Release - Graduate Student Conference, 02/09/08

Release!

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

10am – 6pm

Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre

Graduate Student Conference

Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Release! is the Centre for Cultural Studies’ annual MA students conference: a moment of friendly and relaxing interactivity. Everyone is invited to attend, participate and discuss about the latest outcomes of cultural research at Goldsmiths.

To release refers in this case to the act of unbinding or undoing – not as a denial of the path followed over the course of the degree, but as a turning point. The momentum of the flow of the activity is no longer inwards, but becomes released outwards; the solitude of reading, researching and writing is replaced by the joy of sharing and questioning.

Being Released! can be a physical activity of liberation from confinement, obligation or even pain. It can also be a device put into place to unfasten a mechanism.

Release! provides the opportunity to celebrate an activity that has reached its end…in order to be replaced by other activity.

We extend a warm invitation to all to join us next Tuesday, 2 September in the Ben Pimmlot Lecture Theatre, 10am - 6pm.

Later, party!

This is the Release! of our papers and our Release! party!

Release.ccsgold@googlemail.com

http://releaseconference.blogspot.com/

AtHQ - Let’s take over the CCS

In the attack the headquarter events there were voices asking for changes. Some were exited, some were frustrated, some were content, some were dissatisfied. What could we make out of that? What comes next after the head quarter was attacked? What if there remains another headquarter with a new dress?

Did we just create something that further justifies our existence and our way of being? We, teaching staff and students, are all fulfilling the request of institutions, since we have been codified by a series of formats, phd seminars, reading groups, exams, panels. The way the programs are planned and carried out already determine our ways of being and codify our identities – both as individuals and as an institution.

We appreciate all the discussions during the 12 hours meeting, we are also impressed by most of the insightful critiques. The wishes for changes, transformations, and twists were, however, not common wishes. They did not have a goal, a direction, or a unified identity. What comes next is still a question?

This is where we can start. Instead of thinking of how to improve teaching and learning, we want to think from the perspective of community. Institution itself brings us into being, but there lies another concern of “being with”, which has more to do with interaction, communication. This does not mean coming behind one cause, under one banner, but it means being together after we have come together. The task is not to define a common goal or to change the institution, because we are the goal and we are the institution.

We are writing to invite your participation to a project, which aims at a more radical way of rethinking the event. We have only one proposition to make: WE HAVE TO TAKE OVER THE CENTRE TOGETHER. The only way to attack the headquarter, is to abolish the headquarter. We, the students and those staff members who are willing to, should take over the planning and the building of the centre (not the money or the jobs) – for one year as an experiment. To “Take over” is not to replace the headquarter, or seize the power, but to conquest the headquarter with a new form of communication – through being together, and starting our thinking as well as our learning all over again each day. There is no power to be seized, there is only power to be or to do.

We look for a communication, which transforms the relations between educator and educatee from a subject-object relation into a process of active sharing of knowledge, experience and intuition. It means deconstructing the hierarchies and identities we have voluntarily taken as students and teachers, as experts and non-experts. We can start it as a project. We can call it minoritarian thinking. We can call it learning with each others, instead of from others.

What are the questions to be asked? Maybe we should not have any predetermined way to do things, we should not do anything if we do not want it. We can ask, who should plan the MA and PhD programs? Do we want a PhD seminar? If we do, who should plan it – the students or the staff, or both? Do we want to read in the seminars, or do we want to start our thinking from somewhere else? How can students take part in the research? How can we make students contribute, give, instead of taking or receiving? How could students run the centre together with the staff, or how can we abolish these identities altogether?

You can say that we have already asked these questions, that we already have more freedom than many others. But our task is to ask, whether this really is the case… Let’s ask ourselves: why do we have readers waiting for us when we enrol; why does the staff know what the students are doing but the students do not know what the staff is doing.
As we all know, the main obstacle for changes in the academia has traditionally been the common reluctance to give up the structures of power and authorities. If we have any trust at all in the CCS, we must believe this cannot be the case here. In other words, this is not supposed to be a student revolt, but creating a coming community for all of us at the CCS.

We, the initiators, call for everyone to take over our thinking, as an opening but not as a ready-made program. We do not have any answers to your questions: the communication should start here: we want to here your responses and meet you next week at Laurie Grove. Meanwhile, all those interested, please, contact us or use the newborn wiki: ccsgold.pbwiki.com

Yuk Hui: huiyuk(a)gmail.com
Hanna Kuusela: hanna.r.kuusela(a)gmail.com

AtHQ - Defending the Headquarters

Does cultural studies have its own territory that is worthy of being defended?

Given that the autonomy of disciplines has been vehemently debated and de facto denied as usefully productive by many, how can cultural studies be the source of any resistance whatsoever without staking out a particularized terrain and theatre of potential operations? (channelling Boris Groys in Art/Power”, 2008)

 What would a practice-based PhD look like in CCS that would of necessity claim its territorial, conceptual, and political stakes here as opposed to Visual Cultures, Media & Communications, or Fine Arts? How might this be a useful and even crucial attachment as opposed to merely a convenient academic anchor?

