Culture and the University as White, Male, LIBERAL HUMANIST, Public Space

This is an 'author's cut' of the fourth 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. 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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It is some of those writing critically on race who have perhaps gone furthest in helping us to understand why it’s not enough to just have more equality, diversity and inclusivity. Why it’s important to transform the dominant discourse network and its manufactured common sense about not only who writes and publishes – which people from which backgrounds and communities – and what they are being conditioned to write and publish about. Welcome changes of that kind can be made without threatening the cultural status quo or the financial interests of those who dominate it too much. What’s also important is how people write and publish: how writing, publishing and subjectivity are enacted and performed.

Elsewhere, I’ve drawn on the antiracist, anticapitalist, antiheteropatriarchal approach of Latin Americanist theorists such as Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, along with the infrapolitics of Alberto Moreiras and Gareth Williams, to think more about this issue. I’ve engaged with theorists to do so because contemporary theory helps us to understand our modes of being and doing in the world, and to imagine them differently and so change them. In addition to that of Escobar et al, there’s the work of intersectional feminist Sara Ahmed. She has written powerfully about ‘diversity as welcome’, as ‘an invitation to those who are not yet part to become part’, to be assimilated into the dominant way of doing things; and about how much of culture, and the academy within it, is white male public space:

When we talk of ‘white men’ we are describing an institution. ‘White men’ is an institution. By saying this, what I am saying? An institution typically refers to a persistent structure or mechanism of social order governing the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community. So when I am saying that ‘white men’ is an institution I am referring not only to what has already been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure. A building is shaped by a series of regulative norms. ‘White men’ refers also to conduct; it is not simply who is there, who is here, who is given a place at the table, but how bodies are occupied once they have arrived; behaviour as bond.

There’s that of Zoe Todd as well – to cite beyond the usual roster of ‘brand’ or ‘rock star’ theorists. Todd draws on Ahmed to critique philosopher Bruno Latour’s failure to reference contemporary Indigenous scholars in his research on cosmopolitics:

What I have experienced in the UK academy is what Ahmed describes: white men as an institution that reproduces itself in its own image. It is important to note that Ahmed speaks to the structures of whiteness, and indeed we must remember that a critique of whiteness is meant to draw attention to the structural, routinised aspects of ‘white public space’. Ahmed goes on to describe how this reproduction is citational – one must cite white men to get ahead.

And, of course, we only need to look at certain fields, such as media philosophy – not forgetting those associated with the ‘trendy and dominant Ontological Turn’ as Todd characterises it: actor network theory, speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, media archaeology, cosmopolitics, planetarity – to find plenty of scholars (including women and those from Black and Global Majority communities) who primarily cite white men.

We thus have a situation in which both culture and the academy in the West are spaces where those:

·      who are not upper- and middle-class white men, or – and this is important when it comes to thinking about issues of equality, diversity and social justice – or who are not aspiring to be, and so do not operate according to their regulative norms and codes of conduct, are more often marginalised or excluded. They are less likely to be employed or published in the first place; and if they are, they are not promoted, retained or awarded permanent full-time positions.

·      who are not privileged white men – in either body or mind – have lower status and receive fewer opportunities and rewards. This can be seen very clearly in Western-model universities, as an article provoked by the refusal of Harvard to grant tenure to Cornel West, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Lorgia García Peña explains:

It turns out… that the topics that scholars of color often research are less likely to receive research funding and, at least in some fields, are less likely to be included in the very journals that are valued for promotion. Scholars of color are also less likely than white scholars to be cited when their work is published. And on the teaching front, women and people of color are often evaluated more poorly than white men, even when they are teaching identical content.

·     institutions that are not dominated by the inherited standards and structures of the bourgeois white patriarchy tend to be seen as less prestigious and ranked lower. Again, it’s a situation visible within Anglo-American higher education. As Angela McRobbie writes of the UK context:

The effect of contemporary neoliberalism in the field of education has been to succeed in creating a new common-sense about the university system. … The downside of this is that it has become normal to disregard local universities and to only hold in esteem those belonging to the Russell Group. … Competition translates into re-invoking class-based (not to say ethnic and gendered) hierarchies, and this in turn becomes part of the wider culture. We begin to get used to comments from parents and their teenage children and teachers, as well as from journalists and commentators that what really matters is getting into a ‘top university’.

At the same time, this is where things become even more challenging. For the argument I’m making  is that we need to recognise that culture, and the university within it, is not just a white male space. It is a Euro-Western, modernist, liberal, white male space. In fact, I want to go so far as to argue that it is precisely because culture is liberal that it is a white male space.

Liberalism, as a philosophy, is based on the idea of free human individuals using their capacity for reason to enter consensually into an agreed formal contract with other free individuals in order to maintain their universal right to freedom along with that to life and property. Under liberalism everyone is supposed to have an equal right to participate in the public domain. I stress supposed because for liberalism some individuals are more equal than others. This is especially true of the classical unmarked and disembodied white male liberal subject of the epistemological global North and West. Liberalism’s emphasis on universal rights has never actually been applied universally: it has always referred primarily to privileged Euro-Western white, male, cis, heterosexual human individuals.

