The Wicked City

Posted on 12 Aug 2021 by Clive

The published version of ‘The wicked city: Genealogies of interdisciplinary hubris in urban thought’ is now available online at Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. (Let me know, and I’ll happily send the PDF – here is the pre-publication draft). The paper explores the revival of interest in the concept of wicked problems over the last couple of decades, and how this intersects with the breakout of ‘metrophilia’ (i.e. the widespread interest in the idea that cities and urban practices of all sorts are the key to ‘solving’ all sorts of global problems). Methodologically, the paper is another exercise in the empirical analysis of social thought – more specifically, it works through the idea of tracking ‘ascriptions of responsibility’ as a way of taking problematizations as an object of analysis. This kind of analysis is developed on the understanding that rather than taking it for granted that everyone is talking about ‘cities’ these days because loads of people – more of them, and a greater proportion of them – live in ‘cities’, it might be worthwhile cultivating a kind of ‘epistemic surprise’, as Foucault had it, when faced with the proliferation of ‘true discourse’ about urban life in the twenty-first century: “a true thing’s reality is never the factual reason why the truth of this thing is said in a discourse.” (It’s best too not to reduce the appearance of such a thing in discourse to some version of ‘ideology’).

My discussion of the wicked problems idea in this paper is specifically focused on its relation to what I refer to as ‘urban thought’, but this is just one part of a wider trend of renewed interest in this concept. A recent PhD by Anke Gruendel locates renewed interest in the emergence of governmental rationalities indebted to design-thinking – and includes a fascinating discussion of how the intellectual debates in the 1960s out of which the wicked problems idea was developed included discussions between Horst Rittel, the originator of the idea, and Jürgen Habermas: Anke’s account demonstrates the degree to which the idea of wicked problems is centrally implicated with core questions of critical democratic theory.

Review Symposium: Linda Zerilli’s A Democratic Theory of Judgment

Posted on 23 Aug 2019 by Clive

I seem to have spent a lot of time in the past year writing pieces for book review forums – pieces about other people’s books, and pieces about things people have written about my book, The Priority of Injustice. The first of these forums to go public, a series of commentaries on Linda Zerilli’s wonderful A Democratic Theory of Judgment, is perhaps the most interesting (and easily accessible), in so far as it takes the dialogic form that book review forums seek to perform in print/text, and extends it through an online medium. Syndicate is described as a ‘living network of scholarship in the humanities’, and their symposium on Zerilli’s book is now live, through to mid-September – the format involves one commentary being published a week, with a response from Linda, and further comments added as and when. My commentary is due to be published next week (it focusses on Zerilli’s contribution to a series of critical debates about ‘affect theory‘).

The Means and Ends of Higher Education

Posted on 10 Mar 2018 by Clive

Things I Learnt With Colleagues Last Week

Week 4, and it looks like the combined stupidity of the UUK and lack of preparedness and care by individual University senior leaderships before the current UCU strike action started means that lots of University staff in the UK are still out on strike, not teaching students, not librarian-ing, not providing professional support to researchers, not, public-engaging, and not doing lots of other things they’d rather be doing. That does mean more “learnable moments” for those of us on strike, whether through talking to our colleagues on the picket line (or meeting new ones) or through tweets and re-tweets and blogs. I’ve decided to not have any shame about only now discovering things about my pension, or how the University I work at (NOT for) is run, and instead take my ongoing journey of discovery as an indictment of the very system we are all realising we are part of. After all, none of what we are learning about how the USS pension system has been undermined, or how this is related to the systematic financialization of University funding, or how University governance has been rendered obscure and unaccountable, is actually a secret. Some of it people have known about, and lots of this is actually a focus of robust research. But who has the time to keep up with all this? And who imagined that those representatives of the institutions that one might think were meant to act in the best interests of those who work for Universities would turn out to be, well, less than honest and trustworthy and competent, if not deliberately misleading?

A few things have caught my eye in the last few days, precisely because the focus of my attention has been directed by my colleagues at better understanding the economics of pensions systems and the business models of Universities and because I have had the time to pursue in more depth these issues (there’s a lesson here, surely, concerning what it says about the Efficient Market Hypothesis that it is only when employees are on strike that they have enough time to actually begin to even imagine being able to access all of the information they are supposed by adherents to that abstract principle to have at their disposal in order to function as rational fools).

The first was a great, succinct blog post by Ewan McGaughey explaining the relationship between the planned gutting of the USS pension scheme and shifts in the nature of University governance. As he puts it, the plan to shift risk away from Universities by rendering all ‘pension’ support into ‘Defined Contribution’ schemes in the name of flexibility and choice amounts to recommending a ‘Die Quickly’ Plan. Now, one thing we’ve all learned is that this whole programme of de-risking is related to a broader shift in the strategizing of UK Universities, whereby the urge to reduce pension support as liabilities is intrinsically linked to the imperative to diversify sources of funding in a context of reductions in direct government support. Now, the logics of financialization in higher education are perhaps longer established, and subject to research scrutiny, in a North American context than in the UK, but it is worth remembering that that’s a different context. Thomas Hale provides a short summary of ‘allure of the capital markets’ for Universities at the FT’s Alphaville site (you have to register, but it’s free after that, and totally worth it – he’s been writing about higher education for a while now). It’s good to keep in view the degree to which these transformations in the strategies of Universities are structured by a firm commitment by government since 2010 to restructure the economics of higher education in fundamental ways. The relationship between the pensions dispute and this trend towards financialization is captured in what now, two weeks later, reads like a very old statement from the Vice Chancellor of Exeter, according to which the costs of continuing to support the existing pension system would involve “a reduction to our resources, and would limit our ability to deliver our key missions around research and education as well as our ability to invest in, and improve, the facilities we provide.” This zero-sum representation of what is at stake in this dispute – between investing in uniformly high quality pay and conditions for staff versus a rather obscure sense of education and research ‘missions’ that centre on ‘facilities’ – is, in fact, simply a talking point proffered by the UUK for widespread use. That’s just one of the things we’ve all learnt because of the work of Gail Davies and Felicity Callard and others in reconstructing the explicit efforts of ‘The Voice of Universities’ to legitimise the shift from collective pension support to individualised “Die Quickly” savings plans. (And Exeter’s VC has more recently reiterated the same argument).

