Political Philosophy

‘Adjunct’ Faculty in the Neoliberal University

By
2
22 May 2013
college-grad

Chris from Remak­ing the Uni­ver­sity writes to intro­duce a post by Ivan Evans, pro­fessor of soci­ology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi’s opin­ion piece, “The Neo­lib­eral Assault on Aca­demia,” pro­duced a long dis­cus­sion on sev­eral lists because of its claim that fac­ulty have played a cent­ral role in shift­ing their uni­ver­sit­ies towards rev­enue met­rics and mana­gerial assess­ments of intel­lec­tual value. His example is the arrival of the Research Assess­ment Exer­cise (RAE) in the UK, which has mol­ted into the Research Excel­lence Frame­work (REF). Though pushed by the Thatcher gov­ern­ment, the RAE was accep­ted and applied by the UK pro­fess­oriat. Its suc­cessor, the five-​yearly REF, Prof. Barkawi writes, “com­pletely dom­in­ates UK aca­demic life. It determ­ines hir­ing pat­terns, career pro­gres­sion, and status and duties within depart­ments. ...
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The Reactionary ‘Freeman-​on-​the-​land’ and a Political Fracture

By
4
20 May 2013
Sean Keating

The Irish Times reports over 100 ‘Freeman’-style argu­ments used in the Irish courts this year, cit­ing the Law Soci­ety Gaz­ette . Last Tues­day, Fran­cis Cul­len (36) was sen­tenced to another three months in Mount­joy Prison for refus­ing to recog­nise the court’s jur­is­dic­tion. He claimed, accord­ing to the Irish Times report, that he was ‘a private, sov­er­eign person’. The Law Soci­ety of Ire­land ‘advises any­one in fin­an­cial dif­fi­culty to get advice from someone who is trained in and know­ledge­able about the law as set down in the Con­sti­tu­tion and by the Oire­achtas and the courts’, accord­ing to the Irish Times, which also cites a bar­ris­ter point­ing out the harm­ful and abus­ive dimen­sion to ...
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#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

By
1
14 May 2013
Indian-call-centers

At the begin­ning of the second dec­ade of the Twenty-​First Cen­tury, global civil­iz­a­tion faces a new breed of cata­clysm. These com­ing apo­ca­lypses ridicule the norms and organ­isa­tional struc­tures of the polit­ics which were forged in the birth of the nation-​state, the rise of cap­it­al­ism, and a Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury of unpre­ced­en­ted wars. Most sig­ni­fic­ant is the break­down of the plan­et­ary cli­matic sys­tem. In time, this threatens the con­tin­ued exist­ence of the present global human pop­u­la­tion. Though this is the most crit­ical of the threats which face human­ity, a series of lesser but poten­tially equally destabil­ising prob­lems exist along­side and inter­sect with it. Ter­minal resource deple­tion, espe­cially in water and energy reserves, offers the pro­spect of mass star­va­tion, col­lapsing eco­nomic paradigms, and ...
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Anti-​fetishism: Notes on the Thought of Walter Benjamin

By
2
22 April 2013
Walter Benjamin

Although Wal­ter Ben­jamin doesn’t always dir­ectly ref­er­ence the notion of polit­ical fet­ish­ism, it can be argued that this concept under­lies everything that he writes. Benjamin’s concept of the “phant­asmagoria,” that miasma of mis­rep­res­ent­a­tion that stands for real­ity in our time, is basic­ally a state­ment about polit­ical — among other forms — of fet­ish­ism. For Ben­jamin, this mass prac­tice of fet­ish­ism has both polit­ical eco­nomic and theo­lo­gical ori­gins. In the short run the phant­asmagoria is the off­shoot of com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism and the rise of cap­it­al­ism. More pro­foundly, fet­ish­ism is, for Ben­jamin an off­shoot of the fall of Adam, as well as the less often men­tioned Eve. Ben­jamin tells us that whereas in para­dise, Adam had a dir­ect and unme­di­ated rela­tion­ship to the objects he found there ...
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The Public Life of Private Law: Seminar Series Update.

