31 August, 2010
crystal palace
Whilst I never take pictures of people, I liked this one from the other day at the dead site of the Crystal Palace.
30 August, 2010
delueze in context conference, dundee
Deleuze in Context Workshop
University of Dundee
24 September 2010
11 AM - 6 PM, Carnelly Building, Room 2.20
Supported by School of Humanities and Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Dundee
Speakers
Jeffrey Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University, ‘Between Realism and Anti-Realism: Deleuze and the Spinozist Tradition in Philosophy’
Ian Buchanan, Cardiff University, ‘Deleuze and the Question of Revolution’
Craig Lundy, UNSW, ‘Historiophilosophy: Absolute Thought and its Historical Milieu’
David Martin-Jones, University of St Andrews, ‘The Child Seer in and as History: Putting the Cinema Books into Context’
Dominic Smith, University of Dundee, ‘Get Beyond Bad Faith and Bartleby: Some Stakes for Contemporary Thought’
Organiser: Professor James Williams, School of Humanities, University of Dundee
This event is free but places are limited due to the workshop format, so please book ahead as soon as possible by contacting James, j.r.williams[at]dundee.ac.uk
27 August, 2010
marxism in culture: next term
MARXISM IN CULTURE
PROGRAMME FOR AUTUMN TERM 2010
Friday 15 October
Capitalism 2.0: Peer Production, Intellectual Property & Juridification Processes Online
Anne Baron (London School of Economics)
Friday 05 November
Amongst the Ruins of Trier: Marx’s Materialism in the Shadow of the Roman Empire
Edith Hall (Royal Holloway University of London)
Friday 26 November
Marketing Theory, Critical Reflexivity & Ideology
Alan Bradshaw (Royal Holloway University of London)
Friday 17 December
The Marxism of Raymond Williams
Peter Thomas (Brunel University)
All seminars start at 5.30pm, and are held in the Wolfson Room (unless otherwise indicated) at the Institute of Historical Research in Senate House, Malet St, London. The seminar closes at 7.30pm and retires to the bar.
Organisers: Matthew Beaumont, Warren Carter, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Maggie Gray, Owen Hatherley, Esther Leslie, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou, Nina Power, Pete Smith & Alberto Toscano.
For further information, contact Warren Carter, at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or Esther Leslie at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
27 August, 2010
social text on impact, middlesex, etc.
Help! Our faces fell off when we tried to calculate our impact!
Online here you’ll find a range of interesting reflections on the question of ‘impact’, a dementedly cynical piece of oppressive fairy-dust dreamt up by venal bureaucrats to stop academics doing any useful research, ever. The pieces here no doubt have a more nuanced take. The Social Text collection includes a piece by Paula Gilligan about Middlesex, and good pieces from Neil Smith, Stefano Harvey and Stephen Shapiro: ‘Long after the contemporary academy has become bored with Foucauldian critiques of social control through assessment and quantitative metrics (let alone earlier Marxist attacks on reification), none of these insights has prevented the most basic inequities from being proposed as structuring norms.’
24 August, 2010
middlesex situation rumbles on…
[The following notice was posted by Christine Battersby on the Philos-L listserv (useful if you want to know about conferences you’ll never go to, and occasionally witness the weird, deranged mumblings of strange old men - no, seriously, it’s pretty handy. Personally, and especially given that there is about one new philosophy job every half-century, I wouldn’t want to say that no one should apply for this job. On the other hand, it is probably the most controversial (and again, only) job going at the moment in Philosophy. I doubt taking this job would harm the prospects of the person who gets it, but they might want to be aware of the situation…they’ll certainly have a fair few politicised students on their hands. Which is always good; they’re my favourite kind).
‘Those who are puzzled about the recent job advert for the Lectureship in Philosophy at Middlesex University might appreciate some further background information.
As is widely known, four of the Middlesex Philosophy staff have transferred to Kingston University and have taken with them the postgraduate programme. Middlesex is not admitting any new students onto the undergraduate degree. However, existing philosophy undergraduate students were told by Middlesex University that they would be able to finish their BA degrees. This advert seems to be Middlesex’s attempt to recruit—on a ten-month, fixed-term contract—the additional staff member required to fulfil this promise.
