The Commons vs Creative Commons II: On The Undercommons, Latent Commons and Uncommons

This is the second part of an initial 5,000 word draft of a specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that's being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art.

Contents:

I: Introduction * Conceptual Overview * Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons * Liberal Commons * Radical Left Commons * From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

II: The Undercommons * Latent Commons * Uncommons * The Unknown Common * Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-wing

III: Creative Commons * Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons * The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions * Alternatives to Creative Commons

iV: Conclusion: Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity * Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

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The Undercommons

In The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) challenge conventional political, economic and academic structures, arguing that resistance cannot be confined to restoring or reforming institutions such as the university. As far as they are concerned, the North American academy is a site of professionalisation and managerialisation that absorbs and neutralizes radical thought (including Autonomist Marxist theories of the commons and common), turning “insurgents into state agents” (2013, 38). In response, Harney and Moten introduce the concept of the undercommons, which eludes the removal of the place of the commons and commoners through being a nonplace, one “that must be thought outside to be sensed inside” (39). The undercommons is a place of “refuge” (28), where “outcast mass intellectuality” (33) – not just academics but para-academics, precarious workers and those who have left or never entered the university – cultivate a collective intellectual and social life that exceeds the constraints of the university, the state and capital, and in so doing escapes them (30).

Rejecting appeals for inclusion within the university, Harney and Moten advocate fugitive study: a communal, improvisational and performative practice of learning and being together that resists institutional capture and assimilation, never settling into a solid unified identify. This resistance does not seek recognition or legitimacy from the dominant system or its professional-managerial class – not even as critical intellectuals. (Harney and Moten regard the latter as being generally negligent and complacent.) Instead, it involves cultivating alternative forms of shared knowledge, pedagogy and action within fugitive spaces underneath the critical. “[T]o be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (26). Drawing on Marxist philosophy and the legacy of Black radical thought, The Undercommons embraces a politics of abolition and criminal acts over participation in or negotiation with oppressive structures. “[S]teal what one can” – Harney and Moten regard this as “the only possible relationship to the American university today” (26). It is in this spirit that they call for insurgent intellectual and social practices that build new forms of life in the cracks of the system. They even go so far as to consider abolition as ultimately bearing a resemblance to communism, in that it does not call for the “elimination of anything” but rather “the founding of a new society” (42).

Latent Commons

Matsutake mushroom picking

Anna Tsing’s concept of the latent commons, as articulated in The Mushroom at the End of the World, refers to ubiquitous yet often overlooked and undeveloped forms of collaborative survival and resource-sharing that persist within capitalism’s ruins, albeit without the “handrails” of “modernization and progress” (Tsing 2015, 2). These practices do not conform neatly to the dominant economic frameworks and cannot be fully captured by them. Crucially, they are not “exclusive human enclaves” either remaining open to other beings including weeds, pests and diseases – world-making and alienation both being potential attributes of nonhumans as well as humans (Tsing 255, 121, 271). It should be noted that such ontologically heterogenous, relational – and thus site specific rather than universal or scalable (220-221) – forms of commons are being proposed increasingly (see also Blaser and de la Cadena below). These are commons that construct social relations with nonhuman or more-than-human entities and beings as actors and agents and not just objects.

Tsing explores how precarious livelihoods – especially “off-the-grid jobs” such as rare matsutake mushroom picking – cultivate alternate forms of sociality and mutual human and not-human reliance that resist strict privatization and commodification (2015, 33). In contrast to traditional, liberal or radical left visions of the commons, latent commons “don’t institutionalise well” (255). Far from being governed by fixed principles and rules they are informal and flexible. Consequently – again unlike more formal commons – they cannot be easily translated into structures with intentional strategic policies or prescribed behaviours. Instead, they exist in ephemeral, effervescent, “elusive” guises (255), operating within the interstices of capitalism and the law, rather than in direct opposition to them (as distinct from Harney and Moten’s insurgent practices, which also dwell within capitalism’s cracks, but adopt a more antagonistic stance).  

