First there was the Finch Report, then there was the government’s response to the Finch Report, then there was the backlash to the government’s response to the Finch Report, then there was the u-turn by the government as a result of the backlash to the government’s response to the Finch report.  So, where are we now?  Until late January it was to be a requirement as of 1^st April 2013 that all outputs from Research Council UK funded grants be made available through Open Access.  Different councils had different demands from solid Gold Open Access in medicine to a six-month embargo before Green Open Access in the arts and humanities.  RCUK have now said that they will not enforce these requirements for five years, which is as much to say it may never happen.  On the one hand, this is a lost opportunity since in the absence of a meaningful deadline little is likely to happen on the question of Openness (five years is sufficiently far away for the entire policy to have changed).  On the other hand, it’s a great relief since RCUK’s plans made very little sense.  HEFCE have announced its own consultation with the more measured aim to see what can ‘be reasonably achieved’ for the next REF.  With the meteor hurtling to earth now on pause there is time for the arts and humanities to develop an intelligent set of responses to Open Access.   In a guest blog for the London Graduate School the editors of the Open Library of the Humanities, Martin Eve and Caroline Edwards, outline some of the issues and how their project is responding to them.

Martin McQuillan,

Co-Director, London Graduate School

***

A spectre is haunting Europe and the world, but particularly Britain, and, like it or not, open access – the practice of making research freely available online, instead of a traditional subscription model –  is coming soon to an RC-UK-funded research-output near you. From April 2013, any outcomes from a project supported by the UK research councils must be published in a compliant destination (journal). This means that the venue must either support Gold open access (the article is open at the source; ie on the publisher’s website) or Green (the article can be deposited with your institution’s repository) after a relatively short embargo. Further to this, HEFCE have opened a consultation on the role that open access might play in any post-2014 REF. This might sound great – and, as we’re going to argue, there are many desirable aspects of this setup – however, the economics of the proposed system are difficult and divisive. There will be lasting damage inflicted unless we act now; we must not accept the system as it stands, but instead think critically. How would we build a system of publication in the twenty-first century – the dissemination of our work – if we weren’t blocked from new thought by the system that already exists?

The ethical premise of open access is, if not wholly without blemish, certainly more favourable than the current mode. In Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics subjects, certainly, it makes no sense to restrict access to research; there could be a cure for malaria that never happens because the right researcher couldn’t get access to the material. We in the humanities – we are assuming a broad, optimistic “we” – want to make the case for our value. We want our students to continue to think critically once they have left our institutions and presumably we also do not wish to encounter problems accessing scholarly material. The current model, however, makes it far more difficult for the general public to get access to articles, it makes it far more difficult for us to show the public what we do and it seems that we (and the public) pay twice for our work; once to fund its creation (through taxes and institutional subsidy) and once to buy it back from the publishers. The current system is not sustainable.

The model of open access that publishers have suggested and that the research councils have adopted is based on the notion of Article Processing Charges (APCs). This is, nominally, a transfer of compensation for publisher labour from the “consumption” side to the “supply” side. Instead of publishers being paid for their work through the purchase of journal subscriptions by academic libraries, authors and their institutions/funders will be expected to pay up-front to cover both labour and publisher profits, so that the output can be made available to all.

This causes problems of some magnitude during the transition period. In this phase, publishers will operate a hybrid model under which the traditional subscription mode sits alongside APCs, thereby raising the unofficial “total payment count” for research to three. Institutions will be further squeezed and there is a rightly held fear that university management will decide who can publish in which destination while the rest (non-superstar researchers, Ph.D. candidates, Early Career Researchers etc.) can go to hell. The RCUK policy, imposed far too quickly, should cause some fear and there was a recent House of Lords Select Committee inquiry, to be followed by a BIS consultation, that reflected this feeling.

Although sounding a little too close to Pangloss here, however, there is also a opportunity at this juncture. If we ask, as has been the case at various historical junctures, some more prominently than others, “what is to be done?”, there are several potential avenues.

One of these, a project that we have established, is called the Open Library of the Humanities. This undertaking is modelled on, but not affiliated with, a successful model in the sciences, the Public Library of Science (PLOS). While we entirely understand that the funding structures and challenges in the Humanities and Social Sciences are very different to STEM subjects, we are building a broad, respected, safe and digitally preserved open access publication platform for the Humanities and, in time, Social Sciences. We have assembled an advisory committee with substantial academic capital (because that is what should actually be the mark of a journal; not its name) including Martin McQuillan (Professor, Kingston), Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Scholarly Communications Director of the MLA), David Armitage (Chair, Harvard) and David Palumbo-Liu (Chair, Stanford) to name but a few alongside those with an expertise in open access publishing such as Peter Suber (drafter of the Budapest open access Initiative Statement and director of the Harvard open access Project) and Michael Eisen (founder of the Public Library of Science). This is a project that is driven by academic input, not imposed by publishers.

We are pitching for a substantial degree of funding to get us off the ground that will enable us to run a model that can waive Article Processing Charges if an author cannot pay them. We hope to solicit institutional support (as suggested by the Budapest open access Initiative Statement) once the model is up and running. In this way we intend to work around the differences in funding between the sciences and the humanities through the potential abolition of APCs on a large-scale model. There will always be arguments that making our work openly available renders us susceptible to exploitation. If, however, we can fix the publishing mess that has been landed on our doorstep and provide near-universal access free of charge, it seems that this would be a valuable first step and that concerns about exploitation, in the face of increased visibility and, dare we say it, “impact”, could wither away. We hope that you will join us.

Dr. Martin Eve and Dr. Caroline Edwards

Founders, Open Library of Humanities

https://www.openlibhums.org

Alongside the deregulation of the Higher Education market (new entrants, access to private finance, degree awarding powers on offer, elastic use of the title university) the new fees regime was the first step in a consciously engineered paradigm shift from education as a publicly funded right of citizens to a privately acquired, for profit, traded service.  Private funding for UK higher education now exceeds public funding (0.7 per cent and 0.5 per cent of GDP, respectively).  It threatens to be a tragic social experiment and has been the biggest public policy disaster for a generation: the Coalition’s Poll Tax.  The result has been the loss of 17% of all new three-year undergraduates (54,000) from English universities this summer.  Figures released by UCAS last Friday, after both Vince Cable and David Willetts had addressed the Universities UK gathering of Vice Chancellors, show this massive drop off in students taking up degree places in England.  The danger now is that because of the high fiscal cost of loans, the Treasury will permanently remove these numbers from the system to bring spending commitments back into line.  The loss of students is not just down to fears about debt; it is also the result of the misguided attempt to control technocratically the cost of the Loan Book through the Margin Core policy of removing AAB applicants from the student number control.  HEFCE over estimated the number of AABs in the system by about 8,000 while a Michael Gove inspired culture of rebasing exam classification resulted in less students than predicted achieving their expected grades.  Add to this the low numbers of deferred students coming through from last year, before full fees were introduced, and the result is a £1.3bn loss in teaching income over the next three years across the sector from Southampton to Northumbria.  That is plain incompetence and something worth apologising for.

However, things are about to get even worse.  If anyone still labours under the illusion that raising tuition fees had anything to do with the deficit, they should ask as Richard Murphy does, why was the cost of the Student Loans Company not included in the several rounds of Quantitative Easing? [http://ht.ly/dQTZi]  The effect of QE (the government borrowing money from the Bank of England, which it owns) is to write off government debt because if you borrow from yourself you can repay at your leisure, or not at all, since no real money has changed hands.  For a few billion more on a £650bn QE plan there would have been no need for £9,000 tuition fees and everything that has fallen out from them.  This is once again an example of how rushed and botched the fees strategy was rather than ‘the best policy in the circumstances’.

The third horseman, deregulation, also made an appearance with David Willett’s commitment at the UUK conference to exempt private providers from VAT on fees, like traditional not-for-profit universities, in order to create ‘a level playing field’.  In fact this queers the pitch even more by reducing further the difference between for-profits and not-for-profits while simultaneously leaving those traditional universities without the access to private resources that the for-profits enjoy.  Any competent private company that backs one of the new entrants will have many ways in which to take profits out of institutions (consultancy, service charges etc.) and so the VAT exemption will merely increase private profits at the tax payers’ expense.  The abandoned HE bill was supposed to introduce a regulatory framework that would sort this out, for good or ill.  Instead we have a situation that is neither fish nor foul but will clearly give the profit makers an advantage.  It should also be said that contrary to popular opinion the private equity that backs these new entrants is not interested in owning bricks and mortar on the Holloway Road.  Rather, it wants the brand equity that comes from the traditions of British publicly funded universities to sell through high-volume, low cost degrees in the Asian and American markets.  It’s not so much selling the family silver as selling the family name and coat of arms to the highest bidder.  They are also attracted by the cash flow of universities, whereby private equity can lend money to a university (say through a bond sale such as the one now under way at De Montfort University) underwritten by the guaranteed income from student fees over the lifetime of the mortgage.  In this way, student fees income (borrowed by the government, repaid by graduates) will flow out of universities to private lenders to allow for universities to borrow money up front in order to compete for more fee-paying students and AABs etc etc etc.

