open

Here is my contribution to a recent workshop on "Beyond Walls: Teaching and Learning in the Open." This was part of UBC's Open Access week.

I start from a brief discussion of my Wikipedia project from a few years ago, Murder, Madness, and Mayhem. I go on, however, to a more general discussion of the role of the university at a time when there is both increasing production of the common and ever new attempts to construct new enclosures that would restrict and commodify our common knowledge and intellect.

In particular, I talk about the possibilities for a program I'm teaching on at the moment, Arts One. More on this soon...

Also

Review of François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. Trans. Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus surely has some of the most remarkable opening lines of any work of philosophy or cultural critique. First published in France in 1972, just a few years after the demonstrations of May 1968, its stylish bravado immediately reminds us of the attitudes struck by student agitators, and proclaims that their radical energies persist: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, as other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.” The original French is even more striking, playing on the fact that “id” and “it” are both “ça” (“Ça fonctionne partout . . . Quelle erreur d'avoir dit le ça.”). “It” is a machinic unconscious that is defined not by what it represents, but by what it produces: “Everywhere it is machines--real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (Anti-Oedipus 1). The question “what does it mean?” gives way to “how does it work?” As Deleuze and Guattari go on to declare in their second enquiry into “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” A Thousand Plateaus: “We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier: we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed” (A Thousand Plateaus 4). They therefore refuse any attempt to derive meaning from biography, to reduce the work to its author(s). Indeed, they disclaim authorship as anything but a matter of arbitrary convenience and custom: “Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. [. . .] We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied” (A Thousand Plateaus 3-4).

Read more... (.pdf file)

LASA

Alberto Moreiras has written a very nice article on the recent LASA Congress. It mainly comprises a series of reflections on the function played by the Congress itself and the trajectory of Latin American cultural studies over the past decade (a true "Latinamericanism since 9/11"). It then ends with some reflections on the discussions in San Francisco, via a rather promising account of posthegemony:

La posthegemonía es una modalidad de práctica teórica en la que caben innumerables tipos de análisis y tomas de postura, pues no es ni normativa ni prescriptiva: es sólo, y por lo pronto, el lugar de un posible encuentro capaz de generar pensamiento nuevo.

[. . .]

El término incluye de antemano su posibilidad crítica y resulta tan apropiado para pensar problemáticas estatales, es decir, en el registro del estado mismo y de la política de estado, como intra- o extraestatales (microfísicas comunitarias, regionales, ciudadanas o rurales, o bien macrofísicas de la globalización y su impacto), de marea rosada o neoliberales, populistas o no. Y en la medida no menor es que su productividad crítica está lejos de reducirse al pensamiento de lo político: constituiría también una herramienta fundamental para pensar la cultura, y con ella todas las modalidades de presentación de lo visible (estéticas, poéticas) al margen de postulados meramente identitarios. Tiene la capacidad de intervenir en cuanto crítica del conocimiento porque es antes que nada crítica de la ideología, y tiene la capacidad de proponer rearticulaciones políticas e intelectuales de todo tipo.

Alberto Moreiras, "¿Puedo madrugarme a un narco? Posiciones críticas en la Asociación de Estudios Latinoamericanos". FronteraD (June 27, 2012).

Prospero

“Prospero’s Book: On John Beverley's Latinamericanism After 9/11”

Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails.
-- The Tempest, Act 5, Epilogue

John Beverley presents himself as the grand old man of Latin American cultural studies. And not without reason. He was there at the outset in the early 1990s, and has figured in almost all of the significant discussions and debates--about testimonio, subalternity, representation, the politics of location--that have marked the field’s trajectory since. He has been equally instrumental in building the infrastructure of the field. At Pittsburgh, he helped organize the various conferences that brought together significant players associated with cultural studies in Latin America. And he has directed the dissertations of numerous graduate students who have gone on to become important voices themselves. Throughout, Beverley has often shown remarkable generosity of spirit: though his own intellectual and political positions have been clear and often trenchant, he has seldom found the need to impose them on others. He has always welcomed dialogue and disagreement. If there are no “Beverleyites,” that is to his credit: he has never forced anyone into his own mold. But as time passes, he increasingly feels that he is part of a generation that is the last of its kind: the last that can remember the heady days of armed struggle and revolutionary enthusiasm; the last, he suggests, with a personal link to a politics that was truly a matter of life and death. As such, Beverley is perhaps understandably concerned for the future of the field once that link is finally broken. Even among his peers, too many have given up the fight, have turned instead to reactionary neoconservatism; meanwhile, the young are too easily tempted by ultraleftism or other “infantile” disorders. In Latinamericanism After 9/11, then, we can imagine him as a “venerable old teacher,” who with “a firm voice--a masterful voice capable of seizing an idea and implanting it deep within the listener’s mind”--sits us down to listen to him.