Surely CCS must argue for some particular autonomy (to bring in a much disputed term).

The greater or at least ancillary challenge however would then be to tamper with/expand the existing definitions and formal requirements of the PhD at the level of the university which has very specific guidelines/understandings of what a thesis project should look like.

Who are we? What do we do? How do we do it?

I’m stating the obvious when I say that it’s important to acknowledge that our concerns (collectively and individually) are not necessarily one and the same (something Jennifer notes on her blog entry). The challenges for students and by extension their needs are not identical to those that face faculty as ongoing members of the Goldsmiths research and academic community.

The questions of “who we are” (institutionally as CCS housed within Goldsmiths, as cultural studies in the UK more generally, as researchers—faculty and students) and “what” and “how” do we do the things that we do, must then be continually re-worked and productively coupled with the more urgent question:

“How is a subject of any kind produced in the world”? To attack the headquarters must, in my opinion, place this question at its core.  

Seminars & Events

I think its important that faculty have agency in terms if bringing readings forward to the student seminars. This doesn’t have to be an overly consultatively process because its impossible to know in advance what it is that might perturb and/or provoke us - something that may be embedded in the readings themselves or be triggered in the resulting discussion.

I’m not overly concerned in having my own particular interests mirrored back to me but rather am much interested in the unexpected - ideas that enter into the orbit of my universe that I had never considered before or even knew existed.

Real interest can only ever reside in the fact that one does not know a priori what history these discussions will ultimately be a question of.

I can’t speak for my fellow students but feel that it is important to go to seminars and be actively involved in the events at the college because this is generally where life-long networks are established - to remain in the contact zone so to speak, so that we might create new categories of assembly that don’t as of yet exist.

These are emergent processes that can happen both organically as  students get together in self-organizing reading groups, arrange screenings, facilitate events etc., but can also be evolved through the structural and formal elements of CCS.

There are PhD programs where one can happily sequester themselves at the British Library for four years but it seems to me that CCS was set up in part to counter this model and provide alternate modes of critical engagement - what these are exactly is what this series of discussions is attempting to figure out.

CCS as a Collective Project

I’m committed to CCS as a collective project but also recognize that it contains within it many heterogeneous subfields of potential. I propose mobilizing small-scale intensive projects under the auspices of CC that can connect faculty, students and ideas to other research/creative clusters (in the UK and abroad). This is not to “go out in the world” as was critiqued last time we gathered because it presupposes that we [CCS] are not of the world but rather to acknowledge our potential to connect with other non-aligned organisations/entities.

For example, the Roundtable in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths has been involved in various conferences, exhibitions, and events under the collective banner of RA. We have even opened up our PhD seminars to the public upon certain occasions. 

Could CCS operate as a larger structural device (a kind of resource galaxy), that would consist of smaller subgroups and organisations (cultural constellations) each of which would participate in public events and research activities as specifically named entities? I know that the urgent issue of our of relevance with respect to the college is linked in part to perceptions of visibility and profile. Although these identifiable subgroups would be anchored within CCS and publicised as such, these smaller categorical assembles would allow different constituencies and ideas to move and in out them as needed.

 Some Basics 

• we need to stop making distinctions between theory & practice and understand them as mutually affected terms and terrains of culture making
• we need to refrain from picking and choosing between practices - privileging certain practices over others
• when we approach a non-textual work entirely through the register of language potential tools for thinking are lost 
• we need to develop alternate forms of critique and evaluation appropriate to different forms of practice (whether this is the crafting of a philosophic concept or the scoring of a musical composition)
• we need to acknowledge and articulate the ways in which practice retrospectively performs itself as research
• we need to reinvent components of the thesis requirements = adaptive structures that allow other temporal and spatial elements (non-textual) to move into the thesis project

AtHQ - Containment … Gesture … (negative) … excess(?)

‘Attack the Headquarters’ has left me thinking about certain themes that I feel permeate much of the debates. When approaching the ‘AtHQ’ event I was energized, as I was hoping that this event would allow a space for the creation/deployment of a clearly articulated and mutually constituted base level of consensus amongst the staff and the varying tiers of the student body. Maybe this was an unfair expectation, as much a product of my own lack of experience of these events as much as it is also a product of a certain spirit of hopefulness I find I cannot yet shake from myself. This belief being an a priori belief in the power brought into being by the collective assembling of human beings around the singular moment. I only feel it necessary to outline this above concern in order to situate my understanding of the ‘AtHQ’ meetings so far as being in some senses in conflict with, but also indebted to my a priori privileging of the coming-together of human beings. It should also be noted that I am as of yet not in the position of posting or proclaiming an absolute judgment on any perceived, on my own part at least, eventual outcome of these events.

