Autodidactics of Bits: Adrian Rifkin's Rancierean Cultural Studies & the partition of the pedagogical more

1 Autodidactics of Bits: Adrian Rifkin‟s [Rancièrean] Cultural Studies & the partition of the pedagogical Paul Bowman Against Teaching and Learning This chapter seeks to intervene into current ways of constructing, perceiving, partitioning, policing and discoursing about pedagogy. Specifically, it seeks to flesh out one possible way to reorientate discourse about and practices of pedagogy away from the current simplistic and stultifying focus on „teaching and learning‟. Such a reorientation would be an improvement because it is a limited and limiting conception of pedagogy. Yet it has a strong and constraining hold on educational discourse at all levels. Moreover, the topics or problematics of pedagogy, of didactics, of learning, can be shown to far exceed the current myopic focus on teacher-student relations or indeed „learning resource‟-student relations, or, worse, „student-centredlearning‟. What is first and last to be critiqued and recast is the familiar theme of the pedagogical scene. We must definitively move away from prioritising a teacherstudent conception of pedagogy, as encapsulated in the mythic Socratic (or Oedipal) scenario of the teacher teaching and the student learning, in a clear communicative transfer. There may well be elements of this relation in pedagogy, but by virtue of its anthropocentric focus (and what Derrida referred to as its metaphysical phonocentrism), the discourse of teaching and learning misses vast tracts, realms and regions of material pedagogic relations. However, a term like „material pedagogic relations‟ could be misleading. So let me stress that here it should be taken to refer neither to „new technologies‟, C&IT, VLEs, nor to any other such acronymic new clothes, nor to teaching and learning „methods‟, „techniques‟ or „strategies‟. These are all versions of the same sort of view or partition of the perceptible which construes pedagogy in terms of the metaphysics of presence so critiqued by Derrida, or based on an ideal of transparent, unimpeded, ideally face-to-face communicative transfers, boiling down to an idealization of the teacher-student relation (or scenario) that 2 Deleuze called arboreal, because organised by the Platonic vision of teacher teaching student in the quiet, tranquillity and shade of a tree. Rather than this, this discussion of pedagogy will instead – and perhaps unexpectedly – focus on teaching and learning‟s putative other: namely, research. More specifically, it will focus on archival „research methods‟. The contention is that a reconceptualization of teaching and learning‟s supposed opposite is necessary insofar as it reveals „research‟ and „research methods‟ to be neither opposite nor other, but rather a supplement that could and should subvert (or invert) and displace the terms of the entire debate. Of course, no academic study, paper, theory, exposition, demonstration or argument can, in itself, change anything. But in constructing an argument which first clarifies not only the falsity but also the reductive consequences of the separation of „teaching and learning‟ from „research‟ (a separation which prevails in academic, educational, funding and policy discourses), and secondly which champions an approach to „research methods‟ that is deliberately antidisciplinary (Mowitt 1992) – or, that is invested in a project of altering disciplinarity (Bowman 2008),1 for any number of theoretical, ethical and political reasons – then this paper will at least be making available a further critique, one that may prove useful, that could be used to help alterdisciplinary projects in the arts, humanities and even perhaps social sciences. Such projects are vital because – put bluntly – given the sustained attacks not just on „theory‟ but on „useless‟ arts and humanities tout court, both at (macro) government policy levels and at (micro) disciplinary orientation levels, it is vital that arguments, rationalisations, explanations and accounts at least exist which make cases for how and why to proceed otherwise – in ways that are different to the dominant approaches to pedagogy, in research and in teaching and learning „methods‟. Without strong counterarguments, representatives of practices deemed „useless‟ by the dominant discourse – in this case, dominant educational discourses – will find themselves floundering in the face of political and ideological attacks, as was the case as much during the decimation of UK public university funding initiated by a Labour government and completed by a weak Conservative-led coalition government in 2010 3 as it was during the trailblazing Thatcherite onslaught on arts and humanities fields in the 1980s.2 What is perhaps most astonishing about this is the fact that, despite three decades of living under the axe, „critical‟ academia developed shockingly few intellectual retorts, rejoinders, responses or, indeed, simple counterarguments