Being “neither properly inside nor outside” of capitalism (278, 134) – and intertwining with “multispecies others without knowing where the world-in-process is going” (264) – latent commons on Tsing’s account do not lead readily to redemptive and “utopian plans for solidarity” (134). They are “here and now, amidst the trouble. And humans are never fully in control” (255). Nevertheless, they signal the potential for collective forms of life that are beyond market logics, even if they are not fully disentangled from capitalist structures and the global supply chains that translate between capitalist and noncapitalist value systems. For Tsing, this is enough to maintain that such shifting polyphonic assemblages – such open-ended gatherings of ways of being – still contain the potential to be “mobilized in common cause” (135). Moreover, whereas many of capitalism’s critics insist on its unity and homogeneity as a system – some, like Hardt and Negri, even claiming “there is no longer a space outside of capitalism’s empire” (65) – Tsing counters that the economic diversity of latent commons “offers a chance for multiple ways forward,” not only and just that one powerful current of progress represented by an over-arching capitalism (65). To reiterate, she does not frame these noncapitalist forms and value regimes as strict alternatives to capitalism, however, so much as practices that exist within capitalist worlds: that both interact with capitalism and are drawn upon by it, even as capitalism remains dependent upon them. “There is room here for imagining other worlds” all the same (282), including “an alternative politics of more-than-human entanglements” (135).

Uncommons

Building on Isabelle Stengers’ idea of “interests in common which are not the same interests,” Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena’s concept of the uncommons challenges the universalising tendencies of the commons by foregrounding the existence of multiple, incommensurable worlds and their practices (Stengers 2005; Stengers 2011, 60; Blaser and de la Cadena 2018, 4). In A World of Many Worlds, they argue that many notions of the commons assume both: a single, shared reality in which resources and governance can be collectively managed; and an ontology in which humans and nature are conceived as being “distinct and detached from each other” (18). Blaser and de la Cadena emphasise how different groups – including Indigenous peoples and those in the global South and global periphery – do not necessarily share the same homogeneous ontological assumptions about what constitutes reality, property, ownership, sustainability or collective life. The relations between these communities can therefore be fraught, even antagonistic. The complexity of the situation is increased by the fact that their divergences extend beyond their different realities and ontologies: they can also include the relation between them, how it is perceived and understood it. This relation, too, can exist in multiple, incommensurable forms and be the subject of “adversarial dispute” and not just “allied agreement” (18). The grounds where the “negotiated coming together” of these “heterogenous worlds” can take place is what Blaser and de la Cadena mean by the uncommons (2018, 4). Politics is again not absent but pluralised, as “these alliances may also be capable of refracting the course of the one-world world and proposing … the practice of a world of many worlds, or what we call a pluriverse: heterogeneous worldings coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity” (4).

The Unknown Common

Roberto Esposito introduces a further layer of complexity. He argues that we currently do not possess even the language to talk meaningfully about the common (without an s) – something that, he suggests, “was effectively excluded:” initially from the “process of modernization” and the invention of the state; and later from the “process of globalization” (Esposito 2013, 89). For Esposito, the common can be understood in terms of neither the public nor private (whether as good or property), the global nor local. The common exists rather as something “largely unknown,” and even resistant, to our established ways of thinking and categorizing the world (89).

Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-Wing

Thanks to movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and Barcelona en Comú in Spain the commons has – in recent decades especially – become closely associated with anti-capitalist politics and the left. Among Marxists, socialists, anarchists and eco-feminists it is perceived: as a space in which to experiment practically with alternative ways of organising resources to capitalism; as a means of reclaiming the common from capitalism and its version of the state; even as prefiguring the cooperative or communist postcapitalist societies the radical left is struggling to create. (By contrast, the work of radical thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy [1991], Giorgio Agamben [1993], and Roberto Esposito [2009] on the politics of community and the common has been criticised for being too philosophical and abstract.) Yet the commons can also take right-wing, conservative and libertarian forms. A country club, hunting lodge, gated community or cryptocurrency network may all function as a commons, while many free software communities align more closely with right-libertarian principles, valuing individual merit, competition and minimal regulation. Advocates of neoliberalism may similarly regard the commons as a more efficient means of producing for the market, since it is free from centralised state control and bureaucracy; while some supranational organisations, including both the World Bank and United Nations, have privatised natural resources such as seas and rainforests under the guise of “protecting biodiversity” and “preserving the common heritage of mankind” (Federici 2016). Ironically, one of the most well-known “commons,” however, is not a commons at all.

Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts: New open access book

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts, edited by Gabriel Menotti and German Alfonso Nunez.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Barbarian Currents is available open access (= it can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/barbarian-currents/

Book description

Contemporary art and media art do not exist in separate worlds. In 20th century Brazil, technology was a key element of artistic imagination. Oswald de Andrade, the father of Brazilian ‘cannibal’ modernism, envisioned the Americas as a cradle of a new society populated by technicised barbarians. The country’s post-war avant-gardes embraced computers and electronic media as transformative forces, capable of realising the promise of a nation in search of its modern identity. Barbarian Currents explores this history through a sociological lens, examining the many intriguing circumstances that have shaped the new forms of cultural and artistic expression.

This pioneering anthology brings together the voices of artists, critics and curators who played a pivotal role in the emergence of technological arts in post-war Brazil. The documents, most of which have been translated into English for the first time, remind us that ‘alternative’ art histories are simply the flipside of dominant narratives. They encourage us to look beyond the lens of Western exceptionalism and reframe our understanding of cultural histories worldwide.

Endorsements

Barbarian Currents rigorously illuminates the way in which Brazil’s relationship with technological progress, modernism and utopia shaped a distinctive trajectory for its media arts. The book offers readers unprecedented insight into how Brazil’s media art scene evolved both within and against the global art world. This is an essential resource for understanding the special character of technological art in the Global South.

José-Carlos Mariátegui, Founder – Director of Alta Tecnología Andina, Lima

This unique book fills an essential gap in media art studies. Compiling an extensive directory of Brazilian artistic production, it reconstructs, through the perspectives of its leading actors, an important history marked by creative experiments between art and industry post-World War II.

Professor Giselle Beiguelman, University of São Paulo FAU-USP

Editor Bios

Gabriel Menotti is Associate Professor and chair of the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies graduate program at Queen’s University, Ontario. He also works as an independent curator in the field of media practices. His most recent books are Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies (2020, co-edited with Virginia Crisp) and Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology (2019).

German Alfonso Nunez is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of Multimedia, Media and Communication at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). His work focuses on the Brazilian artistic field of the post-World War II era. Recently, he worked as a researcher at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, where he organised and edited the commemorative book for the Museum’s 75th anniversary.

Series

The book is published as part of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series edited by Joanna Zylinska: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/media-art-write-now/

The Commons vs Creative Commons I: From Ostrom to Postcapitalism - and Back Again

This is an initial draft of a 5,000 word specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that's being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art. Other contributors to the glossary include Felix Stalder, Jason Moore and Hannes Bajohr.

Contents:

I: Introduction * Conceptual Overview * Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons * Liberal Commons * Radical Left Commons * From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

II: The Undercommons * Latent Commons * Uncommons * The Unknown Common * Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-wing

III: Creative Commons * Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons * The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions * Alternatives to Creative Commons

iV: Conclusion: Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity * Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

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Introduction

The concept of “the commons” has one of its historical origins in the idea of shared lands – fields, meadows, pastures, woods – collectively owned, used and managed by a community. In traditional English law, such communal spaces were known as commons. Starting in the late medieval period, many were appropriated for private use and ownership through a process referred to as the “enclosure of the commons.”

