AtHQ – Some Thoughts on Work…

Since the last Attack the Headquarters I have been thinking about the nature of work… especially with all the discussions about theory, practice, vocational and educational issues.

To start with a provocation: When Stanley Aronowitz spoke a few weeks ago, he mentioned that he saw part of his role as an academic as finding his students jobs. Perhaps if this happened here, students would be less likely to be bought out by Unilever…… how about it John?!

On a more realistic (?) note I was excited by the idea that the workers enquiries that have been written through the MA’s Marx module be published in some form, and I would be very happy to be involved with this.

Over the last year I have also been slowly producing some art works that are loosely connected to the theme of ‘work’, and at the back of my mind, have wondered about organising an exhibition in order to show them.

Thinking about collective activity, it occurred to me that these two projects might fit well together. Perhaps an exhibition somewhere in the local area could provide a platform for distributing a newspaper type publication of workers enquiries, films, discussions and debates (about the nature of work in a wide sense from meaningful activity to wage labour?) and workshops with local community groups. Local working history of the area could be explored, or people excluded from working such as asylum seekers be involved. Perhaps this would in some way be connected to the mapping of Goldsmiths and the local area that we have been talking about or just be a parallel event…..

Any thoughts?

HQ Terrors and Uncertainties

Apropos research agendas and what the HQ might be up to. This (renewed) call is just out from ESRC/AHRC. It follows some debate already mentioned here, here and here. But I think now the conjoining of environmentalism, poverty and terror research ads a new, still more spurious fold.

“From: “ESRC
Date: 18 June 2008 12:22:43 BST
Fellowships under the RCUK Global Uncertainties Programme

Please could you bring to the notice of your membership the following
forthcoming opportunity for fellowships under the RCUK Global Uncertainties
programme:

RCUK Global Uncertainties Programme: Security for All in a Changing World
ESRC/AHRC Fellowships on Ideas and Beliefs

Call Launch: 30th June 2008

At the end of June there will be a joint ESRC/AHRC call for proposals for
Research Fellowships addressing key elements of the cross-Council programme
on Global Uncertainties: Security for All in a Changing World.

The cross-Council programme aims to understand the nature and interactions
of five global phenomena: conflict, crime, environmental degradation,
poverty and terrorism. Within this cross-Council framework, this Fellowship
call will focus specifically on ideas and beliefs. The call specification
is currently under development but headline issues will likely include:
• How ideas and beliefs evolve that underpin risks and threats evolve,
and why and when do these develop into violent or criminal activities
• Role of access to knowledge and information
• Communication and representation of risks and threats including the
use of language, images and symbolism
• Relationship between national security and civil liberties debates
• Role of different security institutions

We will be running workshops in different parts of the UK to explain the
call to potential applicants. Current thinking is for workshops in
Birmingham, Edinburgh, London and Southampton.

Please see the ESRC web page for further information and updates on
workshop details: www.esrc.ac.uk/gufellowships/

Any queries should be directed to: gufells@esrc.ac.uk.
______________________________

________________________________________
This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email
______________________________________________________________________

At-HQ – Sharing some doubts about the creative industries and how these should be addressed by Cultural Studies

I have to admit that I have far more doubts and questions than certainties or answers about how the whole socio-economic paradigm opened by the creative industries should be addressed by cultural studies. The public discourse around the creative industries officially appeared in the UK in about 1996 and was heavily endorsed by New Labour related think tanks (such as DEMOS), to be later introduced by government as a model for economic development; now, twelve years later, academia has introduced the creative industries as a subject matter and this has opened many questions that I believe we should address. How are we going to relate to this economic paradigm? What kind of approaches are best suited to deal with the different conceptual issues raised? What kind of workers are we going to prepare? These are some doubts among others that need to be raised. Along the following lines I will try to address some of these questions, trying to reflect on my situation (and double condition) as both a researcher and worker in the field.

We must not forget that the whole creativity discourse was strongly associated with the neoliberalization of the economy, and it emerged as a solution to a number of economic problems raised by the industrial decline and restructuration by part of a conservative government. This was accompanied by an ever growing privatization of culture and its transformation into a leisure focused industry. The creative industries were born as a promise of economic development, as a tool for urban regeneration, as a means for social cohesion and as a sustainable economic model designed to be the basis of the city’s economies. The discourse was also deployed as a way to formalize a big workforce constituted by people collaborating with self-orgs, artists, graphic designers, activists, video game players and people involved in a number of non-profitable cultural activities.

