More Philosophical Freebies

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Angus

Too lazy or thick to read all that difficult philosophy? Well the nice folk at Open Culture have put a bunch of TV interviews conducted by Brian McGee with famous and very posh philosophers on the interweb. Go here.

Aside from Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum there is a noticeable absence of ‘Lady Philosophers’ from the list, but this was the seventies which were, as I dimly remember, quite crap. You may feel the urge to wear tweed and light up a pipe when listening to these. If so, go with it….

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French Theory Download

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Angus

Those of you with a ‘thing’ for contemporary French theory will find this useful – if you don’t know it already:

http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/FTT/

It is a FREE download of a bunch of lectures by Alexander Galloway on lots of deeply trendy incomprehensible types…… Enjoy

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The uselessness of philosophy

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Steve B.

A belated report on the visit of our old friend Ruud Kaulingfreks to the CPPE in February. Ruud talked to his chapter from the Campbell Jones and Rene ten Bos collection ‘Philosophy and Organization‘. His theme was the various ways in which the operability of philosophy has been mobilised in management education and consultancy. The philosophically equipped consultant might be seen as trickster or a joker figure – someone who offers an alternative learning, but who also runs the risk of being seen as pointless, as wasteful. But such an intervention runs counter to the logic of training as a form of governance, which is experienced by its recipients as either a reward (‘come join us for a weekend away in a castle in Poland’) or a punishment (‘attendance at this session is mandatory and will be monitored’). The current vogue for ‘ethical consultancy’ (a glorious term which attracted much discussion) might be seen in a tradition of professional philosophy dating to the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Such philosophy may be seen to have a role as sanctioning or justifying senior managerial decisions. The CEO searches for their own legitimacy, and this search acquires a kind of quasi-spiritual or religious quality. Non-executive directors would then be a philosopher caste for business. The wise elders assisting in the spiritual quest for (commercial) enlightenment. Perhaps we could see in this a tacit acknowledgement of guilt, or the lack of any grounds for legitimacy. Better yet, the gesture of turning to philosophy (or art, or whatever other ‘wasteful’ activity that can be bought in) is a demonstration of the power and the cynicism of the senior manager – ‘I will do what I want and I will take whatever I choose and make it mine in the full knowledge of its incoherence’. The cult which grows around the supposed wisdom of the great business gurus, such as Steve Jobs, is a celebration of the seriousness and sanctity with which the task of seeking meaning in multi-layered propositions which express only their utter vacuousness is pursued: it is turtlenecks all the way down (with apologies to William James).

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Exterritory

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Angus

There were strong echoes of Stefano Harney’s recent seminar at the Exterritory event in Paris this week. Exterritory is a project initiated by Israeli artists, filmmakers and curators Ruti Sela and Mayaan Amir in 2009, to explore some of the many contradictions produced by the struggle over land in the Palestine/Israel conflict. Because both sides lay claim in various ways to ‘territory’ (conceived in multiple ways), Ruti and Mayaan wanted to explore the possibility of stepping outside territory altogether to innovate modes of resistance and to highlight the absurdities of the battle over land. This has involved many different events over the years, most strikingly their projection of images of the region and its many people onto the sails of yachts at night in international waters off the Israeli coast.

Anne Davidian from the Evens Foundation opens the Exterritory symposium

The event in Paris – co-hosted by the Kadist and Evens Foundations – was the first of a number of planned symposia bringing together artists, curators, academics and other oddments to consider what ‘exterritory’ might mean in practice. The Paris symposium explored various aspects of exterritorial and extraterritorial space (the distinction between the two being far more meaningful in French). The first session included (defiantly non-) geographer Stuart Elden’s thought-provoking analysis of the construction of ‘exile’ in Shakespeare’s plays and Laurent Jeanpierre‘s examination of theoretical and juridical notions of exterritoriality. The second session consisted of my own rambling thoughts inspired by events of 2008 and the ‘flash-crash’ – ‘Where has all the (xeno)money gone?‘ – and Dana Diminescu‘s fascinating exploration of the complex and emergent spatialities of migration. All four papers were skilfully brought together by the contribution of Anat Ben David, one of Ruti and Mayaan’s regular collaborators on Exterritory.

Angus getting flash with the Flash-Crash

All sorts of cross-cutting themes and resonances emerged from the papers and subsequent discussion that I won’t rehearse here (the event was filmed and will eventually appear on-line) but for me the most striking aspect was the ubiquity of social, economic, political, individual, collective, planned and spontaneous ‘spaces’ that do not conform to the established norms of legally-defined and reproduced ‘territoriality’. Indeed, by the time we’d worked through the ambiguous spatialities of exile, xenomoney, migration, cyberspace, exception, and many others, territory itself was beginning to look like the minority sport. Which, of course, makes it all the more interesting that so much of our legal, institutional, police, military and political activity should be devoted to what emerges as a very narrow and privileged mode of living in and thinking about the world.

