemed time: by flattering us with what looks like trust in the disposal of our modest obligations, the university displaces all responsibility onto us for the decisions we make about how much to give. There is the problem of imposing limits on ourselves.

This is why I’m finding Daniel Coyle’s book (co-written with pro cyclist whistleblower Tyler Hamilton) about the culture of doping such a thoughtful companion to this difficult time. In the past 24 months, armchair fans like me have asked why so many elite athletes took up performance enhancement, at such personal risk and cost.  The answer’s pretty simple, it turns out. In the Darwinian world of pro-cycling at the end of the 1990s, racing teams learned that the only way to level out competitive opportunity was to meet the standards set by the most committed. To ride within the limits of your own ability became naive, disloyal to the team, and uncompetitive. Young riders waited to be invited to join the inner circle who were doping, and accepted pills handed to them on the basis that it would make them healthier; team management understood and allowed this to happen, because results had become the currency for economic survival, not just for individual riders, but for vast whirling enterprises of sponsorship, employment and profit.

This book has made me think differently about the question of why academics overwork. I now think we don’t yet understand this as behaviour that is harmful to others, not just to ourselves. We overwork like cyclists dope: because everyone does it, because it’s what you do to get by, because in the moment we argue to ourselves that it feels like health and freedom.

This resonates for two reasons. The first is that, just as the high-performing athlete recalibrates the performance of those around her, and creates a productive new-normal, so the workaholic professor does the same. And the irony of my sitting here at 11.22pm writing this is not lost on me. And maybe this is because I am committed. And maybe this is a form of flight or a defence against the abstract pain of the world. Maybe it is a form of self-care, through which I am trying to make concrete how I feel about my past and my present. And maybe as Maggie Turp argues, this form of overwork and performance anxiety is a culturally acceptable self-harming activity. I am performance managed to the point where I willingly internalise the question “am I productive enough?”, which aligns with “am I a good academic?”, which aligns with “am I working hard enough”, which risks becoming a projection onto those around me of “are you working/producing enough?” My example is potentially toxic because being good enough in this productive space is never enough. My culturally acceptable self-harming activities militate against solidarity and co-operation that is beyond value. The defining, status-driven impulse is to increase my value as an entrepreneur, and to demonstrate that through the traces I leave in publications, or managing a team, or in leading research bids, or in blogging and emailing at all hours. And the toxicity reduces my/our immunity and leaves us addicted to our status as all that we have. And all that we have is a reified, anxiety-infused identity.

The second reason is that the high performing athlete is competing. We are locked into a system that leaves us all played out. The logic of competition inside capitalism is rooted in the production of value and the accumulation of surplus value, and this tends towards an ongoing technological arms race designed to give competitive edge. This arms race is rooted in time, and more especially the socially necessary labour time it takes to produce. If my neighbour can turnaround exam papers in four weeks but I can do it in three, or if she has time to produce two peer-reviewed papers but I can squeeze out three, and if I can get my team’s appraisals done in two weeks, and if my performance is based on making my labour time more efficient, then what are the implications for those around me? What are the implications for academic labour more generally, in the drive to reduce the socially necessary labour time it takes to valorise the labour of academics on a global scale?

We might also ask whether this drive both for performance and to make the labour of academics and students productive of value has implications for the work of precariously employed academic staff? Does the valorisation of this work and its co-option inside globalised circuits of capital disconnect those with tenure from those without? Does the valorisation process rooted in impact measures and knowledge exchange/transfer, and commercialisation, and entrepreneurship, mean that the work of the academic peloton is always recalibrated around the highest performing academic athlete? Is this why we do not see the professoriate resisting the financialisation of the university? Because they have a stake in the university as a generator of status and power; a stake in the transnational circuits of power that define their work? The only problem with grounding a concrete existence in the abstract and reified labour of reproducing power is that you fear that power to be transient and scarce and to be hoarded or defended. The defence of the scarcity of power and status amplifies and transmits anxiety; it projects anxiety throughout the academic peloton, reinforced through signalisation and dressage.

Elsewhere I wrote about the University as anxiety machine, where the projection of anxiety emerged through the fabric of relationships.

This is the dissolution of the University as a means for the domination/hegemony of a particular world view or a specific class. This is the dissolution of the University as a coercive space that is re-forged inside-and-against student-debt and impact and research excellence and analytics and employability and entrepreneurship. This is the dissolution of the University as the civil society of tenured professors versus casualised precariat.