Read more... (on academia.edu)

poster

I pass this poster every Monday, in the building where I teach a class on Human Rights. Seeing it always induces a kind of cognitive dissonance, as my class is explicitly not a defence of human rights, but a critique. I happen to think that that's the business of universities: critique, questioning, critical reflection.

Anyhow, the poster is an advert for UBC, featuring a solitary figure on a mountain top and with the slogan "Human Rights Defended... From here." I have little idea what it's supposed to mean, and there's not a word of explanation either on the poster itself or anywhere on the UBC website. The image certainly doesn't seem to have much to do either with the university or with human rights.

Any ideas?

Asian

After a fun class yesterday on Neruda, in which students acted out Poem 15 from Veinte poemas de amor and then wrote letters or poems to the poet from the point of view of the woman or women he addresses (my favorite: "¿Pór que no te callas tú de vez en cuando?"), I was extolling the virtues of UBC undergraduates to some friends.

As further evidence, my buddy Alec mentioned the following video, produced by a UBC class in response to a now somewhat infamous article in Maclean's arguing that Canadian universities are "too Asian":



For more, see Tetsuro Shigematsu's account of the making of the video, "Too Asian?", and Brian Lamb's take, "Is UBC 'too Asian'? Let’s sing and find out".

banlieues

This account of the recent protests against tuition fee increases in the UK is fascinating, especially given its source: the Economics editor of the BBC's flagship current affairs program, Newsnight.

Any idea that you are dealing with Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields on this demo is mistaken.

While a good half of the march was undergraduates from the most militant college occupations - UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex - the really stunning phenomenon, politically, was the presence of youth: bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.

[. . .]

When there are speeches, the university students often defer to the working class young people from sixth forms, who they see as being the main victims of the reform. With the Coalition's majority reduced by 3/4, as I reflected earlier, it is unprecedented to see a government teeter before a movement in whom the iconic voices are sixteen and seventeen year old women, and whose anthems are mainly dubstep.

I have no idea how accurate this account is--I'm a long way away from the protests myself--but it would be quite something it it were. The protests against the initial introduction of fees (which took place when I was at university) were nothing like this.

Meanwhile, the picture of Charles and Camilla's shock at being caught up in the melée, and their realization that they are perhaps not so insulated from ordinary people as they may hope, is quite extraordinary:


Frankly, this may be the only good reason to have a royalty still: to provide images such as this one.

outrageous

Peter Osborne and Peter Hallward, plus various students, suspended from Middlesex University

Middlesex

Many will already have seen the news of the amazingly foolish decision by the University of Middlesex to close what is probably the most vibrant and most important department of philosophy in the United Kingdom.

Here, for what it's worth, is the letter of protest that I just sent:

French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies
797-1873 East Mall
University of British Columbia
Vancouver BC V6T 1Z1
Canada

April 30, 2010


Dear Professors Driscoll, Ahmad, House, and Esche:

I recently learned of the decision to close Middlesex University’s Department of Philosophy.

I share the grave concern already expressed by many colleagues worldwide about what appears to be a short-sighted policy that can only cause harm not only to the University but also to the reputation of British academia more generally.

Last year I had the good fortune to present a paper at the regular seminar hosted by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. I thus had the chance to experience the department’s extraordinary, and deservedly famous, atmosphere of intellectual engagement, with the lively participation of postgraduate students as well as academic staff.

The Centre, and the department as a whole, is very clearly a vibrant centre of research and postgraduate training. It is the very model of the critical thought and collaborative enterprise that should be valued by the University.

This is to say nothing of the prodigious contribution made by the department’s staff in their widely-disseminated research, in their leading role with the prestigious journal Radical Philosophy, in training a generation of young intellectuals in Philosophy and in inspiring others across a wide range of disciplines.

