The Polytechnic

I have a review of Adrian Parr’s Hijacking Sustainability in the new issue of Radical Philosophy. Unfortunately I forgot that the journal does not use footnotes, and I submitted my text very late!! They inserted the footnotes into the text, which makes the beginning of the article slightly strange reading - sorry!

RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 160, March/April 2010 OUT NOW

Mandy Merck, The Question of Caster Semenya
Etienne Balibar, Marxism and War
Peter Osborne, Marx, Nietzsche and the Politics of Crisis
Howard Caygill, Levinas’s Prison Notebooks
Babette Babich, Women and Status in Philosophy
Alex Demirovic and Krini Kafiris on Universities in Crisis
Patrice Manigler, Levi-Strauss, 1908-2009

John Kraniauskas on Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth
Jon Goodbun on Adrian Parr’s Hijacking Sustainability
Andrew McGettigan on new books on noise and improvisation
Benjamin Noys on Daniel Heller-Roazen’s The Enemy of All
Melinda Cooper on Dillon and Reid’s The Liberal Way of War
David Chandler on Jodi Dean’s Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies
John Timberlake on Bould and Mieville’s Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction

Available £6 / $13 from all good booksellers, including Waterstones, Borders, Tate, LRB.

Subscribe online: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com

£30 for six issues (UK), £53 for twelve issues (UK)

Radical Philosophy Subs, Ten Alps Publishing, The Coach House, Turners Drive, Thatcham, RG19 4QB

Email: tenalps@alliance-media.co.uk

TAKE BACK EDUCATION: A TEACH-IN TO BUILD THE RESISTANCE:
THIS SATURDAY 27 FEBRUARY 11AM-4PM, KINGS COLLEGE LONDON

http://educationactionlondon.blogspot.com/

There is an unprecedented attack on tertiary education with cuts estimated as high as £2.5bn - or 1/3 of total HE funding. Upwards of 14,000 jobs could be in the firing line and many institutions could close altogether. We need a united campaign, not just to save jobs but also to defend education.
The No Cuts @ King’s campaign and King’s UCU are hosting a mass teach-in this Saturday. The event is aimed at both students and education workers from across the country and will be full of alternative lectures and tutorials. Hundreds are signed up already; make sure you’re there too!

Sessions include:

• The crisis in our universities and the battle for education
• The tasks ahead – building resistance that can win
• The corporate takeover of our universities
• Reclaiming our students’ unions
• Education for liberation – what could our education look like?
• Education for all – challenging Islamophobia, racism and points based immigration
• 1968 – what can we learn from the fire last time?

The line up includes:

• Terry Eagleton – literary critic
• Alison Lord – UCU branch chair from the victorious campaign to stop cuts at Tower Hamlets college
• Michael Rosen – poet and education campaigner
• Jeremy Corbyn MP – member of Parliament for Islington North
• Nikos Lountos – activist from Greece
• Alex Callinicos – author of Education in a Neoliberal World and professor at Kings College London
• Daf Adley & James Haywood – NUS Executive
• Juan Carlos Piedra – Justice for Cleaners
• Stathis Kouvelakis – Lecturer and author
• Lesley McGorrigan – Officer at Leeds University UCU who are striking against cuts
• Mike Gonzalez – 1968 activist and author
• Patrick Ainley – author of Education Make You Fick Innit
• Sarah Young – student from Sussex University occupation
• Gargi Bhattacharyya – author and professor of sociology
• Assed Baig & Tara Hewitt – students union officers
• Jim Wolfreys – president King’s College London UCU

- - - UPDATE - - - 2 Days to go - - - Eyewitness from General Strikes in GREECE - - -
New additional speaker Nikos Loudos will be giving an eye witness report from the general strikes and occupations against the effects of the crisis and the cut backs in GREECE.

Plus a striking lecturer from Leeds, a Sussex student occupier, Terry Eagleton, Michael Rosen, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Alex Callinicos, Juan Carlos Piedra Justice for Clearners, Gargi Battacharyia UCU, Assed Baig Staffs SU President, Stathis Kouvelakis, Daff Adley NUS LGBT amongst others.

Workshops include the crisis and the battle for education, challenging racism and Islamophobia; the corporate take over of education, what should our education look like?, reclaiming our unions, 1968 – what can we learn from the fire last time?, the tasks ahead – taking back our education.

