Invest in the De-liberalisation of Society

This is an 'author's cut' of the fifith section of 'Defund Culture'. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here. The second, 'Culture Must Be Defunded' is here. The third, 'The Ruin of Culture', here. The fourth, 'Culture and the University as White, Male, LIBERAL HUMANIST, Public Space', is here. Versions of the first three of these sections appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The rest I'm making available for the first time here.)

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In this context Eddo-Lodge is far more radical than her popular status would suggest, for all some have found Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race confrontational, even controversial. Those who read her book (rather than merely reacting to its title) will find passages such as the following: ‘After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo’. For many of my collaborators and I, this deconstruction of structural power must include the persistent mechanisms and habits of mind that legacy theorists – including Latour, Escobar and even Ahmed – continue to conform to when they write and present their books as if they are the personal expressions of an autonomous named individual; one who lives and works in isolation from all human and nonhuman others, and who has the moral and legal right to be recognised as their original, sovereign, proprietorial authors. (And this is the case even though these legacy theorists may explicitly acknowledge in the content of their work that a given composition is, in Escobar 's words, an ‘emergent heterogenous assemblage’, and that ‘all creation is collective, emergent, and relational’.) They then hand their books over to reputable publishing firms (Duke, Stanford, MIT etc.). These firms turn them into commercial products in the form of materially conventional, fixed and finished volumes of long-form argument, that can be purchased at a price determined by the copyright and property regime presided over by late capitalism’s market logic. It’s a configuration of power that works to make sure a relatively small number of ambitious, high profile and well-resourced thinkers continue to have ideas, concepts, indeed whole philosophies and worldviews, attributed to them as theirs, as part of their unique intellectual trademarks. As Kevin Ochieng Okoth asks in an article on ‘Decolonialisation and Its Discontents’ with regard to the decolonial studies of Mignolo and others: ‘What are the implications for anti-imperialist struggle in the global South if those at the forefront of challenging the Eurocentricity of knowledge production are based in the resource-hoarding universities [and publishing houses, I would add] of the Global North (especially the US)? Is there not a danger of reproducing precisely the kind of epistemic coloniality from which we are trying to de-link?’

To listen to the arguments of Ahmed and Todd once more: what I’m doing in saying this is holding these theorists ‘up to the goals they define for themselves’. It’s the structures of culture and the university that stop them from realising many of their ‘most transformative’ ambitions, including exploding these structures, blowing them apart. The pre-formatted liberal humanist ‘dimensions of the academy itself prevent the reimagining’ of theory and scholarship. As the work of Ahmed and Todd bears witness, it’s hard to think of many academic theorists whose responses to the supremacy of white, male, liberal humanist culture that’s behind the marginalisation of people from working-class, Black, Global Majority and LGBTQIAP2S+ communities do not take the categories and frameworks of white, male, liberal humanism as their default starting point for doing so. This is because the de-liberalisation of theory cannot take place until theorists themselves are prepared to engage in the de-liberalisation process in a substantive, structural and physical way, and are willing to recognise that this liberal humanist space is an existing and continuous, if exhausted, reality.

This is what many of my collaborators and I are endeavouring to do: we’re testing some of the strange, new, unsettling – what, following Escobar, we might call non-universal, non-modernist, non-liberal humanist – modes of creating and sharing knowledge and theory that are now possible. As we’ll see over the course of what follows, norm-critical experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, Photomediations, Radical Open Access Collective, ScholarLed, COPIM, Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers and the How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities are attempting to unsettle our accepted, common-sense, liberal humanist ideas of the autonomous subject, the individualistic human author, the unified, stable, fixed and finished book, originality, creativity and copyright. They are doing so by emphasizing instead a range of alternative, non-oppositionally different concepts and values, definitions and distinctions regarding the composition, production and circulation of contemporary theory and research (many of which we’ve learnt from theory). At the present time an incomplete list, which no one text or work could hope to enact in its entirety, includes:

• ontological relationality
• pluriversality (i.e, non-univcersal, non-modernist-liberal)
• intra-active collaboration – of humans and nonhumans
• co-constitution
• collectivity
• polyphony
• processuality
• performativity
• pre-figuration
• situatedness
• responsible openness
• the event (over the finished object or artefact)
• creativity as repetition, modulation, détournement, disappropriation, ‘piracy’
• remixing, reconfiguring, refashioning, reversioning, reframing
• making & unmaking
• learning & unlearning

As such our experimental projects are designed to help us engage in (and transition to) the de-liberal humanisation of our institutions, our culture, even our bodies and how we live and work together.