And it could get worse.  At the moment the number of students in England is capped by the cost of borrowing.  The AAB fiasco has convinced Universities UK that it should push not just for a further opening of the student number control to ABB or BBB but for a complete deregulation of the student market, allowing universities to compete for as many numbers as they want.  This cannot be done without a rethink of the whole student finance package, for all the reasons given above.  Before becoming the President of UUK the Vice Chancellor of University of Bristol, Eric Thomas, wrote to David Willetts in March 2011 about the possibility of private finance funding the future borrowing of an uncapped loans system.  Rather than the government borrowing the money up front for fees, the SLC could fund uncapped student numbers through private investors in return for a proportion of graduates’ salaries.  In such a scenario: how would loan rates be guaranteed (they are not at the moment)? How would risk and credit-worthiness be assessed? What would happen to the repayment threshold? How might student debt be sold on through Credit Default Swaps?  Who would own universities at that point?  If this were all to come to pass it would be nothing short of the privatisation of English higher education.  We are sliding towards it because there is no HE bill forthcoming that can be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and another rushed set of proposals may be taking shape between BIS and UUK to fix a problem of their own making.  The stakes are very high and I am not convinced that, like Nick Clegg, most of the audience of Vice Chancellors at UUK understand why.

As Paul de Man reminds us every apology or confession of guilt is also a self-justification.  The offering of excuses, as Clegg did, is only self-excuse; s’excuser as the French has it (to apologise, to excuse one’s self).  For this reason Derrida notes that asking for forgiveness and perjury are closely related, the former being ruined by the self-excusing pledge of the latter.  Nick Clegg pledging that he will never make another pledge that he cannot keep takes us quite far down this dizzying logic, in which an avowed liar promises never to lie again.  Derrida also goes on to say that if most forgiveness is not really forgiveness but just the acceptance of self-justification then the only thing truly worthy of forgiveness is the unforgivable, the absolutely inexcusable.  The passing of English universities into private hands (by design or by ignorance) will, for many, fall into that category.  However, unlike Uncle Monty, I am not sure if I could say of Nick Clegg, ‘I am preparing myself to forgive you’.

However, given the uncertainty surrounding higher education in the UK, it might paradoxically be said to have a future.  Universities and Vice Chancellors traditionally do not cope well with ambiguity and indecision: the present circumstances looking to many like the gaping chasm of insecurity and doubt, which on the face of it seems a bad way to run major public institutions.  However, the ‘who knows’ principle of Higher Education today also presents us with the possibility for useful leverage in responding to the government’s agenda for our universities.  At present there is no programme to deal with future events, this remains to be invented in the face of the unknown.  On the one hand, universities will have to respond to whatever arrives in September when this years’ notoriously difficult to read application figures materialize in the form of actual life-choices made by 18 and 19 year olds. This response will also have to be a taking responsibility for: universities will just have to make the best of it, whatever happens, in the new academic year.  Their leadership has for the most part been complicit in the path that led to £9,000 fees.  They will also have to make the best of the new technocratic arrangements around Student Number Control that will be in place for the short term until 2015.  On the other hand, if the Coalition has exhausted itself into several years of policy blight, then sufficient time remains in advance of the next election for the formulation of an alternative HE agenda.  One that actually works, and one that might take into account the opinions of people who work in universities, and those legions whose job it is to analyse and critique the HE scene.

What then are the issues that such an alternative policy set must address?  The following is a by no means exhaustive list of what those doing the thinking need to think about:

1. Tuition Fee commitments for 2015 election manifestos: the £9,000 fee/voucher is unsustainable from a Treasury point of view due to the present design of repayments, and unsustainable from a universities’ point of view because its value declines with inflation.  Either the repayment scheme is fixed (e.g. in the form of a graduate tax) or cash is routed to universities through other means (e.g. a lower and more secure ‘graduate contribution’ and a return to fixed grant aid from HEFCE for all subjects).
2. The Student Loan book and the statutory rights of graduates: at present the government is looking to sell off the pre-2012 loan book, it has said that it has no plans to do the same with the new fees regime.  On the one hand, this tells us that the new arrangements are so risky that no one wants to buy them.  On the other hand, it shows that unless present repayment arrangements (what school children were told would happen if they applied to university) are written into law then there remains the possibility that repayment terms will change when the loan book is sold on.  This has already happened in New Zealand, the UK government refuses to guarantee present terms into the future.
3. Privatization and the autonomy of the sector: the Coalition’s desire to support ‘new entrants’ in a competitive market has paradoxically resulted in ministers taking more powers over HE in order to fix that market to achieve their desired outcomes.  At the same time the Tory-led agenda is to see constitutional changes to universities to allow greater private sector (financial) involvement.  Who knows how that will all end and this is why a legislative framework is required, at the moment it all feels a little like the Wild West.  Privo-Nationalisation is beginning to look like a threat to university autonomy around questions such as admissions policy.  Which leads us to:
4. Participation rates and access: as a result of the fiscal cost of the new fees regime, degree places are in decline and student applications in England are falling, especially amongst mature students.  At the same time access schemes such as the Educational Maintenance Allowance have gone; a proposed ‘student premium’ is yet to appear and anyway is not based on any new money to the sector.  These issues are at present badly framed as a debate around ‘social mobility’, which is not the same thing as, say, ‘social justice’ and is in all honesty just tinkering in relation to the big picture issues of HE today.
5. Regulation and what the Daily Mail likes to call ‘standards’: as government departments and Quangos attempt to drive down their administrative overheads, we have for a while been moving towards ‘light touch’ quality assurance (less intrusion, bigger penalties) both in terms of teaching oversight and research peer review.  Given the unhappy history of light touch regulation in the UK banking industry, this might not be the best way to go in a world where students are paying such large fees for their courses.
6. Research, development, science and what to do about the RAE?The government through HEFCE seems to have all but abandoned the principle of funding research excellence wherever it is found in favour of increased concentration of funding.  This has as much to do with the cost of the overheads of administering research as it does with the desire to appease the insatiable and self-selected elite.  However, it will be necessary to think about how to support big science projects like the Hadron-Collider as well as the microclimate of the arts, humanities and social sciences.  The other question here is how long are we going to persist with the present regime of national research assessment?  We should not begin to start thinking about the offspring of REF 2014 on the other side of a possibly complex election landscape.
7. International students and visa madness: the government’s ideological obsession with immigration figures has placed universities in an invidious position and will undoubtedly damage one of the few ‘export successes’ in the UK economy.  It’s a no-brainer to fix but would require the combined will of politicians and universities to take on the divisive discourse around immigration that pervades public debate in the UK.
8. Postgraduate students, further study and training: as the new fees regime works itself out the government has created a long-fuse problem for universities, with debts in excess of £40,000 how will students afford to take on postgraduate study and training?  Already, universities are either rebalancing their portfolio away from a postgraduate offer towards guaranteed undergraduate fees, or, raising their PG fees to match their UG prices.  This will no doubt have significant consequences with the loss of certain postgraduate subject areas and the increased concentration on vocational masters work.  Given that the PG provision in the UK was effectively already a private market of pure choice, its decimation in favour of Whitehall-regulated, voucher-wielding undergraduates seems something of an own-goal for this government.  The future of postgraduate study certainly falls into the ‘who knows’ category.  Possible solutions may involve micro financing from universities or extending the student loan book to 1 year of Masters study.
9. The pernicious influence of mission groups and the health of the HE pyramid:  one of the reasons we are in the state we are in is that although Higher Education is a multi-billion pound industry that feeds the UK economy, HE policy is driven by the self-interested demands of university mission groups.  Governments like mission groups because they allow for the division and rule of the sector, and it’s always possible to encourage some knighthood-hungry VC to publicly support any government position no matter how ludicrous.  However, the greater eco-system of education in the UK stands to be done enormous damage by this behavior, e.g. if you think things are bad in universities, just look at the decline in numbers in our Further Education colleges next year (50% on some estimates).  That ought to be a matter of real concern for government and universities.   Who government listens to and where it gathers its evidence base for decision making from is a huge stake in all of this.
10. Internationalization and foreign campus developments: some of our more gung-ho Vice Chancellors have embraced a future in which UK universities, like the Barclay’s Premier League, will open up new markets in the Far East and become global brands.  This is all cross subsidized by the tax-payer at present although BIS are asking Goldman Sachs to advise UK universities on possible investment partners.   The future of UK Higher Education may well be international but the razor cuts both ways, in an age of globalization the old world certainties around the graduate salary premium and employability no longer pertain.  The opening of UK Higher Education onto global markets goes hand in hand with the complication of life opportunities for UK graduates and so in turn potential university applicants.