John Stuart Mill provides an infamous example. Mill is one of the most important thinkers in the history of liberalism. He has been called both the father of liberalism and ‘the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century’. Yet Mill was also a colonial administrator for the British East India Company from 1823 up to 1858, just one year before the publication of his classic work of liberal philosophy, On Liberty. In that book, written with his partner Harriet Taylor (although in a further example of liberalism’s privileging of well-off white men her contribution often goes unacknowledged and unattributed), he reveals why there is no contradiction between his liberal values and the violent regime he was helping to maintain in India. (We can think here of the liberal belief that the individual’s free, voluntary and undeceived consent is the foundation of the legitimacy of government, this being a consent Britain didn’t trouble itself too much about acquiring in its colonies.) There is no contradiction quite simply because Mill does not consider Indian people to be fully human beings. We can see this from the way in which in On Liberty he offers a version of the ‘white man’s burden’. When it comes to dealing with those regarded as ‘barbarians’, he writes, despotism is a perfectly ‘legitimate mode of government … provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.’

Mill is, of course, only one of the most well-known examples of the way in which, for liberalism, the freedom of individuals really means the freedom of certain white male human individuals (who nonetheless claim the right to speak for everyone). There are many more. They include the fact that the majority of those who signed the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, with its insistence on the self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal’, were themselves the owners of other individuals as property. These slaves were neither free nor equal. At one point they were calculated to represent only three-fifths of a free person. Ever since, the United States has been a liberal democratic nation that is on the one hand based on the idea that everyone is equal, and on the other riven with laws and practices that have denied that equality to large sections of its population based on race.

It is a modus operandi on liberalism’s part that can be tracked back to the very beginnings of the European Enlightenment, for all the latter’s belief in reason, objectivity, impartiality, tolerance and respect for fair and rational debate. It is certainly present in John Locke’s view of animals, plants and the environment as ‘inferior’ non-human others with no natural rights. As he makes clear in The Two Treatises of Government, published anonymously in 1690, this means that, while they might be owned in common, free human individuals can transform these resources into private property by virtue of the labour they invest in them, whether that be hunting, farming or mining.

Locke’s conception of individual liberty – of which a person’s right to property and possessions that ‘no-one ought to harm’ plays an important part – was a key influence on the historical development of both the European Enlightenment and liberalism. Yet this structure of thought, whereby those that comfortably-off, middle- and upper-class white men consider to be inferior and Other are excluded from having equal rights to life, liberty and property, as Locke famously put it, can be traced back still further to some of liberal theory’s earliest origins in the Putney debates. Held in 1647 shortly after the first English civil war and chaired by Oliver Cromwell, these were a series of discussions among the New Model Army, a lot of them Levellers, over the composition of a new constitutional settlement for Britain. It was here that (in the West at least) the notion of inalienable individual rights, including freedom of religious worship, freedom from conscription into the military and freedom from indiscriminate imprisonment, was established. (Prior to this people only had privileges and specified liberties, which were given to them – and could be taken away again – by the powers that be: the monarchy, aristocracy, church.) However, it was accepted that these rights, like the Putney debates themselves, did not include women. Foreigners, servants, beggars and debtors were also excluded.

This is why I say it is because culture is liberal (and not in spite of it), that it is a Euro-Western, modernist, white male space. I want to emphasize these other aspects of culture and the university – which for shorthand I’ll refer to as liberal or liberal humanist (to emphasise the centrality of the human). I want to do so for the simple reason that we can’t escape complicity with the institution of ‘white men’ if, to now remix Ahmed and Todd, the categories and frameworks that are used to perform this decolonisation of thought persist in recreating the academy's white male liberal humanist superiority. In other words, we can’t expect ‘lasting change, or decolonization, to occur’, we can’t ‘bring the house of whiteness down’, if we continue to practice our disciplines in Euro-Western, modernist, liberal humanist terms: that is according to the narrow worldview of privileged white men, their regulative norms and codes of conduct regarding the composition, presentation, publication and communication of research and scholarship.

All of which brings to mind something Michel Foucault writes in The Birth of Biopolitics. In a little dwelt upon passage we find him arguing that ‘liberalism’ should be analysed, ‘not as a theory or an ideology … but as a practice, that is to say, a “way of doing things”’. Foucault’s insistence on the need to interrogate liberalism as a practice helps us to appreciate something important when it is brought to bear on our way of doing things as theorists and scholars. We may espouse explicitly anti-liberal (and anti-neoliberal) theories. We may subject many aspects of the liberal tradition to radical intellectual critique, including its marginalisation of low income, working-class people, female-identifying people, Black and Brown people, trans and nonbinary people, neuroatypical and differently abled people. We may scatter our writing with terms such as relational, ontological and entanglement and talk about how we are intimately enmeshed with our material and immaterial environment.  But we are nevertheless liberals by virtue of how we live, work and think in the world. When it comes to contemporary theory (and much else besides), such liberal humanist blind spots or datum points include:

•       the autonomous (and proprietorial) human subject  
•       the self-identical rational liberal individual
•       the named author as romantic / modernist genius
•       linear thought
•       the long-form argument
•       the coherent, single-voiced narrative
•       the consecutively paged book / journal article designed to be read in a progressive temporal order
•       the unified, homogeneous, fixed and finished autograph text
•       the perfect object, published in uniform, multiple-copy editions, distributed on mass industrial basis
•       monumentality      
•       creativity
•       self-expression
•       authenticity
•       copyright

To provide a specific example: if – riffing on the argument of Jessica Pressman and others – the book is a symbolic representation of and proxy for white, male, liberal humanism, then we can’t change that simply by publishing or citing larger numbers of books by thinkers who are not white men. That risks just being more white, male, liberal humanism. As Ahmed concludes: ‘It takes conscious willed and wilful effort not to reproduce an inheritance.’ (Given what I said in previous sections of 'Defund Culture', it’s worth remembering that the novel is also a bourgeois European invention.) We don’t necessarily need new books, then – or indeed new theory. (Or new novels.) All that risks just being more of the same.

