Who Are Human Rights For?

All of the authors take account of the ambiguous history of human rights, in which they can be said to have inspired the Haitian, American and French revolutions, while also justifying the counterrevolutionary post-Cold War order dominated by the United States. Yet recognising this ambiguity without also acknowledging the distinctive reconstruction of contemporary human rights that makes them part of a neo-liberal international order and the unequal power that makes such a quasi-imperial order possible would be irresponsible. A primary contribution made collectively by these texts is that they clearly diagnose the way human rights have been used to consolidate a particular form of political and economic order while undercutting the need for, much less justification of, revolutionary violence. Williams says of Amnesty International’s prisoners of conscience, who serve as archetypal victims of human rights abuse,

the prisoner of conscience, through its restrictive conditions, performs a critical diminution of what constitutes “the political.” The concept not only works to banish from recognition those who resort to or advocate violence, but at the same time it works to efface the very historical conditions that might come to serve as justifications – political and moral – for the taking up of arms.

Human rights, then, are for the civilised victims of the world, those abused by excessive state power, by anomalous states that have not been liberalised – they are not for dangerous radicals seeking to upset the social order.

This does more than limit human rights to a moral minimalism, it creates a damaging division between liberal nations who are already civilised and illiberal states beset by evil barbarism and in need of salvation, by limiting the claims for justice that can be backed by force to those underwritten by the authoritative institutions of the powerful. This is the demand that liberal human rights make for the avoidance of evil. As Meister notes, ‘Unlike earlier versions of human rights that sought to hasten the advance of social equality, today’s commitment to human rights often seeks to postpone large-scale redistribution. It is generally more defensive than utopian, standing for the avoidance of evil rather than a vision of the good.’ This is a powerful construction because it becomes very difficult to oppose the limited vision enabled by human rights – who, for example, wants to argue against the prevention of cruelty and the avoidance of evil – but it also cynically uses beautiful revolutionary dreams of human rights to uncritically legitimate a political order still beset by violence in many forms, and still calling out for greater justice.

     The liberal account of human rights impoverishes our understanding of politics; as Williams suggests it renders the politics of human rights as a morality play between saviours, victims and savages, which obscures the pervasive hierarchy and force that uphold the ideal and institutions of human rights.

As an increasingly critical legitimizing instrument for contemporary imperialism, human rights, and its imperial modes of intervention – humanitarian war and humanitarian aid – relies heavily upon the production of subjects in need – in need of rights, in need of democracy, in need of rescue. This subject-in-need, in turn, interpellates, organizes, and mobilizes subjects who come to see themselves as bearers of the responsibility to rescue – good humanitarians who, however critical of imperialism, come to participate in the ethos of empire. (2010, p.64)

It is the way that human rights fit into a wider imperial politics that is at issue here, not the failings of particular individuals trying to do good. Of special importance is how the victims that human rights are supposed to protect are treated. Meister, for example, is excellent at analysing the way victims along with perpetrators of human rights abuse must be pacified, as the experience of repression and exclusion may give victims reason to demand the upsetting of the established order. Therefore, it becomes important that victims are seen as needy and powerless, not active and engaged. Victims, constructed in this way – abused, in need, voiceless, without agency – then require particular types of saviours, not only who are empowered by the existing order of things but also who are not to blame for the excesses and violence of that order.

That Human Rights Discourse addresses us as bystanders, and not beneficiaries, is indicative of the transposition of human rights itself from the register of political mobilization to that of global popular culture. In this culture, apathy – our natural response to the pain of others – is to be replaced by empathy, the morally induced ability to feel the pain of others as our own. If consumers of our popular culture only felt less apathy toward (and thus empathy for) victims, the argument goes, they would hold themselves responsible for what they allow to happen. The culture also assures them, however, that they were not really responsible – that their true failing did not arise in any particular relation to perpetrators or victims but rather from a simple lack of compassionate feelings combined, perhaps, with willed inattention to the facts. (Meister 2011, p.213)

Goodale traces a related obfuscation in the misrepresentation of anthropology’s resistance to the idea of human rights, which he argues is not based on crude moral relativism, but rather on the very real danger that universal politics, through their assimilative tendencies, present to marginalised peoples. Ironically, rejecting the real concerns about assimilation as immoral and irresponsible relativism does not prevent privileged consumers of human rights culture from ignoring the suffering of others, such that universal morality guarantees assimilation but not concern. The stability of the contemporary liberal international order depends on that passivity, which is not easily or quickly converted into action, as indifference to everyday human suffering punctuated by outrage at those events presented as exceptional evils both preserves the status quo and justifies forceful interventions.

The practical import of this construction of the moral drama of human rights is that the fundamental architecture of international politics is affirmed and made incontestable – the exclusivity of the nation, backed up by violence, is rendered necessary; the violence inherent in the legal order, both domestic and international, is privileged and rendered legitimate; the deprivation and inequality wrought by capitalism is removed from public view, as its effects are the consequence of private transactions. The harm of this architecture is also felt most severely, and predictably, by those who are from the under-class, from ethnic minorities and victims of patriarchal social structures (it is worth noting that the issue of gender is under-examined by all the authors discussed here, which is unusual because similar pioneering works have focused on this issue to great effect). Baxi’s examination of the difficulty and promise of a human right to development is an important illustration of this. Claiming a right to development must not only contest the idea of what can be made an appropriate object of rights, rejecting the notion that rights are injunctions against the actions of others rather than claims to positive improvements of one’s condition, but such a rights claim must also contest the meaning of development itself. Baxi argues that a right to development that was drawn from the experiences of the impoverished and not beholden to ready made myths of developmentalism, would imply a reconsideration of the relationship between public and private control of production and exchange to guarantee greater welfare and opportunity (both domestically and internationally), as well as a move away from the notion of a single model of development as increasing national wealth.

All these texts dwell on this difficulty, on the dangers and possibilities of engaging with human rights for people struggling against and subject to power – and their reflections converge on the necessity of recognising and naming the complicity of human rights; the struggle to reclaim human rights, understood as a set of ideals about the best way to be human, is as much a matter of how we think as it is of political action. Goodale locates the imperialism of human rights as much in their abstract universalism as in the practices of powerful states and non-state actors, and Baxi suggests that giving up theories of human rights is an act of emancipation in itself, both suggesting that how we think must change if we also want to change who human rights are for and address the violence and injustice not only unresolved but enabled by a quasi-imperial liberal human rights. Williams goes farthest in his critique, suggesting that

Given this, it would seem that we need some means of advancing a new episteme of political violence, one that affords us better ways through which to recognize and map acts and conditions of violence and, we hope, to develop more effective means and strategies through which to confront and contest the global fields of brutality. To these ends, it is useful to reengage the history of postwar human rights praxis and examine in a more critical fashion what other ways of knowing and responding to violence have been used and developed, concurrent with those of human rights, yet largely out of view and grossly underappreciated.

What Do Human Rights Promise?

Given the challenges addressed in these texts, what can human rights achieve? A central line of Meister’s critique is that human rights as we know them today are explicitly intended to limit the promise of justice – both because the horrors of the twentieth-century suggest that such promise might come at too high a cost, and because the promise of justice as greater political and social equality is opposed by the post-Cold War powers. If he’s correct, is the opening that Goodale and Baxi see in human rights practice adequate to restoring the revolutionary promise of human rights? When analysing the importance of the ideal of self-determination, in opposition to colonial domination, Baxi’s suggest that human rights may be adequate to the task.

Far from emerging as any mimetic reproduction of the Enlightenment ‘values’ and its associated progress narrative, movements for national self-determination mark a world-historic rupture, in turn resulting in alternate visions and paths of development.

This claim is, in essence, the wager that all of these authors make: that actually opening up the idea of human rights to all of humanity, rather than a privileged minority that uses the idea to divide up the world, would rupture our political and moral understandings in a profound way. But questions linger in light of such optimistic pronouncement. How can they create such a rupture? Can we break so cleanly with the order of things which define and are defined by human rights?

The ruptures enabled by human rights, the authors suggest, are driven by the tension at the heart of human rights: the affirmation of the moral and political salience of our common humanity, which is itself defined by pluralism and profound difference. As Goodale suggests, ‘It is, rather, a normative response to suffering that reflects a wisdom of a very different and (we might say) anthropological sort: that which comes from an acceptance of the complicated and (to some) endlessly frustrating fact of human multiplicity.’ And while the recognition of profound difference may motivate the well-intentioned to challenge the imperial dialect in which human rights are articulated, there is still a question of what motivates resistance to the order of things. As Meister suggests, seeing in human rather than more particular terms opens the possibility of seeing injustice. ‘Once we recognize that the many unequal advantages in society could not be justified starting now, an obvious question arises: “Why not socialism?”’ Or, given the inequalities of our current world, why not something else? Why not revolution? The idea that human rights can inspire a new pluralist ethos of global order, what Goodale describes as ‘a future transnational or postnational normative framework that is based on the imperatives of ethical restraint, humility, and legal pluralism’, and can motivate a revolutionary politics, which Williams, drawing on Frantz Fanon, insists human rights must do in order to remain relevant for emancipation, creates as many questions and controversies as it resolves. While the call to think more critically and expansively is valuable as such, perhaps the most important contribution these authors make is giving us some markers to use in taking that project forward – as it is not a well-marked or easy path.

While it may be curmudgeonly to end on a pessimistic note, the project of reconstructing human rights requires serious-mindedness. There are two important warnings that we find in these texts. First, human rights is indeed a culture – while this culture is contested and plural, it also dominated by the interest of the powerful and a pervasive social discourse that constructs its subjects in particular ways. Therefore, there is always a risk in taking up human rights, in engaging the language of power. As Goodale presciently warns,

it is much easier for people to appropriate the idea of human rights for specific legal, political, or social purposes than it is for them to embrace the – at times – radically alternative conception of the person that forms the basis for this idea. In other words, in many cases the coming of human rights demands something of identity that the practice of identity is not prepared (or able) to give.

With this warning in mind, our optimism about the potential for human rights to open up the moral and legal order of world politics, and to provide vision of substantive justice, must be tempered by the challenge of building an alternative culture and an alternative political order – especially one that is open to plurality and contestation.

