— Sustaining the Ivory Tower: Oxbridge Formal Dining as Organizational Ritual — Journal of Management Inquiry (via nogoodreason)
A tweet from the Lebanese American University’s official account. LAU is the only Lebanese university (as far as I know) that’s on twitter. I submit without comment.
— Derrida, Negotiations, cited in Mansfield (2006)
How did we find the strength to go on? In the modern period, ‘‘the people’’, the collective subject and patient vehicle of progressive Enlightenment and historical meaning, became nothing but a pretext for murder, the Volk, the proletariat, the petty bourgeois settler clearing away peoples and cultures as so many obstacles to agriculture, carving out the requisite emptiness for a fantasy-autochthony. In the modern period, while ‘‘the people’’ awaited one humanistic apocalypse or another, aching for the promised final unity, purity or triumph, people themselves were mangled by bureaucratic genocides, brutalised by imperial police actions, photo-spectralised by nuclear experimentalism, shamed by the normativities of bio-power, and disappeared in the silence and night of one political terror apparatus or another, forced assimilations, forced migrations, forced industrialisation, emptied villages in Poland, in Kenya, in Chechnya, Bengal, Vietnam, Algeria, El Salvador, and East Timor, concentration camps, treacherous infiltrations, racial disenfranchisement, liberal complacency and error. In the twentieth century, when politics became art, art became madness, madness became pornography, pornography became murder, and murder became just entertainment, a delirium no subjectivity could make purposeful or more than rhetorically redemptive. Only love was redemptive by 1969. In the twentieth century, nature became simply the passive object of administration, pleasure was re-packaged as science, because science was the only language the newspapers accorded authority. It was the time of the eternal recurrence of the spiritless mind, the eternal poverty of the scandalous minority, the eternal sunshine of the exterminating angel, when the poet said: ‘‘Black milk of daybreak we drink you at sundown/We drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/We drink and we drink it/We dig a grave in the wind there one lies unconfined’’ (Celan 1990, 63). ‘‘Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?’’ (Beckett 1965, 90).
As a consequence, our time is a time of shameless defeatism, when we know everything we are told is misinformation, but this knowledge does not protect us, or inspire us to a future freedom, where things will be transparent. We know politicians lie, kill, cheat and dishonour us, but it is not clear what can be done about it, or whether in fact it is to be accepted with a frustrated resignation. We are not ignorant of what they do nor indifferent to it, but we are impelled to trust them by the apparent lack of any other option. This defeatism is not childlike nor naïve, not ignorant nor idealistic. It is wise, split between the wisdom of a cultivated lassitude where knowledge does not lead to the struggle with difficulty, nor to the dangerous decision, and an impatient, but directionless radicalism where the long awaited re-birth of progressive spirit seems further off every day, and the hope for change becomes simply invested in the imminence of first economic, then environmental, then terroristic, and now military catastrophe.
In the West, we pay our governments to do our murders for us, in the crisp hi-tech, neat, logistical, politic, rationalised, well-mannered and eminently reportable, statistical, Christian, way they have mastered these things, leaving the electorate untroubled by the cost on which its luxury depends and who gets to pay it. The legacy of the Reagan/Thatcher experiment: do not frighten the electorate with the spectre of the injustice, torment, dictatorship, starvation, epidemic, exploitation or genocide that it causes or benefits from. The electorate must be kept in a warm cocoon of moralistic platitudes, and homespun economic automaticity, where world-affairs are reduced to the business of an unthinking common sense, and the role of the media is merely to police stereotypes we can all hold in contempt: the cheating tradesman, the paedophile priest, the corrupt politician, the charlatan diet guru, thus creating a pathetic simulacrum of social consensus around injustices that never accumulate into a positive theory of the just itself. The point is Derrida never gave in, never conceded to the platitude, to the easy, reassuring orthodoxies of left or right, of humanism or subversion. No balking at risk, no refusal to recognise difficulty, no pragmatic concession that incommensurables, aporias, incompossibilities needed at some point to be truncated, by-passed, frustrated or overcome. No sense that thinking had a limit beyond which only authority or pragmatism should take us. For Derrida, there was no pragmatics without thought, except the pragmatics that would not admit what it thought. No pragmatics without metaphysics. The pragmatics that disavowed metaphysics simply confessed how bad, un-self-conscious and ill-considered its metaphysics actually was. There was no point for Derrida in a thought that did not think, that refused to think, the ‘‘humanity’’ that settled for rhetorical gestures, the politics satisfied by an educated resignation, nor, above all, did he ever concede to defeatism and its small wisdom.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 3 (SEPTEMBER 2006)So when will it start being okay for me to introduce my papers with pure unmitigated rage like this…?
