The Para-Academic Handbook
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THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK A TOOLKIT FOR MAKING-LEARNING- CREATING-ACTING edited by Alex Wardrop & Deborah Withers HammerOn Press THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK: A TOOLKIT FOR MAKING-LEARNING-CREATING-ACTING © Individual authors, 2014 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2014 by HammerOn Press Bristol, England http://www.hammeronpress.net ISBN-13: 978-0-9564507-5-3 ISBN-10: 0956450753 Cover photo Arise by Rachael House 2013 www.rachaelhouse.com Cover design by Graeme Maguire/ Eva Megias www.graememaguire.com Typeset by Eva Megias www.evamegias.com A CKNOWLEDGEMEN T S We would like to thank all the contributors, Gary Rolfe, Isabelle Stengers, Ruth Barcan, Sam Thomas, Ika Willis, Rob Crowe, Eva Megias, Rachael House, Sue Tate, Hannah Austin, Graeme Maguire, Maud Perrier, Natalie Brown, Genevieve Lively and all those who support para-academic movements of knowledge making, learning, creating, thinking and acting. C ON T EN T S 1 WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW Gary Rolfe 6 RECLAIMING WHAT HAS BEEN DEVASTATED Deborah Withers & Alex Wardrop 14 A PROCRASTINATION Alex Wardrop 20 NOTES ON THE PREFIX Alexandra M. Kokoli 31 SPACES OF POSSIBILITY: PEDAGOGY AND POLITICS IN A CHANGING INSTITUTION Lena Wånggren and Maja Milatovic 39 INTERVIEW WITH JOYCE CANAAN 61 A PEDAGOGICS OF UNLEARNING Éamonn Dunne & Michael O’Rourke 71 EMBOLDENED AND UNTERRIFIED Christian Garland 81 A LESSON FROM WARWICK The Provisional University 87 BEYOND THE DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY Kelvin Mason & Mark Purcell 107 DECENTRING KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION Laura Sterry 121 EDGE, EMPOWERMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY Tom Henfrey 140 HIGHER DEGREE (UN)CONSCIOUSNESS Emma Durden,Eliza Govender and Sertanya Reddy 164 CROWDFUNDING OF ACADEMIC BOOKS Oliver Leistert & Theo Röhle 175 PARA-ACADEMIC PUBLISHING AS PUBLIC-MAKING Paul Boshears 189 AN ACTIVIST-ACADEMIC’S REFLECTIONS Louise Livesey 206 NO MORE STITCH-UPS! Dr Charlotte Cooper 232 SIMULTANEOUS LIFE AND DEATH Georgina Huntley 237 ON THE ACADEMY’S POINT OF EXTERIORITY Fintan Neylan 243 THE PROS AND CONS OF PARA-ACADEMIA Tony Keen 250 REFLECTIONS OF AN INCIDENTAL MAVERICK Paul Hurley 256 OTHERWISE ENGAGED B.J. Epstein 263 MARGINAL INQUIRIES Margaret Mayhew 291 EPICUREAN RAIN Eileen A. Joy 301 RESOURCES WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW Gary Rolfe I have recently been struggling to find a word to describe the growing movement of resistance towards the ever more corporate mission of the university. I toyed at first with calling this emerging body of people, ideas and practices the Subversity in recognition of its largely subterranean nature. But it is no longer an underground movement; the resistance may not be immediately apparent, it may not advertise itself overtly, but it is there, unseen in plain sight, functioning side-by-side with the corporate mission. I finally settled on the Paraversity, which I described as a subversive, virtual community of dissensus that exists alongside and in parallel to the corporate university.1 Had I thought of it at the time, I might well have also coined the term ‘para-academics’ for those individuals who work across and against the corporate agenda of what Bill Readings called the ruined university,2 whose mission is, as far as I can see, the generation and sale of information (the so-called research agenda) and the exchange of student fees for degree certificates (the teaching agenda). However, it seems that I have been beaten to it by The Para-Academic Handbook. The corporate university is not going away, but neither is the paraversity; in fact, I would go so far as to say that we are all para-academics now. Of course, when I use the word ‘we’, I do so with certain qualifications. Firstly, the ‘we’ I refer to is those who are likely to read this book and others like it: we dissenters; we who feel disenfranchised by what our 1 2 the para-academic handbook universities have become; we who simply cannot passively go along with the doxa, the general consensus of what a university is nowadays for. And, in any case, to ask what a university is for is completely to miss the point. As Michael Oakeshott put it, ‘A university is not a machine for achieving a particular purpose or producing a particular result; it is a manner of human activity’.3 This at least should give us hope.We must resist at all costs the idea of the university as a machine: a university should not be defined by what it produces (information, graduates) but by what we (para-) academics do and by how we relate and respond to one another. We (that is, we para-academics) must resist becoming cogs in a corporate machine; to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, we are each of us separate and independent ‘little machines’ whose operations are defined by our connections to one another.4 I repeat: not cogs but individual machines, and machines that are defined not by what we produce but by how we produce it; by process rather than product; quality rather than quantity. As I said, this should give us hope. If the university is, as Oakeshott suggests, ‘a manner of human activity’, then we can change the university by changing how we think and behave as its constituent parts. Which brings me to the second qualification on my use of the word ‘we’. Bill Readings warns that the university is in danger of becoming ‘an autonomous collective subject who is authorised to say “we” and to terrorise those who do not, or cannot, speak in that “we”’. 5 I suspect that some academics and others who are reading these words will, like me, have already felt the terror of the collective ‘we’. Thewe to which I refer, then, is not the ‘we’ of consensus, of compromise in the name of getting on (in both senses of the term), but describes what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a plurality of singularities, or what Readings refers to as a community of dissensus.6 Dissensus is not dissent, it is not the opposite of consent, but a special case of it. The practice of dissensus is a commitment to thinking alongside and in parallel to one another with no pressure to reach agreement; indeed, the purpose of thinking in parallel is to keep discussion and debate open and alive precisely by avoiding coming to agreement. WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW 3 A community of dissensus is a community of thinkers committed to formulating questions rather than providing answers and to keeping those questions alive, active and productive for as long as possible. A community of dissensus is a community of researchers, scholars and students (that is, of para-academics) committed to asking questions of one another, to listening and respecting each other’s views and ideas, and to describing, explaining and advocating their own ideas with no expectations or obligations to agree. A community of dissensus is a community that consents not to be bound by consensus. The para-doxical (that is, parallel to the doxa, to received opinion) space in which we para-academics operate should not be thought of as either inside or outside of the orthodoxical university. In fact, it would be misleading to think of the paraversity as existing in space at all. As academics, we all of course occupy a physical space within the university; we are each, to some extent, tethered to a discipline, a department, a curriculum, a course. However, to the extent that we are also para-academics, we are also individual little machines, free to roam physically, intellectually and emotionally. Universities organise and understand themselves as linear, unidirectional tree-like hierarchies in which we are leaves attached to twigs, attached to branches, attached to a central trunk. In contrast, the paraversity takes the form of a rhizome, an underground, tangled root structure in which, as Deleuze and Guattari tell us, any point can be connected to anything other, and must be.7 It is the duty of the little para-academic machine, then, to connect with anything other, to plug in, to become entangled with as many people and projects as possible. This multiplicity of singularities which makes up the paraversity is reflected in the content of thisPara-Academic Handbook. These are mostly singular visions and singular projects. That is not to say that they are undertaken in isolation from what is going on around them; indeed, many of them are delightfully tangled and woven into the tissue of the orthodoxical university. However, they make no concessions to the doxa and no compromises in the face of the terror of the collective ‘we’. You do not need to have read this handbook to know this to be true; you need 4 the para-academic handbook only look at the contents page which will also, I am sure, suggest to you that what you are holding is not only a handbook, but also a headbook and a heartbook. We, the plurality of singularities reading this book, the we who reject the doxa in favour of the para-doxa, who think, create and scheme together in parallel without the need or desire to converge, who resist the terror of the collective and the pressure to be productive; we are all para-academics.