     The second limitation of human rights is that they may have too much historical baggage, they may be tools that are too dull to serve their purpose. Human rights not only inspired struggles to create a secular and national polity, they were also formed by those dynamics and there is an open question of whether than can be reconstructed to serve radically different visions. Meister wonders

Does the present unthinkability of a past wish (for example, to exterminate a perceived enemy) mean that it is gone? Where did it go? In whom do we believe it now resides? Twenty-first-century Human Rights Discourse does not welcome such questions. Its most positive achievement has been to insist that someone is to blame for human rights violations and to reject excuses that deflect blame onto the victim. This technique of keeping the paranoid anxieties of beneficiaries at bay leaves little psychic energy available for a turn toward greater justice. If Human Rights Discourse is what comes after evil, something must come next.

If the limits of human rights can only be overcome by a turn toward the pursuit of justice, the language of human rights and the idea of a universal human subject of politics may prove too limiting – as Baxi suggests in his consideration of what human rights may mean in a posthuman world. The only answer given in these texts, and perhaps the only responsible answer, is that human rights have no claim to be the exclusive mode of political ethics and no guarantee of their future progressive value. In contesting dominant understandings we can explore the possibilities of human rights, but those explorations themselves must be contested, and they may be found wanting. Contesting human rights insists on the possibility that a world without human rights be a better one – which is among these authors’ most significant contribution.

Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays by Upendra Baxi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

http://thedisorderofthings.com/2012/02/18/human-rights-contested-part-ii/ to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights by Mark Goodale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence by Randall Williams. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights by Robert Meister. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011.

The central tension of human rights is that they propagate a universal and singular human identity in a fragmented political world. No one writing about human rights ignores this tension, but the most important question we face in judging the value of human rights is how to understand this tension and the divisions it creates. The expected divisions between good and evil, between moral universalists and dangerous relativist, between dignified interventionists and cowardly apologists, have long given shape to human rights, as both an ideal and a political project. Seeing the problems of (and for) human rights in these habituated ways has dulled our capacity for critical judgment, as few want to defend evil or violent particularisms or advocate passivity in the face of suffering. Even among serious and determined critics our inherited divisions are problematic (and increasingly over rehearsed), whether we think of human rights as the imposition of Western cultural values, or in terms of capitalist ideology serving the interests of neo-liberal elites, or as an expression of exceptional sovereign power at the domestic and global levels. The ways that these divisions deal with the tension at the heart of human rights misses the ambiguity of those rights in significant ways.

     Rather than trying to contain the tensions between singularity and pluralism, between commonality and difference, in a clear and definitive accounting, the authors of the texts reviewed here allow them to proliferate. Rather than trying to resolve the problem of human rights, they attempt to understand human rights in their indeterminate dissonance while exploring what they might become. To create and invoke the idea of humanity is not a political activity that is unique (either now or in the past) to the ‘West’. The people most dramatically injured by global capitalism sometimes fight their oppression by innovating and using the language and institutions of human rights. Political exceptions – the exclusion of outsiders, humanitarian wars and imperialist conceits – are certainly enabled by the same sovereign power that grants rights to its subjects, which is a metaphorical drama all too easily supported by human rights, but it is only a partial telling of the tale, a telling that leaves out how human rights can reshape political authority and enable struggles in unexpected ways. The work of these authors pushes us to reject the familiar divisions we use to understand the irresolvable tension at the centre of human rights and see the productive possibilities of that tension. If human rights will always be invoked in a politically divided world, and will also always create further divisions with each declaration and act that realises an ideal universalism, then our focus should be on who assumes (and who can assume) the authority to define humanity, the consequences for those subject to such power, and the ends toward which such authority is directed.

     Starting from this alternative approach is important for the simple reason that it alters the viewpoint from which we evaluate human rights, as we are no longer stuck, as a matter of the terms of discourse, defending particularism, relativism or passivity in the face of injustice, and instead we are enabled to challenge the idea that some human beings have a unique privilege to intervene and bring salvation to others, to determine the meaning of human rights, while also affirming the active political agency of women and men throughout the world taking up the tool (or weapon) of human rights to preserve their own dignity. All four authors ask us to re-focus in this manner (though the specifics obviously differ in important ways) and for that reason the works themselves are openings rather than definitive statements. I ask three general questions of the authors in order to explore the openings they have provided: How are human rights made? Who are human rights for? What do human rights promise? In answering these questions through these texts I suggest connections and differences, highlight deficiencies and insights, and try to encourage further developments on the beginnings they present to us.

How Are Human Rights Made?

To ask how are human rights made is to already take a position, one that sees human rights as social constructions rather than divine laws or principles of transcendent reason. To start from this position is to be sceptical of metaphysical deductions of moral norms, but this scepticism is broadly accepted at least since Richard Rorty suggested that a human rights culture is just one of the cultures that humanity has made for itself, it represents one of the shapes that the malleable human animal has taken. Secure, tolerant, concerned, and relatively rich liberals make Rorty’s human rights culture; they have used some of their wealth and security to develop a culture that is defined by their desire to prevent the suffering of human beings, wherever they may be located geographically and culturally, and which, he thinks, should be spread as widely as possible. In their own way each author under consideration here picks out inadequacies in Rorty’s ironic liberalism by raising questions about what the human rights culture is, what it is good for, who speaks for it, and how it is made.

     Upendra Baxi begins Human Rights in a Posthuman World by reminding us that

When grassroots postmodernists summon us to a struggle against the “monoculture” of universal human rights and liberation from the re-colonizing “Global Project” of human rights, by “bringing human rights down from its pedestal” and the summons for resituating human rights “amidst other significant cultural concepts which define a “good life” in a pluriverse”, they embark on a different theory project than those rights-weary thinkers who insist that the very idea of human rights is based on a moral mistake.

Baxi’s grassroots postmodernists are not Rorty’s liberal ironists, even if they agree that rationally deduced moral principles are rarely adequate protection; they are often insecure, struggling, poor, abused and ignored, but they are not waiting for wealthy liberals to save them, they are not waiting to be protected up by an ironic rather than divine power. Nor are these grassroots postmodernists critical philosophers like Gorgio Agamben, who deduces an irredeemable wrong written into the logic of human rights that necessarily preserves and justifies the exceptional power of sovereign authority. Rather they are women and men living in varied communities, struggling to live with dignity, making use of human rights when it enables those ends (Baxi’s politics for human rights) and opposing human rights when they are pernicious (Baxi’s politics of human rights). This is the key shift in each of these texts, a move to see human rights not simply as a product of ‘Western’ culture; nor the exclusive domain of lawyers, politicians and international civil society representatives who draft international human rights declarations and treaties; nor as a gift given by moral philosophers, good-hearted activists or imperial powers bringing the benefits of civilisation.

     While Baxi’s work draws both on critical human rights activism and postcolonial legal theory to reorient how we understand human rights, in Surrendering to Utopia Mark Goodale starts from anthropology’s ambiguous historic engagement with human rights to understand how they are made by those far away from centres of elite power, both geographically and ideologically. He suggest that not only are international human rights norms ‘vernacularized’ as they move from elite cosmopolitan centres into the wider (and not necessarily less cosmopolitan) world, but that they are also made through everyday social practices of political struggle in non-elite centres and in marginal spaces of the international system. Further, Goodale argues that we should ‘prioritize human rights in the vernacular’, which is to argue ‘that “human rights” (understood diffusely) must be both theorized and legitimated in terms of the groundedness of social practice, those mundane (yet often transformative) occurrences of what de Certeau called the “practice of everyday life.”’  This suggests looking to how those subject to international human rights law understand and reconstruct legal and moral norms, and to how human rights are made and remade through everyday practices of political struggle. Both Baxi and Goodale go beyond constructivist human rights scholarship that focuses on the diffusion of norms from the international to the local. In place of that top-down model they look to the scepticism, resistance and creativity of ‘grassroots postmodernists’. This move to consider how human rights are used and created by communities that are struggling for dignity, as well as how human rights enable linkages that form an alternative global network, risks appearing naïve, as a romantic narrative of authentic struggle realised through a universal appeal to shared humanity. Neither author succumbs to that risk, but in the critical company I have forced them to keep here, they appear at first glance to be potentially too sanguine.

     Human rights cannot simply be remade through creative acts of ethico-political imagination, they are the artefacts of a particular political history and they have been institutionalised in problematic ways. Remaking human rights is a political project, demanding both struggle and the construction of new institutions – which is of special importance because human rights have been a central pillar of the post-Cold War liberal order and cannot be redeemed easily. As Robert Meister argues in his theoretical and historical study After Evil, ‘Today the invocation of human rights is often part of a political project fundamentally at odds with the revolutionary struggles based on human rights: it is the war cry of a self-described “international community” led by the victors in the cold war.’ Liberal human rights are presented as a higher politics premised on the transcendence of vulgar politics through ethics, which renders violent struggle and political contestation into evils to be avoided because they always risk turning into exceptional and horrific violence and atrocity. Human rights are a politics that comes after evil. In this time after evil, victims and beneficiaries of past violence are reconciled and the individuals responsible for evil are punished, avoiding the need for revolutionary changes that might upset power structures beyond limiting (but not eliminating) their capacity for violence and commit cruelty.

     The limits of this politics of human rights does more than constrain us to a liberal-capitalist framework (beyond which we are repeatedly told we cannot see), it also reinforces the nationalist structure of state authority in contemporary world politics, which Meister ties to the logic of both colonialism and genocide. Colonial settlement makes the question of how the settler can live among ‘savages’ explicit, which is unavoidable so far as the sovereignty of a people is thought in terms of a moral sameness (civilisation) that is unsettled by insistent difference (barbarism). This dynamic not only gives us the civilising mission that continues to resonate in contemporary human rights discourse, but it also makes genocide thinkable.

The settler’s question is, “How can we live among these savages without civilizing them?” For the colonial project of civilization and governance to get under way, however, living without the “savages” must always be a conceivable option. It then follows that living without the settler must also be imaginable for a nationalist liberation struggle to occur as an outcome of colonialism.