Now, almost 12 years later some voices have been raised alerting us that the estimate growth figures launched by the DCMS were slightly more optimistic that what the facts have shown us. In the report published by the GLA named ‘London’s creative sector:2007 Update’ a different picture has emerged. The creative industries that were conceived to offer work opportunities to a workforce that had been made redundant by the industrial restructuration that took place in the 80’s, only were accomplished this mission on a steady level during the first years that the model was implemented. The study shows us how from the years 2001 to 2005 there was an important downturn in jobs in the creative sector. The initial estimates and targets were never met. The growth projections for the sector were widely overestimated and by no means have the creative industries taken the economic lead in the cities, which depend strongly on the financial, banking and touristic sectors. The year 2005 saw a raise in jobs created in the sector but the DCMS included in this survey creative people who work in non-creative industries (such as a musician teaching maths in a high school).

In a recent talk given by one of DEMOS’ founders, Geoff Mulgan (MIK, 2007), he made it clear that the economic future of the developed nations lied in the health and education sectors, leaving the creative industries way behind in the list of economic sectors. Also we see that with the introduction of schemes of social innovation and mass participation (Wikipedia, Youtube, etc.), society as a whole is starting to be conceived as a creative industry. Citizens are producing FREE contents for televisions, radio stations, magazines, newspapers, etc. This opens a big question that the sector needs to face, because, if society is outsourcing contents for the entertainment and creative sectors, what are cultural workers expected to produce? There is no doubt that with the strong critique to expertise and a growth of a DIY culture, creativity will be displaced from the hands of a few to the bodies of all the members of society.

With its natural delay academia is not only addressing the creative industries from a critical point of view, but has developed a number of courses aimed at generating creative workers ready to jump into the sector. The first question I think we should address concerns the role that the CCS has and how can it relate to the creative industries. Are we here to analyze, critique or to prepare a critical workforce ready to enter the creative sector? Being slightly more pessimistic I think that we could also consider if the sector really does need highly specialized intellectual theorists or if instead it demands people happy to cut and paste and network for long hours been paid low salaries. I believe that once this is clearly addressed, it becomes easier to understand the role that such a subject matter has in contemporary academia and the role that cultural studies can adopt in relation to the field.

To analyze critically the creative industries discourse, cultural studies stands in a perfect position and has a big number of tools and resources ready to be deployed. Its history as a discipline (and as a site for the critical analysis of culture) and its interdisciplinary nature seems to set out an extraordinary framework that can help us to understand the creative industries and their social and economic implications. This can be made from many perspectives; we can use many sociological works that have enquired into the labor conditions, gender roles and social implications of the sector in society. Philosophy has also many interesting insights to offer, starting from the Frankfurt School to more recent authors such as Paolo Virno or Maurizio Lazaratto, who have tried to define the aesthetic and moral dimensions attached to cultural work. Marxist cultural analysts have also reflected on the emerging values attributed to culture, its transformation into a commodity or how it is now envisaged as a resource ready to be exploited by urban planners, city developers, diplomatic agents, etc. The ever growing economic role of culture cannot be taken for granted, culture has entered the economy, but the economy has also culturalized itself. Even though, we must evaluate to what extent can these disciplines help to create a critical workforce ready to enter the sector. We must also ask ourselves if the creative enterprises are interested in hiring critical subjects, I am not that sure that there is a clear answer to this question.

One of the conclusions that I have reached with my work on the creative sector is that it comes to a point in which work and life merge to such a degree that they booth end up being the same. No longer can one distinguish when he or she is working or having fun, when she is networking or just having a chat. In most cases the creative career and the life of the worker end up being the same. This is the reason why I believe that we need to work on an approach able to combine a theoretical but also a practical dimension. This must lead towards a theory of work and life, aimed at addressing a life of work. I think that one of the challenges that the cultural studies is currently facing has to do with stopping to think about work, to instead start thinking through work. I have recently grown an interest on forms of analysis that seem to have become redundant but from which I believe there is still much to be learned from. Some of these include the militant polls carried out by the Operaist activists in Italy during the sixties and early seventies. One of the first activists to use this type of tools was Karl Marx who on 1881 carried out a poll for the Reveu Socialiste in France. These surveys do not aim to interview workers, but to trigger conversations with workers. They do not seek to find answers, but to pose questions that are negotiated between the interviewer and the worker on a collective act of reflection. Recently Antonio Conti from Posse Magazine put it this way “if we accept that the poll, understood as a linguistic work, as the construction of a place in which to talk, to recount and to exchange experiences, constitutes a place for the immediate construction of conscience and a site for communist organization, we see how it becomes a perfect instrument to intervene in contemporary issues, now that linguistic, relational and communicational work has become completely hegemonic”.