A common image of a commons

Over time, the term has expanded to take in a wide range of collectively held and accessible resources. Among them are:

•       natural commons – animals, forests, fisheries, rivers, air, the earth;
•       social commons – including some Indigenous knowledge systems and traditions;
•       urban and political commons – such as those established during protests, assemblies, occupations    of public spaces, squares and so forth;
•       money commons – also known as tontines in various regions in Africa, a form of “autonomous, self-managed, women-made” banking system (Federici 2016);
•       digital and networked commons – as associated with peer-to-peer (p2p) production, platform cooperativism and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (F/LOSS) communities.

For centuries, the concept of the commons has been at the heart of debates over collective ownership and community governance.

Creative Commons (CC), by contrast, is a modern initiative. Founded in North America in 2001, it is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the free provision of alternative copyright licenses. These CC licenses enable creators to share and build upon works while remaining within the confines of the existing copyright laws. Though Creative Commons is often regarded as an example of the commons in the digital age, it is important to understand that there are fundamental differences between the commons and Creative Commons.

Conceptual Overview

Traditionally, “the commons” refers to land and resources that are controlled neither by private ownership nor the state; instead they are owned and shared by a community of commoners. Importantly, the idea of the commons can also encompass the social and economic processes and institutions through which commoners create, steward and maintain both the shared assets and their community. Access and use are here governed collectively and equitably by a specific group of users according to mutually agreed-upon rules. Each member of the community therefore has a stake in, and rights over, the commons.

Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons

The work of Elinor Ostrom, who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her research on the commons, demonstrates that local communities can successfully co-manage and conserve shared ecological and environmental resources without the need of privatisation or centralised state intervention (Ostrom 2015). Ostrom’s studies counter the tragedy of the commons, a concept popularized (though not originally coined) by Garrett Hardin, along with the term “commons” itself, in his article of the same name (Hardin 1968). Hardin maintains that individuals acting in their own short-term self-interest will inevitably deplete common resources: through overgrazing or overfishing, for example. Despite frequently being used to justify the privatisation of the commons and removal of those who common, this argument assumes an absence of management or rules. In reality, commons are typically governed by social contracts and agreements that regulate use for both individual and collective benefit and prevent abuse, exploitation and neglect. Indeed, it is precisely this system of participatory self-governance that distinguishes commons from land and resources to which there is simply open and free access (a city street in which people are able to socialize and children play, for example). Any tragedy is the result not of the commons, then, but of people operating as individuals in their own interests to maximise their private property.

Liberal Commons

Philosophers, anthropologists, economists and political theorists have long debated the commons, particularly in relation to capitalism. Liberal perspectives today tend to view the commons as a supplement to capitalism rather than a direct alternative. They focus on preserving and expanding access to common pooled resources while protecting them from excessive commodification and control by either market or state. The influence of this liberal approach is evident in the use of Creative Commons licences by those open-access publishing organisations that look to build a global knowledge commons within existing economic structures through the sharing of the academic research literature – as opposed to fundamentally transforming those structures.

Radical Left Commons

More radical left interpretations see the commons as offering a practical political alternative to capitalism. Instead of being controlled by the market, including market socialism, or even the central state planning of the Keynesian left, resources and spaces are here created and governed collectively by a community of users who self-manage them in a horizontal and participatory – rather hierarchical, authoritarian, top-down – manner. Advocates contend that commoning – the social processes through which both the commons and the community of commoners are built and sustained – acts as a form of resistance to capitalist accumulation, extraction and exploitative wage labour, including reproductive and domestic labour. In this view, commoning is based on shared political principles and practices of co-ownership and co-belonging, such as freedom, equality and social justice. At the same time, commoning offers a foundation for actively crafting radically different non-capitalist ways of working and living together, politically, economically, culturally and environmentally: by revolutionising the home and neighbourhood through collective housekeeping, for instance, or separating the common wealth produced by communities from the military-prison industrial complex. For some, these alternative forms of sociality and cooperation even have the potential to be communist, in that they are often characterised by the elimination of private property, non-capitalist modes of production, consumption, distribution, valuation and exchange, and cultivation of new forms of (common) subjectivity.