to the neoliberal, instrumental, neo-utilitarian rationales that have dominated and ultimately devastated the „critical‟ faculties of the university themselves. Instead of arguments, „critical‟ academics seem to have been much better at delivering denunciations, demonisations and moralizations. Yet, as Jacques Rancière has argued many times, political protests and projects and positions that do not simply demonise the other but that engage the other in detailed dialogue and precisely focused reasoned argument largely fare considerably better than projects which simply denounce and decry the evil enemy. And yet the latter has been the preferred mode of response by embattled and embittered arts and humanities academics and students. The Partition of the Pedagogical Questions of disciplinary orientation, approach and method may seem to be „entirely‟ or „merely academic‟ – a world away from politics proper. But even a quick appraisal of the historical relationships between governmental educational policies and the kinds of fields and approaches that are valued and those that are undervalued quickly reveals that one need not be Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser to see that education per se is always and everywhere eminently political. The risk always faced by „critical‟ scholarship is that of being struck from the books, struck from the record. So reasons must be constructed and given, clarifications, demonstrations and cases must be made for the crucial importance, value and even usefulness of even some of the most avowedly „purely academic‟ work. Rather than entering into this matter from the macropolitical perspective of government (or governmentality), this chapter will instead remain focused on the question of pedagogy. This is because of the role played by what Jacques Rancière regularly refers to as the partition of the perceptible. 4 Today, „teaching and learning‟ is conventionally distinguished from „research‟; „teaching methods‟ distinguished from „research methods‟, and so on. All of these categories have been in a sense invented, abstracted, isolated and separated out as part of the so-called professionalization (aka proletarianization) of university education. In this process of differentiation, definition, clarification and demarcation (objectification or objectifying), what has become obscured is the irreducible interconnectedness and expansiveness of the pedagogic field. Insisting on this expansiveness should be among the most consistent and insistent challenges to the professionalist, managerialist discourse that – to use the word that Jacques Rancière has put on the pedagogical-political map – stultifies all manner of pedagogical scene (Rancière 1987). In order to set out some of the terms and stakes of this matter, this chapter will primarily explore one text by Adrian Rifkin (2003). It is a text that is immensely rich, expansive and enlightening on many subjects. Given this richness, it is regrettably a text that I will be able to discuss here only very selectively and all too fleetingly and, inevitably therefore, reductively. 3 Nevertheless, despite having to overlook many dimensions of it, I will try to pull one key thread out of it in order to amplify one important impulse within it. Specifically, I will characterise it as a reflection on archival (and theoretical) research methods, and argue that this reflection gives good reasons to regard Rifkin‟s manner of archival research method as providing a crucial insight into all „methods‟ and all pedagogy. I will characterise this as an autodidactics of bits. Rifkin is primarily known for his contributions to the fields of art history and queer theory. But, as becomes clear through this very uncanonical text, he should also be connected to the development of cultural studies in the UK. Accordingly, perhaps, Rifkin should also therefore be regarded as involved in the development of cultural studies as such, cultural studies as an institutional entity and disciplinary field per se – even if, as he suggests, one should really regard the history of cultural studies in terms of various BA degrees „lurching into being‟ at a particular time (Rifkin 2003: 105) rather than emerging according to any kind of master plan or overarching programme. 