What this suggests is that liberal human rights can oppose genocide but not the national and statist order that makes it possible. Human rights act as the redemption of the civilising mission, coming after the evils of colonialism and genocide have been repudiated and punished, but unable to offer any grander account of justice to the victims of a liberal order based on global capitalism and the nation-state. Human rights are disabled in this way because they focus on preventing cruelty and violence in their specific and physical form foremost (rather than on structural violence and social deprivation), while also seeking to reconcile victims to the nationalist state order to pacify them, to make them into citizens capable of living with the beneficiaries of past violence and oppression – if not the perpetrators of injustice. This means that while the most dramatic perpetrators of violence and cruelty will face punishment, the powerful individuals and communities that uphold the existing order are redeemed and their roles as counterrevolutionary saviours confirmed in human rights practice.

     Randall Williams also links human rights to the colonial project and highlights the difficulty of challenging the given coordinates of political and social power within contemporary human rights discourse, of getting beyond The Divided World – which is a theoretical critique of human rights drawing on both historical and cultural sources. Like Meister, he finds explicit linkages between universal human rights as an ideal and the racist ideology of colonialism, suggesting that as ‘long as the power to confer or withhold the recognition of the Other’s humanity remains a decision made elsewhere, there will be no substantial alteration of the material conditions that serve as the basis for the very possibility of a distinction between the human and the inhuman.’ The dominant politics of human rights, then, is not easily contested or surpassed, which Baxi and Goodale also acknowledge, but reading these authors together suggests that finding alternative ways of making human rights is difficult and dangerous work, which may not be worth taking on. Williams is pessimistic about the prospects of human rights to enable political change, such that any transformative potential they have will only be achieved by stepping outside the legal framework of international law, which he argues (invoking China Miéville) can only reaffirm the authority of the state, granting legitimacy to its violence while outlawing the use of violence in opposition. Meister likewise thinks that human rights must become part of a revolutionary politics that can see beyond the nation-state and the inequalities of contemporary capitalism if they are to be more than the ideology of the powerful.

     Its likely Goodale and Baxi would agree with much of this analysis, but the optimism one finds in their work grows out of their engagement with specific oppositional struggles that make use of human rights, by focusing on human rights made outside the direct control of powerful global elites. As Goodale suggests this leads to ‘human rights’ that ‘remain fluid and essentially plural and depend not on a hypothetical set of principles articulated by a small sliver of the global community but on the social actors for whom human rights come to form part of their contextualized legal, moral, and political practices.’ Yet, even if we identify the legacies that have made human rights what they are, while also paying attention to the ways they are (and have been) made and used in pursuit of very different projects, the question of what is to be done remains. The adoption of human rights by abused, marginalised and struggling peoples may be a necessary and at times effective strategy, but can it do anything to alter the order of things in profound ways? Can they be more than political tools that enable the weak to grab the ear of the powerful in hopes of pleading for mercy without demanding substantive justice?

Continued in part II.

The Royal Society has just released a fascinating report entitled “Neuroscience, Conflict and Security” that examines the increasing role that neuroscientific research is playing in the military today (thanks to Nick for drawing my attention to it). Indeed, as was reported by Wired’s Danger Room a couple of years ago, the US Air Force has been soliciting  research proposals for “innovative science and technology projects to support advanced bioscience research” that include “bio-based methods and techniques to sustain and optimize airmen’s cognitive performance”, “identification of individuals who are resistant to the effects of various stressors and countermeasures on cognitive performance” and “methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” Likewise, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that gave us the Internet) has long shown significant interest in the potential military applications of neuroscience.

As the Royal Society report puts it, military neuroscience can be seen to have “two main goals: performance enhancement, i.e. improving the efficiency of one’s own forces, and performance degradation, i.e. diminishing the performance of one’s enemy” (p.1). It is with reference to these two goals that I will attempt in this post to make some sense of the wider context and implications of neuroscience’s entanglement with contemporary martial practices.

Neuroscience and the Martial Brain

The first of these objectives is essentially concerned with the imperatives that guide the constitution and operation of military force and the related procedures for the recruitment, training, and command of personnel suited to the various demands of twenty-first century warfare. It has been recognised for some time that the particular tempo, lethality, and and technological-intensiveness of contemporary battlespaces is making unprecedented demands on the combatants occupying them. So much so that DARPA would warn a decade ago that “the human is becoming the weakest link in defense systems” and that “sustaining and augmenting human performance will have significant impact on Defense missions and systems.” Of particular concern is the stress being placed on the timely and reliable execution of cognitive processes such as pattern-recognition or decision-making, at least insofar as the human cannot yet be taken ‘out of the loop.’

Thus the Royal Society report tells us that:

major areas of science and technology development, and associated military applications include neuropharmacology and drug delivery for approaches to sustaining and enhancing brain function and performance; functional neuroimaging as an enabling tool for applications such as enhancing cognition or memory and augmenting learning and training; and developing human-machine interfaces as a means to enhance cognitive or physical performance. (p.5)

In one sense, we can view these developments as the continuation of the “anatomo-politics of the human body”, the origin of which Foucault located in the seventeenth century and the modern disciplinary techniques of the military. If the microphysics of power instantiated through the martial drill of Frederick the Great’s soldiers had as their primary object the kinematics of the human body and sought to govern its posture, gait and articulations, technoscientific  developments now allow this power to penetrate and shape the brain’s electro-chemical structure and cognitive processes.

Attempts to alter and ‘enhance’ the state of mind of warriors are of course not in themselves new. Since the dawn of recorded history, the need to overcome the potentially paralyzing effects of fear and fatigue has led fighting men to absorb various disinhibiting mind-altering substances, from alcohol and opiates to coca leaves and amphetamines. Yet all of these past neurological hacks may come to be seen as incredibly crude and primitive in comparison to the possible military applications of contemporary neuroscience and the neuropharmacological arsenal it promises to unlock.  A whole galaxy of both naturally-occurring and synthetic agents is coming online with the tasks of supporting alertness, concentration, memory, and even in-group bonding and cooperation in the case of oxytoxin.

Yet perhaps the most potentially consequential developments will be found in the area of neural interfacing and its efforts to bring the human nervous system and computing machines under a single informational architecture. The report’s authors note here the benefits that accrue from this research to the disabled in terms of improvements to the range of physical and social interactions available to them through a variety of neurally controlled prosthetic extensions. While this is indeed the case, there is a particular irony to the fact that the war mutilated (which the Afghan and Iraq conflicts have produced in abundance – according to one estimate, over 180,000 US veterans from these conflicts are on disability benefits) have become one of the main testing grounds for technologies that may in the future do much more than restore lost capabilities. Among one of the most striking suggestions is that:

electrode arrays implanted in the nervous system could provide a connection between the nervous system of an able-bodied individual and a specific hardware or software system. Since the human brain can process images, such as targets, much faster than the subject is consciously aware, a neurally interfaced weapons systems could provide significant advantages over other system control methods in terms of speed and accuracy. (p.40)

In other words, human brains may be harnessed within fire control systems to perform cognitive tasks before these even become conscious to them. Aside from the huge ethical and legal issues that it would raise, one cannot but observe that under such a scheme the functional distinction between human operator and machine seems to collapse entirely with the evaporation of any pretense of individual volition.

Winning Cardiac Muscles and Prefrontal Cortexes

There is also a more immediate sense in which neuroscience is being weaponised in that the knowledge it produces is being utilised to directly attack and degrade the adversary’s neural system. The most obvious manifestation of this is the deployment of neuropharmacological  agents to incapacitate targets by inducing “loss of consciousness, sedation, hallucination, incoherence, paralysis, disorientation or other such effects” (p.43). Once again, such experimentation with ‘non-lethal’ chemical agents already has previous history, including trials with LSD such as the one below (for less light-hearted accounts, see here and here).

One of the lessons of past experimentation is that ensuring non-lethality is a significant challenge as the doses required to cause incapacitation may not differ greatly in magnitude to life-threatening ones and there remains enduring difficulties in controlling the dispersion and rate of absorption of such agents (as the Russian FSB found out during the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis). So-called non-lethal weapons therefore raise serious issues surrounding the blurring of policing and military operations and the particular status of incapacitating agents under the Chemical Weapons Convention that the report rightly points to.

But the agents considered here, from opioids and benzodiazepines to neuroleptic anaesthetics and bioregulators, may be still too blunt for the most ambitious of neuro-warriors. Indeed, would the most effective neurological weapon not be that which does not even make its target aware of its effects? A 2008 report commissioned by the US Defense Intelligence Agency thus asks:

Can cognitive states and intentions be controlled? Although conflict has many aspects, one that warfighters and policy makers often talk about is the motivation to fight, which undoubtedly has its origins in the brain and is reflected in peripheral neurophysiological processes. So, one question would be “How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight? Other questions raised by controlling the mind: How can we make people trust us more? What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?” (pp.16-17)

Only last week, DARPA revealed a new $4 million research project called “Battlefield Illusion” that will investigate technologies that can “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” through an understanding of “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs.” In 2004, Colonel Michael McKim  had already argued that the military should seek to “reframe the perception-space” since in the final instance “a bridge believed to be destroyed, or felt to be unable to hold the tanks, can be just as ‘gone from the war’ as a bridge destroyed by bombs.” The holy grail of military neuroscience is therefore nothing less than the ability to directly hack into and reprogram a target’s perceptions and beliefs, doing away even with the need for kinetic force. So that when neural warfare does truly arrive, we may not even know it.

I’m sure you have reasons
A rational defence
Weapons and motives
Bloody fingerprints
But I can’t help thinking
It’s still all disease.

Fugazi, ‘Argument’ (2001)

‘Weapon of War’ could be many explanations and I’m not sure of any of them.

UNHCR official, Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, June 2010

1. War Rape in the Feminist Imaginary

Rape is a weapon of war. Such is the refrain of practically all contemporary academic research, political advocacy and media reporting on wartime sexual violence. Once considered firmly outside the remit of foreign policy, rape is today labelled as a ‘tactic of war’ by US Secretaries of State who pledge to eradicate it and acknowledged as a war crime and constituent act of genocide at the highest levels of international law and global governance, a development which for some amounts to the ‘international criminalization of rape’. This idea of rape as a weapon of war has a distinctly feminist heritage. Opposed to the historical placement of gendered violence within the hidden realm of the private, feminist scholarship was the first to draw out the connections between sexual violence and the history of war, just as feminists fought to make rape in times of nominal peace a matter for public concern. Feminist academics have, then, pioneered a view of sexual violence as a form of social power characterised by the operations and dynamics of gender. Sexual violence under feminist inquiry is thus politicised, and forced into the public sphere.