I believe that we should consider cultural projects as critical enterprises, and as such, every decision made, every step taken will have important consequences. But how far can academia not think about creative enterprises but think through them? To what degree can a cultural enterprise constitute a space for the production of knowledge and as a critical evaluation of itself? I believe we should consider these questions collectively. Some of the constitutive elements of a cultural project can be addressed and be used as tools for reflection. I believe that intellectual property should not be thought as a set of given laws or as a framework in which to develop work, but as an essential part of any project, it must be carefully thought as a possible space for critical speculation which will infer a specific set of qualities to any given work. We should stop analyzing IP as a subject matter but rethink our works through the porous and undetermined aspects that this legal framework offers. The economic sustainability of a project, its ecological impact, its social benefits or its life span are all questions that can be addressed critically, but also tools that can be used as a space for analytical speculation.

I am fully aware that cultural studies can help us to gain a deep understanding of culture, but this is the moment in which we must question ourselves about the extent to which these can help to think industrial matters. Can someone run a company with the knowledge obtained from an MA in cultural studies? Can this knowledge be compared to that provided by an MBA? I myself keep asking this question thinking about my work, I am really not sure that I am better equipped to run a company than someone trained in management, economics, law… I believe that after going through a MA in cultural studies I am in a better equipped to think about contents, or to have a better awareness of some socio-economic issues involved in cultural production. But I must fit my ability to create contents into the reality of the sector which is suffering a displacement: creative industries are no longer product or objects producers, they are becoming service providers. Concluding, I believe that we should focus on a direction in which cultural studies stop thinking about work, but start thinking through business models, energy consumption, work structures or labor relations, evaluating the impact that each of these decisions will have in the sector and how it will affect the rest of the world.

AtHQ – Let’s take over the CCS

In the attack the headquarter events there were voices asking for changes. Some were exited, some were frustrated, some were content, some were dissatisfied. What could we make out of that? What comes next after the head quarter was attacked? What if there remains another headquarter with a new dress?

Did we just create something that further justifies our existence and our way of being? We, teaching staff and students, are all fulfilling the request of institutions, since we have been codified by a series of formats, phd seminars, reading groups, exams, panels. The way the programs are planned and carried out already determine our ways of being and codify our identities – both as individuals and as an institution.

We appreciate all the discussions during the 12 hours meeting, we are also impressed by most of the insightful critiques. The wishes for changes, transformations, and twists were, however, not common wishes. They did not have a goal, a direction, or a unified identity. What comes next is still a question?

This is where we can start. Instead of thinking of how to improve teaching and learning, we want to think from the perspective of community. Institution itself brings us into being, but there lies another concern of “being with”, which has more to do with interaction, communication. This does not mean coming behind one cause, under one banner, but it means being together after we have come together. The task is not to define a common goal or to change the institution, because we are the goal and we are the institution.

We are writing to invite your participation to a project, which aims at a more radical way of rethinking the event. We have only one proposition to make: WE HAVE TO TAKE OVER THE CENTRE TOGETHER. The only way to attack the headquarter, is to abolish the headquarter. We, the students and those staff members who are willing to, should take over the planning and the building of the centre (not the money or the jobs) – for one year as an experiment. To “Take over” is not to replace the headquarter, or seize the power, but to conquest the headquarter with a new form of communication – through being together, and starting our thinking as well as our learning all over again each day. There is no power to be seized, there is only power to be or to do.

We look for a communication, which transforms the relations between educator and educatee from a subject-object relation into a process of active sharing of knowledge, experience and intuition. It means deconstructing the hierarchies and identities we have voluntarily taken as students and teachers, as experts and non-experts. We can start it as a project. We can call it minoritarian thinking. We can call it learning with each others, instead of from others.