The implicit view that supporting pensions is a liability that gets in the way of delivering key missions rests on a broadly shared imperative for Universities to be able to demonstrate that they are enhancing “student experience” – where this means access to high quality work spaces, to fantastic sports facilities, accommodation, high-tech teaching spaces, and the like. All of those things are crucial to making a University the space that it is meant to, no doubt. The interesting question is how it is that we have arrived at a situation in which all those material things are rendered affordable only by drastically restructuring academic labour markets in increasingly bifurcated ways while also streamlining ‘academic support’ professions.

The trelationship between the substantive issues behind the current pension dispute and the shift towards capital investment strategies amongst Universities is neatly captured by Philip Roscoe, discussing the origins of the strike in decisions made by UUK in 2017: “In the summer of last year USS asked employers – via Universities UK – whether they wanted more or less risk. It might seem a silly question, for out of context everyone wants less risk. But universities have a particular agenda. USS is what is known as a ‘last man standing’ scheme, meaning that should institutions start to fail, risk would pile up on those still operating. And university managers, now thoroughly versed in the language, practices and salaries of business, are obsessed with avoiding risk. Risk has practical implications, for under current accounting rules employers must carry full pension liabilities on their balance sheet. This affects administrators who, seeing themselves primarily as curators of rankings in a market-driven system, are diverting all the funds they can into an arms race of building and infrastructure investment. Universities can borrow very cheaply – often at less than the cost of inflation, and almost free money is too good a ticket to be passed up. But lenders are not going to offer such preferential terms to borrowers with huge pension liabilities; for a university, the covenant of USS begins to loom as an enormous blot on an otherwise shiny credit rating.”

The integral link between the pensions dispute and the financialization of University expansion plans involves a search for new sources of revenue, in a context of declining direct funding from government and uncertainty over the reliability of student fee income, the real value of which is declining year on year anyway. (Let’s not forget, in the midst of realising just how badly managed British Universities have been, that the changing political economy of higher education has its source in the determination of Tory-led governments since 2010 to try to make higher education conform to ridiculous models of markets and competition. Universities’ turn to capital investment programmes as a way of seeking enhance ‘student experience’ is an index of a motivated effort to enforce a competitive spirit on higher education institutions, and the move to ‘de-risk’ pensions liabilities is a central element of the resulting and still emergent business model in which getting better loan rates is the driving imperative.)

The transformation of the economics of higher education represents an opportunity for growth for certain fields of private investment, and that’s why there is so much consultancy by the likes of Barclays and KPMG flying around – it serves as a way of introducing potential investors to potential borrowers. Here is pwc summarising the new landscape of higher education funding: “In an increasingly competitive market where all Universities are striving to offer their students, staff and visitors the most positive and rewarding experience possible, the quality of the built environment, the accommodation offering, and the delivery of estates services are playing a more critical role than ever before. In response to this, Universities are developing exciting and ambitious estates plans that propose significant investment in new facilities, and innovative ways of delivering services.” Now, the key thing about this emergent field is that buildings and facilities require long-term financing, and traditional lenders – banks – “are unable to write loans with the same duration and pricing levels of the past”. All of this is a source of some excitement: “New sources of finance, as well as new commercial modes for securing this finance, are therefore needed and are being employed across a variety of projects in the sector”. As NatWest nicely put it, capital debt markets “have capitalised on the lack of bank liquidity for longer-duration financing”.

The most publicly visible example of Universities turning to debt capital markets takes the form of individual institutions – ones as very different as De Montfort and Cambridge – issuing their own bonds (an instrument of indebtedness sold by the issuer to the holder, e.g. what governments do). This trend serves as a way of securing long-term finance that bank lenders are not prepared to extend. But the logics of financialization are not only evident amongst institutions who have leveraged credit in this way. For example, the University of Exeter’s financial strategy is quite prudent – the University is “relatively highly geared”, that is, it’s focussed on paying down relatively high levels of debt accrued from past investments. This is one reason, of course, why pension commitments show up as a risk (not just a liability) for this type of institution. For Exeter, “Pensions” are listed ahead of “Impact of the EU Referendum June 2016” when it comes to discussing financial risks: “The settlement of the USS 2017 actuarial valuation is a key risk, both financially and in terms of industrial relations, with the national trade unions agitating to protect current pension benefits. Current expectation is that the valuation will be settled within the current funding envelope, without increasing costs to the employer or employee but the likelihood that future pension benefits will have to be curtailed is high.” That was written a year or so ago I guess.

Of course the idea that pensions are ‘a material liability’ is just technical vocabulary, it’s not necessarily ripe for deconstruction. But when financial balance-sheets become ‘enveloped’, shall we say, in a wider process of actuarial de-riskification then the idea of pensions as liabilities gets translated into the idea of pensions as a risk, and helps to generate the search for securing the ‘resilience‘ in higher education financing.

Now, you might think that if you are already busy paying down lots of debt, you’d calm down about taking on a lot more. Well… the University of Exeter actually has an ambitious future capital investment strategy (‘Iconic Buildings on what used to be a Car Park’, for short). Exeter’s Capital Strategy proclaims “The next ten years will see us invest £428.5M in our campuses, estate and infrastructure. We are building the estate we need to deliver world-class research and an internationally excellent education, accommodating our students and our world leading academics in exceptional teaching, learning and research spaces.” As I said, there’ll be less car parking space as a result. And it’s not quite clear, from the outside (that is, for those working at this University) where this money is meant to come from. This investment strategy also sits alongside the University’s “People Strategy’, which has the sub-heading of ‘Attract, Perform, Retain’ – I’m not sure how any of those aims is meant to be enhanced by undermining University employees’ pension provision which, as UCU members have helpfully reconstructed over the last week or so, has been systematically pursued by British University senior management for a while now.