This is why it’s important to go further than ‘situating’ one’s knowledge, to use Donna Haraway’s influential term. (‘Situated knowledge’ is a term that has itself been dislocated from its embeddedness in specific knowledge situations to become something of a fashionable floating signifier in the contemporary humanities.) Or, for that matter, acknowledging one’s individual authorial subject position – say, as an academic in a Western university system, working in a disciplinary environment strongly influenced by European (French, German, Italian) theory, as reflected in the references made and sources draw upon. Or even, in Otegha Uwagba’s words, checking one’s ‘privilege (white or otherwise) … to make clear to others that you are at least aware of the unfair advantages you’ve been granted by virtue of skin colour, class background, gender or whatever your own particular stroke of luck.’ For one thing, as Uwagba points out: ‘Conveying that self-awareness’ can become ‘an end in itself, a moral get-out clause alleviating the pressure to do anything more substantial to offset that privilege’. For another, you can do all that and continue to act as a white, male, liberal humanist, whether you identify as one or not. What we really need are new, non-liberal ways of working and living.

The Ruin of Culture

This is an 'author's cut' of the third section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here. The second, 'Culture Must Be Defunded' is here.)

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At this point my argument becomes more provocative still. For the changes I’m pointing to go further than giving more people from a wider range of backgrounds the kind of opportunities that might enable them to contribute to art and culture. This is why none of my work in this area is simply about social mobility or widening access. In all the debate around mobility and access, not enough attention is given to the damage that is done to the nation’s culture by a situation in which 39% of the UK’s leading people are privately educated, with a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge University.

Many writers have come to appreciate how such a state of affairs harms society in political and psychological terms. In Sad Little Men, Richard Beard refers to the work of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien and her 2015 volume Boarding School Syndrome. Schaverien describes a condition:

now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy groups and an emergent academic literature in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. The symptoms are wide-ranging but include, engrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism.

In this environment, Beard continues, pupils survived by drastically modifying their behaviour and emotions:

Abandoned, alone, England’s future leaders needed to fit in whatever the cost….

Terrified of crying for help, of complaining or sneaking, we developed a gangster loyalty to self-contained cliques, scared to death of being cast out, of being cast out again, as we had been from home.

Beard proceeds to argue that, in its impact on his generation of boarding-school boys, evidence of this condition can be seen in the Government’s handling of Brexit and the Covid pandemic.

The author and musician Musa Okwonga makes a similar case in One of Them, his memoir about his time as a schoolboy at Eton (also the alma mater of David Cameron, Boris Johnson and current Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng):

A few years before I arrived at my school, it was attended by a cluster of people who now hold political office in Britain: a group who has driven through some of the most socially regressive policies in recent memory, and whose leader, the current prime minister, is best known for his arrogance and dishonesty. …  I ask myself whether this was my school’s ethos: to win at all costs; to be reckless, at best, and brutal, at worst. I look at its motto again – ‘May Eton Flourish’ – and I think, yes, many of our politicians have flourished, but to the vast detriment of others. Maybe we were raised to be the bad guys?

It's worth remembering this question in light of the fact that, of the fifteen UK prime ministers since 1945, five of them went to Eton. (A total of fourteen prime ministers attended Cambridge University, six of them Trinity College, and a whopping twenty-eight attended Oxford University. One Oxford college alone, Christ Church, educated thirteen of them.) Later in the same book Okwonga writes:

Almost every schoolfriend whom I have seen express a political view on social media has been Conservative. And why wouldn’t they be? This world works for them just as it is. It provides them with living standards and a basic level of comfort that are unimaginable to most people. Why the hell would they want to change that? Both of my boarding schools were overwhelmingly right-wing environments …. This was the world from which these politicians emerged – from which we all emerged – and it proves that you don’t have to be cruel in your daily life to enact policies with cruel effects. You merely have to absorb the mantra, fed to you forever by such surroundings.

Less appreciated in all the discussion of the harm caused by absorbing this mantra is how the flourishing of the public school and Oxbridge-educated in all walks of life – arts, drama, music, business, politics, the law, the media, journalism – ruins England’s culture, too. What has happened to all the recklessness, harshness, superiority, cruelty, arrogance, cynicism, exceptionalism and cliquism there? Are we to believe it just evaporates when it comes to the creative arts? Can it really be that it is played out politically and psychologically but not culturally?

As we have seen, it’s the people (the ‘bad guys’?) from the two top socio-economic classes, who have been through this privileged part of the education system, who then go on to take a disproportionately prominent role in forming England’s culture, usually in their own best interests. It’s this demographic that largely makes the rules as to what counts as culture, and gatekeeps who is good enough to join the ranks of those that get to produce, publish and disseminate it. To be judged as proper and credible an instance of creative culture must often be filtered through this anti-intellectual, upper and middle class, straight, white point of view. Yet England’s culture is all too rarely understood in these terms. Just as being male, able-bodied, cis and heterosexual is unmarked, so this homogenous, limited, somewhat boring culture is unmarked. It’s regarded – by those in publishing, the media, journalism and so forth – simply as what culture is. (Hence, we get situations such as that described by Pamela Jikiemi, head of film, television and radio at Rada, where drama schools ‘are very much held in a chokehold by the white establishment … When you’re white you get actor training, when you’re Black you get training to be white’.) On the spectrum of good to bad, those who have been to public school and Oxbridge are generally considered (largely by those who have been through this elite education system themselves) as being self-evidently better at creating, presenting and communicating it. Better because they know how to pursue the right sort of projects and ask the right sort of questions and adopt the right sort of ‘polished’ tone. They thus have their contributions ranked higher in the cultural hierarchy. There is little sense that English society and its structure functions to impose a particular set of values and concerns onto much of its arts and culture. Nor that it belongs to those who have been to public school and Oxbridge. And that this is the reason these upper- and middle-class white people are held as being better at creating it: because this culture and its rules work well for them. (Hardly surprising really, since it’s this demographic that largely make and police the rules.) Meanwhile those outside this group (those whose parents are not in the two top socio-economic classes, and who do not go to a fee paying school, and are not accepted to Oxbridge), are set up to struggle: both to learn these rules; and to be successful in operating within them even when they do. Consequently, the creative projects they pursue and the questions they ask and the tones they adopt are far more likely to be regarded as improper, objectionable, not marketable or credible,  at best inferior.

