tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/foucault-29377/articlesFoucault – The Conversation2023-12-12T19:03:32Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2192022023-12-12T19:03:32Z2023-12-12T19:03:32ZLeft is Not Woke: a philosopher’s plea for universalism and ‘progress’ is a frustrating polemic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564750/original/file-20231211-17-7hfs0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4300%2C2851&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/people-in-black-shirts-and-black-shorts-sitting-on-bench-during-daytime-qT7fZVbDcqE">Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Some years ago I was surprised to come across a person whose politics I knew to be conservative at a Greens fundraiser. When I asked him why he was there, he said he supported any gay candidate, irrespective of party.</p>
<p>It is this emphasis on identity against values that most annoys American philosopher and writer <a href="https://www.susan-neiman.com/">Susan Neiman</a>. She could well have echoed Cate Blanchett’s character in the film Tar, an acclaimed conductor who is appalled when one of her students discards Bach’s music because he was a white, cis male. </p>
<p>Tribal identities, for Neiman, are undermining the traditional claims of the left for a universalist understanding of justice and progress. </p>
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<p><em>Left is Not Woke – Susan Neiman (Polity)</em></p>
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<p>Neiman’s book <a href="https://www.politybooks.com/search?s=Susan%20Neiman">Left is Not Woke</a> is strongest when querying the centrality of this tribalism. Elsewhere she has written movingly about the way in which German guilt about the Holocaust blocks <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/10/19/historical-reckoning-gone-haywire-germany-susan-neiman/">the capacity to feel empathy for Palestinians now dying in Gaza</a>. </p>
<p>In her book she defends Hannah Arendt’s use of the term “crimes against humanity” to describe the Holocaust, an expression journalist <a href="https://theconversation.com/universalism-or-tribalism-michael-gawendas-memoir-considers-what-it-means-to-be-a-jew-in-contemporary-australia-213459">Michael Gawenda has found objectionable</a> because it elides the particular experience of Jews. </p>
<p>Neiman’s defence of universalism is important and has been praised by Fintan O’Toole in a <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/02/defying-tribalism-left-is-not-woke-neiman/">powerful essay in the New York Review of Books</a> titled “Defying Tribalism”. (Despite living in Berlin, the United States is very much her focus in her book.) But nowhere does Neiman demonstrate that “woke” and “tribalism” are identical. As she claims, concern for those who are marginalised can </p>
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<p>end by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization […] The idea of intersectionality […] [has] led to a focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized and multiplies them into a forest of trauma.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-wokeness-has-become-the-latest-battlefront-for-white-conservatives-in-america-207122">Why 'wokeness' has become the latest battlefront for white conservatives in America</a>
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<p>Her concern is that an emphasis on personal experience can easily magnify tribal grievances at the expense of a universal concern for justice. Neiman’s insistence on the importance of universalism is particularly apposite in the current emotional responses to the Gaza conflict.</p>
<p>It is true some contemporary leftists are so concerned with language at the expense of major inequalities that they forget the need for a politics of redistribution alongside a politics of recognition. But Neiman fails to demonstrate the contemporary American left is beholden to a cartoon version of identity politics, unable to recognise multiple oppressions. </p>
<p>Indeed she stresses the numbers of white Americans who rallied behind the Black Lives Matter protests of several years ago, which would seem to disprove her central assertion.</p>
<h2>The philosophers</h2>
<p>Neiman begins the book by positioning herself as left rather than liberal. She defines a leftist politics as one as concerned with social as with political rights. One assumes she would applaud the tentative attempts of the Biden administration to modify the worst excesses of American capitalism, but while she inveighs against neo-liberalism, she ignores contemporary mainstream politics, wanting instead to seek out the philosophic roots of what she sees as the current failings of many on the left.</p>
<p>Her discussion of the Enlightenment and its claims to universalism is genuinely interesting, even if she is too willing to glide over the deep contradictions in America’s favourite Enlightenment figures. Yes, philosophers like Kant and Rousseau were more aware of the limitations of Eurocentric views than is often acknowledged, but there is little evidence their appeals for universalism actually had much influence on colonial expansion.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-philosophy-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-is-profoundly-contemporary-201179">Explainer: the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is profoundly contemporary</a>
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<p>It is interesting to note Kant condemned the expropriation of land from Indigenous owners but his writings did nothing to check colonial settlers. If any of them read philosophy they were far more influenced by John Locke’s view that only through agriculture could the right to property develop. (Interestingly historian Henry Reynolds <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/truth-telling/">reads Locke rather differently</a> and quotes him in defence of unceded Indigenous sovereignty.)</p>
<p>When Neiman moves to more recent philosophers, the book becomes both polemical and unreliable. For Neiman the philosophical forbears of “woke” are apparently Michel Foucault and <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/">Carl Schmitt</a>, who between them undermined the belief in progress and altruism necessary for a decent politics of the left.</p>
<p>I doubt if one in a hundred contemporary activists could identify Schmitt, who was a Nazi apologist and has been seen as an inspiration for autocrats in the postwar world. Foucault certainly was a major intellectual influence on many activists but Neiman’s dislike for him borders on the irrational.</p>
<p>My antennae bristled when she describes him as “openly, transgressively gay”. In fact Foucault was ambivalent about his sexuality and reluctant to be open about it. Nor was he “flamboyant, courting outrage”, except perhaps in the safety of a few backroom bars. Having condemned identity as the basis for a decent politics, Neiman seems determined to link Foucault’s ideas to his sexuality.</p>
<p>The refusal to find anything useful in Foucault’s analysis of power – especially given the sanctification of Foucault in many academic circles – makes what could be an important critique seem more of an unjustified personal attack. A more generous reading of Foucault could have pointed to his scepticism about identity politics. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758">Explainer: the ideas of Foucault</a>
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<h2>A lack of specifics</h2>
<p>Neiman calls herself a socialist, although I suspect she would be very comfortable with the politics of the Australian Labor Party. She argues persuasively that if we do not believe that progress is possible, we cannot construct a meaningful politics for the left, one that creates greater equality and fairness for all.</p>
<p>In subsequent chapters other obstacles to progress are identified, particularly sociobiology and neo-liberalism. (In her reading, sociobiology suggests inequalities of class and gender are inherent in our DNA, rather than socially constructed.) This discussion of sociobiology is somewhat mystifying, as she makes no direct connection between it and “woke” politics.</p>
<p>Her argument that, in contrast to this view, humans are capable of acting out of more than self-interest is important, but hardly radical. Even the current US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin is pressuring Israel to moderate its rampage in Gaza <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/688ed77b-87ea-425a-acd3-63dd9b914633">for both strategic and moral reasons</a>.</p>
<p>As the book progresses, Neiman tends to fall back on statements of the obvious, with trite observations such as: </p>
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<p>At a time when many ten-year-olds can give you a lecture on carbon emissions, what do the masters of the universe fail to see? </p>
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<p>Had she pursued this thought to consider why her privileged belief in progress might seem illusionary to people whose lands are being obliterated by climate change, there might have been some value to this observation.</p>
<p>Left is Not Woke is a frustrating book, rich in philosophical inquiry but with a strange lack of specifics that might clarify exactly who are the leftists she is criticising. </p>
<p>She ends with a conversation with the Indian activist and writer <a href="https://harshmander.in/">Harsh Mander</a>, who, like her, is appalled by the rise of tribalism in the contemporary world. They share, she claims, a commitment to “universalism, a hard distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress”. To which Mander adds a commitment to doubt.</p>
<p>I, too, would like to believe in these ideals. But when I think of the people I know who share these commitments, many of them, I suspect, would be dismissed by Neiman as “too woke”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219202/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dennis Altman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Some leftists today forget the need for a politics of redistribution alongside one of recognition. But a new book fails to show the left is beholden to a cartoon version of identity politics.Dennis Altman, VC Fellow, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1485242020-11-05T19:07:14Z2020-11-05T19:07:14ZFriday essay: a new front in the culture wars, Cynical Theories takes unfair aim at the humanities<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367383/original/file-20201104-13-81a4a1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1262%2C3050%2C3315&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Liam Edwards/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2017, when a biology professor in a state college in Washington protested against a proposed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/evergreen-state-protests.html">day-long ban</a> on the presence of white students on campus, radical students shut the campus down. </p>
<p>The ban was part of a yearly college event designed to give black and minority students and staff a separate space in which to discuss the issues they face. Tensions were high that year. White nationalist groups had <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/evergreen-state-college-another-side_b_598cd293e4b090964295e8fc">invaded the campus</a>, targeting black students and members of staff. </p>
<p>The comments by the professor, Bret Weinstein, and his opposition to the colllege’s equity programs, led to campus protests against him. In protest against the failure of the college administration to quell the students, he resigned from his job. </p>
<p>Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the authors of the new book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53052177-cynical-theories">Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody</a> regard Weinstein as a victim of an ideology they call Social Justice Theory. </p>
<p>They hold humanities departments responsible for bringing it into existence, and their aim is to explain why it is so pernicious.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-cultural-marxism-really-taking-over-universities-i-crunched-some-numbers-to-find-out-139654">Is 'cultural Marxism' really taking over universities? I crunched some numbers to find out</a>
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<h2>Social Justice Theory</h2>