Exeter is certainly a good an example of the recent spending spree on new buildings that characterises British higher education, a phenomenon that is rooted in a widely shared understanding that this is the secret to attracting students. And if building buildings is crucial to recruiting students, then in turn servicing the debt that finances that building depends on being able to guarantee future student income (an aside: one of the things that working through the logics of this dispute does underscore is just how important teaching students remains to the changing meaning of ‘the University’, including ‘research intensive’ ones). In his discussion, Hale helpfully identifies just how important rankings are to this process of financialization, playing two related roles in mediating demand of “student-consumers” and in “the overall marketing process of debt issuance” (i.e. in reassuring investors that Universities looking for credit are actually any good). Rankings are, of course, just one part of the ‘avalanche of numbers’ that has swamped HE – loads of ‘data’ is used to manage Universities internally so that universities can act in certain ways externally, as it were, for accountability and justification purposes for sure, but also to establish and maintain institutional credit worthiness (remember that next time you are congratulated for achieving a better position in a methodologically dodgy league table). But more precisely, rankings and league tables are now built into systems for finessing the calculation of the risks of different sorts of assets, liabilities, and both estate investments and human capital.

Needless to say, this sort of estate-led expansion of HE is not without its controversies.

It should be said that developing expansive capital investment strategies does not only involve individual Universities directly raising capital through bond issues. Again, pwc is helpful here: “We are, however, seeing significant interest from certain large investors to increase their exposure to the higher education sector through property-related income that is backed by a strong covenant”. What is being referred to here is the turn to using “lease based structures” that allow Universities to access capital with long maturities indirectly (and therefore not messing up the balance-sheet). That line about large investors ‘exposing’ themselves to the HE sector is, of course, meant to be ironic: it’s not really the investors that are exposed in these deals, which actually depend on the assumption that investing in University estate is a safe bet. This second form of ‘innovative’ higher education financing through the credit markets involves Universities partnering up with specialist financial companies, of which University Partnership Programme (UPP) is the most visible in the UK. UPP is a University accommodation developer, that provides to Universities ‘special purpose vehicles’. Basically, they raise the capital for Universities and build and run student accommodation, and ownership of the buildings only passes on to Universities when the original debt is paid back (that might sound familiar). UPP describe what they do in the following way: “Our vision is to deliver the very best student experiences, in partnership with great universities. Our mission is to create exceptional academic infrastructure and support services in partnership. We design and develop high quality, affordable, student accommodation, academic infrastructure and support services. Our unique partnerships enable universities to make best use of their assets, freeing up university resources and improving services to students.” That last bit about ‘freeing-up’ resources is important, because this way of financing building projects allows Universities to keep the costs of investment off their balance sheets – thereby enhancing their on-going borrowing strategies. Nothing to worry about there then.

It’s worth slowing down a moment, and recognizing that the emergence of this debt-fuelled model of higher education is rapidly evolving – until very recently Universities were able to raise capital on favourable terms because of an implicit assumption that they were in the last resort guaranteed against failure by government. That’s no longer such a wise assumption. Government now not only seeks to facilitate new entrants into HE but says out loud it will not automatically prop-up a financially failing University. This effort to enforce marketisation is one reason why it is important to differentiate between arguments that HE is currently an imperfectly functioning market that could be made more perfect, and an argument about why it might not be a good idea to imagine that it’s sensible to imagine it should or could be in the first place. Of course, Universities remain very heavily dependent on government funding in all sorts of ways, primarily in terms of credit-extended to fund student fees as well as direct grants and research funding. It’s not clear that the model of financialization of higher education upon which the trashing of my pension has been premised is actually even sustainable.

And it’s worth noting, in the middle of all this, just how variable the subject of ‘The Student’ has become. It’s easy to bemoan the idea that students are increasingly treated as consumers, but it in fact students are figured in various ways in contemporary higher education policy and strategy: as future recruits, they serve as security against which Universities can secure loans; they are quite publicly presented, amazingly, as superficial air-heads who are easily dazzled by ‘shiny buildings’ when making life-changing decisions; they are expected to be only ever motivated as utility-maximisers by the promise of future earnings in their choices and expectations and satisfactions (giving rise to a weird sense of what ‘vocational‘ means in education, which is reduced to quite instrumental ideas about value for money; which doesn’t leave much space for the idea of a calling, a passion, a life’s worth of mission); and, rather importantly given the debt-leveraged nature of all this building work, as reliable rent-payers. And this disaggregation of ‘The Student’ into a dispersed range of abstract singularities facilitates in turn the re-aggregation of “student voice” and “student experience”, always and only ever spoken-for by University managers.

It’s Not Neoliberalism!

Now, at this point, I want to step sideways and make what might appear to be an arcane theoretical point: I want to say out loud that I think none of this can be helpfully analysed with reference to extant conceptualisations of neoliberalism. My reason for saying this here is because I have made this case on a couple of occasions as contributions to local UCU-related teach-outs in the last week or so, so I thought as a matter of good faith I should reiterate the argument here too. The framing of the wider context for this dispute routinely falls back on the terms of a popularised discourse of ‘the neoliberal University’ set against an idea of Universities as a public good that has come to define a whole space of critical imagination for the academic left and beyond. It’s worth slowing down a moment and considering what difference it makes to think about higher education as a public good or as a means of achieving the public good – and noticing that in neither case are market mechanisms necessarily inimical to desired collective outcomes. I happen to think that the analysis of processes of the marketisation, financialization, and consumerisation of higher education in the UK needs to be freed from the weight of the theoretical edifice of critical discourses of ‘neoliberalism’ (and I think this not just for academic reasons but also because I think it contributes to bad political strategy). I don’t want to rehearse a lengthy academic argument here, so I will try to be quick: leaving aside the complete incoherence of ‘neoliberal’ as either an explanatory or descriptive term, and the fact that all critical theories of neoliberalism tend to suffer from a somewhat unhealthy identification with their putative object of analysis (this is related to the methodological basis of most social science research on neoliberalism, which for all the talk of ‘political-economy’ tends to be based on fairly simplistic forms of discourse analysis (without even admitting it) and interviews with elite actors; or, for those late to the game, it is related to having no regard for the empirical at all, preferring to simply show the normative inadequacies of a set of theoretical propositions that are presented as having already been perfectly realised in the world). To cut a long story short, prevalent theories of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ – whether the carpet theory of roll-back and roll-out variegated neoliberalization, or those of a more sophisticated poststructuralist variety, turn on stark contrasts between states and markets, or between the political and the economic – or, at a deeper level, between bad individualism and virtuous sociality (there are broader issues here about what kind of social theory is at work in critical analyses of ‘neoliberalism’, which tend to be reliant on functionalist theories of the state and of ‘subjectivity’, and devoid of effective understandings of the rationalities of action) .