I wonder if the University’s functions now are being redesigned so that they reproduce a sense of anxiety as a permanent state of exception inside teams and individuals. I wonder whether the focus on productive labour, on the socially necessary labour time of abstract academic work, and the entrepreneurial turn across higher education, each create an atmosphere of anxiety. I wonder whether the reproduction of an ambiance of anxiety is a co-operative endeavour that emerges from inside the University as a means of production that is governed by metrics, data and debt, and out of which value is scraped through the alienation of time. This reminds me of persistent inferiority and internalised responsibility, and of the shock doctrine that recalibrates what is possible.

Are defence or refusal possibilities inside the University as an anxiety machine? What is the psychic impact of: alienated labour; the disciplining of academic labour; the cognitive dissonance inherent in the contradictions of abstract/concrete labour; the rule of money? How do we learn to self-care as opposed to self-harm inside the University? One of the ways in which self-care might emerge is in looking at who is pushing back against financialisation and alienation, be that in casualised labour, or trades union anti-casualisation strategies, or through a precariat charter, or in actions like 3cosas, or in post-graduates for fair pay. These are not organisations of those with tenure, but they force us to consider both the university as anxiety/performativity machine and the idea of making opposition public, as an association of the dispossessed or impacted. They reignite the concrete/abstract relationship between higher education and the public.

This feels more important to me, in questioning the public role of my work, and in making my work feel concrete and about doing/being, rather than feeling abstract and for value. As a result, I begin to think about self-care in terms of my relationships to my public activities, and these are rooted in specific communities that have deliberation, a critique of work (rather than labour), and the idea of “the public” at their heart. The first is the DMU Policy Commission, which developed a charter of 100 ideas to change Britain, and which had a deliberative, co-operative, critical scholarly production process at its heart. The second is the Digilit Leicester Project, which has teacher agency and collegiality, not as a fetishized, aristocracy of labour, but as a means of self-empowerment, at its heart. The third is the Social Science Centre, which has a deeply politicised approach to relationship-building that is against academic dilettantism, and which is rooted in inclusive and co-operative production of the world. The question is whether and how these projects as activities or as doing, enable me to be in the world beyond my reified academic labour. Do they thereby enable me to overcome the concrete/abstract tensions that my labour produces and which are potentially projected as anxiety-inducing on those around me?


governing academic labour: on the circuit of impact


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Coercion through signalisation and dressage

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes of emergent military tactics focused upon the co-operation and the accumulation and co-ordination of co-operative, productive forces that Marx sees inside the factory.

Hence, the need to find a whole calculated practice of individual and collective dispositions, movements of groups or isolated elements, changes of position, of movement from one disposition to another; in short, the need to invent a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible segments whose basic unity was the mobile soldier with his rifle. The same problems arose when it was a question of constituting a productive force whose effect had to be superior to the sum of the elementary forces that composed it (p. 163).

Thus, the machinery of capitalism is constructed co-operatively to maximise the articulation or productive capacity and capability of the elementary parts from which it is composed. “Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 164). Foucault argues that this is done in three ways (pp. 164-7).

  1. The individual body becomes an element that can be placed, moved or articulated on others, so that its space-time co-ordination, rather than its humanity (courage, faith, hope, whatever), become fundamental.
  2. The chronological series (such as the circulation of production or money) that discipline must combine in order to form a composite time are also part of the machinery. The times of each element must be adjusted so that the maximum quantity of forces can be extracted and combined for an optimum outcome, or impact. “There is not a single moment of life from which cannot extract forces, providing one knows how to differentiate it and combine it with others” (p. 165).
  3. The carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command. The productive activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by the injunctions of those in power, which are internalised and do not need explanation. Here signalisation and dressage are critical, so that obedience is reproduced.

This then leads to four characteristics of individuality: cellular (distribution in space); organic (encoded in activities); genetic (in the accumulation of time); and combinatory (through the composition of forces). The outcomes of this disciplinary process are: drawing up tables; prescribing movements; imposing exercises; arranging tactics. This then enables a qualitative shift in the accumulation of outcomes, whether they are framed as money, value, impact, or more importantly power. This is the tension between the social contract and the desire of social groups for autonomy, and the disciplinary, militarised dream of subordination through coercion and through perpetual forms of training to docility.

TWO. Neoliberalism, pedagogy and power

This focus on power connects to John Holloway’s argument in How to Change the World Without Taking Power 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.

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.

I remembered this as I read Jehu tweet that:

Neoliberalism is not at all concerned about markets, but about concentration of power.

And that

Imposing a neoliberal regime on Mexico is just actually concentration of Mexico’s resources in Washington’s hands.

And that

This has nothing at all to do with “freeing markets from state control”, but freeing the productive forces from the Mexico state’s control.

And that

Every state tries to control its economy. For Washington, however, the world market is its economy.