As strikes spread across Europe…come to the “Take Back Education” teach-in this Saturday to organise and strengthen the resistance and to roll back the government’s attacks.

Management at Leeds University have been put on the backfoot by lecturers’ strike threats; other colleges and universities are now starting the process of balloting to strike; the teach-in will be an important step in building the resistance to the massive attacks in education.

Register now! Invite others! Forward this message far and wide!

TAKE BACK EDUCATION: A TEACH-IN TO BUILD THE RESISTANCE:
THIS SATURDAY 27 FEBRUARY 11AM-4PM, KINGS COLLEGE LONDON

Tickets available at http://educationactionlondon.blogspot.com/
(£6 waged, £3 unwaged)

This Wednesday 24th February I will give a paper entitled ‘Gregory Bateson: Ecology, Cybernetics, Aesthetics’, at an half day symposium organised by Jonathan Hale and Chris Johnson of the Science, Technology, Culture Research Group at the University of Nottingham. See below for further details.

David Harvey has recent posted the paper ‘Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition’ on his webssite. It is one of the most interesting of recent attempts by a left wing academic today to think through the implications of the financial and ecological crises, and the potential (and need) for transforming neoliberal capitalism into something less environmentally catastrophic and more socially progressive. Harvey’s work has been consistently insightful in emphasising that the necessity of compound growth for a working capitalism is incompatible not only with a healthy relation to the rest of the planet, but is simply impossible to maintain due to the shape of exponential compound interest curves. He goes on to argue the need to confront the historical disaster of much left wing politics, and proposes a new ‘co-revolutionary’ theory that asks is it possible for us today to re-imagine what communism might be in the 21st century… I have selected some passages below, but the paper as a whole is important reading for anyone interested in our economic and ecological crises.

‘Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition’ - selections from a forthcoming book by Harvey, ‘The Enigma of Capital’.

“Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme “another world is possible.” It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives are to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved…

If we are to get back to three percent growth, then this means finding new and profitable global investment opportunities for $1.6 trillion in 2010 rising to closer to $3 trillion by 2030. This contrasts with the $0.15 trillion new investment needed in 1950 and the $0.42 trillion needed in 1973 (the dollar figures are inflation adjusted). Real problems of finding adequate outlets for surplus capital began to emerge after 1980, even with the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The difficulties were in part resolved by creation of fictitious markets where speculation in asset values could take off unhindered. Where will all this investment go now?

Leaving aside the undisputable constraints in the relation to nature (with global warming of paramount importance), the other potential barriers of effective demand in the market place, of technologies and of geographical/ geopolitical distributions are likely to be profound, even supposing, which is unlikely, that no serious active oppositions to continuous capital accumulation and further consolidation of class power materialize. What spaces are left in the global economy for new spatial fixes for capital surplus absorption? China and the ex-Soviet bloc have already been integrated. South and SouthEast Asia is filling up fast. Africa is not yet fully integrated but there is nowhere else with the capacity to absorb all this surplus capital. What new lines of production can be opened up to absorb growth? There may be no effective long-run capitalist solutions (apart from reversion to fictitious capital manipulations) to this crisis of capitalism. At some point quantitative changes lead to qualitative shifts and we need to take seriously the idea that we may be at exactly such an inflexion point in the history of capitalism. Questioning the future of capitalism itself as an adequate social system ought, therefore, to be in the forefront of current debate.

Yet there appears to be little appetite for such discussion, even among the left…

A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound capital accumulation and eventually shut it down as the prime motor of human history, requires a sophisticated understanding of how social change occurs. The failings of past endeavors to build a lasting socialism and communism have to be avoided and lessons from that immensely complicated history must be learned. Yet the absolute necessity for a coherent anti-capitalist revolutionary movement must also be recognized. The fundamental aim of that movement is to assume social command over both the production and distribution of surpluses.

We urgently need an explicit revolutionary theory suited to our times. I propose a “co-revolutionary theory” derived from an understanding of Marx’s account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism. Social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or assemblage of activities and practices:

a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption

b) relations to nature

c) social relations between people

d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs

e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects

f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements

g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

Each one of these moments is internally dynamic and internally marked by tensions and contradictions (just think of mental conceptions of the world) but all of them are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to each other. The transition to capitalism entailed a mutually supporting movement across all seven moments. New technologies could not be identified and practices without new mental conceptions of the world (including that of the relation to nature and social relations). Social theorists have the habit of taking just one of the these moments and viewing it as the “silver bullet” that causes all change. We have technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists (Jarad Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawkin), labor process determinists (the autonomistas), institutionalists, and so on and so forth. They are all wrong. It is the dialectical motion across all of these moments that really counts even as there is uneven development in that motion.