The argument I’m making may seem reasonably familiar, especially to some of those who are not privileged, straight and white. Even so, it has implications that habitually go unrecognised. Because, as I’ve begun to show, to address this situation it’s not merely a matter of devising a fairer means of distributing places at private schools and Oxbridge: say, by using a system of quotas, vouchers or even a lottery to be more inclusive of diversity. Nor can the issue be resolved by actions such as those pointed to by Zadie Smith. In ‘Contempt as a Virus’, the postscript to Intimations, a book of six essays written during the pandemic, Smith writes of disdain of Black people as a virus that affects the left in the US as much as the right. Such contempt mistakes the symptoms for the cause, she says, quoting James Baldwin, and produces a mentality that:

looks over the fence and sees a plague people: plagued by poverty, first and foremost. If this child, formed by poverty, sits in a class with my child, who was formed by privilege, my child will suffer – my child will catch their virus. … And it's a naive American who at this point thinks that integration – if it were ever to actually occur – would not create some losses on either side. … But I am talking in hypothesis: the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to ‘blackout’ their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and ‘educate’ themselves about black issues – as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their schools.

The answer is not just to provide more Black children in the US or UK with opportunities to attend the same schools and universities as their white counterparts, extremely important though that is. As I’ve indicated, we need to go further than that. Further even than ‘normalising the marginalised’ by giving greater numbers of female-presenting, working-class, Black, Global Majority, LGBTQIAP+, neuroatypical and differently abled people, as well as those at the intersections of these identities, a chance to tell their stories.

After the 2020 antiracist uprisings in many places around the world the journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first Black Briton ever to top both the non-fiction paperback and overall UK book charts, while novelist Bernardine Evaristo became the first woman of colour to top that for paperback fiction. In the text of her Goldsmiths Prize Lecture that same year, Evaristo emphasizes ‘novels need to be generated by and speak to a variety of demographics’. And, of course, it is extremely important to ‘talk about who is writing the novel and what they are choosing to write about’ as Evaristo says, and to start including those whose histories have long been invalidated and excluded: ‘areas such as women’s fiction, world literature or the lesbian novel’, and writers such as Jacqueline Roy, Nicola Williams and Judith Bryan who have been  republished in Evaristo’s Black Britain: Writing Back series for Penguin. I’m aware all this is situated in a particular cultural context. But – and this is a critical aspect of the issue that too often goes unrecognised – there remains a risk that England’s safe, anti-intellectual, privileged, white culture will continue to dominate. As I put it in A Stubborn Fury, paraphrasing Eddo-Lodge, this culture will still thrive. There’ll just be more women, northerners and people of colour involved in creating and disseminating it. As indeed is gradually coming to be the case in some sectors.

A survey of diversity in the publishing industry released in 2021 found that more than ‘half of executive leadership and senior management roles are held by women (52% and 55% respectively)’. Women take up 92% of publicity, 88% of rights, 83% of marketing and communications and 78% of editorial roles.[i] (Both Sharmaine Lovegrove, founder of Hachette imprint Dialogue Books, and Kishani Widyaratna, editorial director of 4th Estate, make the point that these tend to be ‘“white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative women”’.) When it comes to who is producing the books these women are publishing, the majority are by female-identifying authors. ‘629 of the 1,000 bestselling fiction titles from 2020 were written by women (27 were co-authored by men and women and three were by non-binary writers, leaving 341 by men). Within the “general and literary fiction” category, 75% were by female authors…’.

This does not necessarily mean cis-gendered, heteronormative male authors are finding it more difficult to get published than they did in the past, despite a number of claims that have been made to this effect in articles with headlines such as ‘Men “Suffer Sexism In Publishing Industry” as White Middle-Class Women Elbow Them Out’. As several commentators have acknowledged, it could be that fewer men aspire to write literary fiction. After all, being a novelist doesn’t have quite the same cultural cache it did when the likes of D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Graham Green were in their pomp. Not so many men are perhaps growing up with an ambition to be the Albert Camus, Jack Kerouac or J.G. Ballard of their generation. There’s also little chance of making large amounts of money from literary fiction these days. Only a very small number of novelists do so, even enough to make writing a full-time job. Most need to have part-time jobs or other sources of income. Many male authors are therefore more interested in other genres such as fantasy and horror, or in nonfiction: history, biography, commentary, self-help and so on.

Whatever the reason, men no longer have the dominant literary status they once did. Great white males such as Martin Amis and Will Self from the 1980s and 1990s, and even David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy from the 2000s and 2010s, are out of fashion. Right now it’s Ali Smith and Bernardine Evaristo – the latter soon to be president of the Royal Society of Literature – who are feted culturally as producing some of the most exciting new fiction. (And that’s without even mentioning Sally Rooney in Ireland.) Indeed, whereas previously it was white men who ruled the literary prize scene in Britain, over a fifth of the authors shortlisted in 2020 were Black. That’s a significant shift for an industry in which no Black writers were shortlisted at all for four of the years between 1996 and 2009 (these being 1996, 2001, 2002 and 2009 respectively).