Christian Kerslake and Mark Kelly are the two existing philosophers who were—somewhat controversially—left behind by their colleagues at Middlesex. Christian Kerslake was centrally involved in the initial protests about the closure, and was one of the three philosophers suspended by Middlesex. His suspension was subsequently lifted, but it seems that he was not consulted by his colleagues about their move to Kingston, and he also remains committed to fighting for the continuance of the undergraduate degree at Middlesex. Christian Kerslake’s statement
about the move can be read here.
Any philosopher thinking of applying for—or accepting—this position will also notice that the job starts only 2 days before the Middlesex term starts [Christ - I at least had two weeks - IT!], leaving very little time for preparing course materials and the like. No doubt, given the present state of the academic job market, Middlesex will manage to recruit a philosopher for this post; but it would be good if those at the start of their careers could be alerted to the potential perils of this post.’
24 August, 2010
negativity conference, maastricht
Cutting the “Not”: Workshop on Negativity and Reflexivity
September 10-12, 2010
Jan Van Eyck Academie
Maastricht, Netherlands
Organizers: Mladen Dolar, Avigail Moss, Eli Noé, Kerstin Stakemeier and Tzuchien Tho
Please see our website for schedule and updates: versuslaboratory.janvaneyck.nl
Cutting the “Not”
The question of the negative has been one of the fundamental concerns, if not the central problem, of modern and postmodern philosophy. If, since Descartes (and more explicitly since Kant), philosophy is understood as an inherently self-reflexive practice - no longer an inquiry into the essence of things, but the reflection of thought onto its own conditions and limitations - the question of the negative has risen as the necessary counterpoint to this self-reflexivity: negativity as the non-identity between subject and object, the differential correlation between thought and what is external to (and yet conditioned by) thought.
Perhaps the strongest historical example of the coincidence between the problem of reflexivity and negation is the Hegelian concept of negativity, the dynamic process of self-differentiation as self-identity. No doubt, its tremendous impact on contemporary thought can be seen as itself a negative one. In various ways, much of contemporary philosophy ranging from the work of Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida and Badiou has been posed in specific opposition, modification or reinvention of this negative/reflexive dynamic. By inventing forms of negativity that do not involve dialectic reversals and over-comings, by rejecting the fundamental structure of contradiction outright, or by de-globalizing the scope of any dialectic system, contemporary forms of thought have either rejected negativity outright or have re-inscribed or readjusted the power of negativity in local, that is, non-totalizing functions.
In this context of “thinking beyond the negative”, the concept of negativity is often treated as a theoretical shibboleth, a conceptual “password” that serves to divide conflicting doctrinal tendencies, separating allies from foes. In so far as this logic involves the demarcation of a homogeneous theoretical field to be rejected (e.g. Deleuze’s critique of “post-Kantian Hegelianism”), it not only involves a rude simplification, presupposing a unambiguous dividing line where there is in fact a complex knot, but also attests to the fact that in polemically opposing the negative, one inevitably takes part in it. Hence, a fresh, actualized take on negativity does not only involve new ways of affirming the negative, but also has to take note of the “persistence of the negative” (B. Noys) in any thought and practice that claims to have surpassed negativity.
The aim of this workshop is to cut the (k)not of the negative, not to offer any easy way out of the problem, but to reconsider, with the polemical strings cut, the question in its complexity. This means, above all, to appreciate the field of negativity as a “garden of forking paths”, a tissue of folded and interwoven philosophical lineages, with branches extending to extra-philosophical domains. We propose to investigate the problem both forwards and backwards, both looking at the origins of the problem in modern (transcendental and dialectical) philosophy, as well as to the vicissitudes of the negative in contemporary thinking. Our focus will also extend “laterally”, by directing the attention to figures of negativity in art, politics, psychoanalysis and science.