These are just the most urgent issues that need to be addressed in the here and now.  However, they would all be better informed if someone actually took the time to step aside from ad hoc policy fixes and the technocratic management of Treasury commitments to think about what universities are for and what the nation would like to get out of its still considerable investment (through pre-borrowed, pre-approved UG vouchers) in Higher Education.  The whole point of universities, compared to say opinionated journalism, is that the thinking that takes place in them does so over long, considered periods of time.  So why should thinking about universities be so make-shift? We need a thinking that is not based upon a polarized debate about who gets to go to Oxbridge or around silly ephemera such as the ‘student premium’ and social mobility.  Rather, it must be a mature evaluation of the role of Higher Education in the world today (and tomorrow) and how it is to be paid for given all the other competing demands on the public purse in that complex world.  It cannot start out exclusively from the set of assumptions we have at the moment around the infallibility of markets, the light touch regulation of self-declared elites, and the vocational employability of graduates.  If we are to give our universities a future, this alternative thinking of policy must embrace the ‘who knows’ of the changing global tomorrow.  A thinking of what universities are for and will need to be in the future should be the basis for a national master plan for Higher Education.  This plan should affirm the economic, intellectual and cultural importance of the university and tertiary education to an advanced industrial nation.  It should explicitly and thoughtfully address questions of access, opportunity and national need as well as sponsoring quality across a vibrant, rainbow sector.  It will have to unpick all the present short-termism that risks rendering the sector unsustainable and put in place a long-term approach to funding that supports the global success of UK Higher Education as an investment in the infrastructure of the nation as part of a strategy for growth.  Such a plan will require a reaffirmation in what is irreducible in the mission of the university: a commitment to the production of knowledge and its transmission for the social good.  Who knows? Such an affirmation, underpinned by sustainable finance, might contribute to economic growth and national recovery.  It might offer our young people a viable future beyond debt and utility.  It may even lead to something like a new Enlightenment.  Who knows?

‘Due to this necessary mutation, we must first change the very concept of thought, in its relations to philosophy and to other forms of knowledge. This is an inversion that concerns a reversal of old hierarchies, but through a formulation of a new type of primacy without relationships of domination; without relations in general.’

François Laruelle, ‘Is Thinking Democratic?’, in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, eds. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, August 28, 2012

François Laruelle is not the ‘next big thing’ in Continental philosophy. His thought does not aim to correct, reduce, or supersede that of Derrida, or Deleuze, or Badiou. That old game of importing European master-thinkers into Anglophone philosophy – each new figure superseding the previous model – is over. Or rather, the next big thing could be, if we can accept the challenge, to think that there are only small things, small thoughts, everywhere and within every individual – ‘quantum thoughts’ or ‘fractal’ thinking. Truly democratic thought. For, what Laruelle offers us is a new vision of philosophy as a whole that is neither the right nor wrong representation of reality, but posits all thought, itself included, as a material part of the Real. The work of ‘non-philosophy’ is an experiment with what results in our knowledge from seeing philosophy in this way. It says, ‘think this: “all thought – including that of the ‘highest’ in philosophy – is a thing” – now what follows from that, if we take this thought as seriously as possible?’
Laruelle is identified pre-eminently with this term, ‘non-philosophy’ or, as he has called it more recently, ‘non-standard philosophy’. Non-philosophy is not, however, an anti-philosophy. Laruelle is not heralding another ‘end of philosophy’, nor the kind of internal critique of philosophy common in much post-Kantian European thought. The ‘non-’ in non-philosophy should be taken, therefore, in terms similar to the meaning of the ‘non-’ in ‘non-Euclidean’ geometry, being part of a ‘mutation’ that locates philosophy as one instance in a larger set of theoretical forms. Hence, Laruelle’s use of the term non-philosophy is neither a dialectical negation, nor even something contrary to philosophy. It simply enlarges the set of things that can count as thoughtful, a set that includes extant philosophies, but also a host of what are often presently deemed (by philosophers) to be non-philosophies and unthinking (art, technology, natural science).
It is crucial to realise that, despite its sometimes abstract and abstracted appearance, non-philosophy is a practical theory; indeed, it is a performative practice – it does things (to philosophy and to ‘Theory’ generally). This practice of non-philosophy involves taking the concepts of philosophy and extracting any transcendence from them in order to review them so that they are no longer seen as representations, but re-envisioned as parts of the Real. Thought is identified with the Real; it is immanent to it – this is Laruelle’s opening hypothesis or axiom.
And philosophy, in this view, also becomes the material of non-philosophy: it transforms the speech of philosophy into its own speech acts. On account of this apparent ventriloquism, non-philosophy will often look similar to philosophy – like simply ‘more philosophy’, be it Spinozist, Derridian, Deleuzian, Badiouian…. This impression itself is neither false nor true but simply the product of philosophical narcissism, which cannot see anything other than itself in other forms of discourse. So, for example, Laruelle’s idea that thought should think of itself as immanent to the Real, rather than as a representation that transcends it, looks like something that Gilles Deleuze might say. Yet Deleuze would say it in the name of his philosophy, with all its architectonics of virtual vs. actual, organism vs. BwO, war machines, rhizomes, etc. – hence Deleuze’s desire to explain the Real. Even though Deleuze embraces multiplicity and a variety of kinds of thought (artistic and scientific as well as philosophical); nonetheless, the highest thought, the creation of concepts, belongs to (Deleuzian) philosophy alone – he explains the Real: not Boulez, nor Artaud, nor Bacon. For Laruelle, however, there is no explaining the Real, because every thought, Deleuzian or not, philosophical or not, is as good or as bad an explanation as any other – for they are all (non-summative) material parts.
Of course, the philosopher’s perennial response to such ideas will be, ‘how does he know all this?’ ‘How does Laruelle know (or explain) that thought is a part of the Real?’ And his answer will simply be, as it must, because it is Real. He replies to an epistemological demand, a desire for a philosophical account of himself, with a non-philosophical performance. Indeed, this is the only way that Laruelle can reply without returning to philosophy, that is, to providing a sufficient reason for epistemology and so re-entering the circular game of ‘how do you that you know…?’ The question that really follows from ‘all this’, then, is whether this performance is the sign of an arrogance in his thought, or an experiment in removing arrogance, in making all thought as democratic and as universal as a thing.
Admittedly, Laruelle can sound Kantian here (human thought cannot represent the ‘thing in itself’ but only in a mixture of its own constitution with the raw manifold of things in themselves). Yet non-philosophy is a more extreme position than that, because it is not just metaphysics that is asked to forego its supposed power to represent reality, but any philosophy that would hope to represent anything real, that believes that it can adequately think the Real through its own self-appointed powers (of questioning, wonder, deduction, induction, intuition, will to power, affective encounter, sympathy, selfless attention, and so on). Laruelle’s challenge concerns all self-styled philosophical thought especially, including the logic of inference – it is not the critique of a so-called metaphysics of knowing alone. Kantian transcendental deduction must be included in this line-up of methods in as much as it too believes that reality can be thought, or inferred, through its own philosophical method. Each method of philosophical thought, because it hopes to represent the whole exclusively, misses its target in part, because it is partial (just one method). Yet this is not to say that each and every philosophy misses it entirely. The Real is indifferent to, or resists, each attempt at representing it, because every thought (philosophical or non-philosophical) is already a part of it.
Nonetheless, there are still those post-phenomenological or non-Kantian realists who claim to bypass the general Copenicanism and representationalism of Continental philosophy (the self-styled ‘object-oriented’ or ‘speculative’ realists), yet who, all the same, unwittingly abide by a representational structure for their own thought – that is, they still believe in the power of philosophy to account for the Real. Indeed, they regard anyone who would beg to differ as wholly ‘arrogant’, misreading the non-philosophical hypothesis for a self-attribution of even greater powers than those allowed to philosophy. However, their judgment can be traced back to an inability to see a rejection of arrogance as anything other than simply more arrogance, a blindness due to the fact that they prefer to think in only one mold, that of representational thought, even as they disavow it.
For instance, in Graham Harman’s recent review of the translation of Laruelle’s early work, Philosophies of Difference, he refers to ‘the remarkable arrogance with which Laruelle’s theory is presented’ on account of it reducing the form of various different philosophies to one representational (or ‘decisional’) type, irrespective of the individual contents of each. And Laruelle is pretty much damned on this evidence alone (other than Harman saying that Laruelle writes poorly and, at 74, is ‘old’, unlike his ‘younger’ friend Quentin Meillassoux who, at 44, is young): he says nothing about the details of Laruelle’s work other than to précis the chapters of Philosophies of Difference. The phrase ‘hatchet job’ was invented for reviews like this, no matter how blunt they transpire to be. Of course, much could be said here in reply – not least the arrogance of anyone accepting to do a review despite having read next to nothing by Laruelle beyond the one text at hand – but the crucial point to be made is that this ‘arrogance’ only appears to the philosopher who either cannot accept certain aspects of Laruelle’s approach, namely its attempt to integrate the philosophical form of thinking within a consistent theory of immanence (such that its opening axiom obviously makes no sense); or, will not accept other aspects of it, such as the fact that, contra Harman’s faith in the transparent singularity and worthiness of notions such as ‘clarity’ and ‘proof’, a non-philosophical approach would contest whether their meaning is singular at all. Do we have a clear and universal concept of ‘clarity’, for example (that would avoid the obvious circularity of the question in its answer)? Harman remains insensitive to the force of such questions, seeing ‘method’ and ‘form’ as issues only concerning effectiveness (in capturing reality) and communicative facility (in convincing others of one’s mastery).
Another reason for Harman’s mostly ad hominem review stems from his faith in only specific forms of rhetoric or ‘prose style’ – ones like his own for the most part – such that Laruelle’s writing is castigated as ‘generally abominable’. The fact that Harman prefers easy-to-read, quickly consumed forms of philosophical writing – i.e., ones that he can recognize effortlessly as ‘philosophy’ – over anything that challenges these norms, could simply be put down to a parochial approach to philosophical writing, though this would be to respond with further ad hominem criticism. Alternatively, that aspects of Laruelle’s work come close to Harman’s own ideas concerning ‘object-oriented ontology’ (the latter being a fascinating mélange of quasi-Husserlian objective phenomenology and sub-Latourian actor network theory), might encourage one to read Harman’s hatchet-job as entirely strategic: a pre-emptive strike in an anticipated ‘turf-war’ of some sort (at least in his own mind). Finally, that the work of Ray Brassier – Harman’s one-time collaborator in ‘speculative realism’ but now happily estranged from that band of brothers – is also strongly influenced by Laruelle, might lead one to think of Harman’s caustic attack as a small act of revenge on Brassier by proxy. But, again, this point would be entirely ad hominem, and also a ridiculous over-statement. Indeed, this entire paragraph is a parody of Harman’s style and thereby both self-refuting and self-fulfilling (though it is probably a shame that I decided I should ‘break character’ in order to point this out).
The more helpful inference one can make from Harman’s review, therefore, is that it shows the general tendency of philosophies to take representationalist form despite their best, or worst, intentions – to mediate everything through themselves, and so to be blind to the mystery of how they, or any one else, should be able to have complete ‘insight’ into reality – to explain. In contrast to the verdict that condemns Laruelle’s ‘arrogance’, therefore, there is the option to seen his approach as what it hypothesises itself to be, a thought that is part of the Real. He invites us into this view in order to allow us to experiment with the effects that follow from this knowledge. This is his hypothesis or axiom. This axiom itself, of course, can be taken as simply one more philosophical stratagem: such is the philosopher’s prerogative and even essential trait.
One might even say that Laruelle is not offering us a new theory at all (nor a meta-theory), but an alternative ‘stance’ or ‘posture’, a new way of seeing theory: for philosophy to think of itself as immanent to the Real is merely to simplify itself, to see its own practices under the axiom/stance of a consistent materialism that thereby implicates is own enunciation. Philosophy can choose not to do this, as it normally does, but non-philosophy simply is this shift in self-perception. Let me illustrate this a little further. I described non-philosophy above as a ‘ventriloquism’ of the other (one that plays dumb so that it can re-enact the speech of philosophy) – this was a way of understanding what Laruelle means when he says that non-philosophy ‘clones’ philosophy. But perhaps a better analogy for this ‘cloning’ is in the game of charades. There are three basic approaches to playing charades that can be compared with philosophy and non-philosophy. The first two, and most common methods involve one player analyzing the name of a film, book, play, etc., into its component parts – either words or, at a finer level of analysis, syllables. Then, those words or syllables are mimed to the other players; that is, an attempt is made to show what those individual words refer to in the world so that the players might guess the name correctly. The problem with this method is that, all too often, the player who guesses correctly does so on account of already knowing the relationship between the mime and the word’s being mimed (frequently because he or she knows the person miming quite well and the way that his or her mind works, that is, the associations he or she habitually makes in ‘their world’). The method is circular: they have arrived at the name by miming a world already shared with others, not by miming the film or book or play itself. The second most common strategy is to take the words or syllables and convey them by analogy with other words (‘sounds like’) that are easier to mime, perhaps because they are terms coming from biology or physics – something concrete. This would be a reductive approach, though, that only gains its success by making the verbal analogy an end in itself – miming a physical phenomenon, say, rather than a film.
Laruelle, however, takes the third, least common and most ‘abstract’ approach, and tries to mime the film, book, or play in one gesture, in itself and as a whole (not via its name). If philosophy as a whole were the chosen object, then non-philosophy mimes philosophy ‘in-one’ go, that is, in one gesture, and as part of the ‘Real’ (which he also calls the ‘One’). Philosophy is not broken down into its component terms (Aristotelian wonder, Cartesian doubt, Hegelian dialectics, Heideggerian questioning, or whatever else) as though one of those terms could stand for the whole of philosophy. This would only work for those who already believed that all philosophy is, in essence – i.e. when good, when true, etc. – Heideggerian, or Hegelian, or some such thing. Nor is it conveyed by reducing it to another domain such as physics, neuroscience, or linguistics. That, again, would simply assume that this reductive domain already is identifiable with philosophy, a move begging the question as to what philosophy is (which was the whole point of the charade in the first place – to mime philosophy as a whole, universally). Laruelle, instead, takes the charade seriously both because he wishes to convey the identity of all extant philosophies equally – not just of one of its parishes to its own devotees – but also because it is a mime that respects the whole of philosophy, while at the same time (re)viewing it in a new light.
Certainly, then, Laruelle’s is a strange thought, but its strangeness partly stems from its attempt to be utterly consistent. What for some appears to be a reductio ad absurdum, is for Laruelle embraced as the rigorous conclusion that any thought of absolute immanence should accept, were it to be consistent (though whether the concept of consistency, or rigour, can itself be taken as a given, is another matter). Does all of this make Laruelle special, or utterly ordinary? Or might such an ordinariness, a call to the ordinary, make Laruelle’s ideas special, when so many are looking for the recognizably ‘extraordinary’, ‘radical’, ‘transgressive’, and so on? If so, it is a special status that is open to all, because what it says is that philosophy – the discipline that appropriates for itself the exclusive right to think at the highest levels of thought – does not have a monopoly on these powers. Being ordinary, seeing philosophy in ordinary practices is not, despite the term’s associations, easy or simple. It involves a huge effort to reverse, or ‘invert’ our intellectual habits, to perform the democracy of thought, and refuse to try and explain the Real, and to ‘dominate’ other forms of knowledge. Non-philosophy is not ‘a “model” or “system” closed in on itself’, he says: it is ‘a practice of – and in – thought’ and is thereby open to all the mutations and corruptions that come with such practice (which, contra the proverbial opinion, never ‘makes perfect’ but always remains open).