There are at least three reasons why this whole framework of analysis doesn’t really help in analysing what we are all learning about the political economy of higher education through our involvement in this dispute. They all deserve more attention than I can muster here, but I’ll mention each in turn:

First, it disallows the possibility of any positive knowledge of the economic (at best delegating that knowledge to a tradition of Marxist analysis that is certainly worth taking very seriously). And if there is one thing we’ve all learnt these last couple of weeks, it’s that it’s really useful to be able to know about the economics of finance.
Second, as already intimated, risk the central theme linking the use of rankings, pensions as liabilities, and the financing of capital investment (again, that’s what Gail Davies and Felicity Callard have been excavating). And risk is quite central to modern concepts and practices of public life, in a way often underestimated by critical theories. There really is something called the ‘The new risk agenda‘ that is being embedded in bought-in, consultant-led higher education strategising, management and administration. It’s a world in which future pension liabilities show up as a financial risk while leveraged on- and off- balance indebtedness doesn’t, no-one takes seriously the risk of undermining the professional confidence of University staff in senior leadership, and all those flakey metrics are used to make it appear that future student recruitment is a lock-in. There is certainly a debate to be had about ‘the privatization of risk‘, although that’s not quite what is involved here – it’s more like a process in which privatised models of risk, via actuarial practices and the operations of debt markets, have become integral to the delivery of new understandings of the ‘public benefits’ of HEIs.
Third, and picking up on this suggestion, entrenched critical discourses of neoliberalism find it very difficult to acknowledge that the marketisation and financialization of higher education involves the reconfiguration of the relationship between the means and ends of the public dimensions of higher education, rather than the diminution of the public qualities of University life in the face of unrelenting privatisation (the values of efficiency, accountability, freedom and choice that legitimise that reconfiguration are, after all, no less public values than, say, equality or justice). It is presumed that market mechanisms – in this case financialized practices – can only ever undermine properly public values (and it’s never explained why this infectious relation cannot work in the other direction as well).

The example of pension provision, which is what our dispute centres on, should remind us that there is no necessary reason why private means cannot be used to secure public goods (in that respect, Adam Smith remains a rather insightful theorist of modern public life). The history of pension provision in the UK from the early 20th century until the introduction of George Osborne’s “Freedom and Choice’ reforms in 2015 illustrates that it’s perfectly possible to combine private markets for investments with specific tax regimes to deliver welfare outcomes.

Should Universities Calm Down?

I guess my point is simply that higher education isn’t a public good – there are multiple public goods associated with higher education (and they might actually be proliferating even as the means of achieving them is being narrowed). At its most straightforward, as subject to the Charity Commission, Universities in the UK are obliged to demonstrate that their activities deliver Public Benefit to all sorts of constituencies (have a google, you’ll quickly be able to find the annual reporting of how your University’s delivers Public Benefit). It is possible to imagine various configurations of the objects, subjects and mediums of public life rather than holding to a stark contrast between two separate, and opposed realms. The marketisation and financialization of higher education, expressed not least through heavily leveraged capital investment programmes, represents a re-configuration of the means and ends of the public qualities of HE. And it’s not just done in the name of public values (to think that this will do as an analysis requires you to still believe in the concept of ideology, which you just shouldn’t). To illustrate my point, consider the evaluation of the capital investment by the research-intensive Russell Group Universities between 2012 and 2017 produced by the economics consultancy BiGGAR Economics in 2014 (great name). It should be said that most of the increase in capital investment by Universities is driven by a relatively small set of research-intensive institutions. The evaluation found that almost 100,000 jobs would be supported by more than £9 billion of projected investment – spending on “a wide variety of different types of project from new libraries and student accommodation to major urban regeneration projects and world-leading medical facilities” – and that every £1 invested will generate £4.89 ‘gross added value’ – these claims being arrived at by using a “specially developed economic model”, the details of which are not made publicly accessible. These impacts will be felt over different time-scales – the total added value is divided between short-term impacts (the impacts of building the buildings), longer-term operational impacts (which derive from what goes on in the new buildings once they are built) and long-term ‘catalytic’ impacts: there at least 6 dimensions to this latter category, which anchors the really strong claim involved, namely that capital investment by Universities does not just amount to a redistribution of central government moneys but contributes to the active generation of new wealth. The six dimensions are ‘graduate productivity’, ‘medical research’, ‘commercialisation and innovation’, ‘enhanced research competitiveness’, ‘tourism’ (basically, parents coming to stay in University towns when their kids graduate) and ‘improved learning environment’ (which loops back to securing future student recruitment).

The report has a lovely conclusion, in which it is asserted that “Investing in a high quality learning and research environment” allows Universities “to attract and maintain the best students and researchers”. In this vision, capital investment projects are integral to the building of the ‘human capital’ that is central to both teaching and education. What a lovely idea. Unfortunately, no-one told the authors of this report that the specific business model upon which these programmes of capital investment depend actually requires that academic labour markets are increasingly bifurcated and students increasingly treated as assets – so that the ‘human capital’ part of that equation is actually sacrificed to the ‘capital-capital’ part.