But the consensus that rape is a weapon of war obscures important, and frequently unacknowledged, differences in our ways of understanding and explaining it. Like most work in academic feminism, politicised inquiry into wartime sexual violence has often shown an awareness of differences within feminism. Most prominently, Inger Skjelsbæk has argued that feminist accounts can be divided into three epistemologies depending on who they conceptualise as the victims of wartime sexual violence: essentialists (who see all women as victims through a focus on the militarised expression of underlying masculinity); structuralists (who see only some women as under threat and work from a group-based perspective); and social constructionists (who allow that both men and women may be victims and understand femininity and masculinity as malleable categories that could conceivably be applied to anyone within conflict contexts). Others have, for example, differentiated approaches to the Bosnian mass rapes, either identifying sexual violence as specifically genocidal or seeing it as of a piece with ‘everyday’ rape in war.

Although useful, some of these distinctions risk repeating the ‘familiar stories’ that Clare Hemmings warns of, parcelling kinds of feminism into chronological chambers (first there were the essentialists…). Most crucially, it has not been obvious at which level the conflict between conflicting theoretical accounts lies. For example, the apparent dispute between an account of wartime sexual violence in which all women are targeted and one in which men and women are targeted may tell us much more about contingent historical factors (different wars and differing contexts may display different patterns of rape) or analytical distinctions (between acts that are essential to a strategy and those that are peripheral to it) than they do about the philosophical foundations of research. Despite a general concern with multiple feminisms, then, in the case of wartime sexual violence it has generally seemed more important to distinguish feminist from non-feminist analysis and to make the case for war rape as a legitimate topic for the attention of IR scholars than to open up varieties of feminist analyses to scrutiny.

Why not think of feminist accounts of war rape differently? Given the multiple ways in which ‘explanation’ has recently been opened up as a category, could we not think of feminism as embodying different kinds of substantive analysis, different logics of sexual violence expressed in different packages (or assemblages) of scholarly discourse? Following interventions opening these possibilities, we can see different feminist accounts of sexual violence as falling within separate modes of critical explanation, united by common themes and assumptions, differentiated from other modes by the distinctive way in which they assemble and cohere accounts of the social world.[1]

Modes are not mere collections of formal hypotheses, but instead combine different forms of intellectual practice. In this framework, that is taken to mean that they combine analytical wagers (organising concepts which ‘select’ objects of inquiry and underlying explanatory categories like ‘rationality’ or ‘affect’); narrative scripts (the stories we tell about objects of inquiry and the ways in which we people and script our accounts with particular kinds of protagonists acting for particular reasons); and normative orientations (the ideas of responsibility, blame and possible political action implicated in the wagers and scripts that characterise a particular mode) (I’m summarising some dense stuff pretty quickly here, but there’s more detail in the full paper, I promise).

2. The Cunning of Reasons: Instrumentality, Unreason, and Mythology

Turning to a substantive analysis of different explanations of war rape, three explanatory modes are revealed. Existing accounts of rape as a weapon of war have privileged instrumentality, unreason or mythology as modes of wartime sexual violence. Each mode carries its own analytical style in its elements, articulated through a focus on particular empirical regularities and a corresponding characterisation of instances of sexual violence. All have a plausibility when dealing with particular examples. However, the shifting nature of both the modes and of the phenomena under analysis resists any easy preference for one mode over others or reduction of them to three separate and wholly incommensurate hypotheses of sexual violence. The modes are coherent but not in the sense of being directly competing paradigms. They are partly overlapping, and ambiguous at the margins, but also apparently contradictory on a range of key analytical problems.

Instrumentality signifies self-conscious means-ends reasoning at its purest. Put directly, rape is cheaper than bullets. It recalls, within a gendered register, the ‘Machiavelli Theorem’ of one economist – that “no one will ever pass up an opportunity to gain a one-sided advantage by exploiting another party”. Its fundamental analytical wager is that of means-ends rationality, although this is frequently combined with an economic materialism and individualism. Instrumentalist accounts converge on themes of scarcity, greed and accumulation, and so tend to summon groups coordinated to attain the attendant benefits, for example in the idea of military battalions carrying out sexual violence as part of a strategy to seize valuable minerals. Its narrative scripts are of calculating soldier-strategists who self-consciously choose to rape, and its normative orientation envisions agents unconstrained by ethical boundaries, and thus susceptible only to direct disincentives. For instrumentality, rape is a weapon of war because it is in the direct interests of perpetrators to use it for other ends. So wartime sexual violence becomes an extension of politics in the sense that it is one tool among many adopt by self-interested actors.

Empirical support for the instrumentalist lens is drawn from the kinds of plans that embody a certain idea of masculine ruthlessness. Military documents from Bosnia-Herzegovina appear to show a conscious military calculation of means and ends, stating for example that “[Muslim] morale, desire for battle, and will could be crushed more easily by raping women, especially minors and even children”. Certainly, the cheapness of wartime sexual violence for an economic strategy of resource accumulation in the DRC is central for campaigners like Eve Ensler, who has commented that “rape is a very cheap method of warfare. You don’t have to buy scud missiles or hand grenades”. The importance of military objectives and economic goods in the narrative scripts of why men rape brings these claims close to ideas of ‘greed’ as the fuel for civil war, with sexual violence the weapon of choice in the struggle for diamonds or coltan.

Unreason signifies that which lies outside the realm of the self-conscious sovereign individual and his coherently-plotted, goal-directed action. It can imply irrationality in the sense of actions that do not benefit, or even harm, an actor, but it is not chaotic or random. Instead, it suggests the dimensions of behaviour that escape self-reflection and which defy incentives. Sexual violence in these accounts takes the form of a drive or a bond, biological or social psychological. Unreason’s analytical wagers are those of emotional and expressive being and of variegated and contested internal mental states. This gives rise to a focus on themes of trauma, affect and the (perhaps collective) unconscious. The relevant actors thus become not so much institutions or organisations as individuals led to certain acts by a confluence of events and internal urges. Its narrative scripts revolve around a psyche opaque to itself. Consequently war rapists often appear to unreason as confused, frustrated or angry. Unreason’s normative orientation addresses the conditions that perpetuate such psychological states. At the limit, this implies that rape cannot be changed by policy but must be accepted as a kind of persistent eruption. Rape here is a weapon of war because it is the result of desire and fear faced by perpetrators in brutalising situations of affect and trauma.

Unreason is purest in work which stresses the expressive role of sexual violence. This is rape as an over-flowing of frustration. Among its motifs is the idea of sexual abuse as an act of group cohesion among men. It notes the frequent presence of alcohol in rape as well as racist abuse, all “typically conducted in a hands-on orgy of bloodletting”. Related justifications based on the logic of inevitable expressive unreason (‘this is just what soldiers do’) have been critiqued by Susan Brownmiller but have also been implicated in her much-quoted view that rape is “one of the satisfactions of conquest, like a boot in the face”. The most brutal and shocking acts associated with wartime sexual violence – the severing of body parts, mutilation and ‘extra insults’ in addition to rape – seem to fit with the mode of unreason, especially where they are accompanied by evidence of pleasurable release for perpetrators. Practices of sexual defilement suggest a deep disgust and horror motivating rapists, details which evoke rape as carnivalesque ‘laboratories in total domination’. Thus unreason assembles narratives of celebratory and transgressive violence, psychopathology, perverse homo-sociality and the kind of criminal opportunism that can find no justification in a financial reward.

In contrast to the exteriority of instrumentality, unreason relies on a fractured interiority. Unreason contains both the joys of war (war as game; war as the profession of the psychopath; war as festival) and behaviour in war as trauma or psychological coercion (drugs as an enforced lubricant to sexual violence; kidnapped and brutalised children; the fearful lashing out of men with guns). Consequently, its normative orientation becomes similarly fractured between an outright condemnation and palpable disgust at the pleasure taken by protagonists in sexual violence on the one hand, and a pitying recognition of trauma on the other, directing us to move away from a model in which the actors themselves feature so prominently to one which asks questions about how any human being could become so damaged as to enact these fantasies on the bodies of others in the first place.

In some senses, mythology is a mediating term between instrumentality and unreason, curtailing profit maximisation within socio-cultural bounds and providing a symbolic framework for drives. But it is also much wider, embracing discourses, collective belief systems and ideologies. It includes not only doctrines and religion, but the background assumptions that are constructed through human communities, even of “rape as an identity-producing practice”. This is the view of sexual violence as shaped by cultural idioms, embodied in a habitus of masculinity or the expression of long-standing schemas of the body and of gender. Mythology’s analytical wagers are those of collective identity and the primacy of human communities. Thematically it concentrates on socially meaningful difference and subjectivities grounded in the imperatives and limits of a community or a particular institution, which then become the relevant objects and actors. Narrative scripts here frame rapists not as self-interested or as acting out personal desires, but as performers of socio-cultural ritual. Ethical and political options are thus shaped to suggest solutions in terms of changes made to the communities or institutions in question, for example through political campaigns contesting collective misogynistic beliefs or transformations in the forms of recruitment and training undergone by soldiers.

The view of wartime sexual violence as a symbolic reflection of masculinist mythology is strongest in those accounts that stress the ways in which women are treated as signs exchanged among men. Just as there is a persistent patriarchal view of women as ‘beautiful souls’, sexualised aggression can be related not so much to the particular material rewards of the act as to the imaginary role of certain women as representatives of a nation to be destroyed or a community to be punished, and of rape as a violation that only counts as a violation in some collective sense because of patriarchal norms of family and custom. Ruth Seifert, for one, accepts symbolic and institutional explanations of sexual violence but also introduces culture both as that which rape aims at destroying and as the ‘background’ to rape orgies, a set of ideas which generate their content. On this account, women may be raped “because they are the objects of a fundamental hatred that characterizes the cultural unconscious and is actualized in times of crisis”, bodies on which a particular intersubjectivity acts itself out in carnivalesque form.

