Pushing Culture into Politics Symposium
I spent yesterday at a symposium I organised for the London Arts and Humanities Partnership and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama’s Research department. ‘Pushing Culture into Politics’ brought together researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences from the UK, India, Scandinavia, and South Africa to discuss the politics of culture.
I kicked us off with this introduction.
A few words to contextualise today as a space for thinking collective interventions into the politics of culture, and engaging higher education as a site of contemporary political struggle, which is where I’ll begin….
Higher education in general in the UK, and the arts, humanities and social sciences in particular, currently faces an implacably hostile government, who are seeking radically to re-shape the sector by a combination of direct intervention and deliberate dereliction. Universities face a funding crisis, directly caused by their heedless marketisation just over a decade ago and senior managers’ responses to it, that has driven up casualisation and driven down wages. Senior managers are increasingly committing their institutions to so-called ‘restructuring’ programmes, which amount to fire-and-rehire schemes designed to drive pay and conditions further down for staff working on programmes that will be oriented towards employability and collaboration with industry, and away from criticality and intellectual resistance to what seems to be the emerging ideology of post-neoliberal authoritarian populism. How else can we explain a keynote from Michelle Donnellan for sector leaders naming as the government’s priorities alleged antisemitism within the NUS, whose recognition the DfE has suspended, and ‘free speech on campus’?
We are living and working, therefore, in the midst of a destructive attempt to remould higher education into a vehicle for sustaining rentier interests, protecting economic growth in a few key areas, and defending the interests and privileges of a ruling elite. Attempts to resist this, whether at the radical or conservative ends of the spectrum, remain hegemonically liberal, their politics widely shaped by what Olúfémi O. Táíwò has recently termed ‘elite capture’. In this context, forms of radical, critical analysis are widely tamed and co-opted to sustain institutional hierarchies by, for example, the ideology of meritocracy that under-writes assessment at all stages of academic life from essay-marking to research assessment and promotion policies. Calls to challenge institutionalised white supremacy, for example, have had little to say about dismantling hierarchies both within and between institutions. A recently recharged focus on the politics of interpersonal relations further sustains the individualism that paradoxically underpins the institutional capture of radical thought, deflecting attention from power and its systemic operations.
The hegemony of liberal responses to the crisis in higher education, therefore, not only impedes more radical responses from gaining a foothold, but actively plays into the hands of those it seeks, ostensibly, to resist. Individualism and meritocracy provide ideal terrain for the marketisers and rentier capitalists who have assumed leadership of the sector, and the corporatized universities they are creating. The liberal emphasis on the politics of interpersonal relations and the deployment of institutional measures such as training, promotion and sanction to manage them also plays into the hands of the radical right. They are very comfortable talking about prejudice or bias, and the causing of offence, and have become adept at both manipulating the discourse of privilege and using the cover of ‘free speech’ to advance regressive projects. Recently, for example, we have seen a co-ordinated attempt to co-opt the language of radical liberals to their cause, with a push to hegemonize the notion of ‘viewpoint diversity’.
Although it is notable that the liberal mainstream and the radical right are aligned in their resistance to engage questions of institutionality and power, we should not assume that they have shared objectives. Rather, the right has stolen the clothes of liberalism as part of an organised assault on both liberal and radical speech in universities. An investigation by Nafeez Ahmed, published in December 2021, tracked networks of right-wing academics with links to far-right conspiracy theories and racist pseudoscience, which appear to have been propagated with the financial support of American billionaire and far-right activist Peter Thiel. Their activities across a range of platforms have enabled them to influence both the media and government as part of a programme to silence liberal speech and reassert racialized, gendered and classed hierarchies.
Clearly these issues cannot be resolved either within higher education or within the UK. They direct our attention, instead, to the worldwide disintegration of a liberal consensus that only ever offered a temporary and entirely inadequate bulwark against autocratic authoritarianism, and was always wholly aligned with the extractive and underdeveloping project of globalization. The work of Thiel’s network of pseudo-intellectuals and their tin-pot ersatz universities may be both laughable and dull on the surface, but its success as a conduit for influence directs our attention to the confident resurgence of the radical right that requires an organised and determined response. We are joined today by speakers who can offer detailed analysis of all of these transnational phenomena rooted in first-hand experience from a range of positions across the world. I hope, though, that our deliberations will not stop there, remaining satisfied with coherent and subtle articulations of crisis. I hope, instead, that any satisfaction in our analyses will encourage us to go further, and I’ll conclude this welcome with three suggestions:
Might we think together about how to orientate the specific sites of culture that we engage transnationally towards cultural affiliations that refuse the notion that politics is a question of national or indeed global governance, but a problem of building constituencies and resolving antagonisms in the interest of world-wide human thriving?
Can we develop, from the breadth of this gathering, structures of dialogic and collaborative research that are able to reach beyond the confines of individualism, specialism and disciplinarity?
Can we begin to formulate new vocabularies for a politics of culture that can evade regression into the politics of the past and build instead an agenda for radical futurity? Might we, in other words, think together about what and how a better future will need us to have thought back in 2022?
Obviously, these are questions that we can only just about begin to answer in a single day, even one full of great presentations and discussions as yesterday was. If you’re reading this and thinking that they resonate, drop me a line. As Gargi Bhattacharyya emphasised in an excellent, provocative keynote at the end of the day, the questions of where and how to do intellectual political work; how to engage with institutions; how to get beyond the scripting of radical projects, and how to live and thrive together in a time - to put it bluntly - of mass death, are far from easily answered. We can only figure out what’s going on, how to respond, and how to have fun while we do, if we keep getting together.
Here’s a list of yesterday’s talks; do get in touch with anyone whose work sounds like your bag.
Session 1: The Politics of Contemporary Sound Cultures
Malcolm James (University of Sussex): The computational turn, black diasporic sound culture, and its political implications
Brahma Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University): Politics on the DJ: Sonic Hindutva and its Musical Alternatives in India
Session 2: Planetary Engagements
Tom Cornford and Tony Fisher (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama): Planetary Politics, A Manifesto for the Manifesto
Carla Lever (University of Cape Town): Reimagining Tragedy in the Global South: Positions, Provocations and Proposals
Dani Ploeger (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama): The Rojava Co-Operative for Democratic Technologies
Session 3: Creative Interventions
Ariel Kahn (Middlesex University London): Literatures of “Home”, History, and Hybridity
Shreya Ila Anasuya (King’s College London): An Array of Worlds as a Rose Unfurling in Time (Research Informing Practice in Creative Writing)
Houman Sadri (University of South-Eastern Norway): Myths of ‘Home’
Session 4: Reparative Futures
Maria Grazia Turri (Queen Mary University of London): Futuring social justice through the arts
Jemma Desai (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama): “What do we want from each other after we have told our stories?”
Joe Parslow (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama): everything I know about queerness, I learned through death, or Tracing Queer Hope