<p>Pluckrose, a US magazine editor who describes herself as an exile from the humanities, and Lindsay, a mathematician and writer on politics and religion, were participants in the controversial 2018 <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/10/15/17951492/grievance-studies-sokal-squared-hoax">Grievance Studies</a> project, which aimed to discredit gender and race studies by submitting hoax articles to academic journals. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/366592/original/file-20201030-16-1p2ru10.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>By getting articles on bogus topics through the reviewing processes of respected journals and into print, the authors believed they were proving that studies focusing on identity issues are “corrupt” and unscientific. </p>
<p>One <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html">hoax article</a>, published in a journal of “feminist geography” looked at “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity” at dog parks in Portland, Oregon; another purported to be a two-year study involving “thematic analysis of table dialogue” to explore why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters.</p>
<p>Critics of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/10/15/17951492/grievance-studies-sokal-squared-hoax">their hoax</a> quickly pointed out there was no scientific evidence to suggest that journals in fields focusing on identity are corrupt — indeed such hoaxes had happened in other areas of study too.</p>
<p>Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book, which grew out of the 2018 project, traces the evolution and growing influence during the late 20th century of theories about how the language we use to think and talk about the world structures our relationships. </p>
<p>The book takes aim at postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers, particularly the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. The authors blame him for propagating the view that all discourses, including science, create relations of power and subordination. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758">Explainer: the ideas of Foucault</a>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367592/original/file-20201104-15-pzq6lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Michel Foucault.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>In the new millennium, these <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism">postmodernist</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction">deconstructionist</a> projects morphed — according to Pluckrose and Lindsay — into the political weapon they call Social Justice Theory, or simply Theory.</p>
<p>In Cynical Theories, the pair trace the march of Theory as a political ideology through post-colonial studies, queer theory, feminism, and studies of race, disability and body size.</p>
<p>In their view, Theory is a harmful, anti-scientific ideology. It divides society into the oppressed — whose subordinate identities are constructed by hierarchies of power — and the oppressors who, wittingly or not, maintain oppressive relationships through their participation in political and social discourses and institutions. </p>
<h2>Constructed identities</h2>
<p>This Theory is cynical, according to the authors, because it finds oppression everywhere — even in the best intentions of progressive people and their movements of reform. </p>
<p>And it is bad for everyone, including disadvantaged groups, they say, because it gets in the way of an empirical approach to understanding and correcting social ills. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Protest sign reads: What lessens one of us lessens all of us" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367356/original/file-20201104-13-159d89o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Social Justice Theory, say Pluckrose and Lindsay, finds oppression everywhere.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Micheile Henderson/Unsplash</span></span>
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<p>One aim of Pluckrose and Lindsay is to defend the central liberal value of freedom of inquiry against what they regard as an attack on free speech by the rise of identity politics — spawned by Theory. </p>
<p>The application of Theory is also harmful, they say, because it provokes a backlash from people who cannot understand why being white or male puts them into the camp of racists or sexists.</p>
<p>The result, they argue, is a racial politics that becomes increasingly fraught. We hear that:</p>
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<p>racism is embedded in culture and that we cannot escape it. We hear that white people are inherently racist. We are told that only white people can be racist. […] Adherents actively search for hidden and overt racial offences until they find them. </p>
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<p>According to the authors, these categories — race, sex, gender, being gay or straight, abled or disabled, fat or of normal body size — are forced onto individuals by the organising power of dominant discourses in politics, social life and science.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three people walking in queer socks" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367358/original/file-20201104-21-1sjbta5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">According to Social Justice Theory, the authors write, identity determines how a person thinks, acts and what she knows.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Angela Compagnone/Unsplash</span></span>
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<p>Adherents of Theory, they say, then argue these constructed identities are, nevertheless, real and inescapable experiences. For Theory, identity determines how a person thinks, acts and what she knows. A black person is not an individual who happens to be black. Blackness is central to who he is. Being black makes him into a victim of discourses that privilege whites. </p>
<p>Respecting the standpoint of those who have a subordinate position in hierarchies created by the ways we speak and act — blacks, women, people with minority sexual identities, victims of colonial power, the disabled and the fat — is a key political demand for activists influenced by Theory.</p>
<h2>No truth, only discourse</h2>
<p>Social hierarchies exist. Prejudice can be perpetuated by the unthinking behaviour of individuals. Discriminatory treatment of women and black people is sometimes embedded in institutions. </p>
<p>Pluckrose and Lindsay do not deny this. </p>
<p>They admit legal reforms have not eliminated racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. They recognise discriminatory treatment and prejudice can blight the lives of victims and undermine their ability to access the opportunities of their society. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="1963 March on Washington" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367362/original/file-20201104-17-m2wv1f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cynical theories acknowledges legal reforms have not stopped discrimination.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Unseen Histories/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What, then, is wrong with what they call Social Justice Theory?</p>
<p>The authors’ main contention is that Theory is relativist and unscientific. For its theorists, there is no objective truth — only the perspectives of people with different identities. And they demand the same respect for the standpoint of an oppressed group as for the views of scientists. </p>
<p>Pluckrose and Lindsay write:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theories have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation and disagreement of any kind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Because Theory is a faith, it can insulate itself from criticism, say the authors. </p>
<p>It can dismiss dissenters, like the aforementioned biology professor, as the purveyors of an oppressive discourse. </p>
<h2>‘Cancel culture’</h2>
<p>Is Social Justice Theory as pernicious as Pluckrose and Lindsay want us to believe? Their criticism gets most of its plausibility from applications of Theory that do seem harmful and even absurd.</p>
<p>Disability, for instance, is not merely a <a href="https://www.afdo.org.au/social-model-of-disability/">social construction</a>. Treating it as such may prevent the use of treatments that could make the lives of people better. </p>
<p>When doctors tell obese people they should <a href="https://theconversation.com/type-2-diabetes-losing-even-a-small-amount-of-weight-may-lower-heart-disease-risk-116566">lose weight</a> they are not engaging in an act of oppression, but in healthcare. </p>
<p>Pluckrose and Lindsay are right to point out that campaigns to expose oppressive speech and behaviour can cause unjustified harm to individuals who are called out and “cancelled” for minor misdemeanours, or for stating a view that identity activists deem unacceptable. </p>
<p>The abuse heaped on J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, for saying that sexual differences are real and not constructed by discourse is an example. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367594/original/file-20201104-15-1bh0saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367594/original/file-20201104-15-1bh0saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367594/original/file-20201104-15-1bh0saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367594/original/file-20201104-15-1bh0saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367594/original/file-20201104-15-1bh0saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367594/original/file-20201104-15-1bh0saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367594/original/file-20201104-15-1bh0saf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">J.K. Rowling has been abused for her stance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christophe Ena/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-cancel-culture-silencing-open-debate-there-are-risks-to-shutting-down-opinions-we-disagree-with-142377">Is cancel culture silencing open debate? There are risks to shutting down opinions we disagree with</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In my opinion, however, the authors overstate both the illiberal tendencies of Theory and its influence on culture. </p>
<p>You do not have to be a relativist to think the opinions and feelings of people from minority groups ought to be respected. You are not anti-science if you think scientific research sometimes ignores the needs and perspectives of women and minorities. </p>
<p>Advocates of Theory aim to make institutions more inclusive and respectful of differences. </p>
<p>Liberals — as advocates of critical engagement — should be open to the possibility that Theory, despite faults, has detected forms of prejudice our society tends to overlook. </p>
<h2>The question of universities</h2>
<p>The most problematic aspect of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book is the blame it heaps on humanities departments of universities for stirring up a cancel culture and the culture wars. </p>
<p>This gives ammunition to those who want to defund humanities and discourage students from taking humanities courses. </p>
<p>It gives support to the position of the Australian Federal Education Minister, Dan Tehan, who thinks that Australian universities have <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/education-minister-seeks-to-end-university-cancel-culture">succumbed</a> to a left-wing culture that “cancels” conservatives and their opinions. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Students studying viewed from above." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367363/original/file-20201104-17-4ampgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">There is scant evidence of a freedom of speech crisis on Australian campuses.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jordan Encarnacao/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This accusation, also made by conservative groups like the Institute of Public Affairs, is the reason why critics of universities want to force them to sign up to a <a href="https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/media-releases/free-speech-crisis-at-australias-universities-confirmed-by-new-research">free speech code</a>.</p>
<p>But according to Glyn Davis, Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, there is <a href="https://theconversation.com/special-pleading-free-speech-and-australian-universities-108170">no evidence</a> of a meaningful or growing threat to free speech in Australian universities. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/special-pleading-free-speech-and-australian-universities-108170">Special pleading: free speech and Australian universities</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Those who emphasise the dangers of a cancel culture often ignore more serious threats to universities and an open society. The students at the Washington college were reacting to the presence of groups that threatened the safety of black students. </p>