I feel that in some senses the concerns that have been raised for myself are broadly to be collected, for my own understanding as much as anyone else’s, within the three notions I have used as a naming for my post. The first concern is not in any way predicated on any kind of assumption of priority, but is merely placed first as a way for me to think through my response. The concern I have is to do with the concept of containment. I don’t deploy this term within a strictly disciplinarian way, I’m not, for example deploying the notion of containment that accompanies the handling of viral outbreak or nuclear meltdown, but rather as the way in which containment could be said to delineate or construct the outer most point of a concept or debate. This may be a fluidic or permeable outer most point, but I feel that there is still an method of the deployment of ideas or debates that seeks to define, and in some sense it is this mode of definition that I want to address.

I have been thinking about the way in which there are ‘concerns’ implicit to the making of an event like this, but I feel in some sense it is also these very concerns that generate the problems in and of themselves. The premise of ‘AtHQ’, at least as far as I am aware, or have been made aware, is that this is some formal point of departure, or an active moment of movement, in which there is a certain degree of expectation that some formal ‘gear-change’ will occur. It seems to me that the debates thus far have operated along the lines of defining the quality/qualities of the varying methods or modes of analysis or encounters offered and taken up by the active participants, of the bodies, present within the CCS as an institution in itself. It seems to me that the general tonal quality of the provocations made within the confines of the ‘AtHQ’ event is a continual repositioning of the goal-posts, so to speak. In a sense, it seems as if there is a continual struggle (in the less than epic sense) over not just what, but how to define the terrain within which ‘Cultural Studies’ is deemed or “allowed” to operate. It is this moment of (silent?) confrontation that I feel is also the causal moment from where the originary process of containment emerges. In the process of defining the qualitative concerns within/under which we as ‘critics’(?) operate I also believe we construct the very conditions for the self-annihilation of any attempts made to ‘change-gear’. It is as if the harder we accelerate the deeper our wheels bore into the mud

What I am advocating here is not a nihilistic inversion of this problematic. Just because we are in the mud, does not mean we are wrong to make the journey. I do not see ‘AtHQ’ as unnecessary in light of the issues of (self)containment through definition, in fact in some senses I think ‘AtHQ’ becomes more of a necessity. But the issue of self-containment I feel cannot be understood without relating it to the second term of my title which is gesture

By the term gesture I also wish to invoke the relationship that gesture has to the notions of etiquette, manners and gesticulation. In this context I view the concept of gesture as having a quantitative relationship to the related terms I have outlined. I see gesture as a delineation of a unit of etiquette and manners. Although I will not remove the qualitative relationship between the terms, I will begin by addressing gesture as a unit of behaviour, or more broadly a unit of action

For me, manners and etiquette are a way of constructing an economy of gestures, a system of exchanges and valuations that determine the relation of one unit of gesture to another. The issue of containment is also for myself a matter of the deployment of a unit of gesture. The moment of definition undertaken in the moment of containment is for myself a gestural moment. It is point at which a relationship between the individuated gesture is brought to market and is given a value based upon its relation to the value embodied in gestures, by way of the previous containment of preceding gestures in the economy of manners. For myself, the containment of definition only seems to present itself as an issue for nihilism, or self-redundancy, in that it can at any moment reinforce the asymmetry of the economy of manners. In this economy of manners, of etiquette, I do not see the notions of ‘critique‘, ‘innovation‘, or ‘institutionalization‘ as bringing to bear any form of non-value, or anti-value. These concepts cannot but participate in the difficulty of the moment of gesture and the process of self-containment through definition. It is for myself rather the relation between these notions as units of gesture and between these parts as parts of the economy of etiquette that recreates the problematic of the defining moment.

It is at this point that I feel that the last term in my title needs to be highlighted. As it may be recognised, the term is itself already included as a problematic, it is the notion of (negative) excess(?). The reason for my listing of this idea in this manner is also a product of the idea itself. By (negative) excess(?) I mean a lack, but which is conditioned by the presence of itself. In this sense (negative) excess(?) is akin to a certain understanding of the notion of ‘forgetting’, but whereas I view ‘forgetting’ as an empty space conditioned by the dropping of a ‘thing’, I view a (negative) excess(?) as in some ways the inverse. It is a nothing that is actively present (this statement should not be read as a statement on the interpretation of these terms made by others, but as my own treatise that is not intended as a contention against the use of these concepts elsewhere). From this ‘definition‘ of (negative) excess(?) I take it as an important concept in the relation of gesture to the problematic of self-containment through definition. The process of self-defining containment as a marshaling of the unit of gesture will, in my view at least, always leave a (negative) excess(?). There will, in the process of the exchange of units in this economy of manners, always be a nothingness that is only there by its presence, not it’s forgetting

In some senses, this is almost a blind-spot, which seems to be a useful gesture of definition generated by this series of events. But I would try to avoid the notion of (negative) excess(?) being a space of ‘not’ seeing, but as an actually present part of what is being seen, in some senses the (negative) excess(?) is what is seen. The process of ‘critique‘ or ‘defintion’ I outlined earlier are in my view at least, struggles (again, the non-epic kind) over where the placement of this (negative) excess(?) should be. When there is a struggle over the deployment of units of gesture in the context of the construction of the necessary cartographic definition of the terrain of the what/how for and of Cultural Studies and the CCS, I cannot but feel the need to insist upon the (negative) excess(?), the thing that is not there but in some senses casts itself as an inevitability