Extract from ‘The Non-Philosophical Inversion: Laruelle’s Knowledge Without Domination’ – introduction to Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, eds. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, August 28, 2012

http://www.amazon.com/Laruelle-Non-Philosophy-John-Mullarkey/dp/0748645349/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326206781&sr=1-1

The news that Facebook has a population greater than the US and the EU put together (BBC2 04.12.11) reminds us that the company’s aspirations tend towards a proximate ‘statehood’ trather than simply profit. As such, its ‘revolutionary’ potential is not neutral. The question therefore concerns what kind of social bond or social contract it instantiates. A very good indication is outlined at the beginning of David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect (2010), the authorized history of the company. He tells the story of a campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) which again reminds us that Facebook’s political utility is perfectly equivocal such that it can just as easily become a tool for counter-revolution, for popular revolt in support of a weakened and ineffective state.

“Oscar Morales was fed up,” begins the book, because the Columbian’s holiday period, like much of the country apparently, was being disturbed by “the suffering of a little boy named Emmanuel” who was being held hostage along with his mother Clara Rojas and others including the politician Ingrid Betancourt by FARC. Expectation was high that at least little Emmanuel, if not all the hostages, would be released by Christmas 2007 as a result of negotiations between the guerrillas and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. By the New Year the boy still hadn’t been released, but to everyone’s surprise in early January the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced that Emmanuel was no longer in the hands of the FARC, but in foster care. For Morales and many others, this was the last straw. “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry [...] we felt assaulted by the FARC. How could they dare negotiate for the life of a kid they didn’t even have? People felt this was too much. How much longer was the FARC going to play with us and lie to us?” (Kirkpatrick, 1-2).

Morales set up a Facebook Group called Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC (A Million Voices Against FARC). Information about the Group and its plea was rapidly distributed through Facebook’s ‘social graph’, and in a few weeks the Group had thousands of members, and a large demonstration was organised. The demonstration attracted the attention of the Press as indeed did the novel means of its organization and the campaign spread further – in the process expanding the number of Facebook users since it was new to Columbia and associated only with ‘kids’ (4). The very visibility of the numbers of the Group emboldened the campaigners – “Facebook gave Columbia’s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust” – and the site itself provided a key point of organization and liaison. “Facebook was our headquarters … It was the newspaper … the central command … the laboratory” (Morales quoted by Kirkpatrick, 5). President Uribe eventually succeeded in negotiating the release of the hostages but the Facebook campaign and the demonstration were credited with applying pressure on the FARC. Oscar Morales’s “group and the subsequent demonstration made him into a national and international celebrity” (6).

The anecdote illustrates nicely how Facebook establishes a social bond though the production of ‘faces’: the new technology of the social networking site enables Oscar Morales to become the face of the protest against FARC, and ultimately achieve ‘celebrity’. In Seminar XVII Lacan famously organizes the social bond across four terms:

agent other
truth production

It is clearly Facebook and the Group it enables (Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC) that is the ‘agent’ here, addressed to the ‘other’ whose reference is FARC. The authority and ‘truth’ of the Facebook Group is grounded in the number of members of the Group galvanized in relation to the guerrillas. Although they were in the thousands rather than millions (there not being enough Facebook users in Columbia at the time), millions of people did demonstrate in cities across Columbia, inspired by the Group. In contradistinction to the inhuman facelessness of FARC, then, Facebook produces Oscar Morales as the (human) face of a Group actually made up of thousands of other faces like so many pixels or the digital code into which the face dissolves in the original Facebook logo.