Can’t wait!
David Harvey’s RSA Lecture on the crisis of Capitalism in animated form
Today I woke up to news of Israel murdering aid workers & activists on the Freedom Flotilla attempting to break the siege on Gaza. @humanprovince, amongst all the outrage, provided this useful frame for the inevitable word of words after/over tragedy. Having studied theories of pressure group dynamics, I understood the importance of such stratagems, but still had to voice my lament. @troyrhoades replied to my comment mentioning Derrida and parergons, and while I didn’t see how that was relevant, I googled to see where it would take me.
Here is one interesting text I found, relevant & irrelevant in many ways. I copy it a google cache image, as the original server was down when I tried to access it.
(Pre/text: or the reason why I will not write a preface
<1> A preface, normally a relatively short piece of writing which introduces a book, might have various aims: setting up an argument, clarifying the author’s intention, retracing the evolution of the main text, explicating and anticipating the theories which will be developed later, etc. Thus, whether by the author him/herself or an editor or whomever else, such preface presupposes that the person writing it has already identified the themes or thoughts that will be detailed in the book to follow. The preface aims to be a sort of gate, a passageway from an outside world — the “real” one with a political, intellectual, social context — into the world of the text. At the same time, it might also wish to delimit the main text, to establish clear contours by clarifying what such text will be about, and what instead it won’t be about. It provides a programme, it sets up a stable reassuring ground from which to view the horizon of the text.
<2> I don’t wish to write such a preface mainly for two reasons, which as you will notice are really just one. If I did, I would find myself in a double bind: in wishing to summarise my main topic I would inevitably go against its very nature. Moreover, in giving you an introduction I would contradict precisely what I am going to tell you regarding the function of certain structures (let’s momentarily call them that for lack of a better definition), which are precariously positioned between an inside and an outside, on a limit between two edges.
<3> Already, having anticipated my subject, I have in a way betrayed my aim in avoiding this introduction. Thus I wish to interrupt myself straight away and start anew. Without preambles.)
“If there were no main topic, there would be subject for conversation”[1]
<4> I will speak, therefore, of a word.
<5> Yes. You will probably be surprised to know that you are about to read a whole paper on one single word. Did I find so much to say about a word? I did. In fact, there is a lot more that I left unsaid. I couldn’t say it all because I have borders to delimit the size of this text. I must draw margins around what I write, to differentiate between what is relevant and what is not so relevant. Between the inside and the outside. I must confine my writing to the inside, enclose it within a perimeter, which forms a circular line, an orbit around the text. I am not allowed to go outside, ex-orbit unless through footnotes or parenthesis (discrete strategies to overrun or spill over the circumference, taking the text somewhere other, on a detour, but always only to come back to the inside of the main topic). But what is the main topic of this text? You must excuse me if I was already digressing, already blurring the borders. So end of note: I will get back on track.
<6> So my main topic is a word. Detour. This word leads me astray towards other words that share with it a certain movement, or a tendency to movement, or something else, which I will try to uncover. I want to talk about ellipsis, about circles and about différance. Yes, of course these words are related to Jacques Derrida, as words tend to (related also in the sense of a relation through kinship). I am going to start with the essay “La différance” in the book Margins of Philosophy (1882). Reading it, I noticed detour, which caught my eye. Derrida mentions the word a few times and relates it to the workings of the pleasure and the reality principles as they are explained by Sigmund Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” However, detour has ramifications in a certain philosophical context, which Derrida doesn’t fully acknowledge. How so? To begin with, Derrida, despite what some would like to believe, does not break with the tradition of Western metaphysics. “Such a break with tradition … is the best tradition of philosophical thought” [2]. Instead, he does something much more subtle and constructive. He engages through debate and exchange with such a tradition in order to exhibit its inconsistencies and gaps.