I want to offer two quick points by way of further qualification. First, this change in who is being published and selected for literary prizes is a recent thing. It could easily turn out to be a blip, a set of temporary exceptions that prove the continuing rule of the old order. Second, as other observers have remarked, whether this means that female-presenting and Black and Global Majority writers are now being given the same status and authority as their white male counterparts – say, to comment on the larger political issues of the day rather than those of a more intimate nature – is open to question. It’s hard to think of a woman or person of colour who could be said to have supplanted Tom McCarthy as England’s leading avant-garde novelist, for example.

Still, what we can say is that there seems to be the beginnings of a change in who is writing and publishing. What we can’t say is that there is a change in how they are doing so.

Culture Must Be Defunded

This is an 'author's cut' of the second section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here.)

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Understandably, the response of many of those on the left and liberals alike has been to argue against those making such decisions that culture should be publicly funded, and to an increasing extent, not least because Britain’s creative industries are such a success economically and in terms of soft power. The government’s own data shows they contribute £111bn to the economy and are second in this respect only to the country’s financial services. (Clearly, they’re being attacked for reasons other than money.) This has led to initiatives such as The Public Campaign for the Arts. Established in 2020 ‘to protect U.K. culture from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic’ and now the nation’s biggest arts advocacy organisation, their ‘mission is to champion the value of the arts and creativity in the UK’.

However, while my collaborators and I would strongly refute the Government’s depiction of culture, and of universities, as not being worthy of substantial financial support, it’s also fair to say this left-liberal argument is aiming at the wrong target. For us, part of the point of universities, and the arts and humanities especially, is not so much to act as guardians of tradition as to provide spaces where society’s accepted, taken-for-granted beliefs can be examined and interrogated. Keeping this interrogation of common-sense certainties in mind, perhaps we can see the defunding of culture – somewhat counter-intuitively – not just as threat but also as an opportunity: one that gives us a chance to argue for transformative change by asking whose – or indeed what – culture it is exactly that we want to be funded?

In my 2021 book, A Stubborn Fury, I wrote about how 39% of the UK’s leading people are privately educated (that’s more than five times as many as in the general population), with nearly a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. It’s these predominantly upper- and middle-class individuals who receive most of the financial support for education in the UK. Approximately £3 is spent on students in private schools for every £1 that is spent on pupils in the state system. The majority of this money is channelled to London and the south-east of England, where there are 3.8 and 3.6 private schools per 10,000 pupils respectively, compared to just 1.2 in the north-east.

The upper and middle class also receive the largest proportion of the available support when it comes to the creative arts. It was found in 2017 that half of the country’s poets and novelists attended private school and 44% were educated at Oxbridge. Yet just 7% of the UK population go to private school and approximately 1% graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. Clearly, not everybody has the same opportunity to contribute to the arts and culture. If you want to be a published literary author, best be in that 1%. Ideally, that means coming from the south-east of England, because then you have a 35% chance of gaining a place at Cambridge if you apply, compared to just 26% if you live in Wales. (This figure drops to 19% for Welsh students who apply to Oxford.) It also means being upper class economically: in 2017 it was revealed that more than four fifths of offers to Oxbridge were to the ‘sons and daughters of people in the two top socio-economic classes’, and that the situation is steadily growing worse.

All of which raises the question: should we call simply for culture to be publicly funded and risk continuing to bestow opportunities and resources primarily on those who have long received the bulk of them, thus reinforcing the existing hierarchies? The evidence is that the current institutions and structures are not working for everyone – especially not working-class, Black and Global Majority people, whose parents largely do not belong to the top two socio-economic classes. (Over 50% of Black children in the UK are growing up in poverty, according to analysis of Government statistics by the Labour Party.) Given the injustice of the situation, should a certain amount of those opportunities and resources be disinvested from the cultural sphere as it exists now – which is predominantly upper and middle class and, very often, straight, white, Christian, heteronormative, cis-gendered and male? Should they be strategically transferred to other areas of society, with a view to generating art and creativity in the UK that is more diverse (and hopefully less safe, boring and anti-intellectual as well)?

My title, ‘Defund Culture’, as well as referring to the government’s withdrawal of public backing for the arts, is of course an homage to the contemporary demand for the defunding of the police. This is a demand with a long history connected to struggles over class and racial injustice. In the US Angela Davis and other activists were already calling for the defunding of the police in the 1960s. Davis herself traces the history of this demand back to at least 1935. That was the year W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, in which he pushed for the abolition of institutions such as prisons and police forces that he saw as being entrenched in racist beliefs. It was the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, however, following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and many others, that brought the call for the police to be defunded to renewed prominence in the US and to a lesser extent UK. This demand was then given further impetus in the latter by a number of events that took place in 2021. They include the conviction of Wayne Couzens – a serving officer nicknamed ‘the rapist’ by some of his earlier colleagues in the force ‘as a joke’ – for luring Sarah Everard into his car using his police credentials, and then kidnapping, raping and killing her. The police used force to break up a vigil for Everard on the grounds that it was an illegal gathering under the coronavirus lockdown regulations in operation at the time – a response later deemed to have breached ‘fundamental rights’ by both a parliamentary inquiry and a 2022 high court ruling. There was also the guilty verdict passed on another officer, Mark Kennedy, for having an exploitative long-term relationship with an environmental and social justice activist while undercover; as well as the arrest and eventual jailing of Jamie Lewis and Deniz Jaffer, a pair of police constables who took ‘inappropriate photographs’ of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and then shared them in two WhatsApp groups.