Mythology need not condemn whole cultures in a way that buttresses retrograde ideas of patriarchal others or inherently misogynistic civilizational constellations. It may just as well refer to specific institutional contexts and the particular practices hegemonic there. In the mode of mythology, rape is again a weapon and a tool, but not one that belongs to individuals or which is used for accumulation or to release sexual frustration. Instead, it is a tool for a particular community. It obeys the internal requirements and limits set by a particular socio-symbolic order. Resources matter in sustaining and reproducing a group, but that does not mean that all acts in war are orientated towards that end or even that violence should be understood as an accumulatory strategy in any setting. Indeed, following the norms of a group may be counter-productive in terms of material well-being, and may involve restrictions on pleasure as well as the licence to carry out particular socially-sanctioned acts.

3. How Modes Matter

These differences in feminist accounts of war rape do not directly correspond to debates between positivists and constructivists or between qualitative and quantitative approaches to data. Nor do they merely map onto feminist empiricist, standpoint feminist or feminist postmodernist strands of theory. The contrasts between instrumentality, unreason and mythology operate at another level. As sophisticated analyses of philosophy of social science within IR have repeatedly stressed, a philosophical position on epistemology, ontology and methodology does not, and cannot, give rise to a substantive theory of how and why certain events occur. Instead, we should look to the kinds of research questions asked, the ways in which the answers are variably constructed and the emancipatory political commitments built into them. There are manifest and latent stories about what feminist analysis does, just as there are manifest and latent stories about how feminism takes on and transforms categories inherited from elsewhere, and looking at sexual violence in terms of different modes makes these more explicit.

When considered in terms of instrumentality, unreason and mythology, the tensions between different possible explanations are distributed in a new way. In some cases the modes are straightforwardly contradictory and thus force a choice between political options. For example, it has been argued both that rape happens because the militaries in question are extremely hierarchical organisations in which troops obey specific orders to rape (instrumentality) and that sexual violence is opportunistic, occurring because they are insufficiently hierarchical, leading troops to ignore orders and carry out their own wishes (unreason). In the latter example, efforts to strengthen and train militaries in conflict zones will decrease rape. In the former, such efforts will only increase the effectiveness of the masculinised war machine. And viewing the military as a site of mythology may require neither increases nor decreases in levels of hierarchy but instead point to the necessity of shifts in institutional culture.

More commonly, different modes of critical explanation will not crystallise as distinct policy options. Rather, understanding sexual violence in terms of one or other form of critical explanation will shape the priorities and forms of political intervention adopted. This is Engle’s point when she criticises some feminist activism for contributing to an understanding of war rape in terms of ethnicity and sex in a way which diverts attention from wider patterns of gender oppression. But although they are distinct, instrumentality, unreason and mythology are not straight-forwardly incompatible. Modes meet at borders of common interest: instrumentality and unreason share an interest in questions of desire, (ir)rationality, interiority and control; unreason and mythology both require an analysis of the psycho-social divide and the complex relations of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity; and mythology and instrumentality recognise the functional and collective aspects of violence.

But the resultant ambiguity is not simply that of an intellectual menu from which aspects can be chosen at whim, since the kinds of amalgamated modes of critical explanation that result differ in politically and analytically consequential ways. The overlapping yet coherent character of modes means that specific examples of rape in war can be made amenable to more than one mode of critical explanation. This poses a problem common to theory, scientific or otherwise, of how to determine which pattern of reasoning provides the most plausible account of sexualised aggression in conflict. This is the problem of the gap between modes of inquiry and modes of action, between discourses of explanation and the behaviours to which they refer, however closely they may be linked in the process of interpretation. Evaluating feminist accounts of wartime sexual violence will thus require further stages of contention and articulation.

If agreement that rape is a weapon of war can nevertheless entail radically different ideas of why wartime violence happens, what forms it takes, and what can be done about it, then understanding the character of those different ideas becomes important. Feminist accounts instantiate modes of critical explanation: modes because their grammars and styles have a structure and coherence; explanation because this coherence is not merely political or descriptive, but provides an analytical account of why certain behaviours occur and how they lead to certain events and not others; and critical explanation because they do not assume that the processes identified are deterministic and instead see them as social relations and products amenable, or at least partly open, to critique and change.

Sexual violence often seems, in its horror, to conform vividly to Primo Levi ‘s diagnosis of ‘useless violence’: “an end in itself, with the sole purpose of creating pain, occasionally having a purpose, yet always redundant, always disproportionate to the purpose itself”. There may instead be many purposes and ends, and many possible reasons, if no satisfying moral resolutions, beneath our standard accounts of rape as a weapon of war.

[1] These modes are critical explanations because in describing and explaining social relations, they also allow for a political engagement through their stress on the “non-necessary character of social relations” (in the words of Glynos and Howarth). This is itself part of the politicising character of feminist research: in none of the literature examined below is it suggested that wartime sexual violence is just a pattern of behaviour out there unrelated to our attempts to conceive of and abolish it. In this sense, feminism can be read as critical theory, centrally concerned with both reflexivity and normative categories, but not absent ‘cognitive content’ (meaningful knowledge) because of that.

It took at least 200 years for the novel to emerge as an expressive form after the invention of the printing press.

So said Bob Stein in an interesting roundtable on the digital university from back in April 2010. His point being that the radical transformations in human knowledge and communication practices wrought by the internet remain in their infancy. Our learning curves may be steeper but we haven’t yet begun to grapple with what the collapsing of old forms of social space means. We tweak and vary the models that we’re used to, but are generally cloistered in the paradigms of print.

When it comes to the university, and to the journal system, this has a particular resonance. Academics find themselves in a strange and contradictory position. They are highly valued for their research outputs in the sense that this is what determines their reputation and secures their jobs (although this is increasingly the value of the faux-market and the half-assed quality metric). This academic authority, won by publications, is also, to some extent, what makes students want to work with them and what makes them attractive as experts for government, media and civil society. They are also highly valued in a straight-forward economic sense by private publishing houses, who generate profit from the ability to sell on the product of their labour (books and articles) at virtually no direct remuneration, either for the authors or for those peer reviewers who guarantee a work’s intellectual quality. And yet all (OK, most) also agree that virtually nobody reads this work and that peer review is hugely time-consuming, despite being very complicated in its effects. When conjoined with the mass noise of information overload and the extension and commercialisation of higher education over the last decades, our practices of research, dissemination and quality control begin to take on a ludicrous hue. As Clifford Lynch nicely puts it, “peer review is becoming a bottomless pit for human effort”.

This is an attempt to explore in more detail what the potentialities and limits are for academic journals in the age of digital reproduction. Once we bracket out the sedimented control of current publishers, and think of the liveliness of intellectual exchange encountered through blogs and other social media, a certain hope bubbles up. Why not see opportunity here? Perhaps the time is indeed ripe for the rebirth of the university press, as Martin Weller argues:

the almost wholesale shift to online journals has now seen a realignment with university skills and functions. We do run websites and universities are the places people look to for information (or better, they do it through syndicated repositories). The experience the higher education sector has built up through OER, software development and website maintenance, now aligns nicely with the skills we’ve always had of editing, reviewing, writing and managing journals. Universities are the ideal place now for journals to reside.

The clamour for some kind of alternative, for some way of re-adjusting our expectations and practices, is indeed growing. Often critical, this has largely depended on individual academics pointing out flaws, contradictions and rent-seeking amongst existing journals, with increasing but still marginal efforts to start up open access alternatives.  The recent boycott of Elsevier is incredibly heartening in this light, even as it highlights the gap between the activism of nominally closeted science types and the stunningly silent complicity of ‘political’ ‘scientists’. All of this is necessary agitprop-cum-utopianism, but what does it mean in a detailed sense?

Take Lynch’s imagined future university press system:

In this future, most university presses are relatively small organizations, some almost cottage industry participants…Presses operate in much closer alignment with the academic programs of their host institutions; it is not uncommon and not suspect to see a typical press draw half of its publications from faculty at its own host institution, helping to ensure a more rational coverage of the range of disciplines that rely on monographs by the overall system of university presses.

A typical monograph is created digitally, and can be viewed digitally, but intellectually is very similar to a traditional printed monograph; it can be randomly accessed, searched by keyword, and can include many images and sound and video clips. But, except for the sound and video clips, if they are present, the typical monograph can be readily reduced to print with little loss. It would be clearly recognizable to any scholar today, or even from 1930, as a scholarly monograph. (Change in this regard will come much more slowly, and is discussed later.)

Printed books are produced only on demand, and by third parties; there are no warehouses, no physical inventory. Universities have taken the lead in the broader publishing industry in making this transition; while it has certainly hurt many traditional bookstores, the economics have been inexorable…

…The platform providers include among their services a bridge to the consumer market, making monographs available through Amazon, iTunes, and similar channels on a nonexclusive basis, including library-friendly e-book systems; university presses are not involved in these arrangements except perhaps for setting prices. Prices in general are low. Some presses and some authors also choose to make their books available for free download under a Creative Commons license, either immediately upon publication or after some interval. Systematically, the press has moved away from transactional activities surrounding individual sales of individual books, either by eliminating them or outsourcing them.

Access to the databases of the platform providers is at modest cost to any institution with a contributing university press; other libraries can license access to the databases as well, for a relatively low fee…The presses are financed, typically, by a mixture of institutional subventions, author subventions, and some very modest revenue streams from direct consumer sales and from licensing through the consortium.[1]

The comparative advantages are obvious. As non-profits, collaboration and exchange would mean lower disincentives for remodeled university presses. As already academically specialist, academic labourers would find it easier to rate and understand work (and to know when references are wrong), making use of already sunk costs in higher education clustered in universities. Located within living institutes of learning, presses should also find dissemination, translation into teaching practice and consolidation of research communities around particular clusters of publication more straight-forward, perhaps even by offering the hybrid model that a journal like Millennium already works on (in which double anonymous peer-review is combined with an institutionally-located and democratic Editorial board which votes on articles and sets conditions for revision). Costs would decrease, given that large sums would no longer be paid out to external operators with a vested interest in charging over the odds, proliferating outlets and gate-keeping knowledge. In other words, once we no longer see the whole production-and-publication side of the journal industry as some magical process beyond the ken of academics, the solution becomes bracingly self-evident.But who will pay for your intellectual utopia?, the cry goes up.