The BiGGAR report illustrates that even when the impacts of higher education are, as they increasingly are, presented as accruing to individuals (the future salaries of students) or private entities (‘industry’) then this is understood as being a means through which wider public benefits can be generated. It’s just one example of how far the reconfiguration of higher education has involved a trend by Universities to claim to ‘doing everything‘ for everyone (social mobility, productivity increases, technological innovation, instilling civic spirit, solving climate change, etc., etc.); and the associated adoption of management models that are shaped by the imperative to provide evidence of that capacity to deliver for both instrumental reasons and accountability reasons.

So, again by way of example, the University of Exeter makes regular use of economic consultants to help it publicly demonstrate the benefit of increasing number of international students that it has bought to the city and region, part of a broader imperative to demonstrate the economic impacts of the University locally and regionally. And in case that sounds a little too economistic, then the University also makes strong claims about acting as an anchor institution the generates all sorts of social and cultural benefits alongside economic ones. The “anchor institution” idea has taken off in government and other public agencies around HE, and it’s an interesting example of travelling theory, whereby the original sense of the potential of certain public institutions driving regeneration in deprived and ‘vulnerable‘ localities and regions has been turned into a generalised narrative about Universities driving innovation and growth anywhere and everywhere. The specific combination of justificatory logics behind these sorts of claims about local impact is not peculiar to Russell Group institutions, it’s common across the whole HE sector. And one of the key roles of the not-so-loved UUK is to scale up these sorts of claims to the national level.

Now, to return to my theoretical hobby-horse, I don’t think neoliberalism or ‘privatisation’ or counterposing ‘people versus profit’ actually captures what is going on here (And I realise that “It’s complicated and contradictory and complex” doesn’t make a great slogan. It’s much worse even than Rectify the Anomaly, although I am personally increasingly drawn to the idea that University staff should campaign around the slogan “We Have a Right to be Well Managed”). Those slogans (and that’s what ‘neoliberalism’ really is remember) ask us to buy into a moralistic contrast between bad privatised, competitive, marketised, individualised practices versus good, virtuous, sharing ones. As I said, I think the ‘neoliberal’ frame leads us to misrecognize the degree to which what is at stake is a dispute between different understandings of the public responsibilities of higher education, and especially between different understandings of the best means by which to achieve the public purposes of higher education. I happen to think a better place to start is to take seriously Rowan Williams’ characterisation of the current trends in higher education restructuring as being shaped by a “half-baked utilitarianism“. It’s a suggestion that has more purchase in analysing the dynamics of the changing world of higher education, and it is neatly illustrated by the line parroted by VCs that I mentioned at the start, in which the costs of sustaining decent pensions systems is set against the sacrosanct requirement to continue to invest in expansion: that zero-sum line exposes how the calculation of the value of the public benefits of higher education – in terms of social mobility and productivity improvements and that innovation and economic growth that is meant to follow from a credit-led expansion strategy – is totted up and then the ‘sufferings’ resulting from gutting staff pensions are simply subtracted from the total: what you get is a projected overall increase in an aggregated utility function.

In the UK, a shared sense of hubris continues to drive higher education policy (by government) and strategy (by Universities), around which the contradictions and conflicts between these actors revolve. It also lies behind the increasingly toxic mess of top-down, vicious, paternalist, patronising management systems that has come to characterise University life. A significant proportion of University staff have decided to call BS on the whole complex of funding, financing, and management over the last few weeks. As this dispute moves towards its fourth week, what is becoming increasingly clear is that it is not just that the governance of collective University decision-making is in crisis – that much is clear enough when the constituent members of UUK are themselves complaining that this organisation can’t be trusted – but that the whole model of individual University governance is itself in need of urgent reassessment. It’s easy to fixate on the responsibilities of VCs in all of this, but McGaughey is surely right to suggest that it is the whole edifice of upper-level University governance that needs to be democratised: “in every university, staff, the University and College Union, and students should demand every governing body has a majority elected by staff and students.” The reason why ‘democracy’ is the answer to the crisis of British higher education exposed by this dispute is not so much because ‘neoliberalism’ is opposed to democracy (the two are rather closely entangled), but because what everyone keeps calling ‘neoliberalism’ is really a specific assemblage, shall we say, of practices and meanings of accountability, freedom, and public value. At least that’s my argument, and I’m sticking to it.

The Priority of Injustice

Posted on 6 Oct 2017 by Clive

So, finally, the book that I have been writing, on and off, for the last four years, The Priority of Injustice, has been published. It arrived earlier this week – a rather hectic week, which has oddly meant I have been too busy to experience the strange sense of anti-climax that often accompanies the arrival of the finished form of something that you have been making for so long.

This is, in one sense, my Exeter book – the first thing I did in my very first week here, four years ago, was write the proposal and send it off to prospective publishers, It’s also, though, my Swindon book, a book which attempts to articulate an approach to theorising in an ordinary spirit which has been published just a few weeks after moving away from that very ordinary town where I have lived while writing it.

It’s a beautiful object, with a great cover image, by Helen Burgess (I bought one of her pictures once, in one of those open-house art trail events that you get in places like Bishopston in Bristol, so that’s why I knew of her work; it turns out she is part of a geography-friendly network of artists). And I am honoured and humbled to have the book published in University Georgia Press’s very excellent Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series.

I’m now faced with the challenge of promoting the book. I’m quite fond of the Coetzee-esque principle that books should have to make their own way in the world without the help of the author; on the other hand, I have some sense of responsibility towards the argument made in the book, a responsibility to help project it into the world. I’ve already realised that it’s not the sort of book that lends itself to an easy press release – ‘THEORY COULD BE THEORISED DIFFERENTLY’, SAYS THEORY-BOY doesn’t really work as a headline, does it?.