<7> However, the omission to mention the origins of detour might also be a rather unconscious slip in the best Freudian way, rather than a willing ellipsis. Thus, I am spurred to follow this word by two similar withholdings: Derrida’s and Spivak’s [3]. In fact, in the introduction to Of Grammatology (1976), on page xliii, Spivak quotes a passage from “La différance” and she argues that
It emphasises the presence of Freud in the articulation of what comes close to becoming Derrida’s master-concept — “différance” spelled with an “a.” Let us fasten on three moments in the quotation — “differing,” “deferring,” and “detour”…
She returns to differing and deferring as anticipated, but she never returns to detour. Why? Is this an unconscious gap? A repression? Spivak, just like Derrida, only mentions Freud (a Freudian non-slip) in relation to the origin of this idea of detour, but no one else. She completely forgets about detour, left to oblivion in the pages of the introduction and to its own devices in the pages of anything else. Yet, detour can be traced back to somewhere else, somewhere that for some reason Derrida forgets or decides not to mention, to Nietzsche and Heidegger among others [4]. Through them, the tracing back of detour becomes entangled with the emergence of other words. As I continue my reading, I start noticing that some of these words have affinities with detour: exorbitant [5], ellipsis [6], circle, etc. So, before I proceed, let’s take a little etymological detour:
Detour o n. a divergence from a direct and intended route; a roundabout course. ov. make or cause to make a detour. [F detour change of direction f. detourner turn away (as DE- , TURN)]n. diversion, deviation, circuitous route or way, roundabout way, bypass ov. deviate (from), turn away (from), divert (from)
De (…) f. L. de: off, from
Tour o n. 1 a journey from place to place as a holiday. b an excursion, ramble, or walk… (2 a spell of duty on military or diplomatic service )… 3 a series of performances, matches, etc., at different places on a route through a country etc. o v. …make a tour… [ME f. OF to(u)r f. L tornus f. Gk: tornos lathe ][7]
Exorbitant (of a price, demand, etc.) grossly excessive, … [LL exorbitare (as EX-, orbita ORBIT)]
Ex… a. out, forth…d. remove or free from
Orbit …4 the eye socket… [L orbita course, track (in med L eye cavity); fem. of orbitus circular f. orbis ring] (- please bear this eye in mind for later.)
Ellipse a regular oval …[F f. L ellipsus f. Gk elleipsis f. elleipo come short f en in + leipo leave]
Ellipsis (also ellipse) 1 the omission from a sentence of words needed to complete construction or sense … 3 a set of three dots indicating an omission[8]
<8> I apologise for this seemingly irrelevant and rather tedious diversion, but etymological excavations are not unusual in a certain circuit of thinkers among whom is Derrida himself. In this way, I have introduced three words or concepts — circle, orbit and ellipsis -- which will reappear again and again in the course of this text and whose paths will cross with the names of three thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hélène Cixous, whose writings are intertwined with Derrida’s own. Also, through such detour I start to see the resemblance between these words. I could even say that these assemblages of letters and in particular detour and exorbitant, mean roughly the same thing, or at least they refer to the same movement, a sort of dislocation or removal from what is an intended trajectory, a temporal or/and spatial displacement of sorts. My emphasis is on a subtle implication of their meaning. I think that both imply an awareness of — if not a return to — what is the tour or the orbit, what is the proposed or due course. They affect a deviation, while keeping that from which they deviate in mind. Of course, one must know the direct trajectory to diverge from it, and one must know where the orbit is to be able to go off it. Thus, if you are in a forest, for example, and you are on a detour, I suspect that you are willingly abandoning the beaten track, distracted by the singing of a bird or the smell of a flower or the sight of a river. You leave your route, you go and hear the bird, smell the flowers, paddle in the water, but turning your head from time to time towards the traced path which will take you to your final destination. Also, a detour suggests a sort of leisurely, moderate pace, “as on a holiday.” You could go from A to B directly, walking fast, neglecting the scenery, or instead you could choose to take your time. As I have read Derrida, I feel this is exactly what he does. He goes on a stroll. Derrida doesn’t write philosophical treatises with the aim of going from a beginning to an end without distractions. He goes on excursions in the forest of metaphysical thinking. Maybe I am stretching this metaphor too far, but let me see if I can take it even further.