When capitalism itself undergoes one of its phases of renewal, it does so precisely by co-evolving all moments, obviously not without tensions, struggles, fights and contradictions. But consider how these seven moments were configured around 1970 before the neoliberal surge and consider how they look now and you will see they have all changed in ways that re-define the operative characteristics of capitalism viewed as a non-Hegelian totality.

An anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere (in labor processes, around mental conceptions, in the relation to nature, in social relations, in the design of revolutionary technologies and organizational forms, out of daily life or through attempts to reform institutional and administrative structures including the reconfiguration of state powers). The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways. This was how capitalism arose out of feudalism and this is how something radically different called communism, socialism or whatever must arise out of capitalism. Previous attempts to create a communist or socialist alternative fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different moments in motion and failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and uncertainties in the dialectical movement between them. Capitalism has survived precisely by keeping the dialectical movement between the moments going and constructively embracing the inevitable tensions, including crises, that result…

In this instance the relation to nature is the beginning point, but everyone realizes that something has to give on all the other moments and while there is a wishful politics that wants to see the solution as purely technological, it becomes clearer by the day that daily life, mental conceptions, institutional arrangements, production processes and social relations have to be involved. And all of that means a movement to restructure capitalist society as a whole and to confront the growth logic that underlies the problem in the first place.

There have, however, to be, some loosely agreed upon common objectives in any transitional movement. Some general guiding norms can be set down. These might include (and I just float these norms here for discussion) respect for nature, radical egalitarianism in social relations, institutional arrangements based in some sense of common interests and common property, democratic administrative procedures (as opposed to the monetized shams that now exist), labor processes organized by the direct producers, daily life as the free exploration of new kinds of social relations and living arrangements, mental conceptions that focus on self-realization in service to others and technological and organizational innovations oriented to the pursuit of the common good rather than to supporting militarized power, surveillance and corporate greed. These could be the co-revolutionary points around which social action could converge and rotate. Of course this is utopian! But so what! We cannot afford not to be…

The current populations of academicians, intellectuals and experts in the social sciences and humanities are by and large ill-equipped to undertake the collective task of revolutionizing our knowledge structures. They have, in fact, been deeply implicated in the construction of the new systems of neoliberal governmentality that evade questions of legitimacy and democracy and foster a technocratic authoritarian politics. Few seem predisposed to engage in self-critical reflection. Universities continue to promote the same useless courses on neo classical economic or rational choice political theory as if nothing has happened and the vaunted business schools simply add a course or two on business ethics or how to make money out of other people’s bankruptcies. After all, the crisis arose out of human greed and there is nothing that can be done about that!..

If, as the alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared, ‘another world is possible’ then why not also say ‘another communism is possible’? The current circumstances of capitalist development demand something of this sort, if fundamental change is to be achieved.”

Extracts from ‘Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition’
David Harvey
CUNY Graduate Center, New York.

The GREENwich Forum has been running for a few years now, and has established its place in the London Architectural calender. I gave a paper there last year on future scenarios, Gregory Bateson and Extended Mind theory, in an interesting day that included great presentations by Rachael Armstrong, Alan Powers, and the event organiser Mark Titman. Mark intuits, and is researching through these events, a conception of a modern yet romantic metabolism with the non-human universe. This is useful work, and these annual events - which normally include a couple of presentations by recent students of Greenwich School of Architecture - are worth attending. The details are:

GREENwich FORUM
10:00 FRIDAY JANUARY 10th, 2010
Queen Anne Court room 280, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London SE10

“Today is the notion of poetic space as a wild place of otherness, unclaimed and unprogrammed simply a romantic desire? Does modern architecture as a more functionalconstructionneed a romantic notion of Nature? Is there an important place for Nature and romantic thinking in a quantum-digital age?”