The book doesn’t even have any empirical case studies in it, upon which to hang a more popular pitch. It doesn’t really have much more than passing references to some real-world examples. In this respect, I might have broken one of the cardinal rules of writing in GeographyLand. But the book is about the different forms of theoreticism that one finds in contemporary political thought, where that refers to the ways in which appeal to preconstructed examples is used to confirm ready-made philosophical perspectives. So, as a matter of principle, I couldn’t very well reproduce that same gesture myself.

I realise that this might sound defensive, although in this respect I’m in good company. Kant, in the Preface to The Critique of Pure Reason, starts by apologising for not having any examples or illustrations, which he knows would have helped the reader along (if you live and work among geographers, his discussion is actually very funny – it indicates that Kant really was a proper geographer, haunted by the same anxieties about ‘real world examples’ that we have drummed into us all the time!). I am going to resist the temptation to lay claim to his defence that “many a book would have been clearer if it had not made such an effort to be clear”. I am inclined instead to appeal to another grand Theory Master, Talcott Parsons (great name) – Parsons, in his 1968 Introduction to a new edition of The Structure of Social Action, also responds to the accusation that his work was all theory and no empirics – his book, he asserted, was “an empirical study in the analysis of social thought”, which treats the writings of various thinkers as “documents” that “present problems of understanding and interpretation”. Had I read that before I finished my own book, I would have used it, but I didn’t, but I am certainly going to use it a lot from now on. It’s pretty much exactly how I conceive what I am doing in The Priority of Injustice. This is not, mind, merely a matter of exegesis – it’s more like something described by Yi-Fu Tuan, in another preface (I do read past the first few pages of some books), to his Dominance and Affection. He describes his book as an essay, a preliminary undertaking that imaginatively lays out ideas, as a first step towards the focus on specific problems and their analysis. I see my book as doing a bit of what both Parsons and Tuan recommend, with only touch of the apologetic anxiety expressed by Kant.

I should have a go, shouldn’t I, at saying out loud what this very long book is actually about, what it actually argues (it does have a fantastic index!). There is a promotional jacket blurb, which does a quite good job of doing that, but let me try to give a little more substance.

The first thing to say is that this an argumentative book – it’s an argument for a certain way of thinking and theorising, and against certain other ways. The ways of thinking that I argue against can be variously characterised, for sure, but I have come to think of them a constituting a fairly coherent discourse, shall we say, that defines being in the true of avowedly ‘poststructuralist’ critical thought. That name might not quite capture the field, exactly, but what I have in mind is an intellectual world defined by two core features: a recurrent fixation on the dynamics of subjectification; and a tendency towards what I have called ontological trumping, expressed most clearly in the convergence of critical spatial theory with assertive ontologies of the political. Take those two features, splice them together, and you have entered into the unreflexive common sense of what it means to perform critique in contemporary TheoryLand.

The Priority of Injustice is, primarily, a book about democratic theory, which isn’t just any old body of theory, but it’s also a book about the vocation of critical theory more broadly. It’s also in part a book in which I try to pay homage to the thinkers who have really influenced my own intellectual trajectory: thinkers including Stanley Cavell and Judith Shklar, Iris Marion Young and Amartya Sen, Linda Zerilli and Stuart Hall, Albert Hirschman and Partha Chatterjee, Nancy Fraser and Hannah Pitkin, Axel Honneth and Bernard Williams, Phillip Pettit and Cora Diamond. As well as old uncle Habermas, of course. Somewhere in that list there is, I think, the outlines of an account of the rapprochement between post-analytical political philosophy and critical theory of a big C and big T, post-Frankfurt School style (that might be the subject of the next book). It’s in the relationship between those two traditions that I situate my own vision of the tasks of doing critical analysis in a democratic spirit.

The book has three parts, and certainly in my head, these three parts hang together perfectly in a narrative sequence (but hey, you can dip and dip out too, I’m sure – nobody actually reads academic books from front to back, do they?).

In the first part (Democracy and Critique) – which I can’t help but think of as the equivalent of the ‘methods’ section – Chapter 1 (An Awareness of Politics) distinguishes between different styles of radical democratic theory, arguing that it is not disputes about the meaning of democracy that are crucial so much as different understandings of the meaning of meaning. I argue that the rise to prominence of ontological trumping in political thought is associated with an attachment to the ‘etymological gesture’ in accounting for the meaning of key terms of democratic dispute (and I also suggest that Roland Barthes has much the most interesting thing to say about democracy as any twentieth-century French thinker). In the next chapter (Criteria for Democratic Inquiry), I try to articulate, for the first time in my own writing, why I love Stanley Cavell, outlining a view of how the meaning of democracy can be best approached as a problem by roving across discussions of exemplary thinking in Arendt and Derrida, ‘the ordinary’ and the projection of new meanings in Cavell and others, ‘essentially contested concepts’, and analogies of lake-formation, and the ideas of ‘the enactment of democracy’ and democracy as an ‘ethnographically emergent’ phenomenon. This is all as a preliminary to the discussion in Part 3 of the book (Phenomenologies of Injustice) about attending to the force of assertive claims against injustice.

Before getting to that bit, though, the book has a big middle section (Rationalities of the Political), consisting of three chapters in which I try to redeem something of value from what has become the deadeningly simple analysis of ‘the political’, the post-political, and (de-)politicization. In draft, this section was very long, 100,000 words or so, and it was largely negative in tone, but then I remembered the reason why I cut a very similar section from a previous book I wrote – because it seemed a waste of an opportunity to write so much about something that you didn’t actually feel was of much value. So I try to reconstruct the kernel of what is interesting about the tradition of predominantly Francophile discussions of the theme of ‘the political’ (a large part of the answer to what is most interesting about that theme is… the American strand of debates about the eclipse of ‘the political’). I argue (in The Ontological Need) that the splitting of politics into 2 parts (politics and the political, etc – a trick that is mind-blowing the first time you come across it, but quickly loses its allure) – needs to be saved from the prevalent ontological reading in which it has now been entombed. Discussions of the political, certainly in GeographyLand and related fields as well as in a great deal of political theory – qualify as metaphysical in the sense used by Cora Diamond: they impose requirements on what and how phenomenon should appear and how they should be apprehended in order for them to qualify as properly political. It is, really, a bizarre style of analysis, but one which is really good for reproducing certain sorts of spatialized romanticism. Along the way, I attempt to parse different vocabularies of antagonism in political thought (in The Scandal of Consent and The Significance of Conflict), suggesting that it a good idea NOT to ontologize conflict, struggle, and contestation.