Participants include: (alphabetically)
Mark Van Atten
Jean-Yves Beziau
Ray Brassier
Mladen Dolar
Sven Lüttiken
Catherine Malabou
Gregor Moder
Avigail Moss
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
Eli Noé
Benjamin Noys
Frank Ruda
Kerstin Stakemeier
Tzuchien Tho
Jan Völker
Susanne M Winterling
20 August, 2010
roundtable on capital cfp
The Society for Social and Political Philosophy is pleased to issue a
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
for a Roundtable on Marx’s ‘Capital’
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 24-27, 2011
Keynote address by Harry Cleaver
Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of ‘Reading Capital Politically’
The SSPP’s second Roundtable will explore Volume One of Marx’s Capital (1867). We chose this text because the resurgence in references to and mentions of Marx – provoked especially by the current financial crisis and global recession, but presaged by the best-seller status of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Marx’s surprising victory in the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” poll – has only served to highlight the fact that there have arguably not been any new interpretive or theoretical approaches to this book since the Althusserian and autonomist readings of the 1960s.
The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, such that long “obsolete” approaches have a newfound currency, or does in mean, on the contrary, that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for?
The guiding hypothesis of this Roundtable is that if new readings of Capital are called for, then it is new readers who will produce them.
Therefore, we are calling for applications from scholars interested in approaching Marx’s magnum opus with fresh eyes, willing to open it to the first page and read it through to the end without knowing what they might find. Applicants need not be experts in Marx or in Marxism. Applicants must, however, specialize in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching and learning from their fellows, and in nurturing wide-ranging and diverse inquiries into the history of political thought.
If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Your approach to the text might be driven by historical or contemporary concerns, and it might issue from an interest in a theme or a figure (be it Aristotle or Foucault). Whatever your approach, however, your presentation must centrally investigate some aspect of the text of Capital. Spaces are very limited.
Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments (.doc/.rtf/.pdf) to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by September 15, 2010:
• Curriculum Vitae
• One page statement of interest, including a discussion of a) the topics you wish to explore in a roundtable presentation, and b) the projected significance of participation for your research and/or teaching.
All applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process via email on or before October 15, 2010. Participants will be asked to send a draft or outline of their presentation to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by January 15, 2011 so that we can finalize the program.
18 August, 2010
diacritics conference, cornell, sept
Forthcoming: diacritics conference titled “Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Contemporary Italian Thought.” The conference, to be held at Cornell University on September 24-25, 2010, will bring together a number of leading thinkers around the theme and question of the common. Participants include Kevin Attell, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Remo Bodei, Bruno Bosteels, Cesare Casarino, Roberto Esposito, Ida Dominijanni, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri (by video conference), and Karen Pinkus. More information can be found at the conference website.
Don’t forget there’s also the whole of The Italian Difference available from re.press here as a pdf.
Contents:
Antonio Negri, ‘The Italian Difference’
Pier Aldo Rovatti, ‘Foucault Docet’
Gianni Vattimo, ‘Nihilism as Emancipation’
Roberto Esposito, ‘Community and Nihilism’
Matteo Mandarini, ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s’
Luisa Muraro, ‘The Symbolic Independence from Power’
Mario Tronti, ‘Towards a Critique of Political Democracy’
Alberto Toscano, ‘Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism’
Paolo Virno, ‘Natural-Historical Diagrams: The ‘New Global’ Movement and the Biological Invariant’
Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology’
11 August, 2010
new crmep lectures for 2010/11
[The forthcoming seminars for CRMEP, now at Kingston - note that they have moved to Senate House, specific room to be announced, I assume. More information here]
All seminars are free and open to the public. MA and Research Degree students are especially encouraged to attend.
Seminars take place on Thursdays from 5.30-7.30pm in Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1
Semester 1, 2010/11
7 October 2010 Hegel, Kierkegaard and Mediation
Jon Stewart (Kierkegaard Research Centre, Copenhagen University)
21 October 2010 Philosophy, Capitalism and the Novel
David Cunningham (Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, Westminster University)
11 November 2010 Between Sharing and Antagonism: The Invention of Communism in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts
Antonia Birnbaum (Department of Philosophy, University of Paris 8)
18 or 25 November 2010 TBA
Paul Rabinow (Faculty of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley)
16 December 2010 TBA
International College for Cultural Research and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University, Weimar
20 January 2011 TBA
Andrew Benjamin (Critical Theory, Monash University)
10 August, 2010
hamburg: the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented
[At the weekend, I was invited by the Caribic Residency to come and stay in Hamburg. This photo-essay is part of my residency. Over two days, under the theme of bodies/work, I screened various films: Film ist a Girl & a Gun (Gustav Deutsch, 2009), Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974, Thom Andersen), Jean-Luc Godard’s British Sounds (1970), Melanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest (2010), various clips from French/German vintage pornography 1910-1950. I gave a couple of brief talks and there were a couple of readings from Hervé Juvin’s recent The Coming of the Body (2010). I met various Hamburgers, and went on a tour to look at containers. It was an excellent weekend.]