Lynch suggest that the prices quoted for getting your article published open access with established publishers – £1,500 with Cambridge; around £1,600 for Sage (or c. a compulsory £440 per article for the new Sage Open) – more or less reflect ‘true cost’ on the publisher side. This seems extraordinary given what is being provided, although it’s very hard to know how much of this is editing and formatting work and how much is for printing, maintaining basic systems, or subsidising other, perhaps worthy, parts of the business. If true, it would suggest a considerable investment in any new university presses, although one still lower than the 40% margins extracted by some publishers or the 10% of all HEFCE research funding currently spent by libraries on accessing journals.

Moreover, the variation here seems very wide indeed: from £307 for the American Society of Neuroradiology to £3,066 from the parasites at Elsevier or £400 per page to open access your paper in The Lancet. Recall that these are the prices to remove the pay wall for individual articles. I’m going to go ahead and wager that those price differentials reflect not the massively increased costs of publishing with prestige presses, but the added monetary value that can be extracted from consumers thanks to accumulated academic prestige (which, you’ll recall, is given for free, or nearly free).

Looking at the problem from the perspective of those outside the mainstream journal system illuminates matters somewhat. Friends collaborating on a forthcoming issue of the Graduate Journal of Social Science have attempted to cost the true cost of their work to highlight the amount of voluntary labour involved. Between the authors, editors, reviewers and cover artist (but not yet including proof readers or in-house editors), they suggest that the cost of this single issue in wage terms would have been approximately £24,400. A large number, you’ll agree, and one which also aligns with Lynch’s comment that the ‘true’ costs of an article (if peer reviewers and Editors were actually compensated) would be three to four times the charge to make a piece open access (so c. £6,000 per article).

This gives a sense of just how much goes into sustaining the academic journal system as it stands, but notice that it doesn’t actually change the argument for revitalised open access university presses since none of this work is compensated at the moment anyway. If anything, it strengthens the case for a move to university presses, since at least then voluntary labour goes to a non-profit entity committed by founding principles (as any such presses should be) to maximal accessibility and dissemination. Assuming that at least some of those contributing voluntary labour are associated with the relevant university professionally, it also creates a virtuous cycle: quality academics enhance quality journals, with the accompanying prestige (or income) coming back to the institution itself, rather than being parceled off for private companies.

Instead, we need to think about what it is that publishers currently provide and what it would cost to do without them. Existing outlets like The Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies are powered almost exclusively by enthusiasm and free labour. As Steve Brier intimates, this is itself part of the threat of the digital in the ways it might be mobilised against us: a move to distance learning, provided by still more atomised and alienated precarious faculty (suitably flexible to networked demands) in virtual classrooms. Given that open access journals are disproportionately run by non-Faculty, precarious academics and doctoral students, this skews analysis somewhat, but also shows how much is possible. Imagine what could be done with the commitment and resources of multi-million pound institutions behind such projects, or with a wider agenda that matched changes in the academic publishing ecology with changes in our understandings of ‘impact’ and ‘productivity’.

A sketch, then, of a possible balance of functions and funding:

• Peer-review: free
• Editorship: free or nearly free (with costs borne by the institution, which receives prestige for hosting journals)
• Proofing: minimal, done largely by Editorial staff (who end up proof-reading/fact-checking anyway at various stages)
• Production: minimal, largely a question of pdf creation, although also requiring infrastructure
• Printing: minimal, via a move to more on-demand printing

And from academic host institutions and presses:

• some ‘buy-out’ for Editors, to give them the time required with some compensation in lieu
• provision for in-house journal Editorial staff (say one full time individual per journal) to cover production, correspondence, etcetera
• digital infrastructure, particularly ManuscriptCentral type systems and hosting for web-pages/pdf upload, an infrastructure that could plausibly be created, sustained and shared for little cost by a conglomerate of academic presses
• professional support for academic metrics, particularly entry into Citation Indexes, for as long as they remain dominant modes of assessing our work
• a small charge to the public for downloading articles, either on a general subscription basis or per article (say 50p to £1 per article)

This leaves much unspecified and unclear. In particular, the possibility of support for submitting journals to citation ranking systems seems particularly important, since this is what effectively shuts out small scale voluntary projects from being taken seriously for academic career progression, regardless of the quality of the papers, the Editors or the peer review. It is also clearly preferable to move to a system in which the amount of work put into academia is somehow recognised, ideally by adequate funding of the universities, but by payment for reviewers and Editors if needs be. Any charge for articles is an unwanted barrier, but here at least there is the possibility that sufficiently low costs will lead to a greater readership, and a more equitable income stream, than current practices of pay-walled gate-keeping.

In a still softer version of this proposal, publishers could remain, but in a much diminished capacity, continuing to provide some infrastructural support for a fee, but not determining pricing, scheduling and copy-editing as they largely do now. There is clearly some space for mixed systems, although it still seems as if a serious focus on the university as an institutional site is most likely to bear fruit. Here again, there is more to say, and obvious connections to other questions – of quality control, immaterial labour, social value, ‘excess’ publishing and translation – to make the subject of reflection and action.

[1] Lynch excludes journals on the basis that there is much speculation on this already, and also on the grounds that only a few fields have journal costs and times that approximate those of university press monographs. I’m on shaky ground here, but it seems that this is indeed the case for social science (including IR), so the analogy seems to hold.

Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1 (nearest tube Oxford Circus)

Panel with Editors David Chandler and Meera Sabaratnam, followed by publisher’s reception

All welcome

The 1990s was a weird decade for all kinds of reasons. The dice that were thrown into the air as the Soviet Union retreated landed in a particularly intriguing configuration for those politicians, public functionaries and academics from wealthy countries and institutions concerned with ‘peace’ and ‘development’. Their missions, marginalised for decades under concerns for national (i.e. military) security, were quite suddenly elevated as symbols of the new world order and installed as defining foreign policy priorities of wealthy states.

This would be an era in which the promises set out in the UN Charter in 1948 could finally be fulfilled, and various actors could reconcile their progressive self-images with their behaviour in the Third World. It promised the completion of a virtuous circle between peace, development, democracy, security and prosperity, to be achieved by international ’peacebuilding’. The pathology of armed conflict could, at least in principle, be gradually erased from social structures, via a series of curative interventions into state and society designed by experts. From the outset, these included the holding of multi-party elections, economic liberalisation, privatisation of state enterprises and public sector reform, amongst other campaigns such as the promotion of human rights, compliance with various international legal norms and practices. The broad political agenda, and the practices which ensued, have been collectively understood in the academic literature as ‘the liberal peace’.

Two decades on, what has been the record of the liberal peace? In some cases following UN-mandated peacebuilding interventions, such as Namibia, Nicaragua and Mozambique, there seemed to be happy endings. In others, such as Rwanda and Angola, there were distinctly unhappy endings. In others still, such as Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, there have perhaps been no real endings at all. Moreover, the liberal peace agenda morphed and mutated over this period, with the rather more expansive occupation-and-statebuilding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan extending its logic of interventionary reform into one of regime change and counter-insurgency.

Earlier scholarship set about debating whether this meant that the liberal peace was ‘too liberal’, advocating more long-term and penetrative reform, such as in Roland Paris’ notion of ‘institutionalisation before liberalisation’. Critical scholarship in this period often articulated the liberal peace as a neo-colonial attempt to introduce Western social and political norms via the back door. In this sense, it did not disagree with the interpretation that peacebuilding interventions were oriented towards liberal reform.

Many chapters in this volume however note that in many cases that many practices of ‘liberal peace’ intervention have been neither ‘liberal’ nor particularly peaceful. The increasingly obvious chasm between the projected objectives of interveners and their actual actions and effects not only forces a re-assessment of the record, but also pushes the debate about the politics and ethics of the liberal peace in different directions.

This includes, crucially, challenging rather than reproducing the self-representations of interveners. Rather than liberal, technically-efficient experts who have the power to produce outcomes in post-conflict environments, the stories that emerge from the re-evaluation in this volume place interveners as often improvisational, vacillatory and ineffectual, reliant on the power of their finanical clout to produce fragile forms of co-operation and compliance. Rather than a virtuous circle emerging between peace, development, democracy, freedom and security, these are mobile discouses which can present themselves as being in tension with each other in the present global order. Agents and supporters of intervention thus become involved in a complex set of re-articulations and re-justifications for maintaining intervention, which broadly shift responsibility for mission failure onto its intended beneficiaries.

The volume offers a set of different ideas about how to keep understanding and talking about the ‘liberal peace. For some contributors, its framework, although imperfectly executed, remains the only viable one for ultimately necessary interventions in post-conflict environments. For others, a much deeper and closer analysis of the broader social forces that underpin the logic of intervention is crucial. In yet other chapters, a case is made for starting with the agency and critiques articulated by the intended targets of intervention. In bringing together a diverse set of perspectives, the volume aims to demonstrate the political and analytic complexities that have emerged around one of the most uniquely ambitious, self-confident and unusual agendas of the last twenty years.

A recent piece by Michael Bérubé highlights one of the invisible problems of higher education in America (and elsewhere) – namely, the rise of the adjunct as the hegemonic form of the modern day academic. This is in both a qualitative way (with flexibility and monetization becoming some of the prime measures for every academic), but also in a quantitative way (Bérubé cites data that shows more than 2 out of every 3 faculty members are now contingent workers).

While American political discourse often portrays academics as highly-paid, impossible-to-fire liberals, the data in fact shows virtually the opposite (though admittedly academics are likely disproportionately “liberals”). Increasingly the expectation of graduate students leaving university is that:

(a) an academic position will be incredibly difficult to find (I have numerous anecdotes of friends applying for hundreds of jobs and only getting 3-5 interviews, let alone job offers)

(b) when a job is found, it will be contract work

(c) when a job is found, it will involve the workload of a full professor

(d) when a job is found, it will pay 20-75% of a full professor’s salary

(e) in a year (perhaps longer depending on the contract), this process will be repeated

The consequences of this situation are numerous and uniformly negative. The increased pressure on precarious teachers plays itself out in the classroom through less student engagement, more rote teaching, hasty evaluations of student work, and all sorts of other micro-political shifts that subtly shape how students emerge from the university today. These changes may play into management’s desire for more standards and more rote learning, but it’s at the expense of critical faculties.