<p>They were responding to a real threat.</p>
<h2>Combatants in the war</h2>
<p>Pluckrose and Lindsay agree that threats to free speech can come from the right as well as the left, but their preoccupation with the latter indicates where they want to put most of the blame. </p>
<p>Cynical Theories is, on one hand, a scholarly book. Pluckrose and Lindsay are well versed in the literature they criticise, as their participation in the Grievance Studies hoax indicates. </p>
<p>Their book provides an in depth discussion of the works they want to criticise. Their critique of what they call Social Justice Theory deserves to be taken seriously. </p>
<p>But by overstating their case and aiming their weapons at humanities and universities they cannot pass themselves off as objective contributors to a search for truth. </p>
<p>They are combatants in the culture wars.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, is published by Swift Press.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148524/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janna Thompson has done voluntary work for the Green Party.</span></em></p>A new book by participants in the controversial ‘Grievance Studies’ hoax critiques the rise of an ideology they call Social Justice Theory. But the authors overstate their case.Janna Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1292622020-01-27T20:03:43Z2020-01-27T20:03:43ZPeter Handke Nobel Prize controversy: Literature can’t be judged on esthetics alone<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308692/original/file-20200106-123403-1u8g8x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2892%2C550%2C2667%2C3150&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Demonstrators protest the awarding of the 2019 Nobel literature prize to Peter Handke in Stockholm, in December 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stina Stjernkvist/TT News Agency via AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Austrian writer <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2019/summary/">Peter Handke</a> received the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature. The award is for “<a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/facts-on-the-nobel-prize-in-literature">a writer’s life work</a>,” and Handke has written novels, travelogues, theatre plays, screenplays and poetry. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.thelocal.se/20191211/hundreds-protest-in-stockholm-as-austrian-writer-receives-nobel-prize">Hundreds protested</a> the award ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall. This was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/10/protests-grow-ahead-of-nobel-prize-ceremony-for-peter-handke">not an isolated protest</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308694/original/file-20200106-123399-1cs5d6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308694/original/file-20200106-123399-1cs5d6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308694/original/file-20200106-123399-1cs5d6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308694/original/file-20200106-123399-1cs5d6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308694/original/file-20200106-123399-1cs5d6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308694/original/file-20200106-123399-1cs5d6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308694/original/file-20200106-123399-1cs5d6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Literature laureate 2019 Peter Handke gives his speech during the Nobel banquet at Stockholm City Hall, on Dec. 10, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency via AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The announcement of the award generated public uproar.</p>
<p>Handke’s critics say some of his published work has <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/congratulations-nobel-committee-you-just-gave-the-literature-prize-to-a-genocide-apologist/">advanced and fuelled genocide apologetics</a> and they point to his choice to speak at the 2006 funeral of <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/02/09/peter-handke-stranger-in-love/">Serbian ethno-nationalist politician Slobodan Milošević</a>. When Milošević died, he was on trial facing 66 charges including for <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/balkans/milosevic_timeline.html">crimes against humanity and genocide</a>.</p>
<p>The controversy has spurred long-standing debates about where stories come from, who is responsible for them and what it means as a writer to bear witness to truth — and also, which persons or institutions have the authority to do so.</p>
<p>These events unfolded at a time of <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/30/how-europes-nationalists-became-internationalists/">rising ethnonationalism</a> across Europe.</p>
<h2>Sustained dissent</h2>
<p>Handke’s controversial book, <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=YjJcAAAAMAAJ&q=A+Journey+to+the+Rivers:+Justice+for+Serbia&dq=A+Journey+to+the+Rivers:+Justice+for+Serbia&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCoJzRuoPnAhUSx1kKHerlAWUQ6AEIKDAA">A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia</a></em> (translated <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3319.Eine_winterliche_Reise_zu_den_Fl_ssen_Donau_Save_Morawa_und_Drina_oder_Gerechtigkeit_f_r_Serbien?rating=2">from German</a>), attracted <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-01-12-bk-17740-story.html">particular</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/apr/21/features11.g28">criticism</a>. </p>
<p>The publisher of the English-language 1997 translation describes the book on its jacket as both a “sensitive and nuanced meditative travelogue through Serbia,” and a “scathing criticism of western war reporting.”</p>
<p>In the book, Handke writes: “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=YjJcAAAAMAAJ&q=A+Journey+to+the+Rivers:+Justice+for+Serbia&dq=A+Journey+to+the+Rivers:+Justice+for+Serbia&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCoJzRuoPnAhUSx1kKHerlAWUQ6AEIKDAA">all too many of the reporters on Bosnia and on the war there … are not only proud chroniclers, but false ones</a>.” In his search for a “common remembering” he writes: “To record the evil facts, that’s good. But something else is needed for a peace, something not less important than the facts.” </p>
<p>Handke’s Nobel nomination particularly inflamed journalists and survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, where <a href="https://www.icty.org/en/outreach/documentaries/srebrenica-genocide-no-room-for-denial">more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys</a> were killed in July 1995, during the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warcrimes-karadzic-bosnia/timeline-what-happened-during-the-war-in-bosnia-idUSL2164446420080721">1992-95 war in Bosnia</a>. Various <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/10/10/peter-handke-won-nobel-his-great-artistry-critics-say-hes-an-apologist-genocide/">intellectuals</a>, as well as the broader public voiced their dissent about Handke receiving the award on Twitter following the award announcement. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1204047540745846784"}"></div></p>
<p>The bigger context is that <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-did-ratko-mladic-commit-genocide-against-bosnias-muslims?verso=true">some perpetrators denied</a> findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (sometimes referred to as the Hague Tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands) — and the tribunal documented atrocious strategies to conceal crimes, such as moving mass graves. Denials of the Srebrenica genocide <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/07/srebrenica-massacre-bosnia-anniversary-denial/398846/">continue today</a>. </p>
<p>Media reported that Emir Suljagić, a survivor of the Srebrenica genocide who wrote <em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/03/biography.features">Postcards from the Grave</a></em>, said after the announcement of Handke’s award: “<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/09/protest-boycotts-austrian-author-accused-supporting-milosevic/">I am in Stockholm to protest the award being given to a man who negates my suffering and the suffering of so many others</a>.”</p>
<p>During a press conference in December, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/peter-handke-questions-nobel-prize-literature-milosevic">Handke did not provide direct answers to questions about the controversy</a>.</p>
<h2>Committee and academy defend decision</h2>
<p>In an Oct. 10, 2019, press release, the Swedish Academy announced it had awarded Handke the Nobel for “<a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2019/10/press-literature2018-2019.pdf">an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience</a>.” </p>
<p>Following the protests and uproar, both Swedish Academy and Nobel Committee for Literature members <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/21/swedish-academy-defends-peter-handkes-controversial-nobel-win">defended the decision</a>. </p>
<p>Two academy members wrote in a Swedish newspaper that Handke had “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50099218">definitely made provocative, inappropriate and unclear statements on political issues</a>,” but added: “The Swedish Academy has obviously not intended to reward a war criminal and denier of war crimes or genocide.”</p>
<p>In an op-ed, writing as an <a href="https://www.svd.se/forsvarar-valet-handke-en-radikalt-opolitisk-forfattare">individual</a>, one of the members of the committee said Handke in his writing was “<a href="https://artdaily.cc/news/117692/Nobel-Committee-member-defends-Handke-pick#.XgT2Fy2ZPKY">radically unpolitical</a>,” according to a story from Agence France-Presse. British Broadcasting Corp. reported that another member said: “When we give the award to Handke, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50099218">we argue that the task of literature is other than to confirm and reproduce what society’s central view believes is morally right</a>.” </p>
<p>Suhrkamp Verlag, Handke’s publisher, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/11/09/peter-handke-won-the-nobel-prize-then-his-publisher-quietly-circulated-a-strange-defense-of-his-genocide-denialism/">circulated a defence of his work following the controversy</a>, but did not release it publicly, journalist Peter Maass wrote in The Intercept.</p>
<p>Many statements in defence of the award echo earlier French and British 20th century literary criticism. </p>
<h2>Evaluating the text’s language alone?</h2>
<p>The French philosopher Roland Barthes’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jan/13/death-of-the-author">influential 1967 essay</a> “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Image_Music_Text.html?id=U_8yYj9h7aIC&redir_esc=y">The Death of the Author</a>” served to elevate literary work and its language. Barthes wrote: “It is language which speaks, not the author.” </p>
<p>For French philosopher Michel Foucault, the author is a kind of scribe who commits language to paper. The implication is that the author is writing down the realities of the world outside. In his view, “the function of the author is to characterize the existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society” — meaning, ideas and messaging, as he elaborated in his 1969 essay “<a href="https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/624849/mod_resource/content/1/a840_1_michel_foucault.pdf">What is an Author?</a>” </p>
<p>Before them, T.S. Eliot <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent">proclaimed</a> in 1919 that writing “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” </p>
<p>As feminist literary scholar Cheryl Walker <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/448546">has noted</a>, independence-of-the-text critiques have to a certain extent helped “liberate the text for multiple uses,” like re-reading canonical texts from critical feminist perspectives. </p>
<p>But such critiques have also been at odds with literary traditions on the margins. </p>
<p>Historically, the significance of lived personal and collective experiences have been central features of texts by women, Black, Indigenous and people of colour, queer or transgender writers. </p>
<p>These literatures, their readers and their institutions of criticism have long resisted calls to separate author, text and political or social impact.