Outside the Fischmarkt, a fish table and a fish.
Inside the Fischmarkt on a Sunday, not nearly early enough to see the action at 5am. There is a strange evangelical church event on the stage, involving children. Everyone stands around with a beer listening to someone tell them about Gott.
There is something faintly chastening about being too late for a market.
Civic chess! Would probably eradicate all social problems if instituted in every city.
More Fisch. Hamburg has a large anarcho/squat thing going on, and many of the buildings are brightly painted and be-sloganed. We saw one anarchist with a Pekingese, which was surprisingly amusing, like seeing a posh old lady walking a carthorse, or something.
Another marine animal, not sleeping.
The squats along the seafront are covered in posters, stickers, stencils and so on. But I particularly liked this little guy and his flower, made of wood and stuck to a window.
I can’t say that I have, but I imagine it might be quite eerie.
Montages of varying political intensity.
After recent debates about work/right to it/anti-work, this picture seemed apposite. Grrr!
Someone translated this for me, but I’ve forgotten what it says. Something about beating or winning or something.
This is for Evan.
This is for Joshua.
This is for Hegel.
Catching a boat from Landesbruecke, we sailed out towards the containers. Hamburg has the largest port in Germany, and second largest in Europe after Rotterdam (although it depends how you measure it, apparently, and this is a source of some contention among the Hamburg residents we spoke to).
These are for the little people of the sea.
Before we get to the containers, we pass through the back canals of the city, which are filled with huge storage warehouses, still operative.
A recent tourist attraction – a U-boat in the harbour.
This is an office block called ‘Dockland’. It is said that the offices at the end make you feel like you’re directly suspended above the water.
I think this is a luxury retirement home. Dave tells us that Hamburg has more millionaires than any other city in Europe. I imagine there are many slow-moving Ballardian incidents in this place.
It’s a cafe on the water whose roof is suspended by a crane, of course.
Money shot! Finally we get out to where the real action is. I’m not quite as obsessed with containers as some, but there is something utterly sublime about the sheer size of the ships, the vast quantity of the containers themselves and the computerised majesty of the loading process. The men working on the bays, or directing the containers from little cabins, or driving the machines that look, as Dave points out, like At Ats in Stars Wars, are minuscule. Seagulls, when they sit on the end of the container ships, look ridiculous in their avian tinyness.
The symmetries of transportation.
Jasmin tells us that this was the suicide bridge of Hamburg. It is now closed to pedestrians.
This ship is really called ‘Humen Bridge’. It’s from Panama, although I think Panama might sometimes be code for other places.
I for one welcome our new alien overlords.
I believe the anarchists of Hamburg painted this bit.
Back on land, there’s a series of murals dedicated to women working. I think this one’s about immaterial labour. And fish.
I stupidly forgot my camera when we walked by Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red light district. Julian tells us that Foucault had planned to write an article about it when he was here in the late 1950s, but failed to secure funding. This must surely rank as one of the great never-written essays of all time.
I don’t know what Maschinenputz is, but I certainly want some.
The Saturday was Christopher Street Day, Hamburg’s annual gay pride event. The town hall was reassuringly happy to fly the rainbow flag.
As was this department store.
Was sad to have missed Discopig though.
This was part of the logo for the festival.
A war monument sticks high out of the water in the centre.
Next to it was this woman, a kind of swan whisperer, who was feeding the swans directly by hand. They look a little bit like they were biting her fingers off every time she did so, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
Near a new part of the tube was an outdoor exhibition showing the people who’d built it.
The water in the centre of town was an unbelievably horrible colour.
But made for a nice effect once flipped.
Europe!