The four main forms of the social bond for Lacan are the discourses of the Master, the Hysteric, the University and the Analyst. It seems to me that Facebook, appropriately given that it was developed at Harvard, is an example of University discourse in which knowledge (S2), supported by the signifier of the master (S1), is in the position of agent which, through its address to the lack constitutive of desire (objet petit a), produces the subject ($).

A certain modification is necessary however in order to discuss Facebook as a form of social bond with regard to this structure. Facebook is certainly a product of the University, but does not so much represent the ‘knowledge’ of the University as its ‘information’; it is not the agent of operative knowledge, but operative information. As such the structure can organize all the rankable degrees of University life on the same plane from social grooming to academic and professional achievement.

Famously, Facebook was developed at Harvard in a kind of perversion of its bureaucratic procedures. All Universities, colleges and fraternities had a ‘facebook’ of passport-style photographs that are held along with other information as a record of its staff and students. Zuckerberg and his colleagues, initially through Facemash leading to theFacebook used these procedures as a means for student enjoyment: self-promotion, narcissism, dating, voyeurism and so on. From the very beginning there was something ‘superegoic’ in the way in which its ‘obscene’ content (the inspired by the initial idea of comparing female students’ faces to farm animals for example) was conveyed by the apparent neutrality of bureaucratic form. Accordingly, the signifier (S1) that is the governing support of Facebook (S2) is not the name of a Master or a governing Idea of the University (Truth, Culture, Excellence), but a number (1) that stands for numbers generally, metrics, statistics, quantification and so on. The ‘knowledge’, then, if there is any, is statistical information that is operative through the manipulation of computerized data through the use of algorithms. With the Oscar Morales story, number (Un Millon Voces) provides the hyperbolic, even performative command that brings the Group into being as a mass, and its authority as a number provides its ‘comfort’ and security.

As everyone knows there is something uncanny about passport photographs and their inability to deliver a satisfyingly narcissistic image of one’s face (enabling them to be compared to farm animals, for instance). I don’t recognize this image; it’s not me! It is as if the photo booth steals some aspect of the face essential to its enjoyment as a mirror image. The digital face-making, or prosopopeia of Facebook, is predicated upon a generalized prosopagnosia (or prosop – a – gnosia) where the a stands for the lost enjoyment stolen by the bureaucratic passport photograph. However, the theft of enjoyment in the Oscar Morales story concerns the fact that he and his countrymen were cheated by the FARC of the collective joy that would have been brought by the sight of the face of Emmanuel, his suffering relieved by his release on Christmas day. The fact that he was quietly released by the hostages into a foster home without fuss or announcement seems to have produced an irrational rage in the Columbians, strange given the possible alternative: “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry” (Kirkpatrick, 1). It is therefore into this gap, marked in its absence by the suffering or joyful face of Emmanuel in the field of mediatized visibility, that Facebook pours its information, a million faces combining to producing Oscar Morales as Columbia’s first Facebook star, making him “a national and international celebrity” (6). As such, however, he inevitably loses something, loses his offline, off camera ordinariness, becoming vulnerable to the harsh light of media attention and expectation as a hero of political and moral virtue.

Lacan presented his theory of the four discourses in the context of the events of May 1968, most notably in a rowdy exchange with students at Vincennes. Memorably, Lacan claimed that “the aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master”. At the same time, as Matthew Sharpe notes, Lacan also made the claim that university discourse “is increasingly becoming the dominant form structure of social relations”. While Lacan initially had in mind “the societies of the now-former Soviet bloc”, Sharpe shows that new forms of advertising in their ‘superegoic’ appeal to transgressive (as opposed to officially sanctioned) enjoyment are organized according to the same structure, since advertising “faces, and educates, a more or less unformed, ignorant individual” which it compels to consider, “from a quasi-superegoic position of neutral self-observation … what we really are and really want, beneath whatever social masks and roles we may from time to time have taken up”.

Since about 2008, Facebook’s core business, its means of making money, has been advertising, but it is claimed that this is purely a means rather than an aim, and in any case “the word advertising is really no longer the right word for what is going on at Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 263). Rather, Kirkpatrick argues that Facebook provides a space in which producers and consumers interact to the point of becoming indistinct as mutual users of the site. From the beginning “Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece of software – a platform for content created by its users” (31) in which marketers can now pay for visibility for their products but “can no longer control the conversation” about them (263). For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ‘monetization’ merely generates the revenue necessary for a much more profound social project. The company is “founded on a radical social premise – that an enveloping transparency will overtake modern life” (Kirkpatrick, 200), and this premise is the foundation of Facebook’s utopian promise. As the story of Oscar Morales relates, Facebook can be an effective tool working for popular causes in the aid of the state – no doubt in other states it can work against them. As such, however, Facebook is not a neutral ‘tool’ for the political expression of popular reason. It is a form that is itself transformative of other political structures, ushering in a new kind of governmentality. “In a lot of ways”, Zuckerberg argues, “Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies” (Zuckerberg, cited in Kirkpatrick, 254). While particular technology companies are always vulnerable to the rapid exploitation of new technological innovations and a certain boredom threshold concerning their formats, Facebook has it seems made a decisive breakthrough in its reformatting of the social bond. In its infinite streams of commentary, ‘likes’ and followers of Groups and interests, Facebook has transformed the meaning of ‘Friendship’ and opened it up so that a transparent – or ‘transparental’ – love has become the principle of a new technology of neoliberal governance. Whatever the fate of Facebook, for this model to become truly revolutionary would require a further turn clockwise towards the discourse of the Master in which love for the face of the ‘transparental’ One, the index of the multiple, supports the total operationalization of social reality without remainder other than the facelessness that is produced as its surplus and condition.

From Scott Wilson, ‘Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook’ in Glossator 5 (2011): 19-16.

The government wishes to limit immigration to the UK, and to this end it has introduced the CAS (Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies) visa system that is currently making it extraordinarily difficult for universities to recruit effectively non-EU international students.  The cost of this to universities and the wider economy at a time of recession and post-2012 shrinking participation in Higher Education is plain for all to see.  In this system universities who wish to continue recruiting international students without limits must hold a ‘Highly Trusted Sponsor’ status and so have grudgingly agreed to monitor the attendance and movements of ‘sponsored’ students.  In effect our universities are now acting in conjunction with the UK Border’s Agency to manage Tier 4 immigration.  Even more worrying is the difficulty experienced by anyone who has attempted to organise an academic conference in the last 12 months that involved inviting any non-EU academic who requires a visa to enter the UK.  The private company, Worldbridge, employed to process visa claims is working to a contract target of 90% refusal of first applications.  The result has been to demonstrate to the world that the UK is inhospitable to thought.

However, this deplorable situation has just taken a new, and to my mind, more disturbing turn.  After lobbying from universities that immigration controls would adversely affect their ability to remain competitive by recruiting the best international staff, a new Tier 1 ‘Exceptional Talent’ route was opened in August to allow up to 1,000 ‘exceptionally talented migrants’ into the UK annually.  Applicants wishing to enter the UK now require the endorsement of one of four bodies designated as competent by the UKBA to assess their exceptional or otherwise talent.  They are the Royal Society (able to endorse up to 300 candidates), the Arts Council (up to 300 candidates), the Royal Academy of Engineering (up to 200) and the British Academy (up to 200).  In a recent letter to universities Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, notes that this ancient scientific fellowship ‘has reluctantly agreed’ to act as a ‘competent body’ and concludes his letter by saying that ‘the Royal Society has undertaken to monitor the impact of the recent changes in immigration policy…  to ascertain if the current immigration arrangements are having a negative impact on the movement of scientists to the UK’.

This situation is a real cause for concern.  The British Academy, for example, is a fellowship of nominated peers (members of the BA invite others to join it) that acts as both a learned society and funding body (I have been fortunate enough to have received funding several times from the BA).  It is not an agent for the UK Borders Agency.  The British Academy is a body competent to conduct academic peer review, it is not a competent body to determine who should and should not enter the country.  It should not be put in the position where it is asked to undertake such a function for government. Nor should it agree, however reluctantly, to do so.  The same is true of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.  The Arts Council is an arms-length Quango charged with the regional distribution of funding in the creative arts. Its website now states that ‘applications will be assessed by artform and other sector specialists within the Arts Council who will review all documents submitted and judge the extent to which they provide clear evidence that the application meets the published criteria’.  The qualification of these ‘sector specialists’ to judge immigration applications is not at all clear.

There are practical considerations here:

1. These arrangements strike at the autonomy of universities to appoint whatever staff they wish.  The calculation of an appointing institution will no longer be ‘can we obtain a work permit for this candidate’ but ‘will this candidate be acceptable to a designated competent body’?
2. Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London heavily dominate the British Academy, it is not representative of wider UK academia (it is after all a society based on internal nomination).  According to the list of Fellows on the website no practising academic from a post-92 ‘modern’ university or a monotechnic is a member of the BA.
3. Accordingly, who will undertake the task of assessing sponsorship cases of exceptional talent, according to what criteria, and across which selection of institutions will the 200 possible sponsorships be distributed?
4. This is the latest scenario in a developing trend in which political decisions are being passed to the academy to manage.  As with cuts to arts and humanities postgraduate funding in which the peer-led establishment of regional consortia will determine which institutions will continue to receive funding and which will not, the capping of immigration candidates passes a government cut onto academics to sort out according to perceptions of ‘excellence’ and mission group interests.