They have have asserted either that <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=kE3ek_-FGWgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Audre+Lorde%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjThP2RlvDmAhWQJzQIHWDwCNEQ6AEINzAC#v=onepage&q&f=false">the personal is political</a> or that perspective is situational — and rejected the <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=0j2fBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=This+Bridge+Called+My+Back:+Writings+by+Radical+Women+of+Color&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-xLPl1PDmAhXVoFsKHZZvCDkQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">notion that literary work can considered unpolitical.</a> </p>
<h2>Award fuelled ethnonationalist politics</h2>
<p>Critics of Handke’s receipt of the Nobel award challenge the notion that Handke’s literary work can be evaluated apart from its political implications.</p>
<p>Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon has questioned what he calls the academy’s belief in a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/opinion/peter-handke-nobel-bosnia-genocide.html">literature safe from the infelicities of history and actualities of human life and death</a>.” </p>
<p>PEN America issued a statement decrying the academy’s support for Handke, saying the body is “<a href="https://pen.org/press-release/statement-nobel-prize-for-literature-2019/">dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide</a>.” </p>
<p>Among the alarming developments in the Handke affair has been the news <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/peter-handke-nobel-prize-genocide-deniers">that the award fuelled far-right ethnonationalist</a> sympathies. </p>
<p>How or if the Swedish Academy will respond to these developments as the public demands it approach the award more cautiously remains to be seen. It seems unlikely that it will rescind Handke’s award. </p>
<p>But the academy is implicated in this affair no matter what.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129262/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ervin Malakaj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Controversy surrounding the awarding of the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature spurs a long-standing debate about the meaning of authorship and literature with new urgency.Ervin Malakaj, Assistant Professor of German Studies, University of British ColumbiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/958872018-05-02T10:50:22Z2018-05-02T10:50:22ZI watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my research – here’s what I learnt<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217224/original/file-20180502-153873-1yycjez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=754%2C13%2C1711%2C1064&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/abstract-polka-dot-world-map-343406624">dsom/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Speakers recently flew in from around (or perhaps, across?) the earth for a three-day event held in Birmingham: the UK’s first ever public <a href="https://www.flatearthconventionuk.co.uk/">Flat Earth Convention</a>. It was well attended, and wasn’t just three days of speeches and YouTube clips (though, granted, there was a lot of this). There was also a lot of team-building, networking, debating, workshops – and scientific experiments. </p>
<p>Yes, flat earthers do seem to place a lot of emphasis and priority on scientific methods and, in particular, on observable facts. The weekend in no small part revolved around discussing and debating science, with lots of time spent running, planning, and reporting on the latest set of flat earth experiments and models. Indeed, as one presenter noted early on, flat earthers try to “look for multiple, verifiable evidence” and advised attendees to “always do your own research and accept you might be wrong”.</p>
<p>While flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don’t trust is scientists, and the established relationships between “power” and “knowledge”. This relationship between power and knowledge has long been theorised by sociologists. By exploring this relationship, we can begin to understand why there is a swelling resurgence of flat earthers.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-reason-with-flat-earthers-it-may-not-help-though-95160">How to reason with flat earthers (it may not help though)</a>
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<h2>Power and knowledge</h2>
<p>Let me begin by stating quickly that I’m not really interested in discussing <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-reason-with-flat-earthers-it-may-not-help-though-95160">if the earth if flat or not</a> (for the record, I’m happily a “globe earther”) – and I’m not seeking to mock or denigrate this community. What’s important here is not necessarily whether they believe the earth is flat or not, but instead what their resurgence and public conventions tell us about science and knowledge in the 21st century. </p>
<p>Multiple competing models were suggested throughout the weekend, including “classic” flat earth, domes, ice walls, diamonds, puddles with multiple worlds inside, and even the earth as the inside of a giant cosmic egg. The level of discussion however often did not revolve around the models on offer, but on broader issues of attitudes towards existing structures of knowledge, and the institutions that supported and presented these models.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The cosmic egg theory explained.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Flat earthers are not the first group to be sceptical of existing power structures and their tight grasps on knowledge. This viewpoint is somewhat typified by the work of Michel Foucault, a famous and heavily influential 20th century philosopher who made a career of studying those on the fringes of society to understand what they could tell us about everyday life.</p>
<p>He is well known, amongst many other things, for looking at the close relationship <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish">between power and knowledge</a>. He suggested that knowledge is created and used in a way that reinforces the claims to legitimacy of those in power. At the same time, those in power control what is considered to be correct and incorrect knowledge. According to Foucault, there is therefore an intimate and interlinked relationship between power and knowledge. </p>
<p>At the time Foucault was writing on the topic, the control of power and knowledge had moved away from religious institutions, who previously held a very singular hold over knowledge and morality, and was instead beginning to move towards a network of scientific institutions, media monopolies, legal courts, and bureaucratised governments. Foucault argued that these institutions work to maintain their claims to legitimacy by controlling knowledge.</p>
<h2>Ahead of the curve?</h2>
<p>In the 21st century, we are witnessing another important shift in both power and knowledge due to factors that include the increased public platforms afforded by social media. Knowledge is no longer centrally controlled and – <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017/08/30/had-enough-of-experts-anti-intellectualism-is-linked-to-voters-support-for-movements-that-are-skeptical-of-expertise/">as has been pointed out</a> in the wake of Brexit – the age of the expert may be passing. Now, everybody has the power to create and share content. When Michael Gove, a leading proponent of Brexit, proclaimed: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts”, it would seem that he, in many ways, meant it. </p>
<p>It is also clear that we’re seeing increased polarisation in society, as we continue to drift away from agreed singular narratives and move into camps around shared interests. Recent <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2016/10/14/in-presidential-contest-voters-say-basic-facts-not-just-policies-are-in-dispute/?utm_source=adaptivemailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=16-10-14%20panel%20election%20report&org=982&lvl=100&ite=413&lea=66827&ctr=0&par=1&trk=">PEW research</a> suggests, for example, that 80% of voters who backed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election – and 81% of Trump voters – believe the two sides are unable to agree on basic facts.</p>
<p>Despite early claims, from as far back as HG Well’s “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8078973/hg-wells-wikipedia">world brain</a>” essays in 1936, that a worldwide shared resource of knowledge such as the internet would create peace, harmony and a common interpretation of reality, it appears that quite the opposite has happened. With the increased voice afforded by social media, knowledge has been increasingly decentralised, and competing narratives have emerged.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217233/original/file-20180502-153900-1ptisbm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217233/original/file-20180502-153900-1ptisbm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217233/original/file-20180502-153900-1ptisbm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217233/original/file-20180502-153900-1ptisbm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217233/original/file-20180502-153900-1ptisbm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217233/original/file-20180502-153900-1ptisbm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217233/original/file-20180502-153900-1ptisbm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">HG Wells’ plan for a world encyclopedia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scottbot</span></span>
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<p>This was something of a reoccurring theme throughout the weekend, and was especially apparent when four flat earthers debated three physics PhD students. A particular point of contention occurred when one of the physicists pleaded with the audience to avoid trusting YouTube and bloggers. The audience and the panel of flat earthers took exception to this, noting that “now we’ve got the internet and mass communication … we’re not reliant on what the mainstream are telling us in newspapers, we can decide for ourselves”. It was readily apparent that the flat earthers were keen to separate knowledge from scientific institutions.</p>
<h2>Flat earthers and populism</h2>
<p>At the same time as scientific claims to knowledge and power are being undermined, some power structures are decoupling themselves from scientific knowledge, moving towards a kind of populist politics that are increasingly sceptical of knowledge. This has, in recent years, manifested itself in extreme ways – through such things as public politicians <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michael-flynn-conspiracy-pizzeria-trump-232227">showing support for Pizzagate</a> or Trump’s suggestions that <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ted-cruz-jfk-files_us_59f20e61e4b07fdc5fbcaf6e">Ted Cruz’s father shot JFK</a>. </p>
<p>But this can also be seen in more subtle and insidious form in the way in which Brexit, for example, was campaigned for in terms of gut feelings and emotions rather than expert statistics and predictions. Science is increasingly facing problems with its ability to communicate ideas publicly, a problem that politicians, and flat earthers, are able to circumvent with moves towards populism.</p>
<p>Again, this theme occurred throughout the weekend. Flat earthers were encouraged to trust “poetry, freedom, passion, vividness, creativity, and yearning” over the more clinical regurgitation of established theories and facts. Attendees were told that “hope changes everything”, and warned against blindly trusting what they were told. This is a narrative echoed by some of the celebrities who have used their power to back flat earth beliefs, such as the musician B.O.B, who <a href="https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691469676119982080">tweeted</a>: “Don’t believe what I say, research what I say.”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"691411463051804676"}"></div></p>