By
0
21 March 2013
images

By the end of Fri­day, we will be half-​way through our ESRC sem­inar series ‘The Pub­lic Life of Private Law’. The pro­gramme for our second sem­inar is here. The focus of the second sem­inar will be on the uses of private law in seek­ing repar­a­tions for ‘human rights abuses’. In set­ting this theme we had in mind a vari­ety of legal scen­arios. To name three, we are inter­ested in: the use of neg­li­gence to hold the state to account for the actions of its sol­diers; Bici v. Min­is­ter for Defence and Al-​Jedda , and to obtain rem­ed­ies for per­sonal injur­ies suffered by the employ­ees of Brit­ish com­pan­ies abroad; Lubbe and Oth­ers v. Cape and Guer­rer­rao v. Monter­rico. the use of neg­li­gence to obtain rem­ed­ies for past injustices, such ...
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Chávez and the Future of Chávismo

By
1
13 March 2013
Open Revolt

The most cha­ris­matic, demo­cratic polit­ical leader in dec­ades is dead. Whenever cha­risma plays a role in a demo­cratic con­text, it estab­lishes a par­tic­u­larly mobil­iz­ing polit­ical rela­tion­ship between rulers and the ruled, as it adds to demo­cratic legit­im­acy an iden­tity of belong­ing and a shar­ing of goals that go way bey­ond polit­ical rep­res­ent­a­tion. Well used to being hit by a dis­tant, oppress­ive power (which tends to thrive in low intens­ity demo­cra­cies), the pop­u­lar classes come to exper­i­ence a bridging of the gap between the rep­res­en­ted and their rep­res­ent­at­ives. Oppon­ents will then speak of pop­u­lism and author­it­ari­an­ism, but they will sel­dom con­vince any voters. This is because, in a demo­cratic con­text, cha­risma allows for levels of demo­cratic civic edu­ca­tion that are oth­er­wise very dif­fi­cult to attain. Such unique ...
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Right & Rights: Notes on the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
0
5 March 2013
pittorecaravaggesco-lamortedigiacinto

Nancy repeatedly rejects the banal politico-​legal insist­ence on human rights as the solu­tion to every answer, sug­gest­ing that such a move is intim­ately bound to the ‘with­drawal of the polit­ical’ (See Politics/​The Polit­ical). How­ever, he does not reject rights out of hand. In a recent text entitled ‘From the Imper­at­ive to Law’, he explains that: The force of the form called ‘right’ resides in an act that is in the pro­cess of enact­ing a free­dom of all and of each as a uni­ver­sal shar­ing, which is at work in such a shar­ing — and not just occu­pied with delim­it­ing the spheres of free wills to pro­tect one from the oth­ers. In other words, rights enact an act­ive free­dom, cre­at­ive not only of com­munity but also, more ...
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An Ungovernable Italy: Interview with Bifo

By
4
1 March 2013
Bifo

Amador Fernández-​Savater: What is the con­text in which the Italian elec­tions have taken place? Bifo: The polit­ical dis­in­teg­ra­tion of Europe. Europe was born as a pro­ject of peace and social solid­ar­ity, tak­ing up the leg­acy of the social­ist and inter­na­tion­al­ist cul­ture that opposed fas­cism. In the 90s, fin­ance capital’s major centres of power decided to des­troy the European model and the sign­ing of the Maastricht Treaty unleashed the neo-​liberal assault. In the last three years, the anti-​Europe of the ECB and Deutsche Bank seized the oppor­tun­ity of the 2008 fin­an­cial crisis in the US to trans­form the cul­tural diversity of the European con­tin­ent (its Prot­est­ant cul­ture, gothic and com­munit­arian, its Cath­olic cul­ture, baroque and indi­vidu­al­ist, its spir­itu­al­ist and icon­o­clastic ortho­doxy) into a factor ...
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Eco-​Technics: Notes on the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
0
28 February 2013

Nancy coins the term eco-​technics to describe the cur­rent global politico-​economic con­junc­ture. Hil­lis Miller explains: ‘“Eco” comes from the Greek word oikos, the house or home. The pre­fix “eco-​” is used more broadly now to refer to the total envir­on­ment within which one or another “liv­ing” creature “dwells”’ (Hil­lis Miller 2012, 66). Thus, at stake in the term is the man­ner in which the ‘eco’ is tech­no­lo­gic­ally determ­ined and enframed. For Nancy, eco­tech­nics is closely asso­ci­ated with glob­al­iz­a­tion, which he sug­gests should be ana­lysed as a double phe­nomenon: that is as the eco­tech­no­lo­gical enfram­ing of the world in global cap­it­al­ism, and the mon­di­al­isa­tion or world-​formation that ‘main­tains the ref­er­ence to the world’s hori­zon, as a space of human rela­tions, as a space ...
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Politics and the Political: Notes On the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
1
20 February 2013
siren

In 2003 Nancy gave a brief, basic philo­soph­ical radio talk in which he dis­cussed the ques­tion of polit­ics and the polit­ical. Repris­ing his early work with Phil­ippe Lacoue-​Labarthe at the Centre de Recherches Philo­sophiques sur la Poli­tique (the Centre for Philo­soph­ical Research on the Polit­ical), he explained that excess­ive use is often made of the term ‘polit­ical’. When we claim that everything is polit­ical, polit­ics loses its spe­cificity. It becomes ‘total­it­arian’ in the sense that ‘the hori­zon of thought is that of a ‘polit­ical’ absorp­tion of every sphere of exist­ence’ (Nancy 2008, 25). In the face of such a sub­sump­tion, Nancy sug­gests the ana­lyt­ical move of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing le poli­tique (the polit­ical) from la poli­tique (polit­ics). Where polit­ics sig­ni­fies the every­day to– ...
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Flag Protests, Politics and Transition in Northern Ireland