5 Even so, placing Rifkin into the foreground of any narrative of cultural studies emergence is not a proposition that is likely to be met with universal agreement. Certainly, canonical histories of cultural studies would be unlikely to locate Rifkin at any kind of centre. Nor would he claim to have been. Nevertheless, like untold others, he was certainly present and active, on the unstable margins, and the occasional dilations or bursting of the banks of these margins into the unstable centres, of the emergent and constantly contested fields of cultural studies. But of course, anyone who knows (or, rather, thinks) anything about the history of cultural studies should baulk at the idea of a canonical history anyway. Which is one reason why, given the sustained critiques of the impositions of monolithic or univocal and linear histories on what are irreducibly complex formations, critiques that have been carried out in multiple fields and registers for many decades now, readers might already begin to anticipate why placing Rifkin into a relation with the discipline‟s formation and history might be productive, enlightening, informative, and educational, in its own right. This is particularly so given that to place Rifkin‟s narrative of formation at the centre of a narrative of formation makes us foreground the complexity of any such narrativization and of the range of interlocking struggles involved. „It‟s very easy to forget‟, Rifkin points out, „that the formation of cultural studies was in fact a very real fight for syllabuses‟ (104): And not just a very real fight for syllabuses within institutions, but a real fight to establish those syllabuses in the face of institutions which didn‟t understand them at all. I don‟t mean the institutions we were working in – the polytechnics – but I mean the universities, who largely had no idea of what cultural studies was or what was going on in Birmingham, but who at the same time were given power over the polytechnics, in terms of validating and examining our courses, to allow them to come into being. So at the same time as we were trying to formulate the syllabuses in cultural studies, or the syllabuses in new forms of social historical studies, we had to educate the people who were put in power above us to authorise us to do these things. The struggle for syllabuses and the production of the new kinds of student through that syllabus would then make that syllabus work, which is something that is coterminous with the production of the kinds of text which would then further make that set of investigations possible. (Rifkin 2003: 104-5) 6 This chapter seeks to focus on these different forms of pulling out of shape, out of time, and out of place – processes which Rifkin so consistently perceives and engages. In this context, what is also noteworthy is the fact that Rifkin has long had a close intellectual relationship with Jacques Rancière. For, despite Rancière‟s lengthy and prestigious writing career in philosophy, ethics, theory and history, he is only now definitively coming to the forefront of theoretical debates within Anglophone academia. Given the recent widespread explosion of interest in the significance of the work of Jacques Rancière for a very wide range of disciplines, the extent to which Rifkin has for a very long time been influenced and orientated by the work of Rancière (albeit tangentially, much more in the manner of inspiration and mutual affiliation than anything like discipleship) ought to be acknowledged and deserves to be engaged. For if Rancière is a figure whose significance in the context of educational philosophy, theory and practice is still now continuing to emerge, internationally and cross-disciplinarily, then consideration of this case of one of the longest sustained Rancièrean relationships in Anglophone academia clearly has a unique currency. Given the extent to which Anglophone scholarship or many persuasions is currently trying to establish what a Rancièrean history, a Rancièrean cultural studies, a Rancièrean art history, a Rancièrean political theory, etc. will or should look like, therefore a consideration of what Rifkin‟s longstanding Rancièreanism, not just in art history but also in cultural studies, does look like, should also recast this problematic – moving it from the speculative and futural by demonstrating that it already has several long histories, of which Rifkin‟s is but one. Specifically, here, I hope to illustrate the actual and potential alterdisciplinarity inscribed in the convergence of Rancièrean insights and Rifkin‟s approach to research, to the archive, and to the autodidactics of that encounter and that relation. Against Satisfying Method As Rifkin notes, at a certain point in his thinking about history, historical processes and methods, during the 1970s, his archival research led him to a conviction that, in history, culture and society, „it‟s not a question of a dialectic of base and superstructure, but it‟s a case of the two never meeting in a form in which you can talk about satisfactory forms of historical narrative or satisfactory forms of 7 historical outcome‟. He continues, immediately: „That was the point, in late 1978, when I met Jacques Rancière‟ (112). In other words, Rifkin met Rancière in the immediate context of coming to suspect the impossibility of the veracity of satisfactory narratives and outcomes, the impossibility of simplicity, resolution, completion, solution or of dissolution. The other face of such a position, it soon becomes clear, is the enhanced awareness of the extent to which all of these impossibilities are repressed or foreclosed in academic discourse. To say this is not to activate a repressive hypothesis