“OPTIMISM, POWER AND CONCERN” by Mark Titman
Today the older 20th Century territories of architecture have become blurred and new alliances need mapping. It is no longer a matter of design philosophy or built form or even simply silky concepts which can be used to meaningfully denote or understand architecture. I suggest that it is the ’spirit’ in which work is undertaken, in person, in practice and in the application throughout the design and construction of space that must define architecture in our age of climate change.

“THE EDEN PROJECT” by Jolyon Brewis
Since opening in 2001, the Eden Project has become one of the most successful tourist attractions in England and a beacon for sustainable design and climate debate. It’s all a far cry from its previous life as a worked-out china clay pit. Join Jolyon Brewis, Managing Partner of Grimshaw, as he explores the design and development of Eden. Jolyon will address how the study of nature, combined with cuttingedge design, turned a derelict industrial site into one of the world’s largest greenhouses, capable of growing bananas in Southern Cornwall.

” 2KM LIGHT DENSITY GRADIENT LANDSCAPE” by Phil Watson
Phil Watson, thinker and lecturer at The Bartlett and Nottingham University will discuss the Surreal romance of an architecture surmised on the promises of new technologies. Here the alchemical feats of the imagination place architecture firmly back in the body; where these emergent technologies of: nano-mechanics, biological cell engineering and artificial nerve and skin growth allow for a fantastical testing: testing the old ideas of space with the creation of new limits and boundaries that ignore the staus quo once called environment.

“PROGRAMME FOR FUN” by Matt Cannon
“The historical evolution of man into a predominantly urban and industrial creature: an unthinking termite”; John Fowles
A second year project that explores Canary Wharf as a p[reprogrammed space designed as a habitat for a pre-programmed mind. Challenges provided bt nature are designed to stimulate and liberate the people that use these spaces every day, providing an exciting humourous release from the day-to day routine.

“THE PASTORALISTS” by Colin Harrison
Colin Harrison has been the curator of British art in the Ashmolean since 1995 and was one of the co-curators of the bicentenary exhibition on Palmer in 2005-6 at the B.M. and Met. Mus. New York. He has worked extensively on Palmer and the pastoral tradition including the romantic paintings of the movement.

“PRACTICAL INSANITY - COLLABORATION AND INNOVATION IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN” by Jim Dodson
Partner Jim Dodson of “Various Architects” will present a series of real and competition projects that demonstrate their creative use of technology and innovation to create practical architecture. The projects presented will include: a 2.1 kilometer long retractable sound barrier powered by coffee grinds and solar power; the worlds largest mobile performance venue that features a structural inflatable skin; a 120m tall hay-bale cladd tower of massive-timber and fly-ash concrete in downtown Dallas, Texas; and a low-energy low-carbon office building for the west coast of Norway.”

“SERVER” by Alastair Parvin
Server is a large scale planning experiment based on a deceptively simple proposition: Could a motorway be self-sufficient? Working with existing processes, prices, communities and capacities the project takes a section of the M1 and investigates its redesign as a self-sufficient farming system (or ‘Industrial Ecology’); a belt of knowledge-intensive agriculture producing no waste and consuming minimal external resources. In getting there the project explores the role of knowledge in feeding cities, considers future forms of citizenship, casts doubt over our conception of urban design, and questions some of the fundamental assumptions which currently dominate green politics.

“PASTORALISM IN 18th CENTURY MUSIC” by Ann Van Allen
Anne Van Allen, lecturer at The Trinity College of Music, will discuss the naturalist tendancies and pastoral spaces evoked in classical music. The sublime elements of the pastoral idyll have been well expressed in music and the antique tradition of romanticism in music is adhered to in the pastoralist movement of music from the 18th century. Through the ages, music like architecture has taken inspiration from the natural world and the countryside in particular.

Professor Allan Stoekl (Penn State University), ‘The Drift: Surrealism, Situationism and Postsustainable Strategies of Gleaning’

Friday 27 November, 17.30-19.00, followed by reception

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R

Free Admission

ALL WELCOME!

Organised in association with the conference Surrealism, Post-War Theory and the Avant-Garde

Saturday 28 November 2009, 10.00 – 18.30 (registration from 9.30)
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Tickets: £10

Saturday Speakers: Lucy Bradnock (Getty Research Institute), David Cunningham (University of Westminster), Jonathan Eburne (Pennsylvania State University), Jill Fenton (Queen Mary, University of London), Patrick ffrench (Kings College, University of London), Steven Harris (University of Alberta, Edmonton), Alyce Mahon (Trinity College, Cambridge), Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Michael Richardson (independent scholar).