I proffer instead a view of ‘the political’ theme that recovers the phenomenological inflection of this concept as it shows up in the often rather pessimistic viewpoints of Claude Lefort, Sheldon Wolin and Pierre Rosanvallon, with a backward nod to Merleau-Ponty’s Machiavellian account of political life. Finding the interesting aspect of discussions of ‘the political’ in the emphasis on the experiential (which is emphatically not the same as super-structuralist analyses of ‘distributions of the sensible’) allows me to seamlessly link the three chapters of this section of the book to the discussion in the final part of the book.

In the final three chapters, I follow a hint by Axel Honneth and seek to reconstruct a lineage of radical democratic thought that develops not by reference to ever more refined ontologies of disruption and becoming, but by reference to the analysis of the rationalities of action. The final part of the book, the assertive part, has three steps, chapter by chapter: first, (in Claims of the Affected) I reconstruct how the theme of all affected interests has been revived in the geographical turn of certain strands of political thought, and add my own inflection (with due acknowledgement to Robert Dahl), suggesting that this idea needs to be thought of as a heuristic device rather than a prescriptive rule. That argument is then connected (in Subjects of Domination) to a consideration of how theories of democratic justice have come to pivot on the value of non-domination (partly but not only with reference to Phillip Pettit), and how this in turn implies a particular understanding of the grammar of justice claims, best articulated by the wonderful work of Iris Marion Young, my guiding light in all things democratic. The final chapter (The Sense of Injustice) then works through the implications of the argument about affectedness, non-domination and claims-making more fully, catching sight of and bringing into the open a somewhat under appreciated strand of thought that interrupts debates about how best to theorise justice not by ‘going ontological’ but by reordering the conceptual relationships between the idea of justice and the experience of injustice. That strand of thought is quite thin, it’s very recent, but it includes some heavy hitters – Shklar, Sen, for example, and it meets critical theorists like Honneth coming from another direction, and I seek in this last chapter to express why giving conceptual priority to injustice in the analysis of political life matters to the vocation of critique (the theme of the priority of injustice should not be confused with a more general preference, not least in GeographyLand, for practice over theory – I explain just why it shouldn’t in a new paper in Annals of AAG – and to be clear, that paper is a supplement to the book, it contains a discussion that isn’t in the book at all).

And then the book ends, with a claim – a reminder to me more than anything else – about that earlier point that the whole book is really an essay – a preliminary to further inquiry, a setting of a scene, if not of an agenda. If there is anyone out there who wants to give me loads of money to actually pursue the research programme laid out at the end of the book, do let me know.

Geography and the Priority of Injustice

Posted on 25 Sep 2017 by Clive

My paper on Geography and the Priority of Injustice is now available online at the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. The paper seeks to explain why the argument of my forthcoming book, The Priority of Injustice (available from all good booksellers anytime now, including Target), matters for geographers, and geographical thinking about the city in particular (it is part of a special issue of the journal on the theme of Social Justice and the City).

You can get a free online copy of the paper if you click here (this is free for the first 50 clicks – I guess after that you have to ask me for a copy). Here is the abstract:

“This article considers the challenges that follow from giving conceptual priority to injustice in the analysis of political life. Human geography, urban studies, and related fields of spatial theory meet this challenge halfway, insofar as expressions of injustice through social movement mobilizations are given primacy over philosophical elaborations of justice. The privileging of practice over theory, however, reproduces a structure of thought in which justice continues to be understood as an egalitarian ideal against which injustice shows up as an absence or deviation. The practical primacy accorded to expressed claims of injustice inadvertently displaces a model of authoritative, monological reasoning about the meaning of justice from ideal theory onto explanatory accounts and ontologies of space. Basic assumptions about how spatial theory matters to questions of justice are disclosed by tracing the recurrent disavowal of “liberalism” in debates on social justice and the city, the just city, and spatial justice. Thinking about claims of injustice in a double sense—as involving demands on others that require vindication—calls into question the value of inherited ideals of the political significance of the “the city,” by drawing attention to the enactment of distributed public spaces of claims-making, reasoning, and accountable action.”

A Democratic Theory of Judgment – Linda Zerilli’s new book

Posted on 5 Jan 2017 by Clive

Following up on previous posts recommending the work of Linda Zerilli, I see that her new book is now out. A Democratic Theory of Judgment collects and synthesises and augments themes from her recent writings, including a sustained critical engagement in critical debates about affect in political theory (a critique that takes my own engagement with nonrepresentational ontologies seriously, in a critical way, alongside the arguments of Ruth Leys, which is flattering). But there is much more than that going on in the book it addresses what I would argue is a resolutely geographical problem of making critical judgments in new situations where inherited criteria don’t work (or, perhaps, where inherited understandings of how criteria work don’t work). My own attempt to elaborate on this problem, in my book, The Priority of Injustice, out sometime this year, owes a very great deal to what I have learned from reading Zerilli’s work, going back to her fantastic critique of skeptical residues in feminist cultural theory.

Towards a Geography of Injustice

Posted on 5 Aug 2016 by Clive

Just in time for anyone still wondering what they should pack to read by the beach this summer, here is a short paper by me entitled Towards a Geography of Injustice, available open access at the Finnish journal Alue & Ympäristö (Region and Environment – my paper is not in Finnish, just to be clear), which I’m told is “unofficially” the “critical geography journal of Finland”. This is pretty much the tidied up script of the Keynote Lecture I presented at the Annual Meeting of Finnish Geographers in Tampere back in October last year. I learnt lots and met nice people at the meeting, and thanks to Kirsi Pauliina Kallio for asking me to write the talk up properly.