<9> If I think of the orbit as a metaphor for Western philosophy, then an ex-orbit would represent a certain movement away from this tradition, but always within it, or with the aim of returning to it, after a decentering or a deconstruction (de- again) of its concepts. A detour would be a critique of metaphysical foundations from the inside. I have the feeling that Derrida is looking for the right geometrical metaphor for the sort of writing he has envisioned, a writing that will enable him to disrupt the orbit of a whole history of metaphysical thinking. He is seeking a figure that could encompass at once spatial and temporal movements, a deviation from the philosophical tradition and especially a critique of the ontology of presence. According to Derrida, this is precisely the gravest fault philosophy has ever committed: the thinking of the meaning of being according to full presence, which is both temporal (the present) and spatial (proximity). The insistence of Derrida on writing is especially efficient in the disruption of this concept of presence. Writing relies and functions on the absence of a presence. Temporally, it produces a delay, an after-effect. Spatially, it does without the present actuality of its author. In a sense, writing even requires the writer’s death to be what it is.
How far have the lonely
stars travelled in cosmic circles since I held you
in my midnight arms [9].
<10> Derrida believes that the “‘repressive’ logic of presence” [10] has worked toward the persistent exclusion of anything that would shake philosophy’s foundations or disrupt its internal working: absence, writing, the other, etc. He defines Western metaphysics as “the ‘circle’ in which we appear to be enclosed” [11]. In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences,” Derrida criticises the circle, together with any other structure which revolves around a centre. The centre is even worse than death. It guarantees “fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude,” [12] preventing the possibility of play. It is a paralysing, stable grounding for all concepts within the structure. It gives meaning and coherence to its elements. This centre has been called by different names, but is always derivative of full presence or logos: “eidos, arche, telos,…God, man…” [13]. Thus Derrida realises the need for a rupture in this structure, the need to think of the centre not as a “fixed locus, but [as] a function” [14] to allow for the play of infinite signification. However, he cares to stress that we cannot achieve this play without the language and the concepts of philosophy, but we must establish a “metaphysical complicity” [15] to engage in a (de)constructive critique. In other words, he is recommending a little detour off the orbit/circle of metaphysics, but with the intent of never losing sight of it.
<11> Robert Smith in Derrida and Autobiography (1995) has also noticed a recurrent concern in circles and other shapes in Derrida. He writes
… as absolute non-loss and continuity, the circle symbolises presence… the analysis of the circle is sustained throughout [Derrida’s] career — as if he too were circling around it and had to keep coming back to it from an autobiographical compulsiveness — from “Ellipse” in L’ecriture et la difference, to the “alliance” in La Dissemination and elsewhere, to the circle made around the neck by tie and noose in Glas, to the encyclopedism of Hegel which he analyses, to the circumcised glans in Schibboleth, to the world-circuit of tourism and travel in Ulysses gramophone… [16]
<12> And I shall come back to Ulysses shortly. But first I would like to return to my three words and to the three names I have mentioned. I will start with ellipsis and Nietzsche. To begin with, keeping in mind what I have just said about Derrida’s aims with structure and circle, the ellipse has the advantage of being a distorted circle, but the disadvantage of having a centre. However, apart from a geometrical figure, ellipsis is also the voluntary omission of something that is supposed to be there. This suggests not only a motive or a strategy for the non-inclusion of the origins of detour in Derrida and Spivak, but it also provides a convenient play of absence and presence: what is not there — the non-written — and what is there — the three dots representing what is missing. These two meanings of ellipsis come together in Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return. Beginning from a discussion of Edmond Jabès’ The Book of Questions, Derrida moves onto Nietzsche, when he comes to the conclusion that
the return of the book is of an elliptical essence. Something invisible is missing in the grammar of this repetition. As this lack is invisible and undeterminable, as it completely redoubles and consecrates the book, once more passing through each point along its circuit, nothing had budged. And yet, all meaning is altered by this lack. Repeated, the same line is no longer exactly the same, the ring no longer has exactly the same center, the origin has played. Something is missing that would make the circle perfect… The return of the book here announces the form of the eternal return… This repetition is writing because what disappears in it is the self-identity of the origin, the self-presence of the so-called living speech. [17]
Listen to me! For I am thus and thus.
Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not! [18]
<13> So there is something missing in repetition, which makes repetition non-self-identical. What is missing is the centre or full ontological presence. Derrida clarifies this point in a book called The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, in which he investigates Nietzsche’s most autobiographical work, Ecce Homo. Derrida considers the initial part of this text in light of the eternal recurrence as explicated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is not a cosmological view of the world. Nietzsche doesn’t say that the world has and will always repeat itself unchanged (like an orbit or a circle), but he is advancing a moral obligation or a challenge to make of one’s life something one will never regret and thus will be happy to repeat again and again. However, this isn’t an identical repetition, but a selective one. Repetition “cannot be identical… without abolishing itself thereby. “[L]’anneau de l’eternel retour …. {becomes} a ‘retour eternel de l’autre’…the ring of the event…comes into being through this seal of contractual (and contracting) difference” [19]. L’autre being, in the case of Nietzsche, the other which prevents his self-identity. In Ecce Homo, he claims Ich bin der und der: I am this and this, “the both, the two, life the dead [la vie le mort],”[20] the living mother and the dead father. Nietzsche is always caught in this differential non-self-identity, which implies that the self can never be there as full presence because it is always already divided. Thus, when Nietzsche says “I write myself to myself,” he is referring to this other within himself that prevents his self-identity. Autobiography, which is supposedly an attempt at self-knowledge, turns itself into an allo-biography, because it requires a detour to the other to come back to the self: “self-identity has to be mediated though an other” [21]. When Nietzsche writes in the first person, when Nietzsche signs his name in his own signature by writing his own autobiography, the “I” is not constituted yet. He does not exist yet. Only when the signature returns back to him via the eternal return is it finally validated. This countersignature affirms the first. I am sure Derrida must have used the example of travellers’ cheques somewhere. When you first get one of these cheques, you sign it. Then, when you later present it at the cashier, you have to authenticate your own signature with another of your own signature — a countersignature — otherwise the legal and economical value of the cheque is null. So the countersignature that returns to Nietzsche when he writes himself to himself validates the first by repetition.
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Cristina Masters, Cyborg soldiers and militarised masculinities /via wildcat2030
Auto reblog for that “site/cite” - I think I despair…
One of the defining features that is often given of cultural studies, on which it is proposed that everyone in cultural studies will agree, is that it is a politically committed field.2 It was certainly in political terms that Stuart Hall positioned his own activities as a teacher, writer and academic. Speaking at the landmark 1990 conference ‘Cultural Studies Now and In the Future’ of his time at the Birmingham Centre in the 1970s, Hall remarked that ‘Gramsci’s account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do… we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual’. And this is so even though, as Hall admits, the ‘problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found’ (Hall 1992a: 281). Now anyone attempting to translate this kind of politically committed role into the present historical conjuncture is immediately confronted by some rather difficult and challenging questions. Does the hope, for instance, that, in Hall’s words, ‘there could be, sometime, a movement which would be larger than the movement of petit-bourgeois intellectuals’, continue to be one we can actually carrying on ‘living with’, given that we currently occupy a period in which the victory of capitalism’s free-market economy and defeat of any political alternatives to neo-liberalism seem somewhat assured (1992a: 288)?
Even if the rise of such a movement is still considered to be a possibility, is any historical alliance of progressive forces today really going to be discernible as the kind of radical political project with which cultural studies, and the work of Hall and the Birmingham School in particular, has traditionally been associated: that of the British New Left and the ‘new social movements’ (feminism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, gay liberation and so on)? Or is it more likely to adopt the kind of ‘disorganised’, decentralised, multitudinous form that appears to characterise the new wave of large-scale, ‘anti-capitalist’ and anti-war protests that have emerged over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s? In which case, is the development of a new form of politics and a new political project not required if cultural studies is to retain its sense of political engagement in the twenty-first century - something perhaps more along the lines of that conceived by Agamben (1993), Derrida (1994) and Hardt and Negri (2004) in terms of the ‘coming community’, the ‘new international’ and the ‘multitude’ respectively? And is cultural studies something that can connect with or otherwise assist such a ‘movement of movements’ anyway? It certainly doesn’t seem to have had much success in this respect so far (as Jeremy Gilbert’s chapter in this volume makes clear).