No doubt the learned societies will say, like the CAS sponsoring universities, that they are trying to make the best of a bad lot and, as the Lib Dems like to say, without them things would be much worse.  However, this situation is an intolerable conflation of a xenophobic immigration policy with the role of the UK’s academic institutions.  What is particularly insidious is the conflation of peer review as the determination of research excellence (‘exceptional talent’), the competing interests of imaginary mission groups, and moral panic over the immigration of non-European citizens.  Once the academic community has accepted the false-consciousness of mission groups, the bogus arguments for research concentration, and economic expediency over academic purpose, it is a short step to endorsing reluctantly the necessity of acting as an agent in the capping of entrants to the UK.  This sort of piecemeal accommodation of the unacceptable and previously unthinkable cannot be allowed to stand.  At a recent meeting of Universities UK, its chair Eric Thomas said ‘it is in nobody’s interests that Universities UK falls out with the government’.  Now that our learned societies have been transformed into a branch of the UK’s Borders Agency it is time for us all to reassess such derisory realpolitik.

 However, the two events have very important key features in common.  The phone hacking scandal is not just about whom knew what and when (this will all fall out in a slow burn for years to come).   At heart this is a story about the state of the public realm in Great Britain.  For thirty-two years we have been told that markets are the solution to inefficient public service.  Ultimately, The News of the World and News International did what it did because it enabled them to sell more newspapers, and profit was of greater significance than the interests of what we vaguely call ‘the public good’ or the commitment to truth that ought to inform the practice of journalism.  In turn, it was the unregulated dominance of News International in the market place and so UK public life that caused politicians and the police to turn a blind eye to criminality.  In this way the poison of a culture of complicity and compliance between the media, parliamentary politics and the police has corroded British public life.  The public realm has been evacuated of the qualities of complexity and critique in favour of the crude reductionism of the market where all value is measured by cost and profit.  The police and successive governments did nothing to investigate the criminal activity of News International because they had become inured to the status quo and believed that no one cared enough to make an issue of it.  As it turns out this assumption was quite wrong, as we have seen with the wave of public revulsion that followed assiduous investigations by academics, bloggers and The Guardian.  No doubt Mr Murdoch’s company will survive (despite perhaps even the prosecution of his son and heir) making a commercial virtue out of necessity.  David Cameron’s reputation may not share such a fortunate fate.

Similarly, the Coalition government sought to implement the trebling of tuition fees in England in the belief that no one cared about universities as public institutions.  This assumption also proved to be incorrect as the swelling of righteous anger from students, parents, academics and the public has shown.  The condition of our universities and the state of the public realm are inseparable.  For every politician that has kow-towed to please the Murdoch press, there has been a Vice Chancellor keen to please government of any colour.  In particular those in positions of power in our universities have failed to exercise their critical faculties in relation to the incipient marketisation of Higher Education.  David Willett’s White Paper does not spring autochotonously from the grey matter of his two brains; it is the continuation and perfection of an insidious logic that has been eating away for some time at the idea of the university as a public good.  It places the market at the heart of the higher education system in order to hand privilege and position to a few and profits to the private sector.  There are no doubt useful idiots who will welcome it; they would in truth welcome the exact opposite if they thought it would earn them a knighthood and seat on an HE quango.  The lack of critique in public life is as detrimental to the wellbeing of our national institutions as the priority now given to market values, and clearly the two things are related as the phone hacking scandal singularly demonstrates.  The scandal also demonstrates that we are all in this together.  A collective guilt has to be borne for tolerating this culture of complicity. With every satellite dish and premier league football ticket sold tacit approval was being given to the corrosion of UK public life and its institutions.  Equally, every time an academic buys into the marketised logic of mission groups or impact assessment, we are all responsible for promoting a culture in which £9,000 tuition fees are possible and the very idea of the university is eroded. 

In the midst of this economic storm, we have reached a tipping point and now have the opportunity to reset a British public realm 2.0 in which complexity, plurality and critique are central to national life and in which the value of public service and a commitment to the pursuit of enlightenment, development and the truth are the bedrock of publicly funded institutions.  We must also have a commitment to the absolute necessity of an autonomous press and independent universities.  Just as the pre-Murdoch News of the World revealed the Profumo affair, it was The Guardian who pursued the phone hacking scandal to the point when the Prime Minister was forced to concede two public inquiries.  The Guardian, however, has teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for several years and has an uncertain future in a digital-first market.  Equally, many excellent universities will face uncertain futures in the wild frontier free-for-all proposed by the White Paper.  There is nothing wrong with competition, universities and newspapers have always competed fiercely between each other.  However, both investigative journalism and the academy serve a greater public good than market forces or the profit motive; a good which our public institutions were established to protect and exercise at critical arms length from government.  The handing over of these public institutions to for-profit companies and the whole scale dismantling of regulation can only lead to the sorts of disaster that we have witnessed this week.  All of this government’s difficulties revolve around this point: as with universities, as with the NHS, as with the banks, as with News International the marketisation of the public realm should be overwhelmingly opposed by those who are still prepared to exercise rational critique.  A new public realm is emerging from these transformations.  I have no pre-programmed solutions to offer it in advance of its arrival; it is at present ‘inconceivable’.  The public realm will always be predicated on an economic relation, in the general sense, between competition and critique.  What remains to be thought, and to be fought for, amidst the ruins of the collapsed News of the World and the government’s faltering attempt to privatise all public service in the UK, is how far we will tolerate the definition of that necessary competition strictly in terms of monetary speculation rather the speculative power of ideas and ideals.

Here, then, let me advance one idea of what a University should be. A University is that institution which, by taking teaching and research together, allows for education at a level higher than the standards required for everyday and already well-educated participation in our societies and our world. The quality that makes this education a ‘higher’ is one governed by a demand for a certain edification. The demand in question here is a requirement that we search for, or invent, that which constitutes the true, the good and the beautiful. We might recognise this more simply as a demand for the prioritisations of science (searching for the true), for social sciences (the good) and the arts (the beautiful). Of course, that which is true, good and beautiful is never single or monumental: that is why we must always continue to seek these things, for, by their very nature, they change all the time. However, by giving a first principle for our University as that of discovery or invention, we find that a University is about making the conditions in which we become open to future possibility; and the single word for that is freedom. The University exists to extend the reach of freedom, first of all. Secondly, it does this by attending, via its searches, to questions of judgement or justice. And thirdly, given that it exists of necessity in a shared public sphere, that justice and that freedom must be held in common; and so it attends to the extending also of democracy.

These are indeed noble aims: extending freedom, justice and democracy. Indeed, they are not just aims; they are values. Nowhere in the White Paper will we find anything as dignified. Instead, the Government confounds the issue of values with that of prices. It does this because of the legacy of the Browne Review, and the already well-documented betrayal of students (and other constituents) by the Lib Dems and Conservatives in the rushed and ideologically-driven Fees Bill in December 2010. The White Paper is circumscribed entirely by the question of the fiscal deficit, and the ideological demand that it be dealt with in a very specific fashion. It endorses the view that today’s young people should pay for the unjust, even wicked, behaviour of those who subscribe to the view that the sole determinant of human motivation is the greedy desire for private gain.

The White Paper’s view is that students, allegedly empowered by a supposed free consumerist choice, should be ‘in the driving seat’; but, given the savage cuts to the teaching budget, they will be in the driving seat of a car that has been emptied of petrol. It is indeed admirable to say that students should be at the heart of the University system; but the metaphor bears scrutiny, Given their intrinsic transience, with us for typically three years, they might be better thought of as the blood, the circulation, the ongoing and ever-self-refreshing and growing life-force. There are others in the body-university, of course; and teachers and researchers might also have their entirely legitimate, even necessary, place and functions in keeping the body alive and well.

The White Paper nonetheless places students at the centre of a system that turns out not to be a body at all, but a market-place in which they are to be surrounded by a variety of ‘producers’ whose wares need better labelling. The key for all this is a supposed improvement in the much-vaunted ‘student experience’. In the terms offered by the White Paper, the student experience will be immeasurably improved by the provision of lots of data (much of it already provided routinely, as it happens) concerning admissions criteria and norms, job prospects and other similar factors that can be reduced to quantitative numbers. As is now standard in all questions of the student experience, the actual content of learning and teaching appears rather as an after-thought (perhaps unsurprising, now that it is stripped of fundamental resource), once we have dealt with all the market-led and consumer-driven business. As we all know, the student experience is often ‘enhanced’ by the provision of yet more branded coffee-machines dotting the campus, as external business tries to gain brand-loyalty among future consumers.

Then, we find that the quality of teaching will be improved, magically, by the near-total withdrawal of funding, to be replaced by student-demand and competition. If you are an academic, you are now in clear competition with colleagues: online summary reports of student surveys of lecture courses will be available ‘aiding choice and stimulating competition between the best academics’. The X-Factor has arrived; bring in the new VC, Simon Cowell. But this logic of competition is, as with the entirely discredited Lansley Bill for the NHS, to be centrally applied to all that we do. HEFCE’s new role is to be as a ‘consumer champion’ and ‘promoter of a competitive system’.

