Category Archives: Academic Commentary

Support Steven Salaita

From Corey Robin’s blog…

Calling all political scientists…

Joe Lowndes, who’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon, is organizing a statement on the Steven Salaita affair. The statement reads as follows:

Dear Chancellor Wise: we the undersigned will not visit the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus until Professor Salaita is reinstated to the position offered him by the faculty and which he had accepted in good faith.

If you are a political scientist, and you wish to sign the statement, please email Joe at jelowndes@gmail.com.

John Protevi, a professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University, is organizing an identical statement for philosophers. If you are a philosopher and you wish to sign the statement, email John at protevi@lsu.edu.

Austerity: A Dangerous Accident?

Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 288 pp.

(Note: This is an extended, remixed version of a book review I’ve written for a forthcoming issue of New Political Science).

0

In the context of the current financial crisis, it is fair to expect that any book taking as its title Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea should satisfy at least two criteria. On the one hand, the book should present a robust exposition of the basic genealogy of the concept. On the other, the book should try to offer an argument as to how this idea achieved such a preeminent position in guiding not only the decisions of key policymakers but also the everyday, commonsensical worldview of the very populations for whomthese decisions will have the most serious consequences. It is in terms of the former that Blyth’s book is strong.

Continue reading Austerity: A Dangerous Accident?

Between Fetishization and Thrift? A Response to Dave Eden’s Autonomy: Capitalism, Class and Politics.

Between Fetishization and Thrift? A Response to Dave Eden’s Autonomy: Capitalism, Class and Politics.

The wonderful people over at Disorder of Things have posted an extended version of my recent review of Dave Eden’s excellent ‘Autonomy: Capitalism, Class and Politics.’ The original version, which appears in the current issue of New Political Science, is focused more on the book itself. This version tries to offer a more developed response to Eden’s thoughts on the place of the critique of the commodity in contemporary Marxism. Sincere thanks to Wanda and Pablo for hosting the piece. ~ Nick

The twenty-five most important academic books to me from 2013 | Progressive Geographies

Sebastian Budgen Stuart Elden shares his top twenty-five most important academic books from 2013, over on Progressive Geographies.

Live at the #ISA2013 Weblog Awards!

These are not duckies!

20130404-193931.jpg

Michael Hardt, ‘The Right to the Common’ – A Response

What, if anything, unifies the expressions of public protest that ‘kicked off everywhere’ in 2010-11, from Dataran to Tunis to Zuccotti Park? If such a unity exists, to what extent are those engaged in the struggles self-consciously aware of it? And, if such a self-consciousness exists, to what extent does it help further the cause of social justice in a world beset by financial crisis and elite corruption? In his talk at Ohio University’s campus in Athens, last week, Michael Hardt argued that the main stake in this most recent “cycle of struggles” was the pursuit of a sort of ‘right to the common.’ While those in the movements were engaged in struggles that were spatially and temporally specific, he suggested, they were unified by a desire to resolve a contradiction that has become increasingly apparent in the context of the current financial crisis. That contradiction inheres in the fact that the main ideological wellsprings for resolving the crisis have essentially run dry. The flaws of neoliberalism, on the one hand, or the idea that the optimal distributive solutions are to be found through a doubling-down on the rationalizing logic of the market, are by now well-known. Conversely, on the other, the notion that a philosophy of ‘public goods’ can somehow guarantee “shared open access” to the common, a notion which Hardt understands in quite an expansive sense, is increasingly suspect given the draconian statist policies such a position can sometimes underwrite. Hardt’s thesis then, briefly stated, is that the commitment of the movements to a form of organization and decision-making that is essentially horizontal (my term, not his) in nature attests to a sort of emerging awareness of the need for an alternative to these ‘zombie’ ideologies. This spirit of horizontalism, he appeared to say, distinguishes the movements as engaged in a kind of “double combat.” That is, in their efforts to engage in a kind of radically democratic form of allocative management – an attempt beset by flaws to be sure, but a meaningful attempt nevertheless – horizontalism appears to adopt the following posture: “We win the public, but then we have to fight it for the common.”

Continue reading Michael Hardt, ‘The Right to the Common’ – A Response

Tidal 4 – Coming Soon!

Of interest, a new issue of Tidal (No. 4) is coming out on Friday. From the Facebook page:

Tidal 4 is being released this Friday evening. At this event, you can pick up your own free copy of Tidal 4. It will include original, commissioned contributions from many organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy and Strike Debt, such as Shyam Khanna, Pamela Brown, Sofia Gallisa, Ann Larson, Nastaran Mohit, Harrison Magee, among others, as well as known thinkers such as Michael Hardt, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, John Holloway, and Chantal Mouffe. Collective pieces from Tidal Team and friends (Nick Mirzoeff, Andrew Ross, Nicole Hala, Nathan Schneider, among others) and a Student Movement piece from Free University folks. At this beautiful event, we welcome you to great conversation and presentations by many of the contributors and friends.

Tidal is available from the Occupy Theory site.

Times Higher Education – High price of gold: How early career researchers will suffer

The kids done good! Ninja OpenIR theorists get mention in THE on open access publishing:

In an independent submission, Paul Kirby of the University of Sussex and Meera Sabaratnam of the University of Cambridge also list retired academics, independent scholars and non-governmental organisation researchers as among the academic “poor” who might suffer in a model where universities pay publishing costs.

via Times Higher Education – High price of gold: How early career researchers will suffer.

Panel CFP, ISA 2013: “It’s kicking off… everywhere? Diffusion, resistance and the post-political”

3 – 6 April 2013
ISA San Francisco

#Provisional title
It’s kicking off… everywhere? Diffusion, resistance and the post-political.