I can barely fathom the university priorities that allow this department, perhaps above all, to be selected for closure. It would send a terrible signal to the academic community in Britain and outside were this decision not reversed.

I implore you to reconsider.

Yours


Jon Beasley-Murray
Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies

Truly, British academia is in a sorry state when decisions such as this can even be contemplated. Apparently the given reasons are that the department "only" contributed 53% of its revenue to the central administration, rather than desired 55%, and that the university figures it can earn more of a financial profit from students on lab-based courses than from those in the Humanities.

What's most incomprehensible is that this petty penny-pinching so damages the university brand that it is surely financially as well as intellectually an act (as Radical Philosophy put it) of "wilful self-harm" on every level.

There's something more happening here than the simple marketization of academia, the encroachment of economic logic even in its most naked, neoliberal form. What we see here is an institution giving up altogether on the traditional vocation of the university.

Middlesex apparently no longer cares about its brand, its reputation, or even the neoliberal university's recast mission to present itself as a center of "excellence" (to use that much-abused buzzword).

It is as though Middlesex aspires to be something other than a university. Sadly, it is not alone in this "aspiration."

Heidegger

And no, I haven't read Sein und Zeit.

Via Quick Study.

appreciation

Ian McGuire's Incredible Bodies is a campus novel, and true the genre also therefore a comedy of academic manners--or their lack. In the spirit of Lucky Jim, the protagonist Morris Gutman is a insecure and harried lecturer (assistant professor) near the bottom of the totem pole in an English department at a university located in a drab provincial British town. He labors without success on the work of a marginal writer, and lives in fear of his colleagues, his students, and his family alike who in turn collectively regard him with a mixture of disdain and (worse still) pity.

By one of those strange coincidences, however, that drive comic novels, Gutman finds himself accidentally dispatching one of his tormentors, a horribly over-confident and over-articulate graduate student by the name of Dirck van Camper, and subsequently presents an essay of van Camper's, entitled "Total Mindfuck: A Study in Ethics and Embodiment," as his own. Gutman's luck starts to change.

Now fêted by all and sundry, not least his over-theoretical and over-sexed colleague Zoe Cable, Gutman finds himself at the forefront of the burgeoning discipline of Body Studies, and enjoying all the perks of a successful academic life: conferences in Los Angeles, approbation from the Dean, a book contract, and co-directorship of a "Research Hub." Naturally, such an idyll can only last so long. Gutman finds that his fall from grace is as abrupt as his meteoric rise. Moreover, he plunges far further than he had previously ascended: divorce, alcoholism, jail.

In the end, however, things start looking up again for Gutman. A series of further coincidences enable him to seek his revenge on those who have brought him low: directorship of the Hub is once more on the cards. But an encounter with a long-lost acquaintance who had chosen not to go on to academia from his PhD puts him right: the moral of the story turns out to a refusal of the entire game of "outsmarting other people, being clever, cleverer, cleverest" and accepting rather a "life of cheerful underachievement" (366).

For all the satire, then, (and McGuire's novel skewers academic fashion more effectively than many others in the genre) Incredible Bodies is ultimately shaped by something more like compassion. It revolves around an appreciation for what is under-appreciated, perhaps precisely because it is under-appreciated. Here, for instance, is Gutman's wife's reflection on her relationship with this consummate loser:

Her love for Morris was still there, she realised. It was like an outfit hanging in her wardrobe which she didn't wear anymore, but couldn't throw away. Every now and then, when she was looking for something else, getting ready for her day, she would notice it again. Now as he lay there, silent, perfect [. . .] she thought it possible she could try it on again, it might suit her. She took a blanket from the rocking chair and laid it over Morris so just his head was showing. He smelt of something, of what? Of Morris. She groaned at this evidence of his absoluteness. (371-72)

Finally, this novel is less notable for the comedy (though it is certainly funny) than in fact for its unexpected affirmation of a form of embodiment (habits, affection, smells) that somehow perpetually escapes the fashionability of "Body Studies."

restricted!

This was the building where I work as it was this past weekend:


A shanty-town, a fence, checkpoints, razor wire, guard towers, signs warning that interlopers could be shot on sight, even a couple of tanks...