This is about the production, circulation and accumulation of power, with the market as a lever to that end. This is less a project about marketisation and financialisation than it is about those tactics of signalisation and dressage that underscore the reproduction of power-over the world. Holloways argues that we cannot live in ignorance of the power relations that discipline our lives through the perpetual forms of activity and training, especially inside and through higher education, which coerce us. He argues for the positive creativity that emerges from the negativity of critique and from our “refusal of capital”, through the direct and active production of an alternative pedagogical terrain focused on doing rather than preparation for capitalist work. The recuperation of doing, as opposed to capitalist labour, and the development of our shared power-to create the world, rather than simply to maximise profit is central to this project. Critical here is a focus on power that is produced from processes which signal and that enforce dressage, by recalibrating the work of individuals co-operatively.

THREE. On the production and circulation of impact

Inside the University, impact signals compulsion that is itself self-harming behaviour, and then enforces dressage in the name of power. This point was made at Governing Academic Life by Michael Power, in his focus on the role of impact in acting as a form of governance over academic labour. He argued that impact was an open and public closure of what can be discussed and produced, in order that a governance/command structure for value production could be imposed. Here metrics and investment interact to forms a circuit of capital rooted in academic production, with that productive power of research being disciplined through signalisation that then imposes a form of dressage.

Power then argued that the really existing practices that emerged from the institutional recalibration around impact catalysed knowledge transfer and exchange, policies around public engagement and the co-option of the public by the private, the impact of impact on future earnings, and the use of data and analytics to drive future investment. Effectively the latter forms a complementary, data-driven disciplinary layer to the proposed credit default swaps and derivatives in student loans that drive the incorporation of higher education inside the circuits of transnational capital. For Power, these innovations then promised to deliver new dimensions of academic performance, which are revealed as: cellular (distribution in academic space, like the classroom and archive); organic (encoded in academic activities like research and scholarship); genetic (in the accumulation of academic time inside-and-beyond the university); and combinatory (through the composition of forces inside and through universities as associations of capitals). The outcomes of this disciplinary process are the production and accumulation of power over academic labour that is realised: through tables of performance that coerce competition; prescribing the movements of academics through data-driven investments and strategies for enterprise, like the Future Earnings and Employment Record; imposing exercises like knowledge transfer and exchange; and arranging tactics like the REF or the NSS. Thus, impact accounting is a new vector of managerial control of academic activity.

One critical point that Power made was about the way in which the terrain of research was shifting, in part driven by processes of financialisation across higher education. He argued that the circuit of research/impact inside the productive forces of the University was shifting from:

Research – Impact – Research

in which a research idea was measured and quantified for impact to underscore further research, to a point where impact was the catalyst for the circulation of research. Thus, systemically the cycle was shifting so that the circuit of research (production) was forced to align with the circuit of impact (money/finance). Critical here is the realisation of the circuit as:

Impact – Research – Impact or even Impact – Research – Impact’

This connects to Marx’s argument about the circulation of commodities in Volume 1 of Capital.

The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C-M-C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside of this form we find another specifically different form: M-C-M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially capital.

Now let us examine the circuit M-C-M a little closer. It consists, like the other, of two antithetical phases. In the first phase, M-C, or the purchase, the money is changed into a commodity. In the second phase, C-M, or the sale, the commodity is changed back again into money. The combination of these two phases constitutes the single movement whereby money is exchanged for a commodity, and the same commodity is again exchanged for money; whereby a commodity is bought in order to be sold, or, neglecting the distinction in form between buying and selling, whereby a commodity is bought with money, and then money is bought with a commodity. [2] The result, in which the phases of the process vanish, is the exchange of money for money, M-M. If I purchase 2,000 lbs. of cotton for £100, and resell the 2,000 lbs. of cotton for £110, I have, in fact, exchanged £100 for £110, money for money.

Now it is evident that the circuit M-C-M would be absurd and without meaning if the intention were to exchange by this means two equal sums of money, £100 for £100. The miser’s plan would be far simpler and surer; he sticks to his £100 instead of exposing it to the dangers of circulation. And yet, whether the merchant who has paid £100 for his cotton sells it for £110, or lets it go for £100, or even £50, his money has, at all events, gone through a characteristic and original movement, quite different in kind from that which it goes through in the hands of the peasant who sells corn, and with the money thus set free buys clothes. We have therefore to examine first the distinguishing characteristics of the forms of the circuits M-C-M and C-M-C, and in doing this the real difference that underlies the mere difference of form will reveal itself.

What, however, first and foremost distinguishes the circuit C-M-C from the circuit M-C-M, is the inverted order of succession of the two phases. The simple circulation of commodities begins with a sale and ends with a purchase, while the circulation of money as capital begins with a purchase and ends with a sale. In the one case both the starting-point and the goal are commodities, in the other they are money. In the first form the movement is brought about by the intervention of money, in the second by that of a commodity.

