I’ve obviously got no direct personal experience, but have had a number of conversations with female and male colleagues about it. And now there’s a blog dedicated to compiling the experiences of women in philosophy departments, which may be of interest to those in other disciplines.
On science and universal values
Sam Harris gives a Ted Talk consoling “people like us” with the good news that science will provide universal standards of right and wrong, good and evil. Thank you, Science! All those pesky relativist and fanatical religious type can now be put in their place.
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The Nu-Bureaucratic Zombie Academy
Whither UK academia? Last month scientists blossomed with anger when Vince Cable, a man of advanced learning no less, wildly misrepresented the state of research excellence. Such a transparently false ’empirical’ case for cuts depends heavily on the trope of pointless, money-sucking academics [1], as if billions in state rescue packages had been precipitated by feckless spending on the Large Hadron Collider. Although social science and humanities is a sideshow [2], the claims are just as misleading for those of us working in politics, since 72% of the stuff we pump out is ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally recognised’.
The travesty of the RAE is what provides the commonsensical gloss for this redoubling of efforts to ‘magnitise’ investment, realise profit and ‘link to’ (read: subsidise) business. All of which conforms wonderfully to k-punk‘s diagnosis of capitalist realism, business ontology and nu-bureaucracy:
…the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labour which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of work itself. Continue reading
New Scholarship on Human Rights
Human rights in politics and academia is ubiquitous and the literature on it ever-expanding. Yet much of what I hear and read is much of a piece, which is why I thought it would be interesting to highlight three (relatively) recent books that, I think, are developing the most interesting studies and new understandings of human rights. The texts don’t represent a cohesive agenda but rather reveal lines of connection through three (at least) different disciplines – and as I suggest below, collectively they contribute to an important and emerging way of rethinking human rights, particularly for those who are critical of the role human rights play in justifying the actions of powerful states and coercive interventions.
The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local, edited by Mark Goodale & Sally Engle Merry (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Human Rights and Social Movements, by Neil Stammers (Pluto Press, 2009)
My own research on human rights is in global ethics and international political theory, but I have found myself increasing dissatisfied with the account of human rights as a political practice offered in many contemporary works. Within philosophy and political theory, empirically grounded human rights research is particularly lacking, but even within political science and international law there is a dearth of good critical work based in historical or contemporary analysis of how human rights are actually put to use. Continue reading
Manifest
It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility.
-William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
– Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections On A Damaged Life (1951)
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heteropias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.
Michel Foucault, The Order Of Things (1966)
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’, The Future (1992)
– Pablo, Joe & Meera
The Disorder Of Things 