Yes, once again the campus had been turned into a movie set. (Rumor has it they were filming Wolverine.) Still, I thought that there was perhaps some poetic truth here about the contemporary university.

(Thanks to Rafa and Tal for the photos.)

wrench

Further to discussions about the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, Gareth Williams has kindly made available his essay "Deconstruction and Subaltern Studies, or, a Wrench in the Latin Americanist Assembly Line" (.pdf file). This is the English version of his contribution to Hernán Vidal's Treinta años de estudios literarios/culturales latinoamericanistas en los Estados Unidos, a book which, as I have noted, is not easy to obtain.

Williams's essay does many things: it provides a counter-history of the Latin American studies group, its demise, and the subsequent "end of the alliances"; it is an argument for the role of deconstruction and against the ideological misreadings of deconstruction within Latin Americanism; and it is an empassioned plea for a new relation to the field.

Three brief quotations, then. First, a salutary caution about any declaration of manifestos:

The last twenty years have coincided with the full-blown consolidation of the neoliberal corporate university in the United States and beyond. In this time I have been struck by the way U.S.-based Latin Americanism has succumbed increasingly to the false authority of phrases such as “what we need to do . . . ” or “what should be done is . . .” which are repeated with disconcerting ease in both writings and professional meetings alike. Of course, what these sentences generally do is function as stand-ins for actual conceptual labor, and it is perfectly understandable that Latin Americanists based in Latin America, for example, should take umbrage at such phrases since they are by no means completely disconnected from the far reaching babble of contemporary corporate arrogance. (2-3)

Second, another account of the "end of the alliances":

At the Latin American Studies Association International Conference that took place in Washington D.C. in early September 2001, Néstor García Canclini announced the “end of the alliance” between the varying strands contained within the Latin American cultural studies paradigm. I do not mean he inaugurated the end of that alliance. I think he was merely responding to the fact that university discourse on Latin America, in all its distinct registers and loci of enunciation, had definitively succumbed to the corporate logics of market forces; that is, that Latin Americanism had embraced the commodity fetishism of its own thought and language, without further ado, and had become nothing more than market force and competition in action. Needless to say, without a commitment to collective theoretical reflection this situation will not improve, because the alternative is that prospective students to Ph.D. programs who ask questions such as “Does your department do postcolonial theory?” will be perfectly justified in reproducing the banal competition of the Latin Americanist assembly line. (20)

And third, a discussion of the "decision for vitality" that faces us:

It is up to all of us to assume responsibility for, or to turn our backs on, the practical and theoretical decision for the struggle of the part of those who have no part (and, therefore, for philosophy as class struggle at the theoretical level). We can decide for the positivity of the police or decide for affirmative political subjectification. Make no mistake, it is a vital decision, a decision for vitality, or not, in which the future lasts forever with or without us. The decision for the future, indeed, the decision that there be a future for the democratic practice of a theoretical politics of culture in Latin Americanism, is, in this regard, yours, ours, for the taking. That decision for the future, within the context of the corporate police university, is a decision for real philosophical and political responsibility toward Latin America and its truth, in theory and in practice. It is a decision for something other than the reduction of thought to the technical reproduction of our corporate police order and its ideas. (54-55)

Beyond this, I won't summarize the entire essay; I urge you to read it.

Moreover, in the particular context of this blog, the essay is also important in that it offers a strong defence of at least one version of "posthegemony," drawing on Alberto Moreiras's The Exhaustion of Difference. I have outlined my own differences with Gareth and Alberto's versions of posthegemony elsewhere (.pdf file), so I won't do so again at length now. I'll merely note that here, Gareth also takes up Rancière's distinction between police and politics, rightly (I think) arguing that projects for hegemony are always in the end police actions, rather than politics strictu sensu. But his suggestion seems to be that politics in this sense is always democratic; i.e. that the state always and only works through "police thought’s calculated management and distribution of places, powers, functions, locations and loci of enunciation" (52).