Balloons, presumably from the parade, had found their resting place in a particularly fetid corner of the lock system.
This bin wants to be a container when it grows up.
I liked the void-like effect of the inside of the van.
This is Heinrich Heine. This photo is for Stathis.
It’s a van der Graef generator! In a box.
Before we left, we stopped at the Cafe Paris. In this ceiling decor is carefully hidden both a hammer and a sickle.
Ben and Fiona should enjoy Berlin when they arrive next week…
The walk to the station was littered with strange objects behind glass or, erm, attached to bike railings. I too was tempted to chain myself to one rather than leave.
5 August, 2010
after the postsecular and the postmodern
Daniel Whistler and Anthony Paul Smith recently put together a collection entitled After the Postsecular and the Postmodern (there’s a review of it over at the new journal Speculations by the lovely Austin Smidt. I have a somewhat anomalous piece in there about Feuerbach (of course), but it’s really a very good collection. The tireless Scott McLemee interviews the editors here for Inside Higher Ed:
Daniel Whistler: Ignorance of the history of philosophy of religion is the academic norm, and our wager is that through straightforward history of philosophy one can excavate resources that have been neglected, so as to begin to see the discipline afresh. It is a matter of revitalizing our sense of what philosophy of religion can do. Therefore, while mutating the history of philosophy is crucial, so too is understanding what that history is.
3 August, 2010
studies in social & political thought: new website
2 August, 2010
speculations: new online journal
[Although I am not involved in the speculative realist ‘turn’, apart from occasionally writing incomplete and elliptical digs at bits of it, this seems like an interesting project]
The first volume of Speculations is now online. Speculations is a journal dedicated to research into speculative realism and post-continental philosophy. Our aim is to facilitate discussion about ongoing developments within these emerging movements and related disciplines. The journal is open access and peer-reviewed.
Information about how to access the various formats can be found at our website. The journal is available in a physical print on demand format. As a free PDF. And individual PDFs of the articles can be downloaded at our site.
30 July, 2010
call for papers sspt
CALL FOR PAPERS SSPT18 (Autumn/Winter) – Utopia, Dystopia and Critical
Theory We invite submissions for the next issue of SSPT linked to the theme
of Utopia, Dystopia and Critical Theory. In a period of geo-political,
ecological and e…conomic turmoil, we find ourselves in the midst of a
crisis of legitimation with respect to the dominant post-Cold War neoliberal
economic and political doctrine of unfettered market-led growth,
de-regulation and privatization of national resources and public services,
and total sovereignty of private ownership and capital over all spheres of
life. With a deepening crisis of the neoliberal political economy, it is
clear that mere economic functionalism is redundant. Now is a time for a
critical reappraisal of the frameworks and structures that continue to be
applied to a highly conflicted and unsustainable political and economic
system. Such projects will need to engage with debates over utopia/dystopia,
for any consideration of transformation in the present entails a complex yet
inextricable orientation towards the future.
Please send your articles of 5000-6500 words (in .doc format) via email to
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Accepted articles will be published alongside a selection
of papers on the same theme from this year’s SSPT Conference (held in May
2010). The deadline for submissions is 31 August 2010.
Possible topics include: -
• Science Fiction, Cultural Politics, the Political Imagination
• Crisis (of Capitalism, Feminism, the State, Marxism, Critical Theory) •
Ends (of History, Ideology, Capitalism, Communism, Neo-liberalism,
Postcoloniality)
• Immanent and Transcendent Criticism
• Environment, Catastrophe, Risk
• Futures (of Critical Theory, Political Economy, Postmodernity, Europe,
Islam, Secular Humanism, Globalisation, Feminism)
• Representations of Transcendence, Utopia/Dystopia, Apocalypse,
NegativeTheology
• Iconography, Idolatory and Ideology Critique.
26 July, 2010
lady gaga’s world-historical importance
‘At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga’s music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: “I want people to see the truth,” he said.’
From the Guardian report on the Wikileaks Afghanistan story. Furthermore, Iceland’s role in permitting the free-flow of information through their deliciously lunar landscape makes them once more my favourite country in the world, along with their openly gay PM, their actual, practical sexual equality, their industrial-accident blue lagoon and their volcano that messed the world up, and hopefully will do so again. Plus elves.