#Call for panel participants
With the global financial crisis now in its fourth year, a host of horizontally-organised antagonisms from the Indignad@s to #OccupyDataran have emerged to challenge the traditional institutions of world order. It is perhaps no wonder that scholars and commentators are debating the extent to which it is necessary or appropriate to identify lines of similarity and commonality among these struggles. Neither is it surprising that some may express reservations concerning these emerging analyses as risking the subsumption and universalization of that which might best be approached as singular. Yet these debates emerge simultaneous to events and uprisings, and the strategies and tactics of current struggles are still very much in development. In response to the ISA CfP, the panel will ask, indeed, how desirable is specificity and congruity in the diffusion of ideas? Who specifically are the agents involved in such movements, and what causal mechanisms carry out, as well as block diffusion? Furthermore, what are the predicted outcomes of the diffusion of ideas, energies, emotions, and desires emerging from the Occupy movement?

The ongoing rise of social struggle predicted by the Social Unrest Index in the International Labour Organisation’s 2012 World of Work Report means that governments have strong incentives to depoliticise issues of rapidly rising unemployment, austerity measures and cuts in public spending, pressures on immigration law, and the rise in punitive government sanctions and policing. How are specific strategies of depoliticisation emerging, and how can these be revealed as obstacles to diffusion amongst resistance movements? This panel, avoiding theoretical or disciplinary boundaries, will seek to examine recent movements in light of global pressures and the philosophical challenges arising from them. What exactly changed to bring forth new energies? To what degree can background conditions and experiences be claimed to be shared? To what extent have recent social movements sacrificed transformative potential, for inclusivity? Indeed, in a world where the sphere of political participation looks increasingly bulimic, to what extent does the strategic refusal of the movements (as yet) to pose themselves as a constituted or final subjectivity, represent a remedy or a hindrance in the increasingly formidable project of global democratic renewal?

The organizers of this panel wish to invite proposals for papers on any of the above questions or related themes.

#Submissions
Please submit a 200/250 word abstract to Nicholas Kiersey <kiersey@ohio.edu> and Phoebe Moore <P.Moore@salford.ac.uk> no later than Thursday, May 24. Should we receive a strong number of proposals, we will be happy to coordinate splitting the submissions over a number of panels.

#Dissemination
Please note that this CfP is being issued in the context of recent events and critical discussions associated with the #occupyirtheory movement, and in anticipation of further such discussions at ISA-BISA in Edinburgh and the Millennium Conference in London later this year. As such, our goal would be to evolve this proposal into a book length volume entitled (provisionally) ‘Occupy World Politics’.

On Formulation in Hardt and Negri’s ‘Declaration’

Among the various bits and pieces circulating about Hardt and Negri’s new Declaration, Jason Read’s blog suggests a tension between the newer, constitutionalist tones of their project and the sentiments of Negri in an older text, Insurgencies. For Read, Declaration is somewhat overly fascinated with “the US constitution”, whereas the younger Negri was much less interested in dictating formulations:

“A great current of modern political thought, from Machiavelli to Spinoza to Marx, has developed around this open alternative, which is the ground of democratic thought.  In this tradition, the absence of preconstituted and finalized principles is combined with the subjective strength of the multitude, thus constituting the social in the aleatory materiality of a universal relationship, in the possibility of freedom.”

via Unemployed Negativity: Revolution in Theory/Theorizing Revolution: On Hardt and Negris Declaration.

But interestingly its their openness to the non-formulative approach of the movements that draws ire. For example, Doug Henwood was rather critical on his FB page about H&N’s reference to the Israeli tent protest being pretty hushed on the topic of Palestine (Loc. 41/1506), thus reading H&N as saying this topic was treated was somehow correctly expendable in the interests of unifying the movement. Others chimed in on occupy being shallow on the topic of war in general, and not letting Cyndi Sheehan speak. But this seems to be missing the point. The movements of course likely contain sizable numbers of people who would wish to express solidarity with the Palestinians. That they don’t do so is no sign of lack of interest or solidarity. As the pamphlet argues, the movement does need to be strategic about its longevity. To accomplish this, the movement is experimenting with ways of finding an effective common platform. Of course, if not mentioning an issue necessarily means that you don’t care about it, then this is indeed a concern. But it could also mean that you you just want to avoid getting bogged down in an intractable debate. This is a common technique adopted by the GAs in the OWS movement where minimal common principles can be agreed as a consensus position and then returned to later. OWS movements are themselves careful on this. While they do express solidarity with other ‘occupy’-style movements around the world, they do not offer expressions of solidarity with people involved in armed conflicts (Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Uganda).

What is interesting about H&N’s new work is the extent to which they balance observation with evaluation. The general tendencies of the movements are examined for their ‘commonality’ but also for their potential to live up to their promise. They’re establishing criteria of what, in their view at least, would likely constitute a Princely strategy of success, all the while saying its too soon to tell what will come of it all. I need to give the book a much more detailed reading so these comments are necessarily somewhat sophomoric at this stage, but the initial intellectual reactions to this question of formulation are interesting. Commenting on the book more from the perspective of the activist, Mirzoeff summarizes the valences of domination that H&N suggest confront the populations of the world, and agrees with the way the book poses the ‘counter powers’ to these valences as necessarily exterior to ideology or centralized political leadership. The task of developing a new, open constitution against such an array of forces is a daunting one, to be sure. But Mirzoeff seems to get the point. As he concludes, “the next steps won’t be found in a pamphlet but in the sometimes arduous, sometimes exhilarating process of communing.”