For me, the (negative) excess(?) is a fundamentally ethical and political problematic. When the forces of critique are intended to be brought to bear upon some part of the map, in what sense will that attack only alter the view we have of the part of the map the attack takes place in by simply moving this (negative) excess(?), rather than say an attack that rewrites the very borders in which we find our attack confined and defined. If force is placed anywhere, how can there not be a weak point in the defense in any possible moment of counter-attack? The only solution I can view, and this is only my pint of view, is that this (negative) excess(?) is not merely a hindrance, but is also a key tool for strategically coordinating the attacks we make on the headquarters

As all acts of definition are contained or implicated in the economy of manners, I see our (negative) excess(?) as no less a hindrance for ourselves that the (negative) excess(?) that conditions the counter-attack that we may receive from the headquarters. Thusly, we must understand the gestural methodology employed by the headquarters in its moment of defining its maps, and move against it. The headquarters is part of a system of speculation in the economy of etiquette, defining and applying value to not only this economy on the collective scale, but also at the point of the unit. By containing the individuated unit of gesture within a certain terrain, the headquarters creates it’s own (negative) excess(?), it is here that I see as the point of the map where we should be.

We must always be fighting the method of definition employed by the headquarters by not avoiding their sight, but being the one thing that cannot but be avoided. As the headquarters assembles a map, we must make ours faster, whilst they assemble their forces, we must assemble ours faster, and whilst they prepare for a counter-attack we must already be mounting the next offensive.

And this can only occur, in my view, in the knowledge of the methods of definition of gesture used by the headquarters through it’s participation in the process of the valuation of these selfsame gestures. The methods of valuation we employ are only effective in light of their relationship to the methods of valuation used by the headquarters, not by the divergence of methods employed by our forces in any one of our attacks. It is not how we define the heterogeneity of attacks we make upon this supposed headquarters, but by the commonalities we share that allow for us all the occupy the point of the headquarters (negative) excess(?).

It is here that I feel I can return full circle to my opening remarks about the a priori expectations I came to this event with. It is not so much the defined qualities of our individuated gestures of critique that define the value of the critique. There is not innate value to any critique outside of it’s placement within an economy of etiquette, which are in a sense already predefined by the valuations made in the very moment of the deployment of any unit of gesture. It is rather the commonality, or ‘brought-togetherness’ of these units of gesture. It is the very process of the creation of the singular moment in which an assumed commonality is possible that will allow for us to best formulate the next line of attack, and allow for us to plot out where the headquarters has placed its (negative) excess(?). Although this process of formulation will not be within the worry of becoming stuck in the mud, once we are all here it becomes less a matter of frantic pedal pushing, and more a matter of us all putting on our wellington boots, exiting the vehicle and collective dragging ourselves out of the dirt.

AtHQ - Concerning ‘Attack the Headquaters.’

As I wasn’t invited to deliver my thoughts to the meeting (of course I wasn’t - who would have invited me? Who would even have thought to?), I have collected some of them here for review at leisure. Please do REVIEW them - dispute them, second them or second-guess them. That much has been said already by others, but it bears repeating.

I am not really extending a singular argument, but rather, trying to say what may yet be unsaid - drawing attention to various of those ‘blind-spots’ which were referred to at the first meeting. I’m also intervening, consciously, because I can.

There is probably more than one single, coherent CCS in effect already. There are multiple agendas here at CCS, and what already is is being called into further doubt by AtHQ. Dear sweet utopians (myself included)

might dream of consensus, here as elsewhere. However, speaking practically, such liberal sentimentality could effectively handicap the (work, etc.) ethics of CCS (such ethics surely being a - if not the - core issue at stake for AtHQ). It is one thing to uphold standards of mutual respect; it is another to imagine that the democratic platform itself is the royal road to success. In all this I wear my politics on my sleeve. What I am getting at is that I already recognise healthy levels of dissent in the department, and discord as to its nature, its mission(s) and their appropriate means of pursuit. I think that Attack the Headquaters has the potential to increase that dissonance, create factions and thereby encourage the evolution of innovative phenomena. Constitutive homogeneity should be allowed for and properly recognized where it occurs, but it should not be actively encouraged. This is a thoroughly ecological concern (a point which I may expand on request).

Let it also be remembered by all that Goldsmiths and the CCS are already real, mundane social, political structures manifest in the world-at-large. It is certainly prudent to draw attention to difficulties of voice, power, access etc. in their effect upon the practical functioning of the Centre (it is even better to suggest realistic solutions). However, let us not obsess! These problems are NOT specific to CCS. They are endemic to ‘our’ society - even to society as such, I suspect. We/you/they may very well want to think about the

apparent reluctance of some people to stand forward at certain times and cast their opinions in class, meetings or wherever. But for pity’s sake don’t imagine that there is something ‘wrong’ with CCS specifically because those problems occur. Politics and personality are and always have been part of the wallpaper, so to speak, and if they concern you, I urge you to throw your attention towards the whole wall rather than the tiny (potentially self-indulgent) little pattern that describes the CCS. Look, certainly, but don’t stare.