This leads into Bérubé’s point about how adjunct teaching undermines the very notion that university teaching is a professional endeavour. The expectation that by going to university one is being taught by professionals is materially denied by the conditions of work: the lack of office space, the lack of library and journal access, the lack of time to spend on individual students, and so on. What Bérubé misses in this, though, is the ways in which this de-professionalization of the academic position fits comfortably with the overall shift of the university into a training centre. For anyone who sees the university as a(n always contested) space of potentially critical thought, this is anathema of course.

On a broader social level, Paul Mason has noted the rise of the “graduate with no future”. Generations of students had been told and believed that if they studied hard and worked hard, they would end up with a better life than the previous generation. This generation is the first to have to widely face up to the impossibility of this belief. Youth unemployment rose massively across the world after the 2008 financial crisis, but as the chart below shows – nothing has improved since then. Sociologically speaking, contemporary graduates consist of a variety of different backgrounds, meaning that what affects the student population (heightened dreams, collapsing reality) extends via social diffusion and affects the entire populations: low-income groups to upper class groups.

While there are some specificities to the modern-day academic, we should be under no illusions that we’re alone in this situation. The figure of the adjunct is a mere instantiation of a more general phenomenon. Rather than producing industrial commodities (classical labor), or creating informational and cultural content (immaterial labor), or being part of a particular income group (the 99%), the modern worker in general is defined by precarious existence. Precarious existence means not simply part-time, flexible and temporary work; it also includes the unemployed in a world where the social safety net is being cut, and it includes full-time permanent workers who have minimal savings in a world of hefty household debt. The former live a quite clearly precarious existence, surviving benefit cheque to benefit cheque. Yet the latter also lives precariously, insofar as any disruption to their lives (e.g. a job layoff, a surprise medical expense, etc.) will plunge that household into their own private austerity. The chart below shows a US indicator of this trend towards less savings and more precarity, while a recent report out of the UK found that 28% of all households had less than £250 in total savings – sufficient to last 5 days. Recognizing that precarity is an existential condition reveals that despite the fragmentation of work, much of the world already shares the condition of being “indebted, insecure, and vulnerable“. The only question left is how to mobilize this commonality to effect change.

Chart via: http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/07/11/Guidolin.pdf

With precarity being one of the main reasons why workers can’t reverse their loss of power (e.g. fear of lost wages from a strike, or fear of fighting back and being fired), a key point for any future organization has to be how to establish a system whereby the fears of precarity are mitigated. Some signs of how this organization might come about can be seen in the UK’s largest union, Unite, and their recent project to involve more unemployed people and students. There are tentative steps here to widen the standard working class constituency and mobilize the precariat more widely through, for example, education and legal support. A more thorough attempt to integrate the precariat into an organized movement, however, needs to somehow alleviate the affects of precariousness without at the same time simply replacing what should be the state’s function to provide a safety net.

Related:

Elsewhere, Mike Konczal has a nice piece on gender and the New Deal reforms in relation to precarity here.

And Jacobin magazine has a critique of the very idea here.

Apropos our earlier look at the rhetoric of anti-rape advocacy, Sarah again pointed me in an interesting direction. This time to Vancouver, where a familiar campaign was launched last year. Echoing a similar phraseology (We Are Man; My Strength Is Not For Hurting; Real Men Know The Difference), this one says: Don’t Be That Guy. As is the vogue, the focus is principally on intoxication, nights out and not taking advantage, accompanied by cod-parental instruction: Just because you help her home, doesn’t mean you get to help yourself; and Just because she isn’t saying no doesn’t mean she’s saying yes; and Just because she’s drinking doesn’t mean she wants sex.

What’s interesting is that this exercise in ‘behavioural marketing’ is now seen as a success, and being given significant credit for an apparent 10% drop in rape rates since 2010. To wit:

The reversal in the trend related to sexual assaults reflected the impact of the new education program, better training for police officers and more effective investigation and enforcement, [Deputy Chief LePard] said.

The exact causal balance here is unclear, and there are no firmer details on this gendered accounting for us to work with. There still seem to be some good reasons for scepticism, but if anyone does know of more comprehensive studies on the impact of men-focused campaigns, do share. Particularly interested to hear of any research into the effects of similar behavioural marketing as part of mass anti-rape efforts in the midst of militarised-humanitarian intervention, whether in Congo or elsewhere.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark “K-Punk” Fisher writes of Kurt Cobain:

“In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche”. (p. 15)

This is as concise and accurate a summary of the dead-end of Nirvana’s nihilism as one could ask for – but as an illustration of the wider impotence of cultural and artistic expression to push beyond a dominant social vision of neo-liberal capitalism it’s not wholly convincing.

Fisher is right about Cobain, but his observation begs the obvious question: is Nirvana the wrong listening choice? If we turn to artistic expression for exemplars of how to begin anew, to think beyond our current moment, to escape the scripted thoughts, words and movements that structure our lives, this is actually a vital question.

Who should we be listening to?

This is a question that overflows beautifully, but here I want to explore the significance of one group – The Roots. This is partly an expression of personal love, but it’s also borne out of two less subjective impulses: (1) The Roots are insufficiently appreciated as an artistic and intellectual resource – they are artists in need of critics and journalists equal to their own insight and intensity; and (2) while I appreciate the efforts of those studying politics in an academic setting to bring in cultural resources, I don’t identify with International Relations’ obsession with Science Fiction (even as I appreciate the significance genre fiction can achieve), nor do I get much out of Political Theory’s tendency to appeal to classic dramas, and the multidisciplinary use of cinema, while fascinating, rarely leaves me inspired – so, returning to what one knows and finds inspiring – I want to argue it’s well worth listening to The Roots (and hip hop music) to understand the world and find profound insights.

A simple proposition: The Roots are the most important artists in popular music today – not bigger than Jesus, or the only band that matters – but possibly the best hip-hop group ever and a creative and intellectual force the quality of which is rare in music, especially music that maintains a popular orientation. This proposition matters because understanding and appreciating The Roots’ work over the past thirteen years takes the listener into an artistic world that expresses a very particular experience of the first decade of the 21^st century (black, urban and American) through profound musical originality and penetrating intelligence, this experience provides a very different vision that has the potential to disrupt the exhausted and nihilistic sense of inevitability that Fisher so rightly identifies.

“I’m kinda like W.E.B. Du Bois meets Heavy D and the Boyz”

- Dice Raw, “Get Busy”, Rising Down (2008)

W.E.B. Du Bois‘ idea of double-consciousness provides a way of appreciating the importance of The Roots. Double-consciousness is defined by a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” While this burden threatens to overwhelm a positive sense of self-awareness and confidence, it also enables a second-sight in women and men systematically repressed and whose experiences are devalued, allowing a sharper vision of social violence and providing substantial resources for struggle and emancipation. The Roots carry over this sense of double-consciousness, but rendered more positive and confident by decades of growing black self-awareness, increasing social strength and important political victories in the US and more widely, such that they render the potential psychological weakness of double-consciousness into an incisive and positive vision, one wholly at odds with Cobain’s musical and cultural legacy of frustrated exhaustion.

Speaking of traditions of black music in America, Du Bois says,

“Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”

Black culture in America provides an alternative reservoir of tradition (in the form of hip-hop culture, black musical traditions, political radicalism and distinctive forms of socially engaged religious practice) that not only nourishes the social imagination but is resistant to co-option. Hip-hop music is received by the dominant culture as a threat that must be commodified and tamed, but the refusal of a hip-hop artist to acquiesce to their own commodification need not reduce to an empty and ironic refusal nor solipsistic underground fetishism. The Roots, among others, maintain both a lucrative musical career and a challenging artistic output, at least in part, because of their capacity to occupy multiple subject positions – knowing that the music business is a business, intentionally challenging young, black, urban identities normally associated with hip hop, exploiting the fear of black assertiveness in mainstream culture in the US and working as “working musicians” who write, perform, produce, arrange for multiple artists, across generations and genres. But they are not simply polymaths too nimble to succumb to commodification – they are also self conscious creators of their own musical and intellectual space, shared in common, tied to tradition, and pushing relentlessly outward and forward. It is this quality, so essential to beginnings, that I focus on here.

Over a series of posts I want to consider the visions contained in The Roots music, with a particular focus on the political importance of their work – running from their groundbreaking 1999 album, Things Fall Apart, to their 2011 concept album, undun, I pull out a central theme from each album, which hardly defines the limits of their significance, but rather focuses on some of the insights they offer up with abundance.

Things Fall Apart (1999) 

“I am no man, I am dynamite.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

On Beginnings

“Listen close to my poetry, I examine this like an analyst, to see if you can handle this”

- Black Thought, “Next Movement“

Beginning are difficult – this is a simple truth that is particularly pertinent to anyone who feels pressed in by the world as it has been given, who struggles to find fractures in the world that might be expanded far enough to stand up to their full height. Partly this is a struggle to give expression to the discontent one feels – it’s not enough to know, as the early Roots’ records insistently documented, that one’s culture has been distorted, co-opted, defiled and weakened by its basest impulses – we need an analysis, an account of the dynamics that make’s our present condition combustible material for making new worlds.

Those of us who study and write on politics would do well to remember this, as the challenge is not to find a research question to answer or a puzzle to solve but rather – if we hope to properly criticize existing conditions – to understand what it is that makes the social world unlivable, destructive, painful and suffocating, in order to reach beyond that condition, to the next movement. This resonates with Marx’s imperative to not only understand but to change the world, obviously, but there is more to be said.