This is a short and quite discursive version of only one part of a longer, and I hope deeper, argument about ‘the priority of injustice’ that I have been working out in my head while writing a book, which I think I have just completed this very week – it’s called, well, The Priority of Injustice. Somewhere between presenting a talk on ‘geography and the priority of injustice’ at Kentucky in April 2015, writing a first draft and then second draft in Vancouver last summer while on ‘research retreat’, and giving the Lecture in Tampere, I worked out what the book I have been writing was actually about – it’s about theories of democracy, substantively, I’ve always known that, but more specifically it’s about how to think about the vocation of thinking critically about democracy democratically, if you see what I mean. But it’s become a book about ‘the priority of injustice’- and this doesn’t mean favouring practice over theory, or even the empirical over the conceptual; it might mean not ever writing “(in)justice”, and not thinking of justice as an ideal; and not saying ‘post-political’; it might also mean thinking more about the meaning of domination, and freedom. Above all, it might mean thinking that politics is ordinary (but, obviously, in a not immediately obvious sense of ‘ordinary’….).

This particular paper is an attempt to summarise all of that, and connect it to some thoughts about how these matters are and are not addressed in GeographyLand.

Unlikely incarnations of democracy

Posted on 13 Jul 2016 by Clive

So, let’s re-cap:

Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015, having secured enough nominations from MPs to appear on the leadership ballot because, back then, we all took it for granted that the point of being the leader of the Labour Party was to lead the Labour Party in Parliament, and at elections to this and other representative bodies in Scotland, Wales, EU, and locally.
Once elected as leader, Jeremy Corbyn demonstrates a complete inability to develop meaningful policy, of any sort, but especially on economic issues. His Shadow Chancellor, meanwhile, does draw up a good reading list.
As leader, he demonstrates culpable incompetence, perhaps mendacity, in the biggest single electoral decision since 1945, the result of which recalibrates British politics decisively to the right for at least a generation, if not forever.
He happily cultivates the idea that all of his failures to make any impression with the wider electorate are due to ‘media bias’, thereby demonstrating a certain degree of contempt for the cares and concerns and interests of the people he is meant to be persuading.
As both candidate and leader, Jeremy Corbyn is consistently presented as the embodiment of honesty and integrity and, above all, that most undemocratic of virtues, of authenticity.
Jeremy Corbyn loses the confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the body, remember, without whose nominations he would not have been able to run for leader in the first place, because the point of the Labour Party etc, etc, etc.
This is a ‘coup’, apparently. Because the PLP has no other reason to exist than to follow the ‘mandate’ of the Authentic One.
Jeremy Corbyn refuses to resign. Because he would not, after all, want to be mistaken for Iain Duncan-Smith, or Margaret Thatcher.
Anyone who disagrees with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, (lack of ) actions, principles, pomposity, is called by his supporters either a Blairite, or a Red Tory, or a Neo-Con, or a Neoliberal (did I miss anything?). Because Jeremy Corbyn is The Vindicator.
And because if you have no doctrine, or if the doctrine you have is silly and unconvincing and poorly formulated, then all you’ve got to fall back on is an appeal to the ethos of unity.
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is formally challenged because at least one MP is able to muster enough nominations from amongst the PLP.
All of this is apparently an affront to the ‘mandate’ held by the Leader, which seems to extend into infinity.
And all of this generates another rapid spurt of people joining the Labour Party, as if Corbyn’s leadership is all a cunning ploy to boost membership by encouraging both supporters and opponents to sign up (I’m not a terribly active person, politically. But I have slogged around streets in Swindon delivering leaflets for the Labour Party. If all those 10s of 1000s of new Corbyn recruits to the Labour Party put in even that minimum effort, the Labour Party’s performance in elections in May and at the Referendum would have been very different. My point is not a holier-than-thou one, it’s that the growth in membership under Corbyn over the last year does not necessarily mean anything).
A kerfuffle ensues over whether the candidates for the leadership of the Labour Party should be treated equally, by all being required to secure a threshold of nominations from the PLP. It turns out, because this is politics remember, that they do not have to be treated equally in this way at all.
So Jeremy Corbyn will again be a candidate for leader. Because, despite not being able to command the support of the PLP, he would not want to be mistaken for Andrea Leadsom.
The Labour Party NEC then decides to rather arbitrarily limit the franchise through which the forthcoming leadership election will be decided. Because, again, its politics, which is fine.
Somewhere down the line, though, depending on the outcome, the Labour Party NEC may well have just inadvertently, perhaps not, sought to redefine the meaning of what it is to be an MP in the UK – the lifting of the requirement that an incumbent leader should have to seek nominations again for a leadership election, even after massively losing a vote of confidence of his MPs in Parliament, implies that in the event of Corbyn being re-elected, MPs (the same ones, or some freshly selected ones perhaps) should function not as representatives of their constituents, but primarily as delegates accountable to the ‘membership’, the size and shape of which is, remember, just revealed to be easily manipulated through political horse-trading (although actually, this bit is open to alternative interpretations – does it indicate a prefiguration of the Labour Party anticipating a move to full PR and therefore a list-based system of selecting candidates…?).

As politics, this is wonderful, grubby, full of spite, so who could complain. ‘Democracy’ is a word being claimed by different sides in all of this, especially where it helps to close down an argument or potentially silence critics or de-legitimise opponents. It’s a very good word with which to do that. It does not belong to one side or the other, but different versions of what ‘democracy’ means are certainly at stake in this rolling drama (roughly speaking, narrowly narcissistic activist-centric ones versus compromised ‘polyarchic’ ones). But it’s politics, in the end. Properly political politics, too.

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Unlikely incarnations of democracy

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