To go further, and to risk sounding like even more of a heartless fascist, some of the problems that have been voiced around these discussions, as problems with CCS, are more accurately personal problems which impact CCS because their sufferers are allied to the Centre. This isn’t to denigrate those personal problems, or to suggest that their consideration is out of place here (I’ve had these problems too); I merely think that

the distinction is important, as it may help us understand the situation more clearly. For instance, I hear that many individuals are experiencing a crisis of purpose with regards their academic lives, their thinking and their presence in CCS. This is hardly surprising for MA candidates at the least, given the (probably quite necessary) structure of the course! But this is NOT the same problem as the similar lack of direction of the CCS as a whole.

Some academics are only really comfortable when proffering their own normative values; others instead only feel comfortable discussing what apparently is rather than what they may feel should be. Still others find no ethical problem here! Perhaps a similar set of judgements faces CCS-at-large through the process of AtHQ. In any case, we may relate our personal problems with CCS to the collective problems of CCS as a whole, and we may even seek to tackle them together - but if we do so, let this be a conscious decision, rather than an implicit assumption (particularly where the one might otherwise be assuaged without recourse to the other).

There is certainly a lack of purpose in the CCS. This may be a strength and a weakness; it is the weakness

that concerns me here. I would like to propose an agenda, a programme, in fact a subjective moral stance for the CCS in addition to the foregoing (practical) ethical concerns. I wish to set alarming precedent for our discussions now by proposing a benchmark against which all further discussion may be judged. I am well aware that this move might make some people uncomfortable, and for a plethora of reasons. Let them voice their discomfort.

There are sufficient REAL problems in the REAL world for much of what gets discussed as ‘problematic’ in CCS to be distasteful in the extreme. On the one hand we have climate change, peak oil, food crises and myriad other practical problems gradually making life more difficult for everybody, whilst each one of these REAL problem threatens a phase-shift any day that might suddenly topple us all into dangerous, unexpected territory. On the other hand we have arrived in modernism’s absolute future - not the relative, ongoing future of our own individual lives, but the absolute science-fiction future of the End of History. This is a

fiction, we know, but there is nevertheless an alarming lack of ability to reimagine anything today. I think this is a profound problem for the CCS. We are a microcosm of the global empire that knows that ‘the chips are up,’ that there are too many threats and too much change coming from too many sides at once, but still we are unable to act because we are unable to imagine - or to commit. We know all this, we talk about this at CCS, but we don’t treat these problems with the unique, unparalled respect which they deserve. Any other concerns are secondary. This is my contention. The scholarly reflection on Kierkegaard can wait for a time when the (potential, but very real) collapse of global society, culture, civilization has either been averted or, by conscious preparation, survived. If Kierkegaard is relevant, let him be relevant to these contemporary practical concerns.

I humbly propose that those who can abide by these principles stay with the CCS, and those who cannot, pursue their traditional studies elsewhere. There is the potential here for CCS to do something worthy, unique, and truly historic. CCS is in crisis because the world is in crisis. Every day the media reports the

crises, but the politicians remain out-of-phase. Every day the situation gets worse, and the danger of catastrophic failure grows. Shouldn’t this complex of cultural problems become the explicit focus of CCS? If not, WHY not? And if not us, then who?

People will always have pet projects, and each academic will pursue a different part of the same puzzle. But the benchmark against which a value judgement should be made, for any undertaking in/with/by the CCS, should be as follows: does it contribute to the understanding of, amelioration of, or experimental intervention in, the world-in-crisis as described above? This judgement is often tacitly made already, but it is something new to suggest that it be adopted as the very foundation of a resolved or self-resolving CCS-in-crisis. The ‘critical interventions in creative industries’ alluded to in the centre brochure is already half-way to suggesting a genuine culture of engagement - but I am convinced that formalising the link between CCS and the ‘cultural industries’ is a mistake. That site of intervention is too narrow and although it

offers itself to subversion, it naturally stands on enemy territory. And there IS an enemy.

I have some practical suggestions (partly in response to James and Luciana), and these will follow on later. For now, I’m interested in what people make of my (possibly quite audacious) suggestion of a definitive ‘benchmark’ against which we and the CCS may be judged, in respect to our world-in-crisis. Would people rather stay with unadulterated academia for its own sake? Am I overstating the world’s problems? Where does the people’s glorious revolution fit into all this?

Please respond.
Thank you.
- Darren Flint.

AtHQ Round 2

With the second part of Attack the Headquarters coming up this Tue 27th (2-6pm, RHB 150, as before), would it be worth asking if there is anything in particular that participants would like to see happen differently from the first day - in particular in terms of the collective discussions? The provocateurs lined up will surely set the tone and direction of much of the meeting, but I wondered if there were any practical issues arising from the last session that anyone felt needed addressing?