A History of Asking, by Steven Connor - new open access book from OHP

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of A History of Asking, by Steven Connor.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, A History of Asking is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-history-of-asking/

Book description:

Asking is one of the simplest and most familiar of human actions, and has a right to be thought of as single most powerful and most variously cohering form of social-symbolic gesture. Because so much is at stake in the act of asking, asking, or asking for, almost anything, whether information, help, love or respect, can be asking for trouble, so a great deal of care must be taken with the ways in which asking occurs and is responded. A History of Asking is the first attempt to grasp the unity and variety of the technics and technologies of asking, in all its modalities, as they extend across a spectrum from weak forms like begging, pleading, praying, imploring, beseeching, entreating, suing, supplicating and soliciting, through to the more assertively and even aggressively self-authorising modes of asking, like proposing, offering, inviting, requesting, appealing, applying, petitioning, claiming and demanding. The book considers the history of 6 broad modes of petitory practice. The act of begging, both among animals and humans is considered in terms of its theatrics. The institution of the political petition, protocols for which seem to arise in also every system of government of which we have knowledge, is tracked through from late medieval to nineteenth-century Britain. The act of prayer, central to religious practice, though often the last form of religious behaviour to fall away among those lapsing from adherence, and one of the religious practices that is most likely to be adhered to in the absence of any other religious commitment, is the subject of sustained scrutiny. The appeal of prayer is essentially to the fact of participation in language, and the specific forms of commitment to the condition of being bound, bindable, or biddable by it. Wooing and the associated economics of seduction and solicitation are tracked through from the formalisation of the conventions of courtly love in the 12th century through to modern techniques of flirtation. The book revives the antique term ‘suitage’ in order to discuss all the forms of sueing and suitorship for favours or advantage, as well as, more broadly the act, pursued almost life-long, of trying to get one another to do things for us, in particular in indirect or vicarious forms of what may be called ‘interpetition’, such as the dedications of books to patrons, the institution of the testimonial or letter of reference and the practices of flattery. A History of Asking concludes with a discussion of the many ways in which our necessarily parasitic relations on each other in a complex society are both conveyed and dissimulated, especially through the ways in which we summon and salute different kinds of service. 

Author Bio

Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English Emeritus in the University of Cambridge and Professor of Living Well with Technology at King’s College London. He is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has published books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and postmodernism, as well as on topics such as ventriloquism, skin, flies, air and numbers. His website at http://stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in progress.

On Naomi Klein's 'AI Machines Aren't Hallucinating. But Their Makers Are'

In 'AI Machines Aren't Hallucinating. But Their Makers Are', Naomi Klein provides a powerful critique of the architects and ‘boosters’ of generative AI.

It’s hard to disagree with her clinical treatment of the ‘utopian hallucinations’ of Silicon Valley CEOs: that large language model AI will solve the climate crisis, deliver wise governance, and liberate us from drudgery.

Yet like many recent accounts of the dystopian (even fascist!) future of AI, Klein’s analysis still takes an unmarked/black-boxed, modernist-left liberal humanism as the position from which everything else is to be measured and understood. And we can include in this her conceptions of privacy rights, creativity and copyright.

In its destabilising of the belief that art and culture must stem solely from the creativity of human individuals, and opening us up to an expanded notion of intelligence that is not delimited by anthropocentrism, might AI represent an opportunity for ‘we leftists’ even more radical than those Klein points to but quickly discounts? And might this be the case for all she discounts AI’s most exciting promises for good reason: because in order for large language model AI ‘to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home’, it ‘would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life’.

Take the environmental crisis. Our current romantic and extractive attitude toward the environment as both:

1)   passive background to be protected;

2)  freely accessible Lockean resource available to be used to generate wealth and profit

is underpinned by a modernist epistemology based on the separation of human from nonhuman, culture from nature, living from non-living? Yet isn’t it this very epistemology and its ‘human values’ that AI might, just might, help us move beyond?

Experimenting with Copyright Licences

My post on 'Experimenting with Copyright Licences' able to support a collaborative, radically relational approach is now up on the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project website.

https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/combinatorial-books-documentation-copyright-licences-post6/release/1

It's part of the documentation for Ecological Rewriting, which is the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers/Open Humanities Press pilot.

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/

It discusses both Creative Commons licenses and Collective Conditions for Re-Use (CC4r) by way of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's 2017 book Assembly.

Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, edited by James Gabrillo and Nathaniel Zetter

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, edited by James Gabrillo and Nathaniel Zetter.

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

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/articulating-media/

Book description:

To ‘articulate’ media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What materialities might survive media’s many articulations and associations?

Diverse in topic and method, the collection’s nine chapters analyse those questions of value, representation, and categorisation that are held within the languages of media. Contributors consider media technologies – following previous volumes in the Technographies series – not as mute objects addressed through language, but as processes and devices situated in the very grammars and vocabularies of their address. Scholars of literature, film, musicology, art, design theory, and media history evaluate new linguistic possibilities for thinking across disciplines and for considering the significance of location to media-critical writing. Collectively, the book traces the ways in which media vernaculars have shaped the vernaculars of media theory, and proposes a few ways in which we might reshape them.

Editor Bios

James Gabrillo is an assistant professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He was previously a lecturer at The New School and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.

Nathaniel Zetter is a College Teaching Associate in English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.

Series

Articulating Media is published as part of the Technographies series, edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/technographies/