From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

Others go further still. They position the commons not only as central to anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist movements seeking to disrupt dominant power structures, and as a strategy for reclaiming public resources following their historical and global enclosure (Bollier 2002; Harvey 2012; Linebaugh 2014). They also envision a commons reimaged for the 21^st century as a political event, a starting point for transitioning out of capitalism to more just and equitable postcapitalist societies (De Angelis 2017).

These emergent political forms are rooted in diverse philosophies and imaginaries. They include:

•       decentralized, cooperative, peer-to peer networks (Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis 2019);
•       economies of post-development and post-extractivism, degrowth and post-work (Gorz 1980; 1999);
•       systems of solidarity, mutual aid and collective care: of the young, old and ill, and extending to care for the natural world (Federici 2018).

Debate persists, nevertheless. Do the commons – like communism for Marx – have to emerge out of capitalism and its contradictions? Antonio Negri argues that capitalism actually “creates the common:” that Marx doesn’t have a pre-capitalist conception of the common (Negri 2003). Here, the common and capitalism aren’t opposed, the one operating as a parallel alternative to the other. The common is impossible without capitalism. (As well as “the commons” Autonomist Marxists such as Negri often refer to “the common,” by which they mean those social relations that are a feature of post-Fordist capitalism’s dominant mode of production. In this context, the common is understood as a foundational condition for the emergence of the commons. As Negri puts it when writing with Michael Hardt: “one might say that the common is what we share or, rather, it is a social structure and a social technology for sharing” [Hardt and Negri 2017, 97].) The key question for Negri is how to separate the common – in the sense of abstract labour “that gets appropriated by capital and becomes common” – from exploitation (2003).

Yet must the commons (and common) always be defined in relation to capitalism: as that which arises out of capitalism, or refuses, resists, undoes or otherwise works through and transcends it, as the concept of postcapitalism implies (Dardot and Laval 2019)? And might a comparable question be raised regarding the state? That is, can the commons and its redistribution of public property and public good only take shape within, and simultaneously in opposition to, particular configurations of the state and state infrastructure (e.g. communications, education, health, sanitation, transport)?

Publishing Activism within/without a Toxic University: new open access booklet

Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press' Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, which is edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter:

Publishing Activism within/without a Toxic University

edited by the Radical Open Access Collective

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/publishing-activism-within-without-a-toxic-university/

Co-published by Post Office Press (POP) (https://hcommons.org/members/pop/) and Open Humanities Press, this experimental booklet brings together reflections from Radical Open Access (https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/) members on publishing activism and its relationship to the neoliberal university. Created as a side project to the Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism conference (https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/radicaloa3/), it explores how publishing can respond to the ongoing crisis in higher education. The authors ask: How can we – as scholars, publishers and activists – engage with a university in perpetual crisis? How can we practice publishing activism within/without a toxic institution?

Inspired by the cadavre exquis technique of the Surrealists, the booklet adapts and (ab)uses this method to foster collaborative, responsive writing. It shows how multiple, potentially conflicting voices can coalesce around a shared crisis and move activist strategies forward in new ways.

It draws from three key ROAC titles published under open licenses: The Undercommons (Minor Compositions: https://www.minorcompositions.info/), Luescher, Klemenčič, and Jowi’s Student Politics in Africa (African Minds: https://www.africanminds.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/9781928331223_txt.pdf), and Conio’s (ed.) Occupy: A People Yet to Come (Open Humanities Press: https://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Conio_2015_Occupy-A-People-Yet-To-Come.pdf). These works, reflecting on protest, activism and student politics, served as a starting point for examining higher education through the lens of social justice publishing activism. The first text in the booklet directly responds to these books, initiating a chain of responses, each written within ten days. Contributors extended the preceding response, engaging with the booklet’s theme and, optionally, the ROAC back-catalogue. Designed by Alex Trencianska, Mia Dawson, and Lisha Wang, the booklet was 'unfolded' during the 3rd Radical Open Access Conference.