One comment I heard a couple of times after the last session (in amongst all the encouraging feedback and debate) was that some people almost felt afraid to speak up for fear of antagonising others in the room. Now although AtHQ is not the place for direct personal attacks, nor perhaps for purely negative criticisms (whether of selves or others), at the same time people should not feel they have to keep what they see as burning issues bottled up. If anyone feels that there are topics, questions, issues that ought to be addressed but are somehow getting left out, then it is important that everyone present feels they can point to these omissions. In terms of what I was saying in the last session, the very definition of a blindspot is that you can’t see it: we need each other to point them out.

This, incidentally, is also an issue of relevance to every seminar/workshop/reading group… Any ideas on how we can make people more comfortable in speaking out/up? Or indeed, any other practical suggestions for the form of the discussions on the second day?

AtHQ: Jennifer Bajorek

AtHQ session 14 May

What I tried to say and would say again:

1. On the Centre as a disciplinary entity versus the Centre as inserted in an institution

I was happy to hear from Luciana that we are done talking about interdisciplinarity! I take this to mean that it is no longer helpful to think about what we do in the Centre or in/as Cultural Studies in terms of disciplinarity either. Maybe we’ll still have to say these words from time to time, in contexts void of actual thought, but they won’t have meaning. This would be the place to open a parenthesis on who we are, as many of “us” will not ever be in these contexts (academic job interviews, writing grant and book proposals, etc.), and so a parenthesis on the divide between “the teachers” and “the students,” to which we should try to be as attentive as possible without succumbing to delusional fantasies that we can make it go away. I was grateful to Luciana for making this clear and to all the others who affirmed after she spoke and in the pre-event posts.

Indeed (on the divide again for one second), it became clearer to me as I was going on about the Nigerian delegation that there may be some static or dissonance around what staff and students experience on precisely this question of a happy post-discipline life. I have this vague impression that students are more likely to feel that they “chose” a discipline and a degree programme with a proper name attached to it whereas I as staff have the luxury of feeling, most of the time, that I have been chosen and even rewarded (or punished…depending on the day) for my refusal to cave to disciplinary protocols. This is partly idiosyncratic but it’s an idiosyncracy clearly shared across the Centre staff. What I’m trying to remind us of here is that what is at stake in commitments to a discipline will be, basically for structural reasons, something pretty different depending on whether one is looking at the thing from the perspective of student or staff. This is part of what gets picked up in the conversations I have sometimes overheard about our relationship(s) to “British Cultural Studies.” Our relationship(s) to it apart from being it (which is the reason, or one of them, I take it why John located our discussion “in the UK”). If the 19th century university gave us these disciplines, that is, these little boxes to shut ourselves up in, it was clearly important for British Cultural Studies to undo all that: the compartmentalization of knowledge, particularly of knowledge as specialization and all of the attendant scientific rationalizations of power.

That moment is dead. We inherit from this project and and we reap the benefits, but the forms taken by these rationalizations are changing all the time and so the responses must also change. We do and we don’t inherit this project. I take that to be the point of the Attack in the first place.

I’m new to the UK. This is part of what I meant when I said I don’t actually know what the institution is. I also meant—and this is what I wanted to say about the Nigerians with whom I met for several hours Thursday morning—is that none of us can afford to be too complacent about knowing or understanding what the institution is. You may think you know what the institution is, but whatever it is it’s going to change on you—and fast. There are proposals getting shot around the College in every department and every centre every day that are similar in intention. Not all the proposals are equal, which is why it is worth thinking about how we can be involved at the proverbial decision-making level. I am not proposing we have to accept the analysis handed down to us (for example, that increasing enrollments and particularly enrollments on the MA programmes is the future and the only way to go), but it does mean we need to be thinking a bit about what the consequences of some of these decisions will be and on a more general level about what is going on. (We could also mention those baloney (Bologna?) accords that will radically change the way our MA courses are taught, and not for the better.)

2. Show me the money

Someone said something during the session about the “stultifying power” of institutions. Maybe they stultify in the sense of make us stupid. But even if this is the case, there is no outside of institution(s) (as the “Critique of Violence” session was basically screaming). I would suggest that institutions are not about stasis per se but rather about the vesting and protection of vested interests. Goldsmiths–if we can accept this name for one level of institutional insertion we share, even if it is not the only one–is under pressure to divest and reconfigure its institutional-libidinal-economy in some pretty radical ways. Students experience this pressure, which is obviously financial but which can be expressed, despite this obviousness, via all kinds of weird displacements, and they respond by lamenting (rightfully) the lack of books in the library or the lack of face time with professors. We as staff experience it in all of these ways, and students are very good about reminding us, and more.

One of the things I have been getting told that my students clearly have not (at least not yet)—and I had just been told it three times in one week by higher-ups in College administration before walking into Thursday’s session—is that the college needs to generate a 2.2 million pound surplus by the end of this year. This in order to maintain status quo. Students can complain to me all day about wanting a smaller seminar, more face time, etc., and I can turn around and try to talk to my “line manager” or to the big boss. No matter what I say, I will get told to go make some money.