<p>In many ways, a public meeting of flat earthers is a product and sign of our time; a reflection of our increasing distrust in scientific institutions, and the moves by power-holding institutions towards populism and emotions. In much the same way that Foucault reflected on what social outcasts could reveal about our social systems, there is a lot flat earthers can reveal to us about the current changing relationship between power and knowledge. And judging by the success of this UK event – and the large conventions planned in Canada and America this year – it seems the flat earth is going to be around for a while yet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95887/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harry T Dyer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A public meeting of flat earthers is a product and sign of our times.Harry T Dyer, Lecturer in Education, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/837352017-09-08T13:03:00Z2017-09-08T13:03:00ZInside view: prison crisis will continue until we hear inmates’ stories<p>Labour MP for Tottenham <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/lammy-review">David Lammy’s report</a> about racial bias in the criminal justice system has just hit the newsstands – and yes, it’s both <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/08/racial-bias-uk-criminal-justice-david-lammy">shocking and true</a> that black men are imprisoned more disproportionately in the UK than is even the case in the US.</p>
<p>Sadly this comes as no surprise to me. For the past few months, I have spent much of my time inside prisons, working directly with inmates and hearing their stories. I am privileged to share in their hopes and dreams, fears and loves, their trials and tribulations - quite literally. I have been able to access spaces – both architectural and emotional – that most of us just don’t see. Black and ethnic minority prisoners are vastly over-represented behind bars, but that’s only one aspect of what has become known as the UK’s prison crisis.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185243/original/file-20170908-25938-1p6kn8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon penitentiary, 1791.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#/media/File:Panopticon.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>It is 40 years since Michel Foucault’s landmark work, <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/d030425">Discipline and Punish</a>, was first published in English. It appeared in French two years earlier, in 1975, bearing the title <em>Surveiller et Punir</em>; the differential emphasis being on surveillance, rather than discipline. Famously, at least for anyone who has ever taken an undergrad module on cultural and critical theory in the past 30 years, Foucault is known for his theories around panopticism, based on 18th-century social reformer <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who/panopticon">Jeremy Bentham’s idea</a> that prisoners could be controlled and reformed by creating the illusion that they were at all times under surveillance. An emphasis on transparency and visibility was intended to promote order and good conduct. Representing a marked shift from the unlit dungeons of previous generations, 19th-century prison design experimented with panopticism. </p>
<p>London’s HMP Wandsworth, constructed in 1852, boasts not one but two glass-walled panopticons, filtering distant light into vast hexagonal atriums. When I tell prisoners what the panopticon actually is they stare at me with a mute commingle of interest, amusement and weary cynicism. Who would believe that, despite Foucault’s best efforts, the actual purpose of the imposing glass tower is typically known to neither inmates nor staff? </p>
<p>They assume – if they think of it at all – it’s just a baroque architectural feature, along with the honeycomb-styled floor grilles that allow you to see right through the floor – all the way down to the star-patterned chamber at the base of the atrium and all the way up to the glass-filled top. What the stars and honeycombs are intended to represent is ripe for speculation; bee colonies and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Court-of-Star-Chamber">Star Chamber</a> spring to mind. </p>
<p>A bitter irony is that the prison population, far from being the most surveilled, is probably the most invisible population of all. Headlines about the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/02/prisons-crisis-perverse-government-reforms-prison-governors-association">UK’s prison crisis</a> appear almost daily, and yet when do we hear from the prisoners themselves? Leaked photographs of <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1524636/shocking-footage-shows-prisoner-taking-drugs-eating-mcdonalds-and-throwing-wild-parties-in-life-of-luxury-behind-bars/">cell-bound debauchery</a> might find their way to the tabloid press and BBC’s Panorama, yet most of us have absolutely no idea what really happens behind the gates. In a horrible parody of the <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/459434/brief-history-what-happens-vegas-stays-vegas">Vegas slogan</a>: what happens in prison stays in prison.</p>
<h2>American stories</h2>
<p>Things haven’t necessarily always been like this. In America, there have been patchy but regular efforts to make prisoners’ voices heard. In the 1920s, journalist John L Spivak managed to access prison farms in the southern States, <a href="http://dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/photographers-john-l-spivak-and-lewis-hine">producing shocking evidence</a> that later featured both in his own book, <a href="http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/georgia-nigger">Georgia Nigger</a> (later retitled <a href="https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2011/7044.html">Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang</a>). Spivak’s evidence also, crucially, featured at the trial of <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/5108">Robert Elliott Burns</a>, whose own first-hand account – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QvF2FZZftY">I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang</a> – landed him a movie deal. </p>
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<p>Some of the most extraordinary prison recordings were those made by folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who toured prisons in the mid-20th century <a href="http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=session&id=PR47&idType=abbrev&sortBy=abc">recording songs and oral histories</a> that were preserved in the strangely dislocated and isolated prison communities. These were composed predominantly of African American males whose lives and bodies were recycled into neo-slavery by an industrialised penal system. </p>
<p>In the 1960s and 70s, a swathe of searing writing emerged from American jails, written by men such as <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/love-letters-prison-angela-davis-george-jackson-affair-article-1.2833995">George Jackson</a> and Eldridge Cleaver, both associated with the Black Power movement; Angela Davis, too, was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/why-dont-you-ever-see-tv-interviews-with-inmates/374447/">famously interviewed from her jail cell</a>, at a time when media access to prisoners was <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/417/817/">being debated in the courts</a> as a matter of press freedom.</p>
<h2>British silence</h2>
<p>But if prisoners’ voices have been sporadic and contested in the US, in the UK – ballad-writing Oscar Wilde aside – they have barely been acknowledged at all. In the 19th century, Henry Mayhew produced encyclopedic tomes devoted to the documentation of London’s urban poor, including <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-criminal-prisons-of-london-by-henry-mayhew">The Criminal Prisons of London, and Scenes of Prison Life</a>. Published in 1862, this book details daily life at Pentonville, Brixton, and Wandsworth. Almost unbelievably, these are still in operation, while <a href="http://www.royal-arsenal-history.com/prison-hulks.html">the prison hulks at Woolwich</a> have been replaced by a modern trifecta – HMPs Belmarsh, Thameside and the curiously-titled HMYOI Isis – all three occupying a barbed wire sprawl in London’s SE18.</p>
<p>Yet, in the UK, prisoners’ voices are not heard. One cannot see where they live and, for the most part, people don’t care. Indeed, people prefer not to see them at all, which is why they are buried behind high walls and information lock-downs. Media access to prisons and prisoners is highly restricted – and to a large extent the media has itself to blame for this. A focus on lurid headlines rather than genuine transparency has created an impasse where those who work within the creaking prison system feel under constant pressure of secret cameras and public outrage. The result is a faintly paranoiac culture of censorship and suppression. </p>
<p>But what is needed is more transparency, not less. The general public needs to understand what happens inside prisons – the good, the bad and the ugly – and to open a genuine dialogue around why, for the most part, prisons don’t work and, in many respects, represent the very antithesis of blind justice. Meanwhile, those inside prison need to know that they are not unspeakable, unacceptable or unseeable. They are real people, with feelings and voices and hopes and dreams, stuck in a pseudo-Victorian merry-go-round that is equal parts prison, madhouse and workhouse.</p>
<p>The Lammy Review gives us yet more reason to express tight-lipped dismay at the lack of rhyme and reason in Britain’s desperate prisons. But when will we be ready to listen to those inside?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83735/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Victoria Anderson is affiliated with Stretch Charity (<a href="http://www.stretch-charity.org">www.stretch-charity.org</a>). </span></em></p>Almost total journalistic shutdown is worsening the UK prison crisis.Victoria Anderson, Researcher/Teacher in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/791532017-06-26T22:35:58Z2017-06-26T22:35:58ZMedia portrays Indigenous and Muslim youth as ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173202/original/file-20170609-4820-rwbyr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A group of youth walked 1600 kilometers to bring attention aboriginal issues in 2013 at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario. They hold up the Cree flag. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">By Paul McKinnon/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The representation of girls and women in the popular press has raised concerns ranging from eating disorders to sexual exploitation. In a similar manner, how youth are represented in the mainstream media also raises concerns about how they are perceived and how they, in turn, perceive themselves. </p>
<p>In fact, media plays a crucial role through which social norms are communicated. The circulation of images and words attach meaning and identities to different bodies in our society. </p>
<p>As a <a href="http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=4537">long time researcher</a> of media, race, gender and representation in Canada, I have studied how media portrayals of young Indigenous people and young Muslims impact public opinion and government policies. These depictions can also deepen the alienation those young people feel. </p>
<p><a href="https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/jcie/index.php/jcie/article/view/27737">My research</a> has examined how stories in the <em>Globe and Mail</em> — which proclaims itself as <a href="http://globelink.ca/platforms/newspaper/?source=gamnewspaper">“Canada’s #1 national newspaper”</a> — represented both Indigenous and Muslim youth. I traced patterns in <em>the Globe</em> print edition across four years from the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2013. I included stories produced by <em>Globe and Mail</em> reporters as well as other sources such as wire services. </p>
<h2>‘Savages’ and ‘Barbarians’</h2>
<p>Rather than look at isolated stories, I focus on the patterns that leap to the surface when the stories are compared and examined together. What becomes obvious is the way in which these youth are represented as <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/27976389">‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’</a>, as described by prominent French philosopher <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucault/">Michel Foucault.</a></p>