In simple circulation, C-M-C, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e., the form of money; but that same value now in the circulation M-C-M, or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay, more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.

Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh. [14] M-M’, money which begets money, such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the Mercantilists.

This final point is critical in our understanding of how the impact agenda, as a form of universal equivalent in academic practice, might become a form of power over academic labour. Through the attempts to start and end with impact, managerial control signals the forms of practice that are acceptable and also attempt to overcome the barriers to the accumulation of impact as it is realised in money, value and/or power. These barriers are reproduced and presented by academic labour’s intransigence in its cellular, organic, genetic, and combinatory characteristics, rooted in the humanity of co-operation rather than the inhumanity of coercive competition for value. Thus, systemically we see imposed: drawing up tables; prescribing movements; imposing exercises; arranging tactics. In an ideal world, such performance management would underscore the circuit of academic research in the form:

Impact – Impact’

Here, we would witness the constitution of a productive force whose effect would be superior to the sum of the elementary forces that composed it. This would be an overcoming of academic labour. It’s abolition rather than its governance, in the name of power. Yet power-over depends on the subjugation of living labour and the production/accumulation of value. This is a critical, systemic tension: the need for power-over labour, at the same time that its abolition is demanded. As I note elsewhere on the domination of merchants in higher education:

The links between commercial educational providers and universities, educators and students as producers and consumers of educational services, data and products, demonstrate power and dependency. This complex interdependency is not reducible to fetishized ideas of money via cost-savings or emancipation based on learning for a life of capitalist work. It links to ideas of the reproduction of capital within limits or barriers, and the current condition inside-and-against education demonstrates how crises re-establish the limits and conditions existing in the system as a totality and in the circuits of productive, money and commodity capital. Moreover, we are witnessing the attempt by finance and commercial capital to synchronise production with their own circuits. This is an uncomfortable symbiosis, as those of us engaged in a higher education that is being restructured by the dictates of finance capital and a new market can attest.

At issue is whether we can help students [society] to develop the analytical tools that enable them to understand the interdependencies of this world and thereby to critique power [and produce new forms of sociability]. Can we help them to change the world in the face of capital as the automatic subject, and against the dominance of our educational lives by finance and commercial capital?

I am left with some questions.

  • How might we use the circuit of impact, and the productive power of research, especially where it is connected to the pedagogic power of student-as-producer, to reveal the face of power?
  • How do we reveal the humanity of doing as a pedagogical act of resistance?
  • How might we reassert the role of production against the imperative for a circuit of Impact-Impact’ that works to negates research as an autonomous activity?
  • How might we reveal the tendency of finance capital to reduce the impact agenda to power-over living labour through dead labour incorporated in the circuit of impact?
  • How might we overcome the signalisation and dressage that forces academic self-harm?

NOTE: as Michael Power spoke about academic researchers as “impactees”, Andrew Mcgettigan noted that they/we might also be the “impacted.” In the process of trying to find spaces to refuse our objectification and alienation, the latter might offer a more grounded way of overcoming impact. In particular, the notion of being impacted is an act of doing that is against our subjecticity or our being. It reveals their power over our potential subjectivity. This is critically and qualitatively different to the alienating internalisation that emerges from our performativity as impactees. Describing the ways in which we are impacted  might offer a way into a radical subjectivity that is rooted in the production of new forms of critical knowledge in everyday life. Here we might coalesce alternatives to the ideological and material conditions of domination that crystallised from the crisis, in particular where those alternatives emerge around the creation of democratic, open, research co-operatives. Whether this can happen inside the University, public or not, is increasingly problematic.


Inside. Through. Beyond. Me.


Posted by hallymk1

I’m in my head. I can’t get around this. I’m driven to crucify myself in my own head. And to question my sense of self, my concrete reality, how I live and think and do. In my own head. Because I have held an abstract view of my own value. My own use. My own lack of possibility. Another view held as my own. My false consciousness.

And forever, since I broke and cracked my apparent, concrete reality in 2000 I have been trying to make sense of inside. What is going on inside? Can I inoculate myself from what I perceive to be my reality? Inside my own head? Can I be reborn as something, someone, somehow new? Inside my own head? To be rid of this apparent, hysterical and useless existence.

And forever, since I broke and cracked my apparent, concrete reality in 2000 I have been searching for the download from the matrix that will make me better. Searching for the thing that will remove the almost daily anxiety, and too frequent panic attacks, and patch-up the cracks. Walking, meditation, t’ai chi, acupuncture, therapy, drugs. The thing that will make me value myself. Make me happy. Make me content. And stop the permanent questioning of everything.

And allow me to do. To keep running. Rather than being. Because being was/is/has been too much.