I beg to differ, and indeed would point to Gareth's own marvelous analysis of the "Atlacatl affect" in The Other Side of the Popular as evidence to the contrary. In this analysis, Gareth shows how the elite Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran army, responsible for the El Mozote massacre among other grievous war crimes, equally incarnated an excess that went beyond any logic of distribution or calculation. And of course, we see precisely such excess in, say, Guantánamo, or indeed anywhere and everywhere else the state imprints itself on our bodies. To put this another way, the state, too, is posthegemonic; it is not a question of positing a putatively liberating posthegemony against a stultifying hegemony. Of course, we need to be done with the concept of hegemony, but that in itself is not enough. Posthegemony opens up the terrain on which the grounds of politics and policing alike are disputed by multiple actors. A politics of affirmation is not exhausted by deconstruction and its "the negative work it carries out against hegemony" (46).

Or to put things in still other terms, the more local ones of the discussion of the field of Latin Americanism: it is surely not enough simply to put a "wrench in the Latin Americanist assembly line." That assembly line also works by breaking down, by breaking up alliances and cutting the wind from our sails. Heck, sometimes we must surely all want the university to be a place of rational calculation. But each and every day we can come up with evidence that it is anything but. Hence a politics of knowledge must also go beyond critique, even beyond the most rigorous and unflinching critique provided by deconstruction.

blogs

Some of the following has been lightly edited as I have been, quite rightly, reproached by Idelber Avelar in the comments. I haven't completely revised this post, however, in part because I think that my basic point stands: for those interested in rethinking the field of Latin American studies, and encouraging new forms of communication, blogs are an obvious resource. And in part I don't want to rewrite history to pretend that I didn't indeed let a number of important blogs slip my mind when originally writing it, or that there are certainly others of which I have been ignorant. Perhaps my error, as Idelber implies, was indeed that I was thinking about the field in overly conventional ways.

One thing that occurs to me as I read some of Alberto Moreiras’s lengthy and thought-provoking comments to recent posts here is that he should start up his own blog!

I'm serious. Yes, Aberdeen's Centre for Modern Thought does run a blog, and Alberto has used it on occasion, particularly in relation to specific events. See this comment on Esposito, for instance. But mainly the Centre uses its blog for administrative purposes, highlighting upcoming events, and comments such as Alberto's soon get lost.

But on his own blog, Alberto could develop some of these thoughts informally. Others could respond. And there would be the opportunity for new connections. For instance, take Alberto's important question: "What if biopolitical democracy is a contradiction in terms. What if there can and will be no biopolitical democracy? Where does that leave us?" This immediately links up with Jodi Dean's current project of working through the classic texts on biopolitics, or some of Steven Shaviro or Nate Holdren's recent ruminations on the topic.

Of course, there are many reasons not to start a blog: lack of interest, lack of time (but for those evenings when there is no film worth watching at the video store...), and so on, and I've often enough been ambivalent about the process myself. Alberto should feel no compunction to take my advice!

I'm also struck by the fact that in the field of (broadly) Latin American literary and cultural studies, this here blog, Posthegemony, is one of relatively few out there. (But see update and correction below...) One example that immediately comes to mind is Idelber Avelar's O Biscoito Fino e a massa. Horacio Legras briefly blogged at 13AVentana=13AWindow, but just at the moment his exuberance for Obama seems to have left him speechless. There are a number of Latin American Political Science blogs such as Greg Weeks's Two Weeks Notice. Plus, more broadly in Hispanic Studies, I would be remiss if I did not mention Jorge Ledo's elegant ficta eloquentia.

Yet, in the context of a discussion of the state of the field and how one might reinvent intellectual freedom within it, or despite it, one might think of taking a leaf out of the book of the many blogging denizens of Philosophy (surely, a far more hostile and fractured field). They consistently show, as in the current buzz around speculative realism, that this informal sphere of discussion and collaboration can, at least at times, prove very rewarding and productive.

Update: In comments, Idelber upbraids me for missing many Argentine and Brazilian blogs. Specifically, he mentions the following: Nación Apache, La lectora provisoria, Wimbledon, Contemporânea, and Odisséia Literária. He later also gives us: Pensar enlouquece, Tiago Dória (on culture and technology), Liberal Libertário Libertino (especially the posts on race) and Consenso, só no paredão (by Alexandre Nodari, a friend and student of Raúl Antelo's).

It's true that I was implicitly thinking of North American-based blogs of a certain type. And I thank Idelber to introducing me to blogs previously unknown to me. I welcome more suggestions.

So let me add the following, which I do follow, a couple of which are indeed based in the US, and which collectively show something of a Peruvianist bias on my part: alma matinal, Kolumna Okupa, Puente Aéreo, Río Fugitivo, Professor Zero, and the Página de Gonzalo Portocarrero.