This competition – and when there are no resources it is better called ‘dog-eat-dog’ – will drive up standards. That statement should, of course, be a question posed with ironically-raised eyebrows. Dog-eat-dog competition will apparently engender greater ‘Value-for-Money’, the fundamental driver of the entire Paper. But the logic of VfM, as it is called in the trade, is simple. It has three stages: Economy, Efficiency, Effectiveness; and it is applied in three moves. First, cut resource (so if a job requires £100 to carry out, allocate only £75 for it); then, the recipient is forced to be more ‘efficient’ (to get £100-worth for £75); miraculously, this efficiency leads to improved effectiveness (more bang for your buck). Of course, the Catch-22 is clear: if you then say your outcome is less successful, you’ll have your finding cut totally as you have failed. So you provide paperwork to say it is indeed more effective; and then, if it is more effective at £75, you can obviously do it for less. The cycle repeats, until we stand where we are now. VfM’s ultimate logic is that we get something for nothing. In an institution governed by dignity, justice or democratic freedom, we called that ‘theft’; now, instead, we call it ‘privatisation’. That is what the WP is about. It is about the ideological demand to privatise HE in this country, to transfer by that means the common wealth of  our cultures and sciences unto the hands of a few – for-profit and for greed. It should be rejected entirely; and we should stand up instead for the University.

Thomas Docherty, University of Warwick

For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution (Bloomsbury 2011) now available

The apparent contradiction in the UK government’s decision to cut all funding to Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects at University in order to open them to market forces while protecting Maths, Engineering and Science betrays something more interesting than the limits of pure competition theory or ultimate market failure. The decision shows that neoliberalism is an art of government, of course, as much as a mechanism of economic growth (as Foucault anticipated in the late 1970s), but perhaps more profoundly, it shows that in the UK at least, science is now the official bearer of truth. Browne’s prioritization concurs with Steven Hawking’s view that science is all we need to answer the big questions of philosophy, and the latter can fight for its survival among the other idols of the marketplace. Science has even superseded literature, Darwin having displaced Shakespeare as the touchstone of National Genius.

Scientific truth is not, of course, an effect of individual genius, but is grounded in scientific method and in the production of a number of (mathematical) correspondences that appear to cohere with certain regularities generated by nature or the real. Science does not speak the truth since these regularities are not found in language but in numbers or formulae. What or where is a truth that no longer speaks – not even of itself in the guise of a metalanguage? Is it a truth that counts, or is counted, or that counts itself (as truth)? For science to tell the truth, numbers would have to speak, a goal that the psychotic mathematician John F Nash Jr. set for himself (Nasar, 2001: 336), the same Nash whose famous ‘equilibrium’ is supposed to justify both the economic efficiency and the social benefits of neoliberalism. Naturally, the Browne Reports’ prioritisation of Science and Technology is not just recognition of the burden of truth and destiny that these subjects now have to bear, but about generating another set of numbers that will reproduce and sustain the current system of social and economic relations.

For those of us brought up under the shadow of Matthew Arnold in the tradition of literary and cultural studies this decision shows that the governing class in the UK has finally given up on the idea that liberal culture has an essential ‘social mission’ or ideological function, as Althusserians used to say. Of course this has been evident for a long time. Even as some of us were busy deconstructing the ‘Shakespeare Myth’ back in the 1980s the governing idea of the University was already moving away from Culture to Excellence, an essentially vacuous term under which the University was transformed from a pedagogical institution to a mechanism for the exchange of information whose governing structure, if not metaphor, is the networked computer. Disciplines became stripped down to a set of equivalent ‘key skills’ to be cashed into the service economy. As we all know, the ability to savour poetic ambiguity, where it occurs, is a fringe benefit relative to a student’s aptitude for ppt presentations.

The neoliberal experiment in government has sought to construct a very different kind of subject to the subject of liberal culture, leaving the latter to withdraw to centres of privilege and heritage sites. As with other state institutions, the ‘privatization’ of Universities has been steadily achieved through the introduction of internal markets and mechanisms such as KPIs and PRP that formally assume a subject of pure self-interest that needs to be governed by the imposition of goals and targets that are continually assessed in the running commentary of internal audit, the latter having no external rationale or reference other than the economic efficiency or ‘value for money’ that is calculated on the basis of the same imaginary interests. This process reinforces and locks-in competition as a formal principle. The ultimate biopolitical aim, or effect, is to produce (economic) life according to mathematizable models. In this way governance manufactures the kind of data-producing subjects it wants even as it justifies itself scientifically in the name of economic reason.

Alongside the credence given to Hawking’s and others view that science has rendered philosophy pointless, another symptom of the belief that science bears the burden of truth is the rise of quasi-scientific approaches to the Humanities. And here I do not just mean sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and so on, but the work of a new generation of academics producing varieties of, for example, ‘cognitive literary criticism’ and ‘evolutionary literary theory’ which look ‘to the cognitive neurosciences for finer-grained descriptions of the workings of language, consciousness and subject-formation than those supplied by influential but inadequate post-structuralist theories’ (Richardson, 2007: 553).

But if the idea is to save the Humanities by imitating scientific methods, it is doomed from the start because its object, the manifest image of the conscious, language-defined human being, is itself unscientific. Ever since the post-linguistic turn of the 1980s and the rapid development of cognitive neuroscience, scientists have become increasingly sceptical about the utility and even ‘reality’ of ‘top-down concepts, such as thinking, consciousness, motivation, emotion, and similar terms’, doubting that they ‘can be mapped onto corresponding brain mechanisms with similar boundaries as in our language’ (Buzáki, 2006: 19). The once notorious eliminative materialism of Paul and Patricia Churchland that famously denounced and rejected the ‘folk psychological’ mysticism of conventional concepts ‘such as belief, desire, pain, pleasure, love, hate, joy, fear, suspicion, memory, recognition, anger, sympathy, intention and so forth’ (Churchland, 1998: 3), has become standard. Everything that goes on in the Arts and Humanities is essentially delusional, a tissue of semblance.

At their most provocative, the Churchlands do not just claim that the folk psychology model that informs Humanities and Social Science is empirically false, but it is also damaging, chronically defective (12). Cognitive neuroscience knows very well that brains are not simply hard-wired, but need to develop. They must become subject to processes of learning in order to function appropriately and efficiently. Trillions of new synaptic connections need to be made between neurons ‘so that incoming sensory vectors are automatically and almost instantaneously transformed into appropriate “prototype” vectors at the higher populations of cortical neurons’ (14). This is ‘learning’. What learning is not, however, is ‘assembling a vast mass of sentences’ because the ‘basic unit of occurrent cognition is not language-based, but rather the high-dimensional neuronal activation vector (that is, a pattern of excitation levels across a large population of neurons)’. And ‘the basic unit of cognitive processing is apparently not the inference from sentence to sentence, but rather the synapse-induced transformation of large activation vectors into other such vectors’ (10). Since human languages are pre-eminently the accumulated archive of ancient folk psychologies, superstitions, misconceptions, misperceptions, myth, narratives reproducing basic cognitive errors, they are hopeless vehicles for learning, incapable of producing appropriate neuronal activation vectors and need to be eliminated. Folk psychology is simply bad theory that results in the bad human behaviour we see all around us and should be replaced by a theory based in the grey matter of the brain, an eliminative materialist ‘successor theory’ (35). The excitement of the Churchlands concerns their promise of a ‘superior social practice’ that will come with the displacement of FP by a theory based in a properly scientific account of ‘human cognition and mental activity’ (35). The disappointment is always that their social imagining falls back on a kind of liberal pragmatism expressing a pious hope that ‘a deeper understanding of the springs of human behaviour may thus permit a deeper level of cognitive interaction, moral insight, and mutual care’ (35), without explaining why the former should imply the latter. As Freud might have noted, one could just as well recoil in horror.

It is not, I would think, in the direction of moral pragmatism that the utopia promised by the faith in science lies. Far from diverting the techno-scientific drive, the financial crisis of 2008 has of course further entrenched the attempt by the forces of neoliberal governance to account for and speculate upon the economic effects of human cognitive processes both individual and collective. The hope is that the market mechanism can be enhanced through the elimination of irrational human impulses (greed, fear, panic etc.) that are based on the manifest image of human motives and behaviour based in language. Rather, through being reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, economic theories can become much more powerful and more substantially integrated within physical science generally. The promise appeals to the demand for increased economic performance, as brains directly interact with each other via screens and scanners for the satisfaction of the numbers.

Given that consciousness is now regarded as too ‘top-down’ a concept to be scientifically operative and too inefficient in matters of optimal performance (as sports people know, the ‘zombie’ brain is the key to high achievement, Ramachandran, 2005: 83), there would not seem much potential for an unconscious, political or otherwise. For psychoanalysis, of course, the unconscious is the seat of truth, at least insofar as it articulates the truth that the subject doesn’t know that it knows. ‘“I, truth, speak …”’, wrote Lacan, evoking ‘the unnameable thing that, by virtue of its ability to pronounce these words, would go right to the being of language – if we are to hear them as they are to be pronounced: in horror’ (Lacan, 2006: 736). The unconscious can no longer be defined simply against the (self) consciousness of speaking beings, but also the functional nonconsciousness calculated by numbers. ‘I, truth, speak’, but the prosopopeia now addresses a prosopagnosia that can no longer perceive in a face anything other than an abstract form correlated to the oscillations of neuronal assemblies that might be mapped onto ever-shifting profiles, markers of nodal points of data predicated on an empty mediating space for the exchange of biometric and economic information. Truth shimmers in every upgrade of Facebook …

While the stream of numbers slides over the real, or the ‘noumenon that, for as long as pure reason can remember, has always kept its mouth shut’ (Lacan, 737), those speaking beings still on the language side of things might ask: what numberless horror is produced or encountered in the slippage, the something of the one (1+) that foams in excess of formulae? Fortunately, it seems, while the noumenon does not speak, it bites, or at least according to some, even as its fangs hook into the ‘technocosm’.