21 July, 2010
lrb’s racism
You are probably all by now aware of the stupidity and racism of one of the LRB’s writers, R W Johnson. Gary Younge has a brilliant piece about it here. Lenin writes about it here. Lara Pawson should be congratulated for her tireless work in making this public.
19 July, 2010
michel serres in berlin, 30-31 july
Michel Serres - Odysseys and Shipwrecks: Opening (more information here).
Summer Talks by the Spree
(Simultaneous translation French-German-English)
* Fri 30.07.2010 | 19:00 h | Admission: 5 € / 3 € Tickets online
19 h Opening of the Summer talks
Susanne Stemmler
Key Note Lecture Michel Serres and conversation with Lorenz Engell, media philosopher (Bauhaus University Weimar)
The French science theorist and philosopher and son of a river boatman was at sea for ten years. Shortly before he turns 80, the most versatile and important philosopher of our times is coming to Berlin at the invitation of Merve Verlag to take part in the Wassermusik Festival 2010 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. An entire weekend you will be treated to an abundance of his “superfluous” ideas. Following his opening talk on 30 July, on 31 July Catherine David and Alexander Kluge will join Serres in conversations. They will follow the flow of his thought, branch off, get stranded ashore - an unexpected odyssey. On the evening of 31 July, Michel Serres will present “Odyssey “, a work that offers a rich variety of insights into his thinking and work practices, and which he conceived especially for the event.
An event by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Merve Verlag in cooperation with the French Embassy and the Institut Français.
Lorenz Engell is a professor of media philosophy at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Since 2008 he has been the Co-Director of the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM, Weimar).
Michel Serres - Odysseys and Shipwrecks: The program
FRI 30.07.2010 | 19:00 h
Opening: Susanne Stemmler, Key Note Lecture by Michel Serres, followed by a conversation with Lorenz Engell
SAT 31.7.2010
12:00 h Conversation with Catherine David More…
14:00 h Conversation with Alexander Kluge More…
19:30 h Michel Serres - Odysseys and Shipwrecks: Lecture Performance More…
19 July, 2010
complete beckett series at backdoor broadcasting
The drawing is by the lovely Isabeau Doucet - and it will hopefully belong to me when she comes back from Haiti.
Beckett talk series Here, care of René Wolf, of course!
18 July, 2010
one-dimensional woman is for lesbians only!
Someone else had already told me that my book was being stocked in the lesbian section of Foyles, but here’s a report by Nichi Hodgson writing for the Erotic Review, of all places, about taking this up with the staff:
‘Not only do you have to be a feminist to read her wickedly witty analysis of 21st Century womanhood, it seems, but a queer feminist at that…it’s a publisher-seller perpetuated cycle of gender issues being only relevant to gay people, which neatly fans the falsely syllogistic flames of lesbians equaling feminists, ergo all feminists equaling lesbians. ’
13 July, 2010
destroying history, one pixel at a time
One of New Labour’s constant obsessions was their desire to seem popular by association. Thus in the bright, perky, early days pop stars were invited to have champagne with Blair at Downing Street and in the later, more desperate, days, Alan Sugar was appointed enterprise tsar. New Labour’s policy on celebrity sheen - populism without popularity - was part-and-parcel of a well-documented world of spin, shady unelected advisers, myriad consultants and a pernicious hyper-real feeling that politics was all about being seen to do something, but not actually doing it. Whether we think that New Labour was a continuation of the Thatcher project, or, alternatively, that the Cameron-Clegg axis is a continuation of the New Labour project is perhaps less important than the fact that this unpopular populism is still guiding policy. Alongside the interminable restructuring of public services, particularly education and health, we have flashy, gimmicky one-liner celebrity interventions whose supposedly popular appeal is, at the end of the day, profoundly mysterious, if all pervasive. (As a personal aside - in the past few years the introduction – and subsequently reordering and dismantling – of PCTs in the NHS has recently caused my father to give up on a system he has been loyal to and working within for forty years – despite the length and dedication of his service to free health care, the Department of Health have decided that his ‘units’ are not worth enough - i.e. his patients are too healthy, precisely partly because of the continuing care they have received. Subsequently, his practice is now deemed more or less worthless (or worth the cost of the equipment alone) and is being tendered our to the lowest bidder - most likely some corporate practice - despite, or really because, of the goodwill his work has generated in the local town. So after all the years of pressure to go private under Thatcher and New Labour, his commitment to making sure those who can’t afford to pay for their treatment have meant that his practice now makes no profit and is unsustainable - the human face of the local PCT was sympathetic, but they can do nothing to change the weighting of the units and the utterly inappropriate quotas in place).