We need to think collectively about our future as inserted in (an) institution. Our response could take a thousand different forms and ought to take place, it seems to me, on a thousand different levels. It was helpful, by the way, John, to have that clarification of the Centre’s historical position in terms of staying under the radar. This moment is, or should be, behind us also.

3. There is not only the institution and/or where is the decision-making level?

We are also always more than, or in excess of, institution. Luciana’s reminder about Graham and the projects he is working on with the local Congolese community was about this. There are other institutions, and new ones, in play in that work, and when I told my students in the Text and Image lecture (think it was Hegel?) that knowledge always gets produced in connection with institutions, this doesn’t mean that the institution comes first and the knowledge gets made in it, or that knowledge is appropriated by institutions or whatever. This can be a very loose “in connection with,” and it can remain unknown, or up for grabs, or totally labile.

This is why I cast the meeting with the Nigerian delegation as a possible index of change or as a marker of institutional lability. There could be something there, in that particular instance, to seize or be seized. But it was more as a marker of other possibilities, possibilities that might be invented, to think and work more radically on, or through, the forces (the violences) that also produce the horrible things. At the very least, it serves as a reminder that some things can change within the institution at lightning speed. Perhaps only where people are chasing the surplus, or think they are chasing it. Maybe we decide we can work with this, on it and through it, without compromise, for a different agenda. Maybe we decide we can’t, and we take a different position.

Where is the decision-making level? Is it actually on top? Is it ever really there? Isn’t this just swallowing exactly “what they want you to believe”: hook, line, and sinker? The culture of student passivity (the fear of speaking we touched on) makes me utterly despairing here. The fantasied contact between some of the highly compartmentalized spaces I work in—the things that happen in the meeting rooms of the delegations AND the things that happen in the classroom—is about this. I walk into one room and see totally labile structures, everything on fire, and five minutes later I walk out again and into the next room and see total paralysis. Sometimes the second room is the classroom sometimes it is the first.

That’s the truly excellent thing about AHQ. That it is getting these spaces into contact. Thank you all (and my apologies for being late and unprepared in the moment: we did a session swap thanks to pathogens).

basta

Jennifer

AtHQ: transversality - Luciana Parisi

Attack the Headquarters - this is Luciana’s presentation from after the break on the first session of AtHQ.

Luciana Parisi - AtHQ: transversality

When one thinks of attacking the headquarters, one assumes, especially in the context of the geneaological history of Cultural Studies, that a critical point has been reached in the formation of the Cultural Studies entity who thinks of itself as having a core and a periphery. Now one may wish to discuss if this model of core- periphery is actually in place here or whether this model stems from the institutional stratification of cultural studies, whose propositions for practice-based research, uniting theory with the every day as well as make of the every day a political, aesthetic, economical investigation of structures of power, have actually become sites of production for maintaining and renewing structures of power. I am referring for example to the institutional and disciplinary pressure that has smoothened the edges of cultural studies through the simplification of ideas, the ready made application of concepts, the formats of practices organized around the categories and the positions of an empirical structure of knowledge. In a sense the space of thought and for thought in Cultural Studies has become repressed by a common sense appeal to the pro-active machine of cultural and creative capital whose apparatuses of capture have become intrinsic to research and to institutions of knowledge where what rules is a pre-emptive set of initiative, creativity, and innovation prefabricated for specific outputs – conferences, publications, research projects, as well as artistic productions, and all sorts of public and community implementations, translating science into art for instance.

In this context Cultural Studies has created itself as a credible discipline – a sort of minor sister compared to her older sisters, above all sociology, philosophy and economics- sustained by the capacity of becoming capitalised in its theoretical-practices experimentation. Yet what has been left behind in its euphoria to become a dominant – grown up - entity, relying on its original practice-based theory, is precisely the praxis of speculative thought, by which I mean the praxis of devicing techniques for thought concerned with building unrealistic or otherwise called hyperstitional – or also fabulation– conditions, able to insert cuts, gaps, break downs in the smooth operational flow of info-knowledge of cybernetic capitalism. Cultural Studies indeed has a special relation with such smooth info-control to the extent that it has embraced the information revolution with its critical investment in the study of media and communication and most recently its analysis of social software, data mining, info surveillance and info economies, as well as of interactive and responsive media environments. And yet what Cultural Studies has come to ignore are precisely the metaphysical conditions of thought and knowledge, which have become all absorbed by the empirical practices of socio-cultural communication.

Nevertheless by establishing itself as a discipline Cultural Studies could not help by being surrounded by a world of peripheral, marginal or minoritarian praxis of thought where the transversal connection between high and low culture, abstract and concrete practices, speculations and pragmatics have proliferated beneath the cynical façade of a dominant enterprise of cultural analysis sustained by disciplinary categories of political identity. If attack the head quarters can be, amongst other things, a way to explore such transversality then a gesture of attack does not concern Cultural Studies in its UK or International fashions but exactly the contrary. Rather such gesture concerns cultural studies as trans-disciplinary and trans-local, trans-international or even the trans-planetary empiricism. Here an attack will be not a provocation intended as a resistance against the Centre of CS but an invite towards minoritarian praxis of thought, which are neither located outside nor inside the Centre, but are exactly to be acknowledged as lateral or parallel practices of a radical empiricism. This means that such praxis is not strictly speaking a practice, or even an application of thought, but more itself a thought-process equipped with abstract and concrete capacities of intervention, a speculative pragmatics.