Editor Bio

Formed in 2015, the Radical Open Access Collective is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. Now consisting of more than 80 members, we promote a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences. What we have in common is an understanding of open access as being characterised by a spirit of ongoing creative experimentation. We also share a willingness to subject some of our most established scholarly communication practices to creative critique, together with the institutions that sustain them (the university, the library, the publishing house, and so on). The collective thus offers a radical ‘alternative’ to the conservative versions of open access that are currently being put forward by commercially-oriented presses, funders, and policy makers.

Like all Open Humanities Press titles, Publishing Activism within/without a Toxic University is available open access (and can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/publishing-activism-within-without-a-toxic-university/

So that’s where theory’s got to — it’s living above the shop.

Metaphorically, the phrase 'living above the shop' carries several layered meanings:

1. A blurring of personal and professional life

2. Deep embeddedness in one’s practice

3. Precarity and hustle

4. Para-academic or DIY cultural spaces

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Last night, I was part of the audience for an event on the theme of ALTEREGOISM, asking: 'What are the consequences of "weirdness" entering the mainstream? How can the fluidity of identity online be used to increase play, connection, and experimentation rather than induce anxiety?'

Organised by the everyone is a girl collective in collaboration with APEX zine, it featured an exhibition of artwork, a durational performance, an open mic jam session and music, and began with a panel discussion featuring 'post-internet stars' Shumon Basar, Nella Piatek, Marisa Müsing, Zaiba Jabbar and Bailey Davis.

Not so long ago, a panel such as this - moderated by everyone is a girl's Ester Freider and Andrea Evgenieva from APEX, whose reference points, judging from the copy I picked up, include Timothy Morton, Mark Fisher, Sherry Turkle, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord — would have taken the form of a cultural theory or cultural studies seminar. It’d most likely have been found in a university setting — or, back in the 80s and 90s, an arts venue such as the ICA perhaps.

But ALTEREGOISM didn’t happen in an established, formal institution. It took place in a packed room above a vintage clothes shop called Bread & Butter in Shoreditch (it had to be East London!).

Nor did it involve just theory: it also brought together art, music, fashion, new media and performance. And it wasn’t only academics either but artists, designers, curators, writers, musicians, DJs, film-makers, publishers …

These are people who may be doing 'serious' research but — having grown up with social media — feel no need to wait until they’ve (nearly) got PhDs to start sharing their work and ideas. And when they do publish, it’s not (just) in academic spaces such as peer-reviewed journals. They’re used to publishing themselves — so they're creating their own journals, magazines, newsletters, podcasts, Tumblr communities, collectives and multi-media live events.

Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away about all this activity. It's not entirely new. There’s a long history of scholars and para-academics operating in 'third spaces' between the university and corporate mainstream, including small artists' bookshops, independent cafés and bars, and the back rooms of pubs. Nor should we get swept up by the romance of it all. A lot of this energy is about finding – or forging – a means for some kind of authentic personal expression of ‘who I really am’ in a cultural economy that increasingly refuses to offer secure, liveable wages for work that's interesting and fulfilling, let alone critical and creative. Consequently, it's not an arena free of ‘artrepreneurs’ either: people acting as entrepeneurs of themselves, their own lives and ideas. Nevertheless, events like this create a collective space to gather, to experiment, to have fun and play together — and so can be seen as a means of pushing back against the individualism and ‘main character energy’ that saturates much of cultural life, online and off.

At this point, it's tempting to try to come up with a spreadable phrase like 'universities are sooo over'. But that would be inaccurate. It'd also be unfair. Much of this would be impossible without higher education. Many of those involved are doing or have done MAs and PhDs as well as undergraduate degrees. If they're not currently employed in HE in some part- or full-time capacity, then they’re very much engaging with — and building on — the work academics continue to produce from within the university.

Still, for what are obvious reasons — job cuts, precarity, casualisation, managerialism, excessive workloads, the general shift away from theory to more conservative intellectual formations and frameworks — university events today often feel a lot less alive than what’s happening here above the shop.