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Logisticality, or the Shipped – Stefano Harney

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Stephen

Stefano Harney returned to the CPPE on the 25th of April to elaborate upon the politics of logistics – what he called, ‘logisticality, or the shipped’. An audio recording of the talk can be downloaded here and a transcript of the talk will be posted shortly. The talk draws a series of obvious parallels to a presentation previously given by another of the CPPE’s prodigal sons, Martin Parker. Martin’s soon to be published paper on containerization is available for download here. Stefano and Martin are to be thanked for many things, not least of all for demonstrating the virtues of not thinking outside the box.

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Paradox in Cairo

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Angus

I have just returned from an exhilarating trip to Cairo to present a paper as part of the Downtown Conyemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) being held at a number of venues across the city centre. I was asked to contribute to an exhibition called ‘I’m Not There’ at the Townhouse Gallery hosted by the Contemporary IMage Collective and curated by its multi-talented curator/director Mia Jankowicz.

As its title suggests, the exhibition comprised a series of ‘absent’ artworks – missing because they had been censored, destroyed, banned, stolen or otherwise prevented from being shown. Instead of the works themselves, therefore, the exhibition space was filled with the ‘biographies’ of the missing works and, in some instances, empty frames and/or wall-spaces whare the works would otherwise have been.

The result was a rather austere exhibition consisting almost entirely of english and arabic text in black and white telling the stories of the various absent works. The idea of an ‘empty’ exhibition is not a new one – as the curator happily acknowledged – but in the context of the ongoing revolution in Cairo it took on a very particular resonance. The Mubarak regime was extremely censorious (though apparently presented itself as doing those being censored a favour because it saved them from future trouble and/or civil unrest) and the habit of censorship seems to be one that is continuing. The prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood winning forthcoming presidential elections in Egypt, and promising to introduce Sharia Law, has raised fears of even tighter restrictions in the future.

My own contribution stemmed from my involvement with Swedish performance artists goldin+senneby‘s ongoing project ‘Headless’ for which I act as spokeperson/emissary. Headless concerns, among many other things, the ways in which contemporary offshore finance uses legally structured absence and agency (e.g. in the form of shell companies, tax consultants, impenetrable private trusts, etc) to conceal wealth and other nefarious activities from the tax and regulatory authorities. In the context of Headless, I stand in for the artists whenever they are innvited to exhibit and/or speak about the project – as they put it, they engage in an ‘act of withdrawal’ (multiple puns intended).

I was, therefore, in the strange position in Cairo of being the only part of an actual ‘artwork’ present, though of course standing in for the ‘real’ artists. In light of this ambiguous position, the paper given was a rather rambling reflection on the representation of absence entitled ‘The art of not being (t)here’. (The Prezi accompanying the talk can be found here).

Having foollishly imagined that the visual arts would offer a wide range of examples of the representation of absence, in fact this is a far trickier topic than anticipated. Fortunately, I was rescued by a combination of earlier reflections on money and boundaries but more importantly by Rosalie Colie’s fascinating but largely neglected study of the use of paradox by Renaissance poets, writers and artists – Paradoxia Epidemica.

Not only was Colie’s analysis relevant to my own profoundly paradoxical situation (having flown to Cairo for 48 hours to stand in an empty exhibition standing in for two people who were absent), but had a resonance with the wider context of the exhibition. Colie quotes a letter by the poet and master of the paradox, John Donne, that gives a flavour of why (with Dr Donne’s apologies for the pre-orthographic spelling):

“Only in obedience I send you some of my paradoxes; I love you and myself and them too well to send them willingly for they carry with them a confession of their lightnes. and your trouble and my shame. But indeed they were made rather to deceave tyme then: although they have been written in an age when any thing is strong enough to overthrow her: if they make you to find better reasons against them, they do their office: for they are but swaggerers: quiet enough if you resist them. if perchaunce they may be pretyly guilt, that is there best for they they are not hatcht: they are rather alarums to truth to arme her then enemies: and they have only the advantadg to scape from being cald ill things that they are no things: therefore take heed of allowing any of them least you make another.”

John Donne, letter to an unknown friend, early 1600s (emphasis added).