From this standpoint, such minoritarian praxis are not there to become simply co-opted by a centre for the capitalization of culture and creative thought, but exactly remain a lateral praxis autonomous from the parameters of the disciplinary and interdiscipinary bifurcation of theory and practice reflected in the structural institutionalization of Cultural Studies. A minoritarian praxis is defined not by a dominant-dominated model. It is not to be confused with the figure/identity of the marginalized. Minoritarian thought is not a question of scale or dimension. It is a matter of concern, of when and how certain unforeseen conditions become relevant to certain occasions, of the extent to which certain events – one could call them revolutions meaning changing the evolutions of things – come to mark the end of a state of affair and the break down or irreversible dis-function of a causal chain of effects.

The autonomy of minoritarian praxis however is not simply given. It needs to be constructed and yet not completely: one will have to acknowledge that the praxis of thought is not equivalent to the intentional mind of the human species. Indeed we know that intentions are also to be found in non-human entities-actors such as animals and machines. This is to say that praxis of thought is infinite. However, from an ethical point of view, the conditions for the autonomy of a minoritarian praxis are constantly to be constructed, but not simply from inside the institution. In other words, for a minoritarian thought of cultural studies to exist it is not sufficient to build a space – a ivory tower, a happy island - inside the institution, inevitably coming to accommodate or innovate the profile of the institution/discipline incorporating such thought by turning it into the marginalised category.

A way of constructing such conditions could be helped by the adoption of a viral logistics, where the institution and the discipline become a host for the invasion of unrealistic techniques of change in the protocol of research activities. For this logistics to acquire duration beyond the temporality of the one off event that can well be accommodated in self-nominated “cutting-edge” institutions and disciplines, it needs to exfoliate the tough skin of institutionalised research inside out spreading the praxis of thought across any research environment, making all spaces, including cities, and planets an opportunity for thought to become speculatively pragmatic, practically unreal. Such spreading can occur by all means of fabulation or fictional reality by devicing techniques of writing, programming, visualising, sounding, architecting, performing, as well as by techniques-agents of community connections, carriers and catalyzers of societies to come. One problem however remains for me: how to discriminate between the infinite praxis of thought, that is how the evaluation of the many praxis of thought can occur across the singular qualities of distinct research environment, which level of speculative praxis becomes a matter of concern and to what extent a praxis needs to declare its finitude, termination when its values have expired.

Thus two questions remain important to me as a speculative researcher in the minoritarian field of cultural studies:

How to invite minoritarian praxis of thought in, which also means out to infiltrate protocols of research activities beyond the protocols set by the alliance between the institution and cultural and creative capital?

How to device techniques of evaluation (of praxis of thought) that endure across fields of aesthetic and cultural expressions which at once maintain a plethora of contrasts and nonetheless together build a parallel and transversal nexus autonomous from the correlational platforms of research activities approved by the institution?

To these questions two suggestions may be here worth considering:

The infiltration of minoritarian praxis can occur through tactics of camouflage or indirect action, which may imply modes of parasiting the disciplinary structure of research and their forms of interdisciplinary modular organization of theory-practice. This implies not simply an instrumentalization of the institution/discipline but a way to expose research to its indeterminate metaphysical conditions. This means not simply translating concepts across fields of study, challenging logic with poetics, as for example occurs in the application of scientific concepts to artistic expression. Rather what I specifically mean by indirect tactics of camouflage is to devise techniques of translogical operations within each and any field of research whereby each discipline becomes a society of praxis with an aesthetic, a philosophy, a politics, a culture, an economics proper to the complex architecture of its speculative activities. This implies turning a discipline into an ecology of practices, as Stengers would put it.

A suggestion as to how to device enduring – or connecting - techniques of evaluation across fields of research, composed of the transversal alliance between worlds of thought which are not simply subsumed to or co-opted by the institutional research and its symbiotic relation with creative and cultural capital, may entail to take seriously the discontinuities in the praxis of thought, the contrasts of its colours, the infinity and complexity of its shades. Evaluation here does not coincide with matching of codes or rules with behaviours and functions. Evaluation rather needs to include the surplus value of each coding research activity as intrinsic to the very nature of code organization. A margin, threshold or minoritarian surplus value of code then can be taken to set the criteria for the endurance or connection of a speculative pragmatics across research societies. This aims not simply at liberating thought from control, but to deflect the direct repressive pressure upon the existence of unrealistic conditions of thought, inflecting such repression towards the construction of impossible logics and towards the destruction of those logics that have accomplished their epochal value. This also means to be ready to declare dead the logic of your political shelter and to learn how to swim again in an open sea of unrealistic conditions.

Luciana Parisi