Oh, and this reminds me that I should update my blogroll sooner rather than later. (Though I understand that they are rather passé these days.)

Further update: Rather than overburden this post with too much retrospective elaboration, here's a link to a talk by Idelber himself on blogging and academia: "Cultural Studies in the Blogosphere: Academics meet new Technologies of Online Publication". A longer version of this paper is to be found in Erin Graff Zinn's The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise.

field

In a recent post, I suggested that "it feels as though the field of Latin American cultural and literary studies has been in the doldrums for, what, perhaps a decade or more?"

Alberto Moreiras responds vigorously:

I don’t agree with you about the doldrums years. I think in fact they were the years where the seeds of a genuinely non-identitarian reflection on Latin American culture and history were planted. They were the best years our professional field has had in the last two hundred or so, because they remain as the only years that indicate the promise of a future for thought in our field. They were also the years where a certain intense clarity finally made itself present. There is now a space for a theoretically informed non-identitarian, republican Latin Americanism, free from the bourgeois consciousness that has long plagued it.

I'd almost like to leave it at that, and say: discuss.

But to move discussion on, let me say that I think that what's at issue here is the nature of the field, perhaps the nature of any intellectual or disciplinary field, and what's expected from it. Or as Alberto goes on to say: "The real issue runs a lot deeper than that. [. . .] What kind of a 'field' do you want to have? And what is keeping you from it?"

In my previous post, I coupled my characterization of the field's "doldrums" with a brief mention of Néstor García Canclini's now (in)famous declaration in 2001 that we'd reached the "end of the alliances" that had hitherto structured the field. I even gave a reference for this allusion: Abril Trigo's account of Latin American Cultural Studies. This was because I still had the book to hand, having earlier written a critique of some of Trigo's positions.

It's clear that we are still working through different narratives and explanations of what happened in 2001, and what has happened since. Here, then, is Trigo's account:

The meetings at LASA 2001 in Washington made official the breakup of fragile alliances as well as the exhaustion of some theoretical positions; its dramatic climax was the announcement of the disbanding of the Latin American Studies Group. The exhaustion of those particular theoretical positions was posited by some, like Beverley and Moreiras, as the exhaustion of Latin American cultural studies tout court, whose final demise was triumphantly declared. This is particularly so in Moreiras's verdict of the 'exhaustion of difference,' which makes of Latin American cultural studies a radical practice, suggesting that the only remaining option of any real resistance to globalization would be the critical mourning of the ruins (2001). Latin American cultural studies and any other form of political resistance are disposed of in a single blow. In our view, exactly the opposite is true. These events culminated a gradual process of readjustment of the different positions and a steady return to the vilified classics of Latin American critical thought, particularly the fecund production of the 1960s and 1970s, including dependency theory, liberation theology and philosophy of liberation, the pedagogy of the oppressed, the theories of internal colonialism, third cinema, collective theater, and transculturation. The cycle, which started with the optimistic drive of the forerunners in the 1970s, has closed upon itself. (367-68)

I'll note just a couple of things about this account. First of all, Trigo clearly does not think that the field has been in the doldrums over the past ten years. For him, the "end of the alliances" enabled the rediscovery of "the fecund production of the 1960s and 1970s." In going back twenty years, the field could discover its true sense of purpose. And yet, second, there is a sense of closure, a "cycle" that has "closed upon itself." Moreover, one might ask, what does it mean to return in this way to dependency theory et. al.? You can never go home again, after all.

Now an earlier version of Moreiras's account of the same dispersal of the late 1990s, early 2000s:

Perhaps the labour of our cultural studies is also and must be essentially shot through with its own ruin: it may be that it is only in the experience of the ruin of thinking that any thinking project can sustain itself as such; without it, thought is doomed to be nothing but programmatic calculation and progressive 'explicitation' of an ideological order. That would be a sort of success for Latin American cultural studies: to have established itself as a programme, to have accomplished a becoming into the new disciplinary order of the time of post-Area Studies, the time of globalization. But that success, as such, could be nothing but a failure. If so, then the failure, a certain failure, could also be (why not?) a certain form of success.