What are the questions to be asked? Maybe we should not have any predetermined way to do things, we should not do anything if we do not want it. We can ask, who should plan the MA and PhD programs? Do we want a PhD seminar? If we do, who should plan it – the students or the staff, or both? Do we want to read in the seminars, or do we want to start our thinking from somewhere else? How can students take part in the research? How can we make students contribute, give, instead of taking or receiving? How could students run the centre together with the staff, or how can we abolish these identities altogether?

You can say that we have already asked these questions, that we already have more freedom than many others. But our task is to ask, whether this really is the case… Let’s ask ourselves: why do we have readers waiting for us when we enrol; why does the staff know what the students are doing but the students do not know what the staff is doing.
As we all know, the main obstacle for changes in the academia has traditionally been the common reluctance to give up the structures of power and authorities. If we have any trust at all in the CCS, we must believe this cannot be the case here. In other words, this is not supposed to be a student revolt, but creating a coming community for all of us at the CCS.

We, the initiators, call for everyone to take over our thinking, as an opening but not as a ready-made program. We do not have any answers to your questions: the communication should start here: we want to here your responses and meet you next week at Laurie Grove. Meanwhile, all those interested, please, contact us or use the newborn wiki: ccsgold.pbwiki.com

Yuk Hui: huiyuk(a)gmail.com
Hanna Kuusela: hanna.r.kuusela(a)gmail.com

At HQ – Exploring the headquarters

We have been reflecting on the identity of culture studies, in the context of the university, capitalism and the state. In my presentation, I tried to provoke people into considering that the boundaries between all of these things is considerably more fluid than we might prefer, but that this is taking place in a more nuanced way than we often imagine. As we at Goldsmiths and CCS comes under the watchful eye of the capitalist-bureaucratic state, so capitalism and bureaucracy start to engage with culture studies. Moreover, this increasing overlap between culture studies and its object isn’t something that should necessarily be bemoaned or celebrated, but explored.

I mentioned a couple of references which relate to this:

• In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello take up the Weberian challenge of understanding capitalism through the philosophies that it uses to legitimise itself. Going further than Weber, they seek to “to reconstruct a critical sociology on the basis of the sociology of critique”. Capitalism, they argue, internalises elements of anti-capitalism in order to sustain itself.
• In Knowing Capitalism, Nigel Thrift argues that the bureaucratisation of higher education is going hand in hand with a newly academic culture in business. Universities take on the tropes of the business world, and vice versa, with seminars, lectures, gurus, and theories at work within capitalism. Like Boltanski and Chiapello, Thrift sees the latter as a means of internalising and thereby staving off critique: it offers “a continual critique of capitalism, a feedback loop which is intended to keep capitalism surfing along the edge of its own contradictions”

We see aspects of the above in the rise of (what I called) S&M consultancy. Gurus and consultants turn up at conferences and tell the assembled business leaders that they’re doomed, stupid, wrong. Chaos is about to sweep them aside. Innovation is about to destroy them. The purpose of this is to give them a theoretical-discursive battering, in the hope of avoiding a material-financial battering. See for example Matt Mason, whose role in the creative industries is to explain why piracy will change the world… while being paid by large music labels. This is all going on while we theorists have to tick boxes, deliver value, and so on.

As a rough typology, this problematic leaves us with four routes forward:

1. Resistance: rebuild the distinction between critique and its object; resist the commodification of higher education at all costs, and attack the adoption of theory and philosophy that occurs within capitalism. As with the Frankfurt School, this is a knowingly-doomed strategy – modernity makes forces of domination all but irresistible. But the yearning for emancipation leaves the critic squirming in amongst them. As Benjamin says, “only to the hopeless is hope given”.

2. Obliviousness: In Adorno’s time, it was positivists who were oblivious to the potential of knowledge to support domination. This was virtually Adorno’s definition of a positivist. But today there is a new risk: the radical who doesn’t realise how much capitalism approves of radicalism. An unthinking assumption that critique is autonomous, while bureaucratic-capitalism is sheer domination, may lead us into faux radicalism, coupled with excessive fear of (and respect for) the dominating potential of bureaucratic-capitalism.