And 14 years is a long time to be searching for the fix. To assume that inside is too broken to be mended on its own. That being inside is too corrosive and too damaging and too dark and too bleak to be cared for and recovered. That it has to be fixed or replaced, rather than cared for and recovered.

And in this I turned to being against. Against how I felt about myself. Because there was no outside the living death inside my head. The daily grind of existing in the things that I do and say, the conversations that I have, and the critical analysis of how I feel about those doings and whether they were right or wrong, and the ongoing critique of what that means for my being.

Who am I? All the time. Is this safe? All the time. Will you leave? All the time. Three tracks in my head. All the time. What. Why. Who. Please tell me who I am?

And always against myself. Inside myself and against myself. Not good enough. Not strong enough. A failure. Useless.

And it is only recently that I see that there is no download. No drug. No fix from outside myself. Only moving beyond myself from inside myself by accepting myself and soothing the anxieties of the child. Allowing myself the space to feel anxious without feeling that I am a failure. Or useless. Or no thing at all.

Understanding that after the trauma of the anniversary of my Mom’s death I am still functioning. That although I couldn’t make it to London to present at a conference two months ago because the dissociation and panic were too much, this wasn’t the end of the world. That It only took two weeks to recover, and in the past it took months. That although I couldn’t get to my friend’s stag weekend, I could still speak at his wedding. That in spite of my fear that I was an academic failure I have presented since. That I have been away since. That I have been to London since. That I have examined and taught and spoken and walked and written and dug and existed since.

And this is a potential beyond. This is an alternative narrative that is a potential beyond. Not to fix my deficits. To care about them and to subsume them inside my care for me.

Understanding that my overwhelming fear that my fractured identity could never be made whole doesn’t need to play out in my life. To play out in ways that I never feel it would in yours. Because I believe in you. And I never believed in me. Until recently.

Because I can have still moments when I think about what, but not why or who.

Because I have begun to reframe how I think about myself, as beyond. As the negation of my cracked identity. The negation of the past that negated me. That taught me the relentless critique of myself and tried to make me run. And that every now and then leads me to exhausted collapse. Or anxious retreat inside. So that all I could think about was being against.

But against has to be fuelled by possibility. Of a rupture against old habits and ways of thinking. Of cracking the thoughts that were once themselves held up as cracked and cracking and irreparably broken. Of old ways of thinking that were useless defences against the world. And defences against myself. That I am useless. That I have failed. That this failure to present inevitably means an ongoing failure to present. That this exhaustion inevitably means a failure to recover and exist. That this moment of anxiety inevitably means that lifetime of struggle inside-and-against myself.

And I have been thinking about this since I presented on academic activism. About my personal epistemological and pedagogic possibilities that are inside/against/beyond my own limited, historic, private anxieties. How might I rethink my limitations as possibilities? How might I rethink what my anxieties are trying to tell me? How might I try to see my individual moments of failure as potentialities for change? How might I read my exhaustion less as failure and more as moments to care for myself? How might I understand and realise a counter-narrative of my life as a positive, concrete, useful process, rather than my having to be or become a fetishised, normal, healthy, functioning thing? To become concrete rather than abstracted? To become real rather than false?

That in spite of my anxieties I made it to Nottingham to present. That in spite of my anxieties I made it to Aston to examine. That in spite of my anxieties I made it to Norfolk on holiday. That in spite of my anxieties I have reduced the hours I spend in therapy. That in spite of my anxieties I continue to teach. That I have begun to ride again. That I couldn’t stop smiling after I saw the line-up for the Governing Academic Life conference, and that I don’t feel like an imposter or fraud. That although I couldn’t make it to the Globe to watch Antony and Cleopatra I managed to write this. And to understand myself a little more.

Because it has to be different. I want to be different. That something inside is desperate to breathe and to be heard, in spite of my anxieties.

And I have begun to read about possibility and “what is to be done” in my work because I am trying to figure out what is to be done in my life.

That I feel I may be able to live for me. Co-operatively and with care and with as much unconditionality as I can muster. That I can see what I have, rather than to fear the loss of what I do not have or never had or that was never an option. That I might be able to move beyond the unconditionality that I crave(d), and that was never possible. To see what I do have. Inside me. Through me. Beyond me. To be beyond the defences and behaviours that I have held against me. Against my own emancipation from my negation. To see that what lies inside is not to be fixed but is to be embraced for what it shows me about myself. To quiet the screaming boy with love and care and attention.

To accept the possibility of beyond as recuperation. Inside and through the ways in which I have imprisoned myself. Rather than inside and against myself. To “be” (somehow) inside and through and beyond.