<p>The former, Foucault argues, is based on the notion of the ‘noble savage’ — an idea created in the 18th century order to support the structure and success of western nations. The ‘savage’ can be tamed and converted into civilization. In contrast, the ‘barbarian’ is motivated by the irrational desire to destroy other civilizations that threaten his way of being and impede his domination of the world. Foucault argues this racist way of dividing populations within a society helped governments to control and build nations. </p>
<h2>Youth consumers are treated well</h2>
<p>Although most representations of young people in popular media tend to focus on youth as teens in trouble, my analysis reveals non-Indigenous and non-Muslim youth enjoy the most positive representations when they are portrayed as good consumers and making contributions to the economy. When they do get into trouble, it is often described in normalized ways such as truancy, wild driving and partying.</p>
<p>In contrast, almost 90 per cent of stories concerning Indigenous youth deal with failure — demonstrating how our systems have failed Indigenous peoples, and how they, in turn, fail to fit in. This leads to a perception that as “problem” youth, Indigenous teens remain unable and unfit to be part of society — that their own inabilities explain why they remain abandoned in prisons or are part of failing social systems.</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with highlighting the failure of these systems. However, context matters in how perceptions are made.</p>
<p>For example, in mainstream society, “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” is highly valued and an individual’s exceptional ability to transcend systemic limitations is constantly highlighted. In contrast, an individual or community’s inability to succeed becomes reflective of their inherent deficiency and failures.</p>
<h2>Terrorists and failures</h2>
<p>The implication is that Indigenous people are unable to survive, and according to colonial logic, they will vanish either through this inability to fit in — survival of the fittest — or by killing themselves. When they do survive, it is because of the benevolence of our institutions and charitable values.</p>
<p>My examination of stories about Muslim youth show a different predominant pattern — a portrayal of ‘barbarians’ who wish to destroy contemporary Canadian society. More than half of the stories I analyzed concentrate on radicalization and terrorism.</p>
<p>Other stories about Muslim youth show a pattern about their inability to assimilate into Canadian society — and that lack of fit was intimately tied to engaging in criminal activity and violating deportation orders</p>
<h2>Violence against women as a foreign concept</h2>
<p>A related thread in the stories covering Muslim youth dealt with victims of honour killings, with the focus being on the fact that such practices of barbarity are contrary to Canadian values. Again, context is important here. In these stories, there is no mention of the rate of femicides in the general population across the country, not to mention the shocking numbers of Indigenous missing and murdered women.</p>
<p>Is it any wonder then that two years ago the House of Commons <a href="http://nationalpost.com/news/politics/barbaric-cultural-practices-bill-to-criminalize-forced-marriage-tackle-honour-killings-set-for-final-vote/wcm/fa816ac9-403e-4018-b5e7-ad39dba7739c">passed the so-called “Barbaric Cultural Practices” bill</a>? And while it was Stephen Harper’s Conservative government that introduced the legislation, the then opposition Liberals supported it. The assumption of that legislation was violence against women, gang affiliation and gang violence are imported from elsewhere — not that they organically emerge from present conditions such as high unemployment, structural and personal violence, isolation and depressed living conditions.</p>
<h2>Deportation, abandonment and ‘rescuing’</h2>
<p>After examining almost 400 stories in the Globe, a few basic themes emerged on how both Indigenous and Muslim youths were portrayed: the Indigenous stories focused on failed systems or problem individuals, missing women and gang violence. For the Muslim stories, it was radicalization and terror, surveillance, immigration, honour killing and gang violence. In other words, ‘savages’ can be salvaged if they do not disappear and ‘barbarians’ can only be ejected through deportation or incarceration, and their women rescued from the clutches of an ultra-patriarchal culture. </p>
<p>Only a small percentage of those 400 articles could be categorized as positive stories — about 18 per cent of the Indigenous youth items and seven per cent of the ones about young Muslims.</p>
<p>In other words, <em>the Globe</em> has created a script in which the answer to deal with Muslim youth is to criminalize, deport or detain them as a way to <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=5R7NRHwD61wC&pg=PR1&dq=Sherene+Razack,+Casting+Out+url&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigt6ebw7HUAhUGkRQKHd6yCLgQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Sherene%20Razack%2C%20Casting%20Out%20url&f=false">cast them out</a>. On the other hand, problem Indigenous youth remain unable and unfit to be a part of the state, so they remain abandoned in prisons and in the mesh of failing systems because of their own inabilities.</p>
<p>The pattern of these stories also helped foster an “us and them” mentality.
With these media messages continually confronting us, it is not surprising to see how these marginalized youths can become even more alienated from the mainstream. </p>
<p>To be sure, <em>the Globe</em> is not the only media outlet to present and sustain such stereotypes. They are rampant across media. Nonetheless, we need to dismantle the idea of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ if we are to progress towards a more just society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79153/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This research was part of a larger project on marginalized and disadvantaged youth in Canada funded by the Canadian Institute for Health Research, led by principal investigator Dr. Helene Berman, University of Western Ontario.</span></em></p>Research shows that the Globe and Mail has created a script in which marginalized youth can only be dealt with as failures or criminals, impacting the way they are perceived in society.Yasmin Jiwani, Professor of Communication Studies, Concordia UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/784772017-06-01T14:03:14Z2017-06-01T14:03:14ZIt will take critical, thorough scrutiny to truly decolonise knowledge<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171333/original/file-20170529-25219-1vyl779.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There are many different ways to approach the thorny issue of decolonising knowledge.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It has become unfashionable to admit that one doesn’t really understand what phrases like “decolonising knowledge” or “a decolonised curriculum” mean. This is unfortunate. The process of coming to understand what decolonisation of knowledge might be is essential to achieving it – and that process is definitely not yet complete.</p>
<p>Decolonisation is not always a welcome concept in some quarters of academia. If curricula and ideas and knowledge are colonised, that means they have been shaped in part by considerations that are political, economic, social, cultural or otherwise tangential to the ideals of academic inquiry. </p>
<p>Admitting a need to decolonise any part of one’s discipline means admitting that it was formerly colonised to some degree. This in turn means admitting that what one previously touted as objective and untainted by the fleeting considerations of worldly affairs was, in fact, mired in them. Academics are much happier asserting that knowledge is power than they are conceding that power is knowledge.</p>
<p>Seen in this light, the decolonisation of knowledge is primarily an intellectual rather than a political project. It attempts to “disinfect” academic activities: to rid teaching, research, and institutional behaviour of influences that have little to do with the fair-minded pursuit of knowledge and truth. </p>
<p>But this is not the only approach. Decolonisation of knowledge is a contested concept. This “disinfecting” or <em>critical</em> model of decolonisation stands in contrast to a line of thought that sees knowledge as relative to a perspective, a cultural context, or something else again.</p>
<h2>Decolonisation as cultural relativism</h2>
<p>Decolonisation is sometimes presented, not as an attempt to resurrect the dispassionate search for knowledge, but as a rejection of the idea of objectivity, which is seen as a sort of heritage of colonial thinking.</p>
<p>Sometimes the idea is that notions like truth, fact or what “works” are fundamentally western and are imposed on other cultures. At other times, the idea seems to me that facts and truths are local. So what is discovered or expressed in one time or place will necessarily be inapplicable in another.</p>
<p>This line of thinking takes its cue from the fact that if you have sufficient power over someone you can enforce your views on them – or simply kill them if they disagree. Totalitarian states typically adopt policies that involve both silencing and killing dissenters. </p>
<p>Karl Marx famously <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm">maintained</a> that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Michel Foucault thought that power and truth are closely related, or even the same thing, which he <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#4.4">sometimes called “power/knowledge”</a>. </p>
<p>On this line of thought, the attempt to critically evaluate the opinion of another person or group looks like an exercise in power politics. It’s a short step from there to the idea that, in order to rid ourselves of the effects of a colonial past, we must all desist from asserting our beliefs over others’ beliefs. There is African belief, and European belief, and your belief, and mine – but none of us have the right to assert that something is true, is a fact, or works, contrary to anyone else’s belief.</p>
<p>On this view, to decolonise knowledge is to understand this and so to adopt a certain very broad kind of relativism.</p>
<h2>Critical decolonisation</h2>
<p>I prefer the first understanding of decolonisation over the second: critical decolonisation over relativistic decolonisation.</p>
<p>One very simple reason is that the kind of relativism I have described is associated with traditions of thought that are European in origin: Marxism and postmodernism. I am sceptical of assertions that these views are of universal application. I worry that some of these assertions may themselves express a colonial heritage.</p>
<p>But I have more substantive concerns, too. One of these is a point made by Ghanaian-British author and philosopher <a href="http://appiah.net/">Kwame Anthony Appiah</a> in his book <a href="http://appiah.net/books/cosmopolitanism/">Cosmopolitanism</a>. Appiah values conversation very highly and rejects relativism in part because it doesn’t motivate conversation. As he puts it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we cannot learn from one another what is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn’t a way to encourage conversation; it’s just a reason to fall silent.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The great attraction of uncritical decolonisation is that it appears to prevent us coming into conflict with each other. We simply accept that everyone is entitled to their views. But a moment’s thought shows there’s no protection against possible conflict. I might believe I can do things you don’t want me to do. I might even have views about your views.</p>
<p>The trouble is that ideas can conflict by themselves. They can logically contradict each other. They can mandate actions that are mutually exclusive. We might think very differently – but we share the same world.</p>
<h2>The risk of being wrong</h2>