The highlighted sections caught my eye in particular. The first emphasises the playful aspect of paradox – something that certainly applies to Headless, but also to many other contemporary art works (e.g. a lot of the grafitti that has sprung up all over Cairo during and since the Revolution). The second is more complex. On the one hand it suggests that the paradox is weak – it simply collapses in on itself if examined too closely. However, it also alludes to the way in which paradox holds a mirror up to the powerful – power itself is a paradox that ‘swaggers’ a little too much and that can always, therefore, be resisted. Paradox, this suggests, playfully mocks power in a way that can both wrong foot it, and higlhlight its own contradictions and vulnerabilities. It also allows for a mode of political commentary that defies censorship by making a virtue of (apparent) banality. As Colie put it:

“The paradox does not commit itself, nor does the paradoxist: another reason why in the melee of Renaissance ideas, there was a paradoxical epidemic, affording man the chance to postpone a philosophical or religious choice he might live to regret. Indeed, the paradoxical form denies commitment: breaking out of imprisonment by disciplinary forms and the regulation of schools, it denies limitation, defies “siting” in any specific philosophical position.”

Rosalie Colie, 1966, Paradoxia Epidemica: 38

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Pedagogy of the Neo-Liberally Oppressed?

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Stephen

Things have recently gotten all quiet on the virtual front. Within the classroom, on the other hand, things are presently very active. This surely must have been expected. Most of us have more people listening to our lectures than we (will ever) have studying our papers or reading our blogs. That has to be the experience upon which we organise, both individually and collectively. I’m not so sure it is something to worry about. After all, if we can’t speak to the interests of the captive audiences whose attention we attain more on the basis of compliance than enthusiasm, we really shouldn’t expect to capture a willing readership online. Teach first, then blog!

Here I’d like to briefly describe what has been happening within one of my classes and hopefully others can share similar experiences and concerns.

Within a course on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) my students and I have been speculating upon the extent to which the occupy movement, alongside a variety of ongoing and proposed parliamentary responses to the global financial crisis, might be considered historically monumental events in 100 years time. The students are being asked to review Colin Crouch’s The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism, particularly his account of CSR, and in so doing they are being asked to speculate, with Crouch, as to whether CSR is likely to become a more prevalent feature of the post-crisis landscape, or not. The students are also being asked to discuss these issues from their own position as potential managers and employees of post-crisis profit-making firms by considering the extent to which the debates and struggles currently in evidence might eventually serve to re-allign their own lives, for better or for worse.

This is, I think, a very concrete set of concerns. Nevertheless, the potential lines along which these concerns might be meaningfully pursued have very quickly proliferated. The reading list I’ve developed looks very much like a whistle stop tour of classical political theory. Whilst I know that an excellent occupy reading list is already being created I find it difficult to endorse anything other than the classics, at least in the context of a 10 hour module. I’m open to debate, of course, but with the likes of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Mill and Marx on my side, my opponent will need to come armed with some pretty strong artillery!

Sometimes I worry that I am doing the students a disservice by not telling them what they really need to know about CSR. These worries rarely last long, however – the resources within the CSR literature are entirely inadequate to the task. So maybe the task itself is the problem? Maybe I shouldn’t bring the student’s own hopes and fears into the pedagogy but instead offer stable points of orientation as if I was really in a position to offer them. Try as I might, I find it hard to adopt that course of action. So maybe that’s the problem.

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When is it over?

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Robert Cluley

We have a speaker coming to Leicester to present a research paper from Middlesex University. I can’t remember for the life of me whether the “comradeship” agreed to boycott Middlesex University in light of the closure of their philosophy department. I thought so. But did I make this up? If there is some boycott in place should it extend to not attending a seminar by a researcher from MIddlesex Uni? Or would that class as the kind of critical intervention that we edited out of our manifesto?

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The University and the Role of the (Critical) Business School

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Stephen

Critical University Studies (CUS) is a term which has recently come out of discussions between Carnegie-Mellon literary theorists Jeffrey J. Williams and Heather Steffen. Many of us have already been engaged with CUS, at least according to the manner in which it is described in the article linked above. Having enjoyed reading the article a couple of times, I have 2 connections between CUS and other areas which I’d encourage everyone to consider.

1) To the specificities of the University based Business School (in light of Khurana, Ghoshal, Locke and Spender, The Rigour/Relevance Debate, Against Management, Critical Management Studies, ABS List, Global Campuses, Distance Learning, etc.)

2) To the current University reforms within the UK (the Fees Debacle [see especially the recent Martin McQuillan documentary, REF 2014 and after, impact based assessment of the university, etc.)

Any insights in this regard would be hugely appreciated.

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Social Scientists of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but Philosophy! (and vice versa)

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Stephen

Social Scientists are very quick to point out how philosophical activity is readily sociologizable. Philosophers, for their part, have never tired of reading sociology as a series of answers to poorly understood questions. Wouldn’t a philosophical sociology just be philosophy? Wouldn’t a sociological philosophy just be sociology? Perhaps the only effect of pursuing both philosophy and sociology is to end up producing neither.