Liberated.


notes on the proto/rollback/rollout phases of the co-operative university


Posted by hallymk1

Stephen Ball writes of three stages of neoliberalism. The first is proto, and refers to the intellectual genesis and maturation of the project. This is the cultural attack on the everyday reality of the public and of the State, and lays the groundwork for building a consensus around the value of the market in defining the production of everyday life. It lays the groundwork for the market as the primary social arbiter. It also creates a set of spaces inside and against which the State can be reconfigured to deliver a policy structure that enhances marketization. This is the doctrinaire new normal.

The second stage is rollback, during which social life that was hitherto experienced negotiated as public or social, like the post-war Keynesian consensus, and which included free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare or education or social services, is broken-up or refused or denied. As a result, those services are enclosed and marketised. In this stage there is a clear interplay between the doctrinal, intellectual underpinnings of neoliberalism and the undermining of the State or of public services as inefficient. This then connects to the third stage, that of the rollout of the new neoliberal normal, through: public policy that enables the privatisation of public spaces; the insuring or indenture of access to public goods like pensions and healthcare; the individualised nature of social services; the opening-up of access to public data for private gain; the use of public policy to catalyse associations of corporations or capitals that can extract or accumulate value; and so on.

Inside English higher education these three interconnected phases of neoliberalism have played out in an increasingly indistinct manner. There has been a limited intellectual project about what higher education should be, or of the idea of what the University might be. In fact, we are left to seek out Coalition Government proposals from analyses of ministerial pamphlets like David Willetts’ Robbins Revisited, or in analyses of the Higher Education White Paper that never became an Act of Parliament, or in analyses of the relationships between Ministers and finance capital (like Goldman Sachs) in the running of symposia about the future of higher education, or in analyses of the role of private finance and global publishers (like Pearson Education).

Elsewhere we witness a policy space that is driven by secondary legislation focused upon: student debt and university funding; leveraging the role of finance capital and the bond markets in institutional debt/refinancing; using student number controls, funding for core and marginal numbers, and deregulation to catalyse competition; the use of key information sets; the monetisation of the student loan book; and so on. Moreover, the institutional response to this recalibration of a funding space has been that of competing businesses, akin to those of the English Football Pyramid, where the health of the league is secondary to the value of the individual clubs. Thus, in order to compete, individual universities restructure through the bond markets, or rebrand themselves for international markets using engagement in on-line projects like FutureLearn, or assault labour rights through zero-hour contracts and casualization and outsourcing, or drive strategies for entrepreneurialism or social enterprise, or engage explicitly in corporate partnerships with publishers and finance capital that pivot around the production of value. Here the proto phase of the marketization of higher education meets the rollback of State funding and regulation, and the rollout of opportunities for marketization and accumulation, in a messy and contested set of spaces. This mess leaves those employed in the university contested and contesting, and dissonant and dissociated, and frayed.

Thus, we see Ball’s transnational activist networks that form geographies of neoliberalism playing out in the recalibration of individual universities as global associations of capitals. Increasingly it becomes impossible to understand the emerging role of the University without developing a critique of its relationships to a transnational capitalist class that is restructuring the University, and which consists of academics and think-tanks, policy-makers and administrators, finance capital and venture capital and private equity, educational publishers, and philanthropists. The aim is to regulate the State and the institutions that are structured by it, like universities, for the market, for enterprise, and for-profit. Critical here is that the proto, rollback and rollout phases are increasingly playing out together in real-time, so that the room for manoeuvre for individual institutions is restricted and so that they are increasingly kettled through competition for an increasingly scarce resource (student debt, research funding, international markets etc.).

One of the issues for those driving policy and practice from this increasingly kettled perspective is that they are unable to evolve strategies beyond a narrative of economic growth. As Michael Roberts highlights, this is an issue because:

Despite a large devaluation of sterling as a response to the financial crash, exports have not made much progress and the UK’s deficit on trade with the rest of the world remains very high. The UK’s government budget deficit is still the highest among the G7 economies. The real joker in the pack for the message that the UK economy is heading for 3%-plus real growth this year and next is that, just as in the US, the capitalist sector is not investing. In the activity indexes, it was notable that investment goods orders slowed.

Roberts goes to argue that in the face of poor investment, exports and productivity, the UK’s rentier economy is left exposed and increasingly reliant on earnings from rent (property), interest (often from abroad), cheap credit and foreign capital flows. Moreover, it is also increasingly framed by precarity amongst those who have limited access to that rentier economy. Thus, a secondary impact is the growth in self-employment, which universities feed-off through consultancy and outsourcing, and stimulate through pedagogies for entrepreneurship. Roberts continues:

One of the features of the employment market in the UK in this ‘boom’ has been the huge rise in self-employed workers. The number of firms with fewer than ten employees has swelled by 550,000 since 2008. While in mid-2013, there were 5.7m people working in the public sector, only 18.8% of total employment, the lowest since records began in 1999. Indeed, the self-employed will outnumber those working in the public sector in four years, once the government has completed its slashing of public sectors jobs and services.