As has often been noted, #DefundThePolice does not necessarily mean abolishing all law enforcement – although it’s sometimes interpreted in that way, by its opponents especially, among whom are that powerful minority for whom the role of police is to protect their land, property and interests. Instead, what this demand is perhaps most commonly taken to mean is that if forces are not serving their communities, and are rather harming large sections of them, including women, working-class people and people of colour, their sizes should be reduced. At least some of the public money the police receive to ensure everyone’s safety and security should then be transferred to other sections of society – local residents, voluntary organisations, citizens groups and so forth – to provide community help and resources in different ways. There’s a recognition, too, that the police today are required to deal with a great number of problems they are not properly trained for and that are better handled by others. So Defund the Police can also mean debundling a lot of their responsibilities and redistributing them to the likes of educators, drug clinicians and mental health specialists, instead of requiring officers to act as everything from social workers and peace negotiators to ambulance crew. That said, for some scholars and activists, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba among them, defunding the police is undoubtedly about working toward a police-free future. It’s about forces being fully disinvested and disbanded and cities being without police and even policing (which is not the same as their being without help, public safety or first responders). Whichever way it’s interpreted, though, Defund the Police is concerned with taking a new, different, decriminalising approach to law enforcement, rather than privatising it or reforming it by punishing a few individuals as bad apples. The idea is to present a radical vision of the future in which the structural and systemic issues that lead to crime, such as social and economic inequality, poverty and homelessness, are addressed in a fashion that offers life-giving alternatives to the carceral logic of the prison industrial complex.  

The call to Defund the Police is frequently rejected as unrealistic, as well as threatening. Indeed, the association with #DefundThePolice is one of the reasons Black Lives Matter is often condemned as ‘Marxist’ and extremist, even though as a horizontal and decentralised movement it does not have just one politics. (Most obviously, in the UK, as far as culture is concerned, it is this association that has led the government and some fans to criticise football players for taking the knee, insofar as this anti-racist gesture is perceived as having politically radical overtones.) Yet Defund the Police is a philosophy that is backed up by the available research (much of which is captured in Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing) – to the extent that, as Howard Henderson and Ben Yisrael point out, at least 13 cities in the United States have engaged in policies designed to defund the police. Similarly, in an article on how it was Elinor Ostrom’s inquiries into defunding the police that led to her celebrated work on the commons – that is on how people can manage and share resources in their community – Aaron Vansintjan notes how ‘Indigenous Peoples continue to practice safety without the police, such as a community in Whitehorse, Canada. Indigenous citizens of Chéran, Mexico “threw out” the police and took safety into their own hands. There is now little crime that was otherwise common in this part of Mexico.’

Can an equally radical vision of the future be presented regarding culture in the UK? As with the call to defund the police, until culture is by and for all of society, and not primarily private school and Oxbridge-educated white people from the south-east of England, should we demand that it, too, be defunded – with some institutions even abolished – and the responsibilities for participating in, managing and sharing culture redistributed to others?

This essay is intended more as a speculative provocation than an economic plan. However, there are a number of ways of funding a more radical redistribution of opportunities and resources that it might be worth exploring as a starting point. They include:

• Defunding London and the south-east: for example, by ensuring a disproportionate share of financial support – whether it comes directly from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport or via Arts Council England (ACE) – no longer continues to go to London and the likes of the Tate, National Gallery and V&A (all of which benefited historically from slavery). Despite repeated calls for a change to this policy, an analysis of data for 2018-19 shows that London still attracts around a third of ACE investment. This works out as £24 per person, with other areas of the country receiving only £8.

• Defunding private education by taking away the public subsidies and charitable status of private schools and reallocating their endowments, investments and properties with a view to gradually abolishing these establishments. (The policy of abolishing private schools featured in the 1979 Labour Party Manifesto and was approved by the Labour Party conference as recently as 2019.)

• Defunding Oxbridge, since as we have seen it, too, is not working for all of society. Money could then be redirected to encourage projects such as the attempt of Cambridge PhD student Melz Owusu to set up The Free Black University in the wake of the Black Lives Matter2 protests. Owusu wants to decolonise higher education by redistributing knowledge and funding, and putting Black students and staff at its centre, along with a radically reconceived university structure, curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment system. As Owusu recounts: ‘I was like, hmm, this idea of transforming the university from the inside and having a decolonised curriculum isn’t going to happen with the way the structures of the university are.’ Many universities are ‘built on colonisation – the money, buildings, architecture – everything is colonial’.

(I’m not advocating abolishing Oxbridge, or universities, or indeed all liberal cultural institutions. I prefer to go beyond modernist-left liberal discourses to advocate a radically pluralized politics that is capable of including the modernist-left, the liberal and the pluriversal at the same time. However, I’m aware there are those who do advocate abolishing the university as well as the police and prisons. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, for example, write that the left slogan ‘“universities, not jails,” marks a choice that may not be possible. … perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence. Perhaps there is another relation between the University and the Prison – beyond simple opposition or family resemblance – that …. of another abolitionism’.)