The recent announcement that Niall Ferguson has been invited to ‘revitalise the curriculum’ for history is very depressing but entirely in keeping with this tendency. Ferguson proposes to introduce a ‘world war two-based video game designed for use as a classroom aid’, but promises he’ll avoid Eurocentrism by claiming that he is also interested in ‘the stagnation of China, the underachievement of Mughal India, and why the Ottoman empire – despite its good mathematics and good-ish astronomy – ultimately failed. It just failed to be part of the scientific revolution.’ May I not-very-controversially suggest that avoiding Eurocentrism isn’t best served by misrepresenting the supposed ‘underachievements’ of other parts of the world. Ferguson, as many are aware, is part of an increasing number of right-wing historians who seek to rehabilitate empire, imperialism and colonialism (or at least significantly downplay their negative elements in favour of a kind of ‘well, yes it was bad, but look at all the advantages we brought!’ type of hand-washing approach). Ferguson also strongly defended the American invasion of Iraq, because it was the sort of thing that proper empires ought to do. War is ‘proper’ history, war must be be carried out by great nations in the name of an ahistorical ‘Empire’ that deigns to attach itself from time to time to certain geographical contenders…but only some can win!
In that sense, Ferguson’s interest in belligerent computer game versions of world history is entirely appropriate – why bother to teach pupils the details of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and the brutal expropriation of natural resources, or the pernicious and ongoing racism of British foreign policy, when you can play a pixellated Churchill instead? To claim that ‘the west’s dominance might have been a case of good fortune’, as Ferguson does, has as little to do with history as horoscopes have to do with predicting whether you’re about to lose your job. The growing interest in ‘counterfactual’ or ‘counter-conventional’ history, with Ferguson as its most famous cheerleader, is a strange and worrying hyper-real approach to the real implications of historical facts, fusing as it does a misplaced philosophical problem with a desire to pretend that everything is just the way it is ‘by chance’ (and thus empire and imperialism are simply not to be blamed, and the historian’s job is to create glorious semi-fictions, rather than uncover evidence or analyse facts and structures). There’s an interesting philosophical take-down of Ferguson’s use of ‘imaginative’ counterfactuals, as opposed to the more appropriate ‘indirect evidence’ here. Oppose Ferguson’s speculative wonderings to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and you get a far more relevant attempt to think how the world could have been different (or indeed, remarkably similar) had history taken a different path. Far better than shooting Nazis in the name of a new nationalism, history in British schools would do well to teach counterfactuals through PKD rather than pander to Ferguson’s noxious brand of shiny status-quo-supporting snake-oil. But not before they’ve taught the rest of world history properly, in all its horror.
11 July, 2010
pigs in heat
This wonderful picture was sent to me by Christopher F. On the same topic, John sent me a link to Five Reasons Why Pigs are more Awesome than You. The final reason is particularly funny.
10 July, 2010
this heat
[Thamespath wasteland earlier today. No captions!]
7 July, 2010
talk TONIGHT at goldsmiths
Xenos - Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
invites you to a talk by Sumit Sarkar
‘Writing a Marxian Social History of Modern India: Problems and Prospects’
with responses by Alex Callinicos (King’s College), Sanjay Seth (Goldsmiths) and Rashmi Varma (University of Warwick)
July 7, 6-8pm
Room RHB 308
Goldsmiths, University of London
Sumit Sarkar is one of the foremost historians of modern India. His books include Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-8 (1973), Modern India (1989), Writing Social History (1998) and, most recently, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism, History (2002). He was a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Group, as well as one of its most important critics.
For further information please write to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).]
This talk is co-sponsored by the journal Historical Materialism