Two days after the LASA meeting, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. It is difficult not to note now that this event contaminated the experience of the academic meeting that had just ended only a few miles away from the site of the Pentagon explosion. In the third panel of the series on cultural studies (and on the basis of previous comments from John Beverley, Nelly Richard and others), Néstor García Canclini had declared the 'end of the alliance' that had kept open at least the possibility of pretending that our field of reflection was structured by common political lines and intellectual presuppositions. Perhaps September 11, then, radicalized the end of that alliance. The New York explosion changed our world and will provoke such adjustments in the North/South relation that it is perhaps absolutely urgent to let thought drift into its own uncompromising radicality. Under the guise of the alliance, under the guise of the conceit that made us work towards the consolidation of a disciplinary convergence in Latin American cultural studies, we were perhaps only rehearsing the emotional residue of the emerging moment of the new paradigm, somewhere in the very early 1990s. Liberation from that conceit might now make it possible for the different tendencies to stop containing their own energy, to stop handcuffing their own internal logics. No more excuses from now on, which is of course a threatening situation to the professional stability of perhaps the bravest thinkers, the youngest among them at least, given the sorry state of affairs in the American university today, which is experiencing one of its worst corporate moments since the 1930s. ("Regional Intellectuals: The Stain in their Eye", Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 11.3 [December 2002], p. 311f.)

Well, here we are, and the situation of the university has hardly improved. Indeed, the job market this last year was, the MLA tells us, the worst since it started keeping records. In that context, what kind of field is possible or desirable? And how can it build on its own history, without enclosing itself in nostalgia?

pool

How is it that the campus swimming pool is open longer hours than the library?

On Saturday, one library shut up shop at 4pm; the other main library (sorry, actually it's now a "Rich person's name 'learning center'") hadn't even bothered to open its doors. And yet the swimming pool was still open when I was going home at around 8pm; indeed, to add insulting extravagance to injury, they had the outdoor pool heated and uncovered despite the snow around and about.

Can't the university at least pretend it's an institution of higher learning, rather than a place to babysit 18 to 22-year-olds?

Image courtesy of freedyk on flickr.
While we're at it, can't the university shovel its walks? Isn't there some kind of law about this? Oh yes, there is...

REMOVAL OF SNOW OR ICE FROM SIDEWALK

76. The Owner or occupier of any parcel of real property shall, not later than 10:00
a.m. of any day except Sunday, remove snow and ice from any sidewalk adjacent
to such parcel for a distance that coincides with the parcel's property line, except
that this provision shall not apply to real property occupied only by a one or two-
family dwelling.

76B. If an owner or occupier of any parcel of real property fails to remove snow and
ice, as required by either section 76 or 76A, the City Engineer may authorize the
removal by another person and the costs of such removal shall be at the expense
of the owner or occupier as the case may be.

Heck, they could even hire people to do it for them.

podcast

I seem to have been podcast. Eat your heart out Ricky Gervais.

In my case, the podcast is mainly about how I don't like WebCT and similar educational technology, but do like Wikipedia.

kewel

This somehow seems to encapsulate everything wrong not just with educational technology, but also with the university today.

Let's take a closer look. Starting with the following map:


What is this? It's a map of the UK, from Google maps, with an apparently random number of cities and town marked (Bolton and Slough, but not Manchester and Newcastle). On the left hand side, under the legend "uk city pop test," the city and town names are provided in alphabetical order, with "population" and a figure. Beside each name is a checked box.

What earthly use is this map? None, as far as I can see. The population information is correlated with geography, but not in such a way that it might be useful. A series of population figures have been recontextualized, to give the appearance of added value, but in fact provide no clear benefit to man, bird, or beast. What is the principle of selection of these particular towns and cities? How does the geographical correlation add to our understanding of UK demographics? What in fact does this map and its accompanying table tell us about geography, population, or the UK? Nothing.

And yet, this map is presented to us as "kewel" (whatever exactly that means), and a host of apparently otherwise rational people are celebrating the fact that this is supposedly "good shit," "awesome," "amazingly cool," "a fine thing indeed," "awesomely nifty," and so on ad nauseam. One commenter even reported "I think my head just exploded". He (or she) is not the only one.