It’s so apparent as to have become almost a cliché, but the impacts of Sars-CoV-2 have offered us a chance to present a radically different vision of what the future of society can look like and how we can make it happen. (Both the BBC and Guardian are running major series, titled Rethink and Reconstruction After Covid respectively, to explore how society should change in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.) Such a transformative change will be disruptive of the status quo. Yet with respect to culture (and much else besides) the coronavirus has already been disruptive of the status quo – albeit in ways that have sometimes served the interests of the Government and their allies in business and the media. Moreover, as the Conservative Party’s response to the Covid-19 crisis shows, we can make transformations in our priorities today that previously would have been considered unreasonable. Ideas about big state intervention in social life that might once have been dismissed as Marxist or socialist were suddenly the only thing that could save us. Between February 2020 and July 2021 the UK Government devoted a total of £370 billion to dealing with the pandemic and its economic impact. Not to introduce profound changes in the financing of arts and culture is therefore clearly a political decision, not a pragmatic one.

In arguing for the defunding of culture I appreciate there’s a danger of building a case that could quite easily appear to lead to a further stifling of critique of the Government, Brexit, authoritarian nationalism or the free market by undermining liberal institutions such as the National Theatre and National Trust. However, the likes of #DefundtheBBC and proposal of Dowden’s successor, Nadine Dorries, to axe the corporation’s licence fee, which issue from the right, are not the only alternatives to advocating for financial assistance to be given to those social and cultural elites who have long received the lion’s share of it. The creative industries can be taken in a very different direction to either of these options. It may seem a strange thing to say at a time when liberal democracy is under violent attack in many parts of the world, including from both populist authoritarianism and antiliberalism. But the undermining of certain liberal institutions is precisely what is required if we want to reconstruct a better world after the coronavirus crisis.  A world in which it is not private school and Oxbridge-educated straight white cis people from London and the south-east who receive the vast majority of support when it comes to participating in art and culture, while others in society are marginalised, overlooked or otherwise silenced.

Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones: new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Glitch Poetics is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/glitch-poetics/

Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.

Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.

Glitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.

    - Charles Bernstein, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania.

So, body-machinic posthuman reader, consider the shock to your system(s) when a glitch-error interrupts the coding-decoding mechanisms that govern your operations. Disruption to the textual condition occurs as voice misrecognition and cycles of translation malform and corrupt the poetics of authorial production. The desire for ideological resistance may or may not be short-circuited by the predictive algorithm manifest in remediating performance and its disruption of literary habits. The old attachment to tactical intervention remains, an aspiration still making its way through the charged circuits of culture, looking for a way to break down the rule-governed barriers between aspiration and effective agency. The pathetic subroutines, often destined to crash, derive from provisional looping of interference patterns that constantly reorder our codified reality. In Glitch Poetics Jones selects vivid examples of the ways the glitch can be used deliberately to produce an uncomfortable intervention in the current conditions of posthuman capitalist culture. Or can it? Read and decide, based on your own bodily-machinic receptivity to ‘technological timings’ and ‘leaky intrusions’ across the ‘creepy porousness’ of your boundaries.

    - Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies, UCLA.

Glitch Poetics figures glitch radically as a key aesthetic condition of the contemporary moment. A powerful exploration of how glitch works across writing, art and bodies, it reconfigures our understanding of technology as an aesthetic force that structures our world.

    - Olga Goriunova, Professor of Media, Royal Holloway University of London.

Author Bio

Nathan Allen Jones is Lecturer in Fine Art (Digital Media) at Lancaster University. Exploring the dynamic relationship between the newest media, language and the art discourse, he has written and made artworks about unicode, blockchain, speed readers and peer-to-peer networks. He is also a co-founder (with Sam Skinner) of Torque Editions, whose publications include Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017) and The Act of Reading (2015), and exhibitions with Tate, Furtherfield and FACT, Liverpool.

The Culture War and Attack on the Arts

This is an 'author's cut' of the first section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy.

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For more than a decade the British Conservative Party, supported by the country’s right-wing media, relied heavily on a hostility to one of the mainstays of the post-war liberal world order, the European Union, to help win elections and remain in power. Aware that it’s far easier to unite people as an imagined community around what they are not than what they are, they achieved this by linking the grievances of a number of different sections of society – about immigration, national sovereignty, the loss of secure jobs, the metropolitan liberal elite – at least enough to be able to form a government.

After Britain’s January 2020 withdrawal from the EU, however, Brussels and its professional class of political technocrats can no longer be blamed quite so convincingly for the UK’s problems. What we have seen since is the Conservative Party devoting more of its attention to the wider ‘culture war’ it began during the vote leave campaign of 2016. Research reveals that the total number of articles published in the UK press each year concentrating on the ‘existence or nature’ of the culture war increased from a mere 21 in 2015 to 534 in 2020. This was followed by another huge rise in 2021 to 1,470.

Yet this conflict is far from confined to the pages of newspapers and magazines. It’s also being conducted on the battlefield of the country’s elite institutions. Witness the reaction to:

• the National Trust heritage charity acknowledging in 2020 that almost a third of the stately homes it owns, including Winston Churchill’s country estate Chartwell, have links to slavery and colonialism. Sir John Hayes, a former minister and the founder and chair of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, has gone so far as to tell the House of Commons that ‘defending our history and heritage is our era’s Battle of Britain’. (Subsequently, a group of ‘anti-woke’ insurgents called Restore Trust was established to fight this particular aspect of the culture war by seeking to have its candidates elected to the National Trust’s governing council.

• reports that Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory were to be dropped from the BBC’s 2020 Last Night of the Proms (dubbed the ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’) as result of pressure from movements for racial justice because of their associations with colonialism and slavery. Oliver Dowden, then Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, intervened to say he shared the ‘concerns of many about their potential removal’ and that he had raised the issue with the BBC. ‘Confident forward-looking nations don’t erase their history, they add to it’, he declared. Dowden, currently Co-chairman of the Conservative Party, has since doubled down on this idea, claiming in a 2022 speech to the Heritage Foundation thinktank in the US that a ‘West confident in its values would not be obsessing over pronouns or indeed seeking to decolonise mathematics’.