By
1
4 February 2013
N04067613590264794_1153899t

The right to protest is cur­rently at the fore­front of crit­ical debates about demo­cracy and the nature of the state. Mass protests have been seen across the European Union in response to aus­ter­ity meas­ures and the poli­cing of protests, dir­ect action and demon­stra­tions in the UK was recently the sub­ject of the com­ment by the UN rap­por­teur on Free­dom of Assembly and Asso­ci­ation. In gen­eral terms, the right to protest, to use polit­ical action to express oppos­i­tion to unpop­u­lar laws, is regarded as a fun­da­mental part of any demo­cratic state. It is an import­ant mech­an­ism whereby the ongo­ing con­test­a­tion of law can be expressed and con­flict­ing views articulated. This appears to be true, how­ever, only to the extent that the ...
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The People Returns: A footnote to protests in Slovenia

By
5
16 January 2013
cv_mors

His­tory repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Marx wrote in his Eight­eenth Bru­maire. This fam­ous remark fits well to the cur­rent situ­ation in Slov­e­nia, when the coun­try exper­i­ences the largest protests since 1989. The per­son stand­ing in the centre of these protests is the same, Janez Janša. In 1989 he was a journ­al­ist of the left­ist weekly Mlad­ina, who revealed mil­it­ary secrets of the Yugoslav army. Today he is Slov­e­nian prime min­is­ter, who has become a syn­onym for both polit­ical cor­rup­tion and the cor­rup­tion of polit­ics. The 1989 mass demos took the legal pro­cess against Janša and three other prot­ag­on­ists of the affair as a case of what was wrong with the former social­ist régime. Today the protests demon­strate ...
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Slovenians Demand Radical Changepr

By
2
15 January 2013
Slovenia Dec 2012

Dur­ing the clos­ing months of 2012, Slov­e­nia has seen a series of mass pop­u­lar protests. Thirty thou­sand demon­strat­ors gathered on Novem­ber 17 for the first protest, organ­ised by trade uni­ons, stu­dents, and organ­isa­tions of retired people and artists. Dozens of protests fol­lowed, large and small, tak­ing place in vir­tu­ally all of the urban set­tle­ments of Slov­e­nia, often organ­ized spon­tan­eously through Face­book and other social media. We would like to cla­rify to inter­na­tional observ­ers that these demon­stra­tions are not “rebel­lions against aus­ter­ity meas­ures and neces­sary reforms“, as the rul­ing rightwing neo-​liberal auto­cratic gov­ern­ment of Janez Janša has tried to depict them. The demands made by Slov­e­nian cit­izens on the streets of their coun­try are not merely for improved eco­nomic con­di­tions, but ...
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Compliance: The Uncomfortable Reality of Docile Bodies

By
14 January 2013
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), Coup d’oeil du Théâtre de Besançon, 1804

The movie 'Compliance' is disturbing on many different levels, and left me with a feeling of extreme discomfort, and even disorientation, long after the credits rolled, no less because it is based on true events, referred to by the American media as the “strip search prank call scam’. As the story unfolds in the movie in the same sequence as it did in reality, Sandra, the manager of an Ohio "Chickwich" fast-food outlet, receives a call from a man falsely claiming to be a police detective. Referring to himself as “Officer Daniels” or “Sir”, he accuses a young female cashier, Becky, of stealing money from a customer. He then enlists Sandra's assistance in physically detaining Becky in the store ...
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The People’s Law Tribunals in Pakistan

By
4
10 January 2013
Okara 09/01

QM: A set of move­ments you have been involved with in Pun­jab is the sath, a form of people’s law. What is a sath and how does it trans­late? What areas are gov­erned by sath? What is your involve­ment? Finally, can you explain how the exper­i­ence of law and justice dif­fers between state law and the people’s sath? AF: The exper­i­ence of sath began in South­ern Pun­jab. Before we begin to explain the sath, it is import­ant to under­stand the pos­i­tion of South­ern Pun­jab within Pun­jab and Pakistan. The com­munit­ies settled in the South are heav­ily impov­er­ished, mar­gin­al­ised and sub­ject to a pecu­liar form of dis­place­ment within their own ter­rit­ory. This form of extrac­tion involves the set­tle­ment of Cent­ral Pun­j­abis and the estab­lish­ment ...
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