Transcript The psychic life of academic feminism: HEY [PPT 683.00KB]

The Psychic Life of Academic Feminism
Neo-Liberal Haunting?
Professor Valerie Hey
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer
The Story So Far ? From Polyanna to
Cassandra?
The Possibility of Crafting New Rationalities
3 Rationalities:
•
1960s liberal humanism –
renaissance or ‘the glad game’
•
1980s- present neo-liberal realism
•
Feminist Futures ?
•
‘We inherit the future, not just the
past’ (Barad, 2010: 257).
The Present Tense
Affective Landscapes
Knowledge about/from the inside
 The Death of Critique - Bronwyn Davies
 Killing Thinking – Mary Evans
 Neo-liberal Cruelties – Rosalind Gill
 Micro-politics & Disqualified Discourses – Louise
Morley
 The Norm of Carelessness – Kathleen Lynch
 ‘To be in agreement with’ – ‘to look, to not turn
away’ – ‘to resist, to resist the facts’ Thomas
Hirschhorn – sticking with difficulty Lauren Berlant.
Academic Affects & Agency :
Navigating Academic Noir
• F
'My point is not that
everything is bad, but that
everything is dangerous, which
is not exactly the same as bad.
If everything is dangerous,
then we always have
something to do. So my
position leads not to apathy
but to hyper - and pessimistic
– activism. I think that the
ethico-political choice we have
to make every day is to
determine which is the main
danger.
(Foucault,1983)
But what kinds of ‘resistant’
politics?
 ‘Obscene Gifts’ – public potlach art of Thomas Hischhorn
‘Revealing the ‘Real’. (Zizek, 1997) = Capitalism versus ‘decaf
resistance’.(Contu, 2008)
 But where can we produce our publics? Given ‘private’
institutionalised academic production.
 Does our immaterial labour matter?
 Hyper productivity – REF productivity functions as alienated –
- form of a commodity fetish not least in the teleology of
‘impact’
 Sveikism, Footdragging, flannelling, pretending ignorance,
skrimshanking and false compliance‘ characterise the teammanged workplace (from Fleming and Sewell, 2002).
The Good Soldier Schweik – overcompliance
https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=BwWexJ72MbI
Ambivalent Disgust
Thinking in a State of Emergency
Cruel Optimism :
‘To phrase ‘the object of desire’ as a cluster of promises is to
allow us to encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our
attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as
explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, all
attachments are optimistic‘
Depressive Realism :
‘There is no collective life without norms, the question isn’t
how to become post-normative as such but how to respond to
the urgency to engender other kinds of anchors or magnets
for new social relations and modes of life’
(Interview with Lauren Berlant 2010)
Toxic Correlations/ Access and
Social Identities
 4% of UK poorer young people enter higher education
(David et al, 2009; Hills Report, 2009).
 5% of this group enter UK’s top 7 universities (HESA, 2010).
 Universities = hereditary domain of financially advantaged
(Gopal, 2010).
 Opportunity hording by privileged social groups? (Morley,
2012)
Resistance/ Imagining
Alternative Universities
• Tent City University/ Bank of
Ideas, London, Occupy
Movement, UK
(dreaming another world awake)
• Unitierra, Mexico
(de-schooling, community projects)
• UNILA (University of Latin
American Integration), Brazil.
(state finance for LA issues)
• QUEST University, Canada
(private, inquiry-based, block
teaching, no departments).
27 J
Feminist (Academic) Futures?
Living in the time of the never arrived
Suspension of now for the next
 Slowing down as a virtue