For some this is a clarion call for entrepreneurship and certainly connects into University agendas for promoting entrepreneurial activity amongst students, or start-ups, or resilience. However, as Roberts argues, this is simply preparing students for a precarious work-bound existence fuelled by insecurity, low real wages and debt.

the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor statistics show that the proportion of new entrepreneurs in the UK driven by valuable opportunities has fallen – from a high of 61 per cent in 2006 to 43 per cent in 2012. And ONS figures show that a falling number of self-employed people employ other workers, suggesting that the rise in self-employment is not translating into new, thriving businesses. Researchers at the University of Warwick found that, in less prosperous areas of the UK, policies to increase firm formation had a negative impact on long-term employment, as those who started new companies had low skills, few other options, and poor market prospects.

What is really behind the increase in self-employed is not ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ but the loss of benefits and the ability of self-employed to claim tax credits under the government ‘welfare reforms’. As Richard Murphy at Tax Research has pointed out, the self-employed now account for 14 percent of the employed workforce but 19 percent of working tax credit claimants. In other words, those working for themselves are more likely to be claiming tax credits than those in employment. Actually the self-employed, like the employed are earning less than they did before the slump. In 2007-08, 4.9 million self-employed earned £88.4bn, but in 2011-12, 5.5 million self-employed earned £80.6bn. Indeed, the Resolution Foundation found that that self-employed weekly earnings are 20% lower than they were in 2006-07, while employee earnings have fallen by just 6%. As a result, the typical self-employed person now earns 40% less than the typical employed person.

This precarious reality is where the fissures between the proto/rollback/rollout phases of neoliberalism meet the University. Moreover, they restructure our everyday educational and pedagogical realities. In the Enigma of Capital, David Harvey has spoken about the ways in which technologies and forms of organisational development reveal these realities through: our forms of production, exchange and consumption; our relations to nature and the environment; the social relations between people; our mental conceptions of the world; our labour processes; our governance structures; and how we reproduce society. If we apply these concepts to the neoliberal University, we are able to ask the following questions.

  1. How do the university’s managers, staff and students produce, exchange and consume, in terms of commodities, knowledge and value? What is the role of financialisation and the market in those processes, and whom do they benefit?
  2. What is the relationship of the University to nature and to the environment? What is the impact of the productive activities of the university on the environment, including its reinforcement of the idea that economic growth is the only option?
  3. What does the production and the reproduction of the university as a marketised and competitive space mean for the social relations between people, including between staff, between academics and students, between managers and unions, and between academic labour and the public?
  4. What does the production and the reproduction of the university mean for our mental conceptions of the world? What does the higher education mean in terms of commodified knowledge or economic growth, or for co-operative, social solutions, or for the development and dissemination of knowledge through society as mass intellectuality?
  5. How does the university as a competing business represent and reproduce casualised and precarious labour processes, amongst staff and students? What does the entrepreneurial turn inside the university mean for the autonomy of academic labour?
  6. How does the marketised university affect our understandings of democratic, social governance? What forms of cognitive dissonance affect the role of the academic in making sense of the recalibration that is enforced through the proto/rollback/rollout phases of the neoliberal university?

In making sense of this process, I am reminded of the need to address Marx’s response to Feuerbach that: “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” Comprehension and solution underpins and is informed by a critical pedagogic project. Joss Winn has made this point when connecting Mike Neary’s work on student-as-producer. Winn quotes Neary focusing on productive pedagogic structure and agency related to the work of Vygotsky:

For Vygotsky, in the factory of the future the labour process takes on a pedagogic function and the student merges with the worker to become: the student-worker; the pedagogic function does not teach the student-worker various skills, but rather enables the student-worker to understand the overall scheme of the production process, within which they will find their own place and meaning, as a process of learning and development. By situating themselves within a pedagogical process, whose meaning and purpose they understand, the production of knowledge is revealed not as something that is already discovered and static ( i.e., dogmatism), but is uncovered as ‘ the dynamic context of its own appearance’ (Vygotsky, 1997). (Neary 2010)

This is not the valorisation of specific entrepreneurial practices that make the individual student resilient or employable or a commodity-skilled labourer inside the market. It is situated, democratic productive activity. This also offers a mirror to the co-option of academic labour in the current proto/rollback/rollout phases of the neoliberal university. This co-option is of both academic staff and student labour, in order to discipline those populations for the market. These are potentially value-laden social forces that the processes of indentured study and precarious, competitive labour relations are dominating inside formal higher education. As Harry Cleaver argues, this is the transnational, secular control over the material reality of everyday life, and which is reinforced pedagogically, and which we can interpret as posing questions for the organisation of the university and its curriculum.