3. Ironic celebration: One approach to the convergence of critique and its object is to abandon the autonomy of theory all together. Actor Network Theory could be accused of this. By simply ‘following the actors’ and seeking to view the world in their terms, ANT risks holding up an uncritical mirror of the world, abandoning concepts (such as ‘capitalism’) that might seem to perform no role in it. It is no surprise that ANT is popular in business schools. The fact that capitalism is now awash with ideas is celebrated, albeit ironically, by some postmodern sociologists.

4. Explore the headquarters: In my work I seek to ‘go native’ with economic experts working for the state. I can speak to them in their language, while also being able to return to CCS and speak in ‘our’ language. I think one needs to become comfortable with this inconsistency, to embody contradiction as Foucault (presumably knew he) did, rather than seek to express it as Adorno tried (and deliberately failed).

From exploring the headquarters, a couple of things become plain. Firstly, bureaucracies are not totalised forms of domination, but nor are they things we can realistically expect to escape altogether. They are indeed, as Weber put it, ‘iron cages’, but iron cages can leave quite a lot of space for freedom, or equally can be sources of security. Explore them, understand how they work, how they break, and what they require in order to periodically leave you alone. People who set targets and create rules know full well the futility of what they do; the people who have the greatest faith in the efficacy of audit cultures are the radicals who seek to overthrow them.

Secondly, the theory that is at large in capitalism, in business schools, and in consultancy seminars is real theory, it is related to what we do. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t also deficient in lots of ways. Explore it, criticise it, take it seriously enough to try and damage it. There are those in the ANT tradition who might seek to improve it or contribute to it. That might be going further than many in CCS might wish to. But if we don’t at least problematise and reflect on the relationship between ‘our’ critical theory and ‘their’ critical theory, we risk falling into the trap of faux radicalism identified in point 2. This is not a targetted remark, just a necessary condition for safeguarding the critical autonomy that we do possess.

AtHQ – Claudia Firth

I wanted to add some thoughts after the session on Tuesday. I’ve been a bit slow due to recovering from post-traumatic exam disorder. I perhaps had a slightly more traumatic experience than most, being in the Assistive Technology Centre where the Technology wasn’t at all assistive. (Is it really hopeless to call for the abolition of the exam?)

Hopefulness/ hopelessness is perhaps a key point as it seems very easy to feel hopeless about the general current crisis out there in the outside world/inside the institution. I share spectropoetics hope about collective thinking/action, but notice how quickly this can slip into hopelessness about the current world/educational situation.

I would like to respond to Tom’s talk in which he made a distinction between political practice and the production of culture as “inherently vocational”. Is it possible to separate creative (artistic, filmic etc.) practice from the vocational? They are not necessarily the same thing, although they can and often do overlap. Perhaps it is naive to think that experimental creative practice can exist without being market driven, and certainly it is true that this kind of practice can be more easily subsumed into the vocational than theory. It is also good to remember that the distinction between the vocational and theoretical in education is an artificial one that was initially drawn along class lines. It is therefore important to try to clarify where the overlaps are, how they happen, and whether it is possible to use, resist or subvert them especially if part of the aim of CCS is to develop critical cultural practitioners. As Tom suggests, cultural studies is itself a cultural product.

Responding to an earlier discussion, politics is certainly where we are, particularly in terms of being part of the educational establishment and the current political drive towards training rather than education. It was also good to be reminded by Tom that although there is this present drive at the moment to make education into vocational training, this trend has existed since Marx and the sausage factory. This instrumentalisation of education is what needs to be resisted through learning to think. Creative practice can offer other modes of thinking alongside the purely theoretical.

- Thanks to Jennifer john [! ed :)] for the posting of the UCU conference as being relevant here. I think this also leads to a wider discussion about the more general difficulty of negotiating/resisting compromises when being paid for doing something that most of us will have to face at some point.

Returning to the difficulty and importance of collective action, it has been good to start thinking with other MA students about the possibility of starting reading groups during the dissertation writing period even though this isn’t a long time. As a part time student I realise I have assumed that my involvement in the MA would pause until October but now realise that this doesn’t have to be the case.

On a last note about Tuesday’s session, I enjoyed the suggestion of a mapping of Goldsmiths as a possible/impossible project.