The central theme of Things Fall Apart is the need to revitalize hip hop culture in the wake of its commodification, to rewrite the debased morality of masculine bravado and materialistic ambition. Yet it is no nostalgia trip – instead it’s a reconstruction, rooted in the past the Roots reference, revere and celebrate like few others, but struggling at each turn to make the frustration, anger and sense of loss fertile and productive. The frustration that motivates Things Fall Apart is much more than the self-referential critique of musical purists, it’s most fundamental basis is in the crisis of black culture in America at the time – which mainstream hip hop of the era seemed to ignore completely, as the anger of black experience was reduced to a gangsta swagger and the hopes of emancipation sold for dreams of conspicuous consumption. The Roots self-consciously set out to restore hip hop’s conscience, as well as the truly threatening anger of a denigrated people aware of their suffering and unwilling to accept their position.

“The rage is still in me, never act too friendly. Scully down creepin’ while you tilted off Henny. Many men begin pure but in this world of sin your holdin’ tight my morale by injure. We scramble, because this game life is the gamble. Vandalize your terrain, go against the grain”

- Malik B, “Table of Contents (Parts 1 & 2)“

To change the world is no easy task. It requires a foundation to stand on and a vision of where the horizon should be redrawn. That foundation is partly made up of a culture that nourishes one’s sense of self, enabling a confidence that safety and freedom are real ends worth pursuing, but its completed by the experience of uncertainty, violence, loss – the negation of one’s confidence as motivation. This experience is part of the human condition – but the question of how to overcome exhaustion and loss of faith is no easier to answer for being common. Its answer requires confidence, strength, and mythology to sustain vision beyond the everyday uncertainties and doubts. This truth infuses the entire album, as The Roots celebrate their ability to best lesser rappers, call forth a party vibe that makes the next movement seem a festival to lose and find one’s self in, and, most importantly, set out to explode the taken for granted inevitability of the status quo – they call forth their own explosive power.

“Every body, touch this Illa-Fifth Dynamite. C’mon, touch this Illa-Fifth Dynamite. C’mon, touch this Illa-Fifth Dynamite. Check it out, eve-ry bo-dy. Touch this Illa-Fifth Dynamite. C’mon, touch this Illa-Fifth Dynamite. C’mon, touch this Illa-Fith Dynamite.”

- The Roots, “Dynamite!“

As Nietzsche claimed to have uncovered the fundamental contradiction at the heart of European thought, which rendered him an explosive force that would rend the culture he refused and sought to re-imagine, The Roots know that for hip hop culture to move beyond its limitations, both internal and imposed from outside, it must shed its idols – both inspired and defamed. Hip hop cannot go back to its insular origins, nor can it be sustained as the commodification and perverse exaggeration of ghetto suffering – this is the thesis The Roots develop on Things Fall Apart and which defines the work that follows. What this requires is that the consciousness of hip hop must expand beyond its given boundaries, without forgetting or neglecting, the black, urban and American experience from which it grows – expanding its concern to defend and ennoble the experience of those people who are marginalized, oppressed and suffering. Expansion, however, threatens to dull the tools that hip hop artists wield, their rage, their sense for the hypocrisy of the social order, their knowledge that what separates the cop and the criminal is power not goodness and their focused rage – which is the greatest protection against commodification and co-option.

“This directed to whoever in listening range. Yo the whole state of things in the world bout to change. Black rain fallin’ from the sky look strange. The ghetto is red hot, we steppin on flames. Yo, it’s infliction on a price for fame and it was all the same, but then the antidote came: The Black Thought, ill syllablist, out the Fifth, this heavyweight rap shit I’m about to lift like, a phylum lift up it’s seed to sunlight I plug in the mic, draw like a gunfight. I never use a cordless, or stand applaudless. Sippin’ cholorophyll out of ill silver goblets, I’m like a faucet, monopoly’s the object. There ain’t no way to cut this tap, you gotta get wet. Your head is throbbin and I ain’t said shit yet, The Roots crew, the next movement, c’mon!”

- Black Thought, “Next Movement”

This is a lesson to be studied and learned. Are we critical academics, radical philosophers, thinkers of what might come, teachers of social engagement and political change? If so, we must ensure we can hear the lessons riding on the airwaves all around us. Can you articulate, preserve and celebrate the experiences that pushed you to know and alter the world? Can you face its limitations while continuing to draw sustenance from that which made you? Can you seek out change beyond your own needs with the same passion you have for your own battles? Can you retain the indignation the world has inspired in you even as the emissaries of the order of things seek to placate you with their comforts and acceptance?

“But before the raw live shows I remember I’se a little snot-nosed rockin’ Gazelle goggles and Izod clothes, learnin’ the ropes of ghetto survival, peepin’ out the situation I had to slide through, had to watch my back my front plus my sides too . When it came to gettin’ mine I ain’t tryin’ to argue, sometimes I wouldn’ta made it if it wasn’t for you Hip-Hop, you the love of my life and that’s true”

- Black Thought, “Act Too (The Love of my Life)“

Fisher uses Cobain’s music to illustrate the sense of futility that enables capitalism’s seeming inevitability. The Roots illustrate another sensibility – they are no less aware of the risks of shouting into the void of contemporary consumer capitalism – but they have tools that Cobain, in his isolation and self-doubt, lacked. First among these is a sense of community apart from the dominant culture – Du Bois’ double consciousness rendered in communal form – as finding a place in a sub-culture provides positive reinforcement of one’s ideals and support to survive without being subservient. Hip hop culture shares this with punk culture – as anyone who has moved between the two can recognize. The Roots’ emergence as mature artists was made possible by this sense of shared purpose – in the late 1990s, working as part of the Soulquarians music collective and playing a part in many other records, they took alternative hip hop and neo-soul to new levels (artistically and commercially). Creativity in any genre – musical or intellectual – requires a sense of home and place, not only to nourish one’s sense of self but also to know the needs of others. This is essentially a form of political community.

“What’s the cure for this hip-hop cancer? Equivalent to this avalanche of black snow, rap flow to get my people thinkin mo’, we at the brink of war. What does it all mean? What’s it all for? With knowledge of yourself, then you’re through the first door. My people hungry and thirst for more, next music explore”

- Black Thought, “Ain’t Saying Nothing New“

The distinctive feature of hip hop as a political community, and the second resource that Cobain lacked, is its assertive form of self-affirmation/creation. Partly drawn from a sense of hybridity that allows the title allusion to jump from Keats’ anti-modernism to Achebe’s postcolonial sensibility to US civil rights politics and to late 20th century America; partly drawn from a combative relationship with dominant American culture – in which hip hop has to be defended as product and art against multiple denunciations, where the forces of law and order are revealed in their brutality and hypocrisy, where myths of equality and prosperity are rendered unbelievable – this self-assertion is bravado and braggadocio rendered as political virtues and creative necessities.

“I shot the sheriff, the deputy, and head of bank treasury. So mounties in the county got a big bounty stressin’ me , but tell ‘em to hold off, they too short to measure me. Mos and Black Thought blast forth with the weaponry.”

- Mos Def, “Double Trouble“

These tools are essential to any beginning, to any attempt to alter the shape of the world, to reconstruct the order of things – a sense of shared purpose and support, along with the boldness to create one’s own idols and declare boldly their superiority to the world we’re given into. In their exploration of hip hop music The Roots exemplify not only a particular bind that many of us find ourselves in, but the necessary tools to pick the locks that constrain and find trajectories of escape that lead to flourishing.

I’ve just seen Martin McQuillan and Joanna Callaghan‘s ‘I Melt The Glass With My Forehead’: A Film About £9,000 Tuition Fees, How We Got Them, and What To Do About It.[1] It does pretty much what it says on the tin, charting the issues talking-heads style. Readers not already deeply involved in the UK higher education system and its various problems will find it particularly enlightening, and the parade of would-be-Ministers making promises soon to be broken is worth the anger-energy alone.

Two things struck me. The first was LSE Public Policy Professor Nick Barr, who, despite making a lonely case for some of the fee changes, nevertheless foregrounded a few important truths. Most obviously neglected by higher education activists, there’s the importance of pre-university education, which remains much more important in determining entry, ‘success’ and social mobility than any fee/loan/tax increase. Moreover, as we’ve seen before, there’s the uncomfortable truth that the Browne proposals were more redistributive than the old system, although the Government’s decision to cap fees removed this potential. Linking these dimensions is the fundamental tension of contemporary higher education, which is of matching mass participation with high quality. On Barr’s account, this cannot happen from general taxation alone without something giving. Of course, this only remains a challenge of public policy under certain comparatively narrow parameters, and, as Howard Hotson reminds us, the system being ‘reformed’ for its own good was actually the best in the world when viewed as the combination of overall quality and parity across institutions (and if you haven’t yet read Hotson on the Ivy League, do).

Second, and relatedly, the focus of our reflections seems already to have congealed around fees, and fees alone. Even on the narrow topic of student finances, the question of living costs is almost totally absent. A few voices from another age mention it, but there seems no place in our moral calculus for considering the differential between those who must support themselves and those who have the supporting done for them. But there’s also something evidently arbitrary in discussing fees without a whisper about the REF, or the impact agenda, or the generalised role of the university as a producer of public goods (and I don’t just mean Ancient Norse) in an age of austere retrenchment. Notwithstanding the manifold critiques of Browne and Willetts (charlatanism being primary among them, at least for McQuillan and Callaghan), all this misses the critical perspective provided by Andrew McGettigan, placing the fees SNAFU within a wider ecology of political economy and long-term transformation. We learn just this week of the next stage of this process at London Met, where all in-house admin is being offered for private bidding and where 229 ‘posts’ (read: jobs)are to be abolished across seven faculties (this coming after the closure of 70% of undergraduate courses).

This all matters because the public discussion of the future university is increasing, even amidst our wholesale crisis of economy. In typical academic style, it’s coming too late for the bait-and-switch, but if the renewal of energy around the idea of a public university is to mean anything, it cannot be a mere retreat. Barr’s argument that teaching grant must be restored in the next Parliament seems both commonsensical and strangely unimaginable, but there are other stagnant pits of the old to avoid alongside the risks of the new.

[1] The title is borrowed from a banner at an anti-fees demo, quoting a 1915 poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky mentioned by Dan Hancox in the film. I borrowed ‘You, Decorous Bureaucrats Of Angelic Leagues’ from the same place. It seemed somehow more appropriate.