The Browne Report’s indifference to the fate of Arts and Humanities relative to the economic imperative demanded of Science and Technology is something I assume that Nick Land and his acolytes are gleefully cheering in technoecstasy. ‘We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/ machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream’. (Land, 1992: 223). LOL.

References
György Buzáki (2006), Rhythms of the Brain OUP.
Patricia & Paul Churchland (1998), On the Contrary, MIT.
Jacques Lacan (2006), Écrits, Norton.
Nick Land (1992), ‘Circuitries’, PLI, 217-235.
Sylvia Nasar (2001), A Beautiful Mind, Touchstone.
V.S. Ramachandran (2005), Phantoms in the Brain. Harper Collins.
Alan Richardson (2007), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, OUP.

This situation was entirely predictable from the moment Cable and Willetts rejected the Browne Report’s recommendation of ‘unlimited fees’ in favour of a seemingly more politically palatable fee band of £6,000–£9,000, while simultaneously stripping away the teaching grant and the capital budget distributed by HEFCE.  Over the course of the Comprehensive Spending review, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills sought to take £4.2bn of public money out of the university system.  At the same time David Willetts made a series of finger-wagging speeches warning Vice Chancellors that if they insisted on charging higher fees than BIS had budgeted for (an average of £7,500) then funding would be removed from elsewhere.  No doubt over the after-speech canapés the Vice Chancellors looked at each other, decided that their colleagues would not hesitate to charge £9K and expecting that in turn the other funds would be duly cut, they decided to charge £9K as well in order not to be left paying the price for everyone else’s aspirational self-valuation.  Under such circumstances, £9K is the only rational option.  And so it has come to pass that despite what Vince Cable promised to wavering LibDem back-benchers during the parliamentary debate on tuition fees, £9K will be the norm and not an ‘exceptional circumstance’. 

Some institutions will decide not to charge the full £9K, but this is a false economy on their part and not doubt over time they will move to the top of the band as well.  These institutions, mostly so-called ‘post-92s’, will receive no thanks for the government for showing restraint in their fee pricing.  The government is now faced with the choice of clawing back funds by three means: cutting the research budget, cutting the remainder of the teaching budget for ‘priority’ science subjects, or cutting student numbers across the sector.  The first two options would disproportionately effect so-called ‘elite’ universities with strong research and large science faculties, who are already as expected charging the full £9K and unable to raise additional income beyond that.  The third option would be a toxic political legacy for Vince Cable and the LibDems, no longer the party of ‘social mobility’ but the party that trebled tuition fees and cut student places.  David Willetts tours the television studios of the UK asserting that he does not recognise the figure of £1bn as the additional cost of price-clustering around £9K.  He is quite right; the actual figure is at least £3bn per annum (http://bit.ly/clmCzR).  That’s £9bn before a single student starts paying anything back. 

The more one actually looks into it the more ludicrous the whole tuition fees policy appears.  On the one hand, according to work done by accountancy firm Baker Tilley for the BBC, a student who borrows a total of £39K (£9K fees and £4K maintenance over three years) who goes on to a good graduate job earning above the national average and receiving a £2K per year rise, would expect to clear the debt in 25 years paying a cash total of £83,791.  That’s quite an APR! David Willetts often quotes the figure of £100,000 as the additional earnings a graduate might expect over a lifetime as a consequence of their degree.  After paying back an average loan like the one cited above, that would leave the graduate with £16,209 as the advantage afforded to them by their degree.  Over 25 years that’s £648.36 per year or £54.03 in their monthly pay.  On this basis it would not be economically rational to go to university at all.  Thankfully, there might be reasons other than financial ones to experience higher education. On the other hand, the consultancy firm London Economics suggest that 80% of women graduates will never pay off the full loan before it legally expires 30 years after graduation, while 40% of men will not repay the full loan either.  So, in fact 60% of debtors (80% of 50% + 40% of 50%=60% of 100%) will never repay the full amount.  At this stage it does not matter one iota whether the fee that a university sets is £9,000 or £8,500 because so much of the money will never be repaid and graduates will be locked into a thirty year cycle of monthly payments in which the difference of £500 a year in fees between Oxford and Leeds Met is neither here nor there.  Once again, £9,000 would appear to be the only rational choice for a Vice Chancellor.  Add to this that numerous well-managed UK universities have enjoyed precarious financial balances for several years now and have no reserves to see them through the present difficulty.  It is not at all surprising to me that a good number of our new universities are choosing to charge £9K alongside the Russell Group; both have been on the edge of financial meltdown for years.

Cable and Willetts are attempting to come up with a short-term policy fix to punish greedy post-92s and to introduce true competition in fees.  However, such a fix does not exist.  The mooted ‘MarginCore’ model whereby universities can bid for additional student places over their core allocation, with successful recruiters growing and unsuccessful ones shrinking over time, is not only the present system whereby HEFCE actually do distribute student numbers but makes no sense in a world of fees competition because it would mean handing additional numbers to ‘cheaper’ institutions again disadvantaging the ‘elite’ and making price the sole criteria of running academia.  The government knows that it cannot coerce the oil companies into lowering prices at the pump so they levy a windfall tax instead.  This might be one option but it would have to apply to all institutions.  Alternatively, this terrible fees policy might contain the seeds of its own financial salvation: namely, that if enough people are put off by £9K as the price of a degree and choose not to go to university at all, then it might be possible to save sufficient money that way.  In any event, the policy is such an expensive and complex shambles that it will have to be rethought from the ground up by the next government.  In the event of a Tory majority next time round, there will surely be a clamour for the abolition of the fees cap and the return to Browne’s unlimited fees utopia.  In the event of any other colour of government the whole thing will all need to be abandoned and replaced by some other form of taxation.

Before I go any further I ought to say that I believe access to higher education to be a democratic right that should be paid for as a national priority through general, progressive taxation (£4.2bn is not a lot to pay for our universities in comparison to, say the £4bn spend by the UK assisting the Portuguese bailout, or the £2bn given away in the budget by cutting the price of petrol by 1p a litre).  However, what the figure of £83,791 over 25 years shows is, that when you strip away the ideological verbiage of ‘competition between universities’ and ‘student choice’ (we’ve established that students have no choice and there is precious little competition) that the present tuition fees policy amounts to little more than an additional form of working-life-long taxation on graduates.  Lord Browne’s committee was asked late in the day by Vince Cable to consider a ‘Graduate Tax’; they dismissed it in one page as, unlike the system currently being proposed, ‘unworkable’.  However, in light of these figures the case for a transparent form of additional taxation for graduates might look more appealing.  But in the interests of ‘fairness’, as we now like to say, it ought to apply not just to the students of 2012 but to all graduates who have benefited from their degree, such as the baby boomers who David Willetts used to believe had ‘pinched’ their children’s futures.  It might also then be applied to those who equally benefit from the production of a highly educated graduate workforce, like oil companies and other types of employers.  Hold on, this is beginning to look like, what’s the word? Taxation.

It is not too late to stop this catastrophic policy failure.  As the U-turn (‘time to pause and reflect’) over Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms shows, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, like all politicians, do after all share a self-preservation instinct of making themselves re-electable.  In the coming year tuition fees will continue to define the failures of this government as the long-delayed White Paper makes its way (repeatedly) through the Commons and the Lords.  Perhaps rather than encourage this running sore, Clegg and Cameron should ‘do a Lansley’ on Cable and Willets and decide that, like the unexpected cost of the Libyan no-fly zone, they do in fact have an additional £1bn to stabilise university budgets back to 2010 levels.  In this way we could all take time to pause and reflect on the alternative to this pig’s ear of a policy.  Right now the students’ union, the NUS, and the staff union, the UCU, are engaging in internecine battles to prove which wing of either union is ‘prole-ier than thou’.  The UCU wish to pursue industrial action over the erosion of pension rights and job security.  But these are symptoms not causes.  The issue is funding the sector: it is tuition fees and the instability they bring as well as the attack they represent on the democratic right to access tertiary education.   Both the NUS and the UCU must resolve to work together to return to the streets once more to demonstrate again and again in order to bring irresistible political pressure to bear on this government to halt the imposition of this crazy scheme.  Following the 250,000 strong TUC ‘March for the Alternative’ they are no longer alone.  Vice Chancellors also need to eat some humble pie, join their staff and students, and now lobby for a delay.  It is not too late (March 2012 would be cutting it fine, but not March 2011).  As it turns out u-turns are about the only thing this government does well.  Étudiants de toutes les écoles encore un effort!