<p>Critical decolonisation means accepting risk of error. It means considering whether indigenous knowledge systems might contain truths that western science has not accessed. But it also means accepting that in some cases indigenous knowledge systems might be wrong. </p>
<p>Critical decolonisation also means considering whether what we find in the canon of an academic discipline whose history has been dominated by Europe and America is really up to much. This is a very scary and painful question for academics who have devoted their lives to the study of what they have been told are works of genius.</p>
<p>Critical decolonisation leaves room for <em>local</em> knowledge. A policy to improve infant nutrition may <a href="https://philosophy.ucsd.edu/_files/ncartwright/phil152/PSA-2-Nov-0900.pdf">work in Tamil Nadu and fail in Bangladesh</a>. The relativist stance says that whether it works depends on your point of view. But this is a poor analysis of this case: it works in one and not the other, whichever place you are looking from.</p>
<p>The better approach is to seek an explanation for the difference: in this case, that the role of mothers in buying and distributing food differs between the two places. One can reject universal truths without endorsing relativism.</p>
<p>If done properly and critically a lot of what we count as great will fall in the process of decolonising knowledge. A lot of formerly unvoiced and unheard ideas will come to light. The process of critical scrutiny is essential to the success of this project – and nobody gets a free pass.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78477/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Broadbent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Critical decolonisation means accepting risk of error. It means considering whether indigenous knowledge systems might contain truths that western science hasn’t accessed.Alex Broadbent, Co-Director, African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, and Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/732112017-02-21T20:09:48Z2017-02-21T20:09:48ZThe humanities: looking the past in the eye<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157523/original/image-20170220-15904-2h0elk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Students march at South Africa's Stellenbosch University in 2015. They were seeking a legal right to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mike Hutchings/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Given the disconcerting present, how can we explain our wretched past and understand our increasingly threatening future? This question continued to drift to the surface as I listened recently to presentations about the history of individual departments in Stellenbosch University’s <a href="http://www.sun.ac.za/english/faculty/arts">Faculty of Arts and Social Science</a> – the name for the humanities faculty at that university.</p>
<p>Some context is needed: next year Stellenbosch will celebrate its centenary, and a commemorative tome beckons. Some faculties are already busy writing up their pasts. The Arts and Social Science Faculty is first exploring various ways of speaking about it before its starts to write. It is commendable, given the value-laden nature of its disciplines. </p>
<p>Stellenbosch University has a special place in the imaginary of South African higher education. The traditional centre of Afrikaans language and learning, the university is often said to have been the intellectual home of the apartheid system. </p>
<p>Like all other tertiary institutions it has had to grapple with political change, the rise of market ideology, and the impact of technological change. </p>
<h2>Key question about the past</h2>
<p>The presentations at the seminar were uneven. Presenters – with one notable exception – made little systematic use of the formal university archive. It is perhaps the only place that could answer the key question about the university’s past: Did Stellenbosch make Afrikaner Nationalism, or Afrikaner Nationalism make Stellenbosch?</p>
<p>In seeking to answer this question, most presenters drew from years in the academic trenches. They recalled members of staff, their interests, the numbers of students, changing syllabi, and the like. But others reached beyond this comfort zone to explore how individuals and their subjects were captured by ideology at various stages in the 100-year history of the university.</p>
<p>One offered an account of a schism between colleagues that continued for three decades. Another passionately explained how, from the late-1960s, the Social Sciences and the project of modernity were forced on the university to help align the country with a changing world. Yet another recalled an earlier war had been fought in the bowels of the faculty over the language of instruction – this time in the 1920s over whether it should be Dutch or Afrikaans. </p>
<p>The current <a href="http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/to-address-wrongs-of-the-past-stellenbosch-language-policy-must-change/">language war</a> raging at the university is over the continued use of Afrikaans – considered by many, still, as the tongue of apartheid – as one of the languages of instruction.</p>
<h2>Bohemian lifestyles</h2>
<p>Scattered through these accounts were stories of difference, even deviance. There were the bohemian lifestyles of members of the faculty in the 1960s. Then in the 1970s classical composers who began to incorporate African themes in their music. In the 1980s there was the authentic student rebellion that drew on rock music – and drugs – to shake up the university and its ruling establishment. This provoked an often ruthless response from a university leadership invoking God, the Afrikaner cause and the then ruling National Party.</p>
<p>But this was not the only disciplining force. The omnipresent English, active in colonial rule and at other universities in the country, invariably exercised their seemingly God-given claim to superiority – in respect of race, the role of Empire, and on why knowledge rightfully belonged to them. </p>
<p>The two days of reflection showed again just how is difficult it is to speak about these things, even in a place whose work is to deal with ideas, and how ideas make – and are made by – the world. </p>
<p>But we all know, or should all know, that knowledge is a fickle mistress. Academic fashions change despite the timelessness promised by the idea of an established canon. This is why, before anything else, academics should be teaching their students that people change their minds if they think about things. Only people who don’t think don’t change their minds.</p>
<h2>Déjà vu</h2>
<p>Midway through the event, I remembered that I had been in this exact space once before. Weeks after the Berlin Wall had come down, I visited a faculty in its Eastern sector of that German city. A well-known professor in the Humanities received me in his cavernous office on Unter den Linden. He was fearful rather than confident about the future of scholarship at the university in a unified Germany in a post-Cold War world. </p>
<p>Significantly, in the course of talking about past scholarship at their faculty, the colleagues at Stellenbosch displayed an even more deep-seated concern about its future. Even if we understand that what what we know is forged by passion, partisanship and politics, to pretend that there is objectivity in the Humanities is to call forth the <a href="http://www.special-dictionary.com/proverbs/source/r/russian_proverb/185294.htm">Russian saying</a> that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>he lied like an eyewitness. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unlike the natural sciences, where measurement and mathematics have become proxies for the truth, every intellectual past in the humanities has to be looked straight in the eye, and its ideological underpinnings unravelled. </p>
<p>This is where the campaign to decolonise knowledge has pulled the Humanities up short, not only in South Africa but throughout the world. At the heart of the issue, surely, is the Foucaultian <a href="http://www.michel-foucault.com/concepts/">idea</a> of social <a href="https://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/foucault-power-is-everywhere/">power</a>. How this is exercised both within the university and the world it always hopes to make? </p>
<p>As a result, are faculty histories to be like South Africa’s <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/Trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>: a transactional zone where confessions are traded for forgiveness? Or should they ideally provide an understanding of the past because it has a bearing on the present and the future? </p>
<p>If the latter, we should all be reading <a href="https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/590/">Alexis de Tocqueville</a>, who wrote that his attempt to understand the French Revolution was</p>
<blockquote>
<p>less about the facts … [than it was looking for] … traces of the movement of ideas and sentiments … [because] … the difficulties … [of understanding] … are immense …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Stellenbosch exercise is a brave initiative spearheaded by a dean. It comes with a quiet confidence in his insight that only conversation can shed light on our conflicted past, and build understanding in an age of great uncertainty about our future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73211/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Vale receives funding from the National Research Foundation. The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) is funded by the University of Johannesburg and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, </span></em></p>Next year South Africa’s Stellenbosch University will celebrate its centenary. A recent conference to discuss the anniversary has reminded everyone present that knowledge is a fickle mistress.Peter Vale, Professor of Humanities and the Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/714602017-01-20T19:03:14Z2017-01-20T19:03:14ZThe art of protesting during Donald Trump’s presidency<p>With the new administration beginning, many people might want to know how to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/19/alternative-inauguration-party-saranac-lake">resist</a> it. The inauguration week includes many protests against Donald Trump’s values – from <a href="https://www.womensmarch.com/">the Women’s March on Washington</a> to the <a href="http://hyperallergic.com/352328/we-need-to-start-now-a-personal-case-for-the-art-strike/">#J20 Art Strike</a>. What should we aim for as we head into protests?</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/ebce.2016.6.issue-3-4/ebce-2016-0020/ebce-2016-0020.xml">reflective citizen</a> and a <a href="https://punctumbooks.com/titles/solar-calendar/">practitioner of philosophy</a>, I am hopeful about the power of protest. I see our time as challenging us to ensure that protests <a href="http://hyperallergic.com/343410/reconsidering-the-aesthetics-of-protest/">take democratic form</a>. When we do, protest rejuvenates democracy.</p>
<h2>A ‘hollowing out’</h2>
<p>On the face of it, our democratic values are in trouble. In new work on democracy, the political theorist Wendy Brown <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos">argues</a> that neoliberalism is “hollowing out” democracy without our realizing it, like rot inside a tree.</p>
<p>Neoliberalism is a form of thinking in which human values are reduced to capitalist market values, especially financial ones. Brown develops the concept from Foucault’s <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781403986559">lectures</a> on the governance of human populations. Foucault asks how people are managed as a people. His answer is that a new way of thinking sets in from the government on down to individual lives.</p>
<p>For example, in <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/">Citizens United</a>, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy characterized political speech as a “marketplace” of ideas. This is odd because reasoning about the public good is not something we simply consume. Reasoning doesn’t work like that. You have to ask what makes sense, not whether you simply want it.</p>