Now, for many, the raising of such questions is no doubt challenging enough given the importance of Birmingham School, New Left, new social movements style politics to cultural studies’ sense of its own identity. Yet difficult though they may be, these questions still all have their basis in a fundamental premise which underpins cultural studies but which, despite (or more likely because of) this, too often remains unaddressed. This is the assumption that historical and social movements of some kind, whether organised or disorganised, recognisable by cultural studies as traditionally conceived or not, do indeed continue to be possible or at least desirable. In fact, we would go so far as to argue that the continuing resort on the part of much of the left in general, and cultural studies in particular, to such progressive historical narratives (even as, like Hall, they often simultaneously express certain reservations about the wisdom of doing so) is actually part of a far larger problem. It is a situation summed up most incisively by Wendy Brown, when she draws attention to the way in which, while many on the left have:
lost confidence in a historiography bound to a notion of progress or to any other purpose, we have coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going. Similarly, while both sovereignty and right have suffered severe erosions of their naturalistic epistemological and ontological bases in modernity, we have not replaced them as sources of political agency and sites of justice claims. Personal conviction and political truth have lost their moorings in firm and level epistemological ground, but we have not jettisoned them as sources of political motivation or as sites of collective fealty. So we have ceased to believe in many of the constitutive premises undergirding modern personhood, statehood, and constitutions, yet we continue to operate politically as if these premises still held, and as if the political-cultural narratives based on them were intact. (Brown 2001: 3-4)
It is consequently crucial, for Brown, that those of us who still consider ourselves as being of the left think about how we might ‘develop historical political consciousness in terms other than progress, articulate our political investments without notions of teleology and naturalized desire, and affirm political judgement in terms that depart from moralism and conviction’ (2001: 4). Brown gets right to the heart of the problem when she asks:
If the legitimacy of liberal democracy depends on certain narratives and foundational presuppositions, including progress, rights, and sovereignty, what happens when those narratives and assumptions are challenged, or indeed simply exposed in their legitimating function? What kinds of political cultures are produced by this destabilization of founding narratives and signal terms? … How do we live in these broken narratives, when nothing has taken their place? (2001: 14)
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The Coming Insurrection (via typicaltaylor)
theguywhoinventedfire writes: This is what I plan to open my discussion on the cosmopolitan ethos with tomorrow. before launching into a tirade against post modern and post idelogocial doctrines that have wooed the university - the peddling of superficial ideas and narratives which allow academics to sit in comfortable offices peddling a few journal articles each year - never actually practising what is preached - instead exploiting themselves through the turning of their intellectual property into another capital generating service. prostitution
“We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists’ clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.
If there is one reason things “digital” might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.
It’s not “the digital” that marks the future of the humanities, it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.”
source via hacking the academy, h/t butterflyhunt
Don’t be marginal.
via @alun, who calls it “like being let loose in a sweet-shop”
“From open-access journals to research-review blogs, networked knowledge has made science more accessible to more people around the globe than we could have imagined 20 years ago.” /via @endlesscities
— Mark Laffey: The red herring of economism, p. 468 /via theguywhoinventedfire, zettelkasten
from ‘Knowing Capitalism’ by N. J. Thrift, p. 48
“It was as a candidate for the Ph.D. at Harvard that I first encountered the Cult of Dullness. Since boyhood I had aspired to be a writer. So with my first graduate research paper I tried to write as well as I could. My professor warned me gently that although he himself did not object to a well-written paper, his colleagues might be put off. They might suspect that I was not really committed to dull writing and thus not a suitable candidate for the Ph.D.
“I encountered the problem again when I sent my doctoral dissertation to a typist to have it type up for presentation to my readers, who would approve or disapprove it. The typist called shortly to express her concern. It did not read like a Ph.D. Was I sure it would be acceptable? What was the problem, I asked. Well, she was enjoying reading it, and that made her uneasy on my account. She was concerned that it might not be accepted. It was not as dull as she felt it ought to be.