So why the plaudits? Well, it has to do with the process by which the map was produced which, in short, involved taking some data from a Wikipedia article and subjecting it to various repackaging and transformations, using technical devices such as RSS feeds. The presentation of this process is interspersed with comments such as "lurvely" before the final "kewel" conclusion. My friend Brian Lamb then tells us that this is an instance of "data literacy".

But not only is the final product bafflingly useless. And not only has, along the way, much of the data (on cities such as Manchester and Newcastle) apparently been lost. It is also clear by looking at the original Wikipedia article--and only by looking at the original Wikipedia article--that the data requires commentary and explanation for it to be effectively understood.

For you might be surprised to learn, if you actually read the data on the map above rather than staring agog while your head exploded, that London is apparently eight times larger than any other city in the UK. The UK, in this rendering, comes to appear more like a country such as Chile, in which Santiago is practically the only city of any note, than the collection of regions with which anyone who has actually visited the place is familiar. How has this strange distortion come about?

Well, by reading the Wikipedia article, in which virtually each and every figure comes with some kind of note, and in which the entire list has a seven-paragraph explanatory introduction, it soon becomes clear how the very definition of a city and city population is a tricky construct. The Wikipedia text explains the difference between city councils, local authorities, conurbations, and so on. It notes, for instance, the difference between the population of Manchester (at 394,269, well below that of Bristol's 420,556) and Greater Manchester (at 2,244,931 well above that of Greater Bristol's 551,066). The Wikipedia article also has footnotes and references, as well as a thriving discussion page, all of which are essentially for any "data literacy" worthy of the name. That is, a data literacy that does not dispense with literacy per se, replacing explanatory text with "kewel" ejaculations and exploding heads.

Yet the very first step in the process led to the map above was to strip the figures of their accompanying text.

It seems that neither Tony Hirst, the person who set this operation into motion, nor any of those who are blithely praising his work, bothered to think about the data itself or what it meant. That, indeed, as Hirst himself has repeatedly stated in response to my comments, "wasn't the point." But if someone can advocate, and others can gasp at, such mangling of data without even thinking about what happens to that data in the process, believing it to be somehow beside the point... well, that's a textbook case of data illiteracy as far as I'm concerned.

The final product is a swish little graphic that turns out to be totally meaningless, much like the visual data points for which USA Today has become notorious. Moreover, this re-presentation of the data in fact distorts of UK geography: in so far as it does in fact hold minimal meaning, it elides all the subtleties of the original source so as to end up as a vapid misrepresentation.

I'm reminded of nothing so much as the various swish repackagings and representations of debt, by which dodgy high-interest loans made out to poor people in heartland USA became class AA securities traded in decontextualized form by people who thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room. In the world of high finance and complex derivatives, too, what mattered only was the "kewel" ways in which figures could be abstracted from people and contexts, mashed up and resold in dashing and "awesomely nifty" ways.

The chickens have come home to roost for this fundamental corruption in the banking and finance sectors. Of course, a little educational technology mashup "goodness" can't be as important or as harmful, right? It's only knowledge and education that's at stake here as the university parodies the neoliberal landscape that it sets out to imitate, rather than critique. This is the university of excellence once more, but now in the sense of Bill and Ted's "excellent" adventure: a couple of goofy guys saying "kewel" as the lights go out on the institution's real mission.

introductions

It seems to me that there are three, perhaps four, types of introduction for a book:

1. The arresting anecdote. This introduction revolves around with some kind of anecdote or story that in some way encapsulates the themes or concerns that are to be explored in the pages that follow. It might begin: "The morning of October 10, 1492, dawned bright and clear..."

2. The straight talk. This introduction outlines the argument of the book. It is essentially the book crammed into twenty pages, rather than two or three hundred. It might begin: "This book is about..."

3. The self-reflective gaze. This introduction discusses the book, and perhaps its style, as a way to explain the processes that led up to its writing, or to forestall criticism. It might begin: "I first had the idea to write about..." Or maybe: "Some will say that the time for a book of this nature is long past..."

4. The missed opportunity. This introduction is less about the book itself, than it is a separate essay about the topic that the author now realizes he or she would have wanted to write about. It might begin any old way.

NB in all four cases, the last three or four pages of the introduction are probably taken up with a chapter-by-chapter outline (a paragraph for each chapter) of what is to come.

Thoughts?

students

This is courtesy of Kansas State University's Digital Ethnography group...


Via Andre Malan.