<p>Brown also discusses how students and families often value education by its “return on investment.” This displaces deeper values such as growing up or becoming a good human being and an active citizen. Learning to govern our lives through shared rule is replaced by outperforming other competitive individuals. </p>
<p>In examples such as these, Brown shows how our capacity to work together is undermined in the way that we think. From the macro level of constitutional interpretation to the micro level of getting an education, neoliberalism “hollows out” our ability to think collectively about things.</p>
<h2>Saying ‘we’ and meaning it</h2>
<p>Thankfully, the ideas in the concept of protest can address this threat. </p>
<p>“Protest” has a Latin root that means to bear witness publicly. The idea is that in protest, some of us step forth and share something we think should be considered by all.</p>
<p>“Democracy” has a Greek root that means that the people have the power to construct society. We interpret this in the United States as rule by and for the people. The idea is that power is shared between us. </p>
<p>Now there can be no sharing when we can’t say “we” and mean it. Someone is being left out.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the minute we can say “we” and mean it, we affirm our shared volition. When we can attach our wills to something and affirm it, we share (some) power. </p>
<p>Thus, sharing power between people demands that people can say “we” sincerely and without reservation, and that they have not <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/adaptive-preferences-and-womens-empowerment-9780199777877?cc=us&lang=en&#">succumbed to oppression</a> in the moment of speaking.</p>
<p>Democratic protest is at heart, I think, the act of finding how we can arrive at a point to say “we” and mean it. “How can we?!” we say in protest. But we also say, “How can we?” (notice the punctuation). “We the people” isn’t just an assumption of democracy, it is democracy’s goal and ideal.</p>
<h2>Clearing a space for each other</h2>
<p>If the main threat to democracy today is the loss of collective thinking, then protest is democracy’s guardian. But protesters must develop the idea of sharing power. Where can we turn to do this?</p>
<p>Today, some of the most exciting work on sharing is found in what is called “socially engaged art.” Artists such as <a href="http://chloebass.com/">Chloë Bass</a>, <a href="http://carolinewoolard.com/">Caroline Woolard</a> and <a href="http://www.michaelrakowitz.com/">Michael Rakowitz</a> have created ways of sharing power and of protesting that reinvigorate community and democracy.</p>
<p>Rakowitz urged that the color orange be <a href="http://hyperallergic.com/200554/an-artist-embarks-on-an-impossible-project-for-tamir-rice/">removed</a> from the city of Cleveland to protest the killing of Tamir Rice after he’d removed the orange safety tip from his toy gun. </p>
<p>Woolard has formed <a href="http://tradeschool.coop/story/">barter schools for knowledge</a> in a “solidarity economy” where knowledge can be shared even when you cannot afford university.</p>
<p>Bass has given people the opportunity to better understand <a href="http://chloebass.com/work/the-book-of-everyday-instruction">what living with others means</a> through a series of interactive exercises. She gets at underlying fears through rituals people can trust.</p>
<p>These aesthetic acts are aimed at bringing people together across boundaries so that we are able to say “we.” They provide opportunities to work through trauma, impotence or class inequality and exclusion. They open up communication.</p>
<p>Protesters can learn from socially engaged art. Why shout at the police when they aren’t listening? It’s more imaginative to organize different ways to hear each other.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71460/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer is co-organizer of a community based group in Cleveland Heights, OH called the Moral Inquiries which discusses civics and ethics bi-weekly.</span></em></p>On the face of it, our democratic values are in trouble. But we should be hopeful about the power of protest.Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics, Case Western Reserve University, Case Western Reserve UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/607772016-08-05T21:53:40Z2016-08-05T21:53:40ZWhither anarchy: ownness as a form of freedom<p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. This article is the third of four perspectives on the political relevance of anarchy and the prospects for liberty in the world today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Freedom, that most familiar of concepts in political theory, strikes us today as ever-more ambiguous and opaque. </p>
<p>While freedom has long been the ideological emblem of the liberal capitalist West, it seems increasingly difficult to identify with any real clarity or certainty. Its meaning has been contorted by the rationality of neoliberalism, which offers us only a very narrow notion of freedom through the market while, as <a href="https://medanth.wikispaces.com/Governmentality">Foucault would put it</a>, governing us through our own liberty.</p>
<p>The supposedly free individual is required to conform to certain norms and codes of behaviour, which coincide with the dictates of the market. Thus the individual, in the name of freedom, is pushed back upon himself and becomes solely responsible for his own economic destiny. This inculcates within him an eternal sense of guilt when he fails to live up to prescribed standards of success or “resilience”.</p>
<p>Furthermore, freedom has become absolutely hinged to the ideology of security that is now omnipresent in liberal societies. </p>
<p>We might add to this a consideration of the innumerable daily instances where, in liberal states (I now use this term advisedly), freedom is constrained and curtailed – by, for instance, over-zealous lawmakers, judiciaries, police and other state institutions and private corporations – not to mention the lack of economic “liberty” experienced by the majority of the dispossessed around the world. </p>
<p>We are tempted to say that the concept of freedom finds itself in a dead-end. When we talk about freedom today, we literally don’t know what we’re talking about.</p>
<h2>Stirner on freedom from within</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Max Stirner in 1900.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Félix Valloton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the mid-19th century, the little-known German Young Hegelian philosopher <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner/">Max Stirner</a> was already arguing that the discourse of freedom was exhausted. </p>
<p>The problem with the standard notions of freedom was that they were dependent on certain external conditions and institutions, like the liberal state, or on the fulfilment of some promise of revolutionary emancipation. They thus reduced freedom to a kind of spectral ideal that always concealed new forms of domination.</p>
<p>If freedom is associated with a certain regime of law or type of community, or is aligned with a higher rational and moral ideal, this in effect alienates the individual’s freedom. </p>
<p>If freedom is associated with a form of state, then one allows the state to determine the limits of freedom.</p>
<p>If freedom is seen as an ideal to be achieved within a higher rational and moral community, then one either pursues an impossible dream, or allows freedom to be determined by a revolutionary vanguard seeking to impose its own vision on society.</p>
<p>In other words, according to Stirner, if external conditions and standards are seen to prescribe and determine the extent of freedom, one ends up disempowering individuals and robbing them of their own capacities for freedom. Such were the limits of freedom that Stirner proposed an alternative notion of ownness, by which he intended a more radical understanding of self-ownership.</p>
<p>What is ownness? Unlike the mystification of freedom, the pursuit of which has become a hollow game (the same could be said about democracy), ownness is a much more tangible experience. I understand it as ontological freedom: the freedom one always already has. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Radical self-ownership is a form of freedom we already have.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eric Huybrechts/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What does this mean? First, it is a singular form of freedom, which is left to individuals to create for themselves, rather than conforming to any universalised or institutionally defined ideal. </p>
<p>Nor is it a question of emancipation, as this simply risks another form of domination – we have seen this in many revolutions aimed at “freeing” a subjugated people. Rather, it is up to the individuals themselves, affirming themselves and their own indifference to all forms of power.</p>
<p>While this might sound like a form of wishful thinking – this was Marx and Engels’ claim against Stirner – it alerts us to what <a href="http://etiennedelaboetie.net/">La Boétie</a> saw as the <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/saul-newman-voluntary-servitude-reconsidered-radical-politics-and-the-problem-of-self-dominatio">voluntary servitude</a> and wilful obedience that underpinned all forms of domination. The flipside of this was a wilful disobedience and a reclamation of one’s own power.</p>
<p>Perhaps we can say that ownness is the experience of self-affirmation and empowerment that ontologically precedes all acts of liberation. Let’s take <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-ego-and-his-own">Stirner’s example of the slave</a>. While the slave has little or no freedom in his chains, he nevertheless has ownness, a sense of self-possession. It is the one thing his master cannot take from him:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That I then become free from him and his whip is only the consequence of my antecedent egoism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this situation, freedom, whether liberal or republican, whether understood as non-interference or non-domination, simply cannot account for the slave’s sense of autonomy, his understanding of himself as his own property and not anyone else’s.</p>
<h2>Lessons for today</h2>
<p>What lessons does this have for us today? In recent years we have witnessed an unprecedented breakdown and crisis of legitimacy in our representative political institutions. </p>
<p>In the hands of our political elites, all these high-minded ideals of liberty, rights and democracy no longer signify anything; they have come to be associated with the worst hypocrisies and abuses.</p>
<p>At the same time, we have learnt – rightly – to be wary of revolutionary promises of liberation and alternative forms of social order as an antidote to the current situation. The question of freedom today is located in this gap between crumbling institutions and the eclipse of utopian horizons.</p>
<p>In response to this deadlock we have seen new forms of political experimentation, in which people seek to define their own lives and their relations with others in ways that are autonomous from dominant modes of political and economic organisation. </p>
<p>Institutions are not destroyed – for what would this lead to but simply a new kind of institutionalisation? Rather they are profaned; used without identifying with or investing in them. </p>
<p>We start to think and act as though power no longer existed. This is not the freedom of the neoliberal subject, sacrificing himself to the God of the Market, but the self-determination of owners invested in themselves and, through themselves, in others.</p>
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<p><em>You can read other articles in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/whither-anarchy">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60777/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Saul Newman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Between institutional collapse and false promises of utopia, people seek to define their own lives and their relations with others by thinking and acting as though power no longer existed.Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory, Goldsmiths, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.