• the decolonisation agenda within the country’s museums and galleries. In 2021 Dowden was involved again, this time in the vetoing of Dr Aminul Hoque, a lecturer in the Educational Studies Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from being reappointed to serve a second term as a member of the board of trustees of the Royal Museums Greenwich because of his backing for decolonisation.

Declaring war on the ‘wokeism' that is held as leading to the removal of statues (such as that commemorating Bristol slaver Edward Colston) or to the renaming of buildings (including Edinburgh University’s David Hume Tower because of the philosopher’s writings on race), has several other advantages. It distracts from the UK Government’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus contagion and Omicron wave, as well as Afghanistan, Brexit, the Ukrainian refugee situation and the economy: rising energy prices, food, labour and petrol shortages, and the cost of living crisis. And that’s without even mentioning the revelations concerning cronyism, corruption and the Partygate scandal. The 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia and its domination of the news cycles saw the Conservatives calling something of a truce in the culture war. Yet, as with so much of what they do at the moment, this was less an indication of a change of ideological conviction on their part and more a matter of political expediency. As such, it was always going to be temporary – especially when Nigel Farage and his allies are in the process of opening a new post-Brexit front around net zero that is designed to oppose action on the climate emergency. Sure enough, at the Tory’s party’s 2022 spring conference the war in Ukraine was positioned as necessitating an end to criticism of British history and debates about statues: ‘we don’t need to be woke, we just want to be free’, prime minister Boris Johnson emphasised in his keynote speech.

The reason political outliers such as Farage are contributing to the culture war, even when they are not members of parliament themselves, is because doing so enables them to help shift what is considered to be politically impartial and ‘balanced’ a notch or two to the right. This is another of the culture war’s advantages for conservatives. The Department of Education’s new rules concerning the teaching of imperialism, racism and, indeed, the climate emergency in England’s schools provide further evidence of this rightward drift. But the culture war also helps to create an environment in which it is acceptable for the Government to reduce the amount of support it provides to those sectors that are liable to be critical, both of its socially conservative politics – on asylum, the right to protest, secrecy laws and so forth – and of democratic capitalism’s constitutive inequalities (in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality etc.). Public, local government and business investment all having fallen since 2008, many arts organisations have been left struggling to survive during the pandemic due to a lack of a public funding package. (Which isn’t to say the Conservatives can’t still get things badly wrong. A 2020 Government-backed advertising campaign encouraging ballerinas to retrain for jobs in cybersecurity had to be quickly withdrawn after it generated a barrage of protests.)

Nor has the antagonism toward those areas of society perceived as fostering critical thought and dissent been confined to the arts, heritage and media sectors. It is now a decade since Michael Gove, as education secretary, excluded the creative arts from the core school curriculum. A lot of institutions have subsequently scrapped their art, music and theatre programmes. At the same time, well-off private schools have been able to invest in substantial arts centres so their alumni can continue to lead the field.

Yet if the Tories are not committed to protecting the creative industries, they are in favour of introducing the teaching of Latin. In 2021 the Department of Education announced a £4m Scheme to do just that, with plans to roll it out across 40 schools as part of a four-year pilot programme for 11- to 16-year-olds, beginning in September 2022. It’s a prospect that returns us to an era when, as Richard Beard shows in Sad Little Men, his book about the institutions that shaped both Conservative prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson, Britain’s private schools were quite explicit in placing greater emphasis on the ‘development of character’ than on the ‘acquisition of knowledge’. Traditionally, such schools taught very little history, geography or even science, focusing more on sport to exhaust and distract their pupils so they wouldn’t be tempted to have sex with one another. ‘Compliance was more important than critical thinking’, writes Beard. When it came to academic subjects these schools concentrated mainly on the classics and religion. Along with their nostalgic instinct to ‘hide in a glorified’ – and often fictitious – past, evident right down to their ‘almost accurate historical costumes’, and associated aversion to new ideas and to difficulty and complexity, this goes a long way toward explaining why so much culture in England, in particular, has tended to be rather safe, homogenous and anti-intellectual.

The withdrawal of support from the creative subjects by successive Conservative governments is also having an impact on universities, and specifically on what courses are available for students to take at which institutions.  Again, arts and humanities education – including media studies, philosophy, history of art, music, dance and performing arts – can continue (in some form at least) at the kind of wealthy, ‘global-brand’ institution that admits a lot of private school pupils in a manner it cannot so easily at others. The result? Between 2009-10 and 2019-20 the number of university students enrolled in humanities courses in the UK declined by 18%.

In fact, universities are an explicit target in this culture war: for their supposed left-wing campus politics, ‘no platforming’ and ‘cancel culture’. (What’s more they’re a target despite research showing that ‘there’s not a great deal of awareness or particular focus among the UK public about universities being in the front line’ of the culture wars, or of being particularly left-wing.) Within this there has been open government hostility toward the arts and humanities due to their assumed teaching of ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘critical race theory’, and ‘low value’ and ‘dead end’ degree courses. (Again, this is in spite – or is it because – of the fact that, across the West, younger people today are actually quite radical and left-wing.) Just as many cultural organisations and venues have suffered from a lack of financial aid during the pandemic, we now have the arts and humanities being deliberately defunded because they are not considered ‘strategic priorities’. According to the University and College Union, the cuts ‘halve the amount of money available for creative and arts subjects’ from the beginning of the 2021/22 academic year. ‘The reforms are part of government plans to prioritise funding for “high-value” courses like STEM and medicine.’