about academic discourse. It is rather to notice the extent to which academic discourse often trades in the fabrication and circulation of satisfactory narratives and complete outcomes. Realising and rejecting the repression or denial of the at best asymptotic relation between archive and account is what underpins and fuels Rifkin‟s theoretical and practical approaches to teaching through and learning from archival research into popular (and unpopular) culture. To prefer to dwell with complexity rather than to prefer to try to exorcise it and impose a coherent narrative or conceptual form on it perhaps bespeaks a history, an ethos and a paradigm of cultural studies that is arguably in jeopardy of being, if not forgotten, then certainly subordinated by both disciplinary practices and disciplinary memories and histories in cultural studies and other fields. Such subordination or amnesia would condemn more than one field to live in more than one type of repetition. Moreover, it could constitute a palpable loss, a denudation of disciplinary possibility – in much the same way that a widespread ignorance about even the most prominent works of cultural studies from the 1970s leads students and academics of „discourse theory‟ to constantly recover the same sorts of ground and make the same sorts of arguments, but in a much more „disciplined‟ – as in formalized, constricted, strictured, hidebound – manners. Of course, to say this is not to elevate cultural studies per se from the same sort of charge. Indeed, cultural studies as a field arguably has an increasingly schizophrenic relation to history itself. On the one hand, as is well known, key figures of the field often insist on explaining cultural studies in terms of constructing rather grand narratives about the struggles involved in its disciplinary formation. But on the other hand, „theoretical‟ cultural studies itself apparently proceeds more and more by way of simple regular replacements of one preferred theorist with another – substitutions, without any attempt to engage with 8 the reasons for the perspectival and paradigm shifts; without engaging the question of why we are all meant to be „doing‟, say, Deleuze now instead of Derrida, and why we are all going to have to be „doing‟ Badiou next instead of Deleuze, and so on.4 Outside of the violent jolts of fashion that grip the movements of cultural theory, more empirical styles of cultural studies proceed with scientific method as the ideal, and inevitably therefore these approaches strongly subordinate, discipline and „police‟ questions of historical formation, conflict and complexity. Nevertheless, some awareness of disciplinary history, of the formative struggles and arguments around politics, ethics, methods, foci, syllabi, investments, priorities, and so on, in the emergence of the disciplinary present could prove transformative of current orientations in such contexts. At the very least, engaging with Rifkin‟s insights into and arguments about the emergence of cultural studies, as well as his theoretical perspectives on the pedagogical relation to/of the archive, could transform many of the practices – both in „research‟ and „teaching‟ – that currently have a widespread hegemony. What is even more pertinent is the fact that Rifkin‟s own accounts of the history of cultural studies do not merely add information that will complete a picture. Rather, his contributions supplement any such picture in a way that pulls the picture or object out of shape and reconfigures it as something rather different, and, indeed, render it constitutively uncompletable. This is not to suggest that Rifkin ought to be numbered among the many who proposed – as a key feature of their intervention – one or another argument about constitutive incompletion. The phrase „constitutive incompletion‟ itself certainly had great currency during the 1980s and 1990s, arising through the encounters between various strands of poststructuralism and, in particular, Lacanian scholarship (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). And Rifkin can certainly be placed within or in a relation to this moment and movement. Nevertheless, his tangent and „take‟ on it never went with the flow of reiterating the importance of „impossibility‟ or „incompletion‟. Rather, Rifkin is invested much more in the importance of reconstructing through the principled pulling out of shape; or a process that I have come to think of as this autodidactics of bits. 9 Aims, Objectives and Outcomes This autodidactics of bits is of direct importance for cultural studies. For, debates about pedagogy are not only dominant within the aim-, objective-, outputand outcome-oriented world of the „professionalized‟ contemporary university, in which managerialist approaches to pedagogy have significantly restructured and reorientated university teaching and research activities in recent decades. They are also arguably at the heart of any and every possible cultural studies „project‟. Many