For further information, send an email to ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk

Co-convened by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and the Courtauld Institute of Art

Food production has rightly become a big area of design research in architecture schools in recent years. A new report by the Soil Association confirms many others regarding the benefits of organic food production. Whilst non organic food is currently cheaper to buy in our shops, that is in no small part because it privatises profit and socialises risk and externalises environmental costs. A widescale shift to organic methods, whilst challenging, might be a modern systems solution to the food question. The report summary states that:

New research from the Soil Association reveals that if all UK farmland was converted to organic farming, at least 3.2 million tonnes of carbon would be taken up by the soil each year - the equivalent of taking nearly 1 million cars off the road.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 89% of agriculture’s global greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential is from carbon sequestration – a fact that Governments seem to be ignoring in the critical run-up to climate change talks in Copenhagen (COP 15) in December.

The research’s key findings are:
The widespread adoption of organic farming practices in the UK would offset 23% of UK agricultural emissions through soil carbon sequestration alone, more than doubling the UK Government’s pathetically low target of a 6-11% reduction by 2020
A worldwide switch to organic farming could offset 11% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Raising soil carbon levels would also make farming worldwide more resilient to extremes of climate like droughts and floods, leading to greater food security
On average organic farming produces 28% higher levels of soil carbon compared to non-organic farming in Northern Europe, and 20% higher for all countries studied (in Europe, North America and Australasia)
In the UK, grasslands and mixed farming systems also have a vital role to play, and soil carbon may go a long way to offsetting the methane emissions from grass-fed cattle and sheep.

Although I am always getting my students to watch this stuff, I have realised that I have never posted this essential educational collection here. This is pretty much what you need to know today, in order to start thinking about the environmental question:

Money as Debt: Although this is not a full blown Marxian analysis, this excellent cartoon documentary by Paul Grignon communicates very clearly describes the particular form of money that modern capitalism is based upon, and makes clear why the environmental and fiscal crises are intricately interconnected. Since making this film, and following the credit crunch, Grignon has produced ‘Money as Debt Pt2′, which can be found easily enough if you search on youtube.

Cradle2Cradle: most people seem to imagine that this just means recycling. It is actually a much more sophisticated metabolic critique of contemporary commodity production, and is the only model that can support a modern industrial human society without damaging the web of life within which we exist. This lecture by William McDonough captures many of the key ideas of c2c:

David Harvey: This lecture, ‘The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis’ by City University New York Professor David Harvey, is a great introduction to the interconnection of urban design, capitalist crisis and the environmental question. You should watch more from Harvey on www.davidharvey.org In this lecture (around 60 mins into the lecture) Harvey makes some very interesting comments regarding work that needs to be done within universities, to challenge the backwards nature of the academic disciplines and courses in economics and business studies courses.

Here are a few shorter comments by Harvey on the environmental question:

Refuting the climate skeptics: Given the extraordinarily ill informed editorial in last weeks Building Design by editor Amanda Baillieu, ‘Is global warming hot air?‘, it is worth watching Michael Pawlyn excellent reply to climate change skeptic Bjorn Lomborg. His reply starts about 3mins into this part of his lecture (in the beginning of the lecture Pawlyn describes some work by his practice ‘Exploration‘:

There are two interesting stories in today’s Guardian in relation to the occasional interest in energy issues in this blog. The first notes that this weekend Spain produced over half of its electricity from wind farms (which happens to be equivalent to 11 nuclear power stations!) The second story notes the growing recognition that Peak Oil is upon us… Indeed it is no doubt this fact that has supported the governments recent announcement of a new nuclear programme… However, whilst as the social anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin noted, a wind farm owned by a multinational power corporation is NOT an alternative technology, it is of course infinitely preferable to a new nuclear programme which can only work on the basis of privatised profit and socialised risk and hidden public subsidies to multinationals. A common-wealth of locally owned and democratically controlled renewable supplies would be a more robust alternative…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/spain-national-record-power-windfarms

…”The massive output of wind turbines meant the Spanish grid had more
electricity than was needed over the weekend. In previous years
similar weather has forced windfarms to turn turbines off but now the
spare electricity is exported or used by hydroelectric plants to pump
water back into their dams — effectively storing the electricity for
future use….”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency

..”The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation’s latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies…”