In his analyses of Neary’s work on student-as-producer, Winn points to the idea that co-operation might offer an alternative critique that in-turn enables the formation of a lasting alternative.

  • The basis for transforming institutions of higher education is the transformation of the role of the student. For Vygotsky, the student becomes the student-worker.
  • The role of the student is not simply that of becoming a ‘collaborator’, or the learner of skills, but as an active contributor to the labour process of the university (i.e. the production of knowledge), within which they find their own purpose and meaning.
  • The division of intellectual and manual labour is overcome through the recognition of education as a form of productive labour itself.
  • By revealing the organising principle of knowledge production, the university becomes grounded in the productivity of its students.
  • Through the transformation of the student and subsequent transformation of the organising principle of higher education, science and technology can be employed to transform society. The student becomes the subject rather than object of history – they make history – and humanity becomes the project rather than the resource.
  • Teaching begins from the student’s experience in a particular social context “so that the student teaches themselves” and are no longer alienated from the production of knowledge. So that students “recognise themselves in a world of their own design.” (Debord)

This is important because it connects to Marx’s argument in Capital Volumes 2 and 3, that it is in this associational phase of capital, that the opportunities for co-operative labour might emerge. These opportunities are global in scope, and are based on co-operative and democratic engagements in civil and political society that include the market, the State, the Commons, voluntary organisations, and the environment. This reflects the work of Bauwens and Iacomella on creating a co-operative, pedagogical project that might reveal alternatives: to the idea of endless growth and material abundance linked to debt; to the idea of immaterial scarcity framed by, for example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and global intellectual property law; the pseudo-abundance that encloses and destroys the biosphere. They argue for a global alliance, between movements based on open and copyfarleft, ecology and social justice, and global emancipation. Here we might usefully ask, what activities are we collectively willing to bear and how might they be determined, governed and regulated? What is the role of the university and of academic labour in addressing those activities and their governance? How do we use the university as a means for the production and liberation of alternatives? How do we create a liberation pedagogy?

Here I come back to my earlier question based on Harvey’s analysis of Capital:

What does the production and the reproduction of the university mean for our mental conceptions of the world? What does the higher education mean in terms of commodified knowledge or economic growth, or for co-operative, social solutions, or for the development and dissemination of knowledge through society as mass intellectuality?

The work emerging around the new co-operativism, and the intellectual underpinnings of pedagogies like student-as-producer, and of organisations like the social science centre offer us a way of framing and reconceptualising the proto/rollback/rollout phases of a co-operative alternative to neoliberalism. They are a way of challenging the reality of the competitive restructuring of public higher education, and the idea that the university is for-profit and valorisation. Here it is the spread of ideas across transnational activist networks of co-operators that might enable a reconnection of academic labour as labour across society, in a form that enables it to support mass intellectuality rather than private gain.

In part this is a reconnection rather than a disconnection or dissonance, through the recognition that marketization increases our collective alienation and that the desire to be other than alienated is to be cultivated socially. This is then about generating layers of democratic engagement and co-operative property rights held and secured in common, so that the knowledge and skills that make up our reality are less outsourced and more rooted in society. I am reminded that a while ago I wrote about this in terms of co-operative possibility.

Thus, we might analyse the idea of the University, inside-and-against the organisational and technological innovations that drive the speed-up or acceleration of turnover time of educational services and commodities in a global market. These innovations include the subsumption of the University inside associations of public/private capitals, in order to secure their competitive place. These innovations also tend to reduce the friction caused by distance and localised working practices. We might then ask what is the popular response to this process? Does the Social Science Centre offer one such popular response? It states that:

while there are fewer existing networks of solidarity than might exist in larger cities, there is also an intimacy and a proximity that provide possibilities for associational networks that might be diffused in larger cities. Most of us work full-time and cannot give the time to the SSC that we would like to. Without the material basis on which to work and study full-time at the SSC, we have to think creatively about the form and nature of education practised within the SSC.

As a response, educators might question how we work through association or co-operation with the geographical and spatial-temporal implications of a critique of higher education policy and practice. We might highlight the dynamics of accumulation and the need to expand markets in established economies and to create new markets as a new form of imperialism (with privileged rights to sell goods via intellectual property laws). We might ask, how does higher education policy and practice demonstrate the flows of capital between the global North and “emerging markets”, in an attempt to allow production in the former to grow, whilst supporting the creation of competitor-economies? We might ask, where is it possible to find the courage to push-back?