thinkers, influenced directly or indirectly by Gramsci, for instance, regard culture as pedagogy. Hence, debates about pedagogy are inextricable from questions of culture, politics and intervention. Gramscian and Bourdieuian paradigms in particular have been dominant touchstones in this regard. But Rifkin‟s alibi, orientation and theoretical underpinning relates much more to Jacques Rancière‟s work, and in particular, I would argue, to Rancière‟s reading of the radical pedagogue, Joseph Jacotot: the educator whose fundamental lesson Rancière claims to have been that not only can one learn without being taught but also that one can teach what one does not know, and that the imposition or enforcement of method and discipline is a stultification of the universal capacity to creatively solve riddles that all people are imbued with and whose existence illustrates a much more essential truth than any disciplining or systematizing institutionalisation can ever reveal (Rancière 1987). Rancière‟s intervention is increasingly well known. But Rifkin‟s own interpretation or performative elaboration of (ir)responsible Jacototism is less clear cut, and indeed adds some important dimensions to Rancièrean Jacototism. To elucidate this, I would like to position Rifkin within a context of educational debate, a world of different paradigms, many of them utterly different to any of the art, literary, cultural, political, queer, historical and philosophical paradigms that Rifkin himself ever discusses explicitly. Of course, given what I have already said about constitutive incompletion, I can hardly now move on to try to place Rifkin within a definitive history. Nevertheless, I can relate his work and words to some important bits of it. One big tumult in particular: postmodernity. Most relevant here is that the gathering storm that Lyotard announced in 1979 came to be characterized not simply by discrete, disconnected language games (paralogies) 10 and the corresponding proliferation of mutual unintelligibility between groups and contexts, but rather, across many fields and sectors, by a new type of connectedness (Lyotard 1979/1984). This took the form of the rise to dominance of discourses asserting the importance of efficiency, profit, market mechanisms, choice and freedom, coupled with the corresponding intensification of techniques of control and restrictions of autonomy in increasingly professionalized sectors such as education. Indeed, it was in the universities and other public sector institutions such as health, education and social services, that entrance into the „postmodern‟ era amounted to the growth of managerialism and the intensification of what some came to call „audit culture‟ (Kilroy, Bailey and Chare 2004). Of course, others, most prominently Foucault, had equally alerted us to the nearly invisible, microscopic, micrological emergence of panoptical power (and of course Deleuze subsequently picked up this baton and ran with it into the famous theorization of societies of control). But Foucault captures perfectly the simple/subtle logic at work in panopticism in an insight that also applies to managerialism, as well as to disciplinarity, and to all of panopticism‟s mongrel offspring besides: The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible. (Foucault 1977/1995: 170-171) The growth of the audit culture in education has seen the implementation of an ostensibly market-based logic that is actually a control-based logic. In universities it has increasingly taken the form of a requirement that disciplines justify themselves according to ultimately utilitarian criteria. Under such criteria, the prevailing questions to be answered are: What is the point of this? What is the use of this? What are the profits or returns of it, and for whom? On the ground, in the bookkeeping, in the administration, in the paperwork, the registration, the assessment, the documentation, management and delivery of university education, there has flourished all of the micrological apparatuses of surveillance and regulation that, to a greater or lesser extent, anyone involved in university education takes for granted today. „Education‟ became end-orientated, outcome-orientated. Courses and modules now have to have explicit and detailed rationales. More and more clear expectations 11 are set out for coursework, combined with more and more prescriptive stipulations of assessment criteria and guidelines. Terms like „learning aims‟ and „learning outcomes‟ have become so familiar that they are now entirely unremarkable phrases within everyday academic-bureaucratic language. Teaching has to have an aim. Learning has to have an outcome. Both must at least pretend to be knowable and known in advance. There are enormous problems with all of the premises and propositions underpinning this dominant neo-utilitarianism. Thomas Docherty sums them up concisely when he points out that notion of „outcomes‟ is „part of the triumph of the managerialist ideology damaging education at the present time‟, because it demands that educators be obliged „to predict with total certainty … what the student who follows the course will be able to do after she has followed it‟ (Docherty 2003: 223). Yet, he complains: An education that is worthy of the name cannot predict outcomes: it is part of the point of education that we do not know what will eventuate in our processes of thinking and working and experimenting. In this sense, education should be of the nature of the event: the Docherty who is there after reading and thinking about Joyce or Proust or Rilke or Woolf is different from the Docherty who was there before that activity; but the earlier Docherty could never have predicted what the later one might think – that was the point of the exercise of reading in the first place: to think things that were previously undreamt of in my philosophy. (224) Docherty has a point. However, closer inspection suggests that in order to make it so powerfully he has had to bodge together some very different things along the way, things that do not necessarily run together in quite the dramatic all-or-nothing mode of his polemical formulation. Specifically, Docherty conflates two pedagogical scenes or positions: one of teaching or of the teacher; and one of learning or of being the learner. Yet, it is eminently possible to be or become both: for teacher and student to change positions unexpectedly; for the teacher to learn and the learner to teach, and so on and so forth. There are other problems with Docherty‟s argument, that I will return to in due course. But nevertheless, despite the limitations involved in constructing such a stark (hyperbolical) opposition between the predictable and the 12 event, this all-or-nothing argument clearly flags up the terms of an entrenched and long-raging debate. Moreover, the terms of this debate do indeed boil down to two starkly different conceptions of education. One position sees (or values) education as training (education as predictable). Another sees (or values) education as, so to speak, revolutionary transformation, alteration, or interruption (education as event). Training and Event Education conceived as training has been decisively in the ascendant in the dominant neo-utilitarian discourse, in the UK at least, since the Thatcherite onslaught on „useless‟ arts and humanities in the 1980s (Young 1992). The „good‟, the „useful‟ education, became defined as training: for industry, for vocations, for moneymaking. The values inscribed within this position increasingly hold not only hegemony but actually now a stranglehold on educational policy, funding, and orientations in the UK (and elsewhere). This is most clearly testified to by the quick move to withdraw all government funding from the teaching and provision of undergraduate courses in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in England, by the recently elected Conservative coalition government in the UK in 2010. As radical as the UK government‟s actions against the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences have been since 2010, their position is not new. It is in fact programmatically predictable, according to a two centuries old discourse about university education in the UK; a discourse which, according to Robert J. C. Young (1992), has been organised by an ongoing and entrenched polemic about whether university education should have any use. Set up within the utilitarian frames of this discourse, and amplified by the neoliberal marketization of everything since the 1980s (and further confounded by the prevalence of a fuzzy „puritanical realist‟ logic which, in its insistence on the superiority of „practical usefulness‟, confuses „usefulness‟ and „value‟ and comes up with a naïve sense of „use value‟ as the yardstick of all use and all value), UK government policy overwhelmingly prefers that which can present itself as unambiguously „useful‟ in the most instrumental (and indeed metaphysical) sense. Hence the common sense: the only useful education is education that only has a useful use. 13 The opposite or alternative position available today, in the current discursive configuration, prefers not so much „uselessness‟ as such, but rather involves a critique and a principled rejection of all utilitarian „end and outcome‟ orientated values in education. It does so for at least two reasons. The first is by dint of an argument which contends that to decide in advance what should be studied, taught and done amounts to a kind of closing down of possibility of discovery and new insight – a closing down of the possibility of encountering the new, the unexpected, the surprise, the event, the different, the other, or indeed even (as Derrida preferred) the future. The second reason is the rather less universal and rather more particular fact that „pragmatic‟, „vocational‟, „training‟ or otherwise end-and-outcomeorientated values always threaten to close down the future employment of those in education who are not involved in education as training. Given Docherty‟s rendition of this position, we can see that the rejection of a utilitarian approach to education (or a rejection of the „education as training‟ paradigm) is easily associated with the arts and humanities. However, it is a perspective that is equally prevalent within the sciences. In the sciences, a version of the „useful v. useless‟ debate has long raged between what Lyotard in the 1970s called „technoscience‟ (i.e., science that operates ultimately in the service of profit-seeking corporations or the military), on the one hand, and „basic‟ or „fundamental‟ scientific research, on the other (i.e., the advocation of theory and experiment; sometimes but not necessarily for theory and experiment‟s „own sake‟, but also because of equivalent arguments about the unknowability, in advance, of what might come to be known; or, in other words, because there are more things – whether or not potentially „useful‟ things – in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of from the position of the present). Even so, things are not so simple. All-or-nothing interpretations of events and orientations may themselves be rather more predictable than evental – missing subtlety, complexity, multiplicity. For instance, despite the undoubted reality of the intensification of bureaucratic surveillance infusing and permeating the delivery of university education today, surely (and actually according to the tenets of poststructuralist ontologies) there must always be gaps, hiatuses, aporias, spaces, play, scope for the unpredictable, the event, the future, etc. These will exist no matter 14 how all-encompassing the statement and enforcement of rationale, aim, method, outcome. Surely, even the most programmatic programme cannot ward off or entirely control the possibility of an event. Moreover, to climb down from the hyperbolical: no matter how febrile, surely no administrator ever said that educators must „predict with total certainty‟ everything that students might possibly learn during a course.5 And besides, surely providing a rationale for a course which consists of reading Joyce or Proust or Rilke or Woolf is not some kind of betrayal or reduction or simplification of the reading of these writers. Indeed, on the other hand, as anyone who has undertaken any kind of „mere training‟ can testify – whether in martial arts or music or marketing, language learning, or management – there is no sense in which „mere training‟, rationalised by predictable outcomes, precludes the possibility of a completely transformative event. I as educator can feel strongly and can give reason upon reason why I might want my students to read Marx, Althusser, Laclau, Hall, Chow or Rifkin – or, indeed, why I might want my other types of students to perform a martial art form three times per day (preferably first thing in the morning) – even if they cannot understand why they should do so, especially in advance of having done so, and even if I cannot predict precisely what they will (also) learn, or what will (also) happen to them, along with what I want them to learn and what I want to happen to them in doing so. Or what happens to me, both in doing the same myself and/or instructing others to do what I do or indeed what I have never ever done, and don‟t know how to do – whether that be „read Rilke‟ or meditate in the lotus position. Similarly, it needs to be remembered: the theorists, or artists, or humanists, or eventists, whether from philosophy or from physics, must not be assumed to be thwarted or tragic heroes: as if some noble, principled Banquo to the murderous managerialist Macbeth. There is absolutely no guarantee, for instance, that those involved in areas that neo(liberal)-utilitarianism deems „useless‟ are not, in fact, terrible elitists; and there is absolutely no guarantee that their works, their subjects, their orientations, their knowledge, and all the rest of it are necessarily „good‟. Reciprocally, it deserves to be said: nor is panopticism somehow simply „bad‟. Nor is an audit necessarily negative. As Timothy Bahti once argued, in a deconstructive 15 argument focusing on one of the most often and easily pilloried „useless‟ subjects, history: to hold to account, to demand a rationale, a justification, a reasoned argument for existence and activity, is not necessarily to condemn „arts‟ subjects to death or to utilitarianism. It can, on the contrary, be an occasion for retheorizing, philosophizing, and perhaps even politicizing or ethicizing an otherwise „merely academic‟ field. He writes: For all the activity devoted to historical knowledge – by which I mean the courses, the examinations, the papers and dissertations and submitted manuscripts – there [should] be the repeated occasion, on each such occasion, for these small and simple questions: How? Why? So what? … [E]ach bit of historical knowledge, each occasion for its articulation and transmission, should become the occasion for inquiry into its methodology and teleology. Even to acknowledge, and to insist upon the acknowledgement, that history has a history, and that the history „known‟ is not a substantial object but a subjectively constructed cognition, can be critical in this context. Put more polemically: no history of literature, no history of art, no history of society, without a philosophy of history, a method of historiography, an internal and external accounting. (Bahti 1992: 72-73) So, from a broadly deconstructive position, this would be an example of „good‟ accounting, with potentially „good‟ transformative consequences. Yet is deconstruction therefore simply „good‟? It was precisely deconstructive arguments such as Bahti‟s which lead Timothy Bewes to argue that, given deconstruction‟s investment in, so to speak, restructuring (by other names), therefore, it could be said to be the case that: The revolution ratified by deconstruction, in fact, is the capitalist one, which effects the gradual anonymization and atomization of society. This revolution lacks any „end‟ other than itself: it involves, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, the „constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation‟. (Bewes 2001: 92) This is not the place to adjudicate the status of anything and everything that has emerged since, within, because of or in relation to something about „capitalism‟. But Bewes‟ challenge to the perceived radicality or unequivocal progressiveness of 16 deconstructive scholarship is pertinent in terms of the problematization of what Derrida himself called „clear-consciencism‟: the belief in one‟s rectitude, the conviction of one‟s rightness, the belief that one‟s position is sound, justified, clean and reliable, and that the outcomes of one‟s interventions will be beneficial, etc. (Given this, of course, Bewes‟ own challenge thereby becomes open to the accusation of being symptomatic of something to do with the capitalist revolution too.) The point here is that if what can be picked up is the extent to which, like many radical thinkers, what Bahti wanted and expressed the wish for in his 1992 essay was a deconstruction and reconstruction of humanities fields, including history, then arguably the response to that request was already well underway, well in the post, and being delivered and injected into arts and humanities departments the world over, through the various different machines of disciplinary deconstruction that travelled under such names as feminism, women‟s studies, black and other ethnicity studies, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and, of course, cultural studies. Of course, the broadly contemporary lurching into being of so many movements, academic and disciplinary revolutions and transformations can be historicized and diversely diagnosed. But although Bewes connects „constant revolutionizing‟ with „capitalism‟, many other approaches could couch this in rather less starkly political, conflictual, or indeed potentially or implicitly moralistic terms. Although Marx did not have words like „modernity‟ in his vocabulary, thinkers such as Heidegger or Benjamin, for instance, connected modernity (capitalist or otherwise) with shock. And this latter kind of vocabulary or worldview is arguably much better equipped and much less liable to collapse into moralism and judgementality. The effort to try to try to prevent thinking and theory about the contemporary world from collapsing into political moralism is what lead Jameson to argue that disapproving of or denouncing the historical period of „postmodernity‟ and its productions amounted to little more than a category mistake. All that was solid This is another way of saying that the modern world is hyperconnected, hypercommunicated and paradoxically therefore disconnected, chaotic, cacophonic, isolating, fluid and antagonistic. This is why, in The Order of Things (1970), Foucault proposes that knowledge per se must henceforth be understood as „a matter of 17 tracking the broken lines, shapes, and patterns that may have become occluded, gone underground, or taken flight‟ (Chow 2006: 81). Similarly, Sam Weber reminds us of Bachelard‟s reflections on the implications that contemporary science has for our understanding of knowledge: „All the basic notions can in a certain manner be doubled; they can be bordered by complementary notions. Henceforth, every intuition will proceed from a choice; there will thus be a kind of essential ambiguity at the basis of scientific description and the immediacy of the Cartesian notion of evidence will be perturbed‟ (Bachelard in Weber 1987: xii). Referring to Foucault‟s genealogical work on the history of knowledge epistemes in The Order of Things, Rey Chow notes Foucault‟s contention that „the premodern ways of knowledge production, with their key mechanism of cumulative (and inexhaustible) inclusion, came to an end in modern times‟. The consequence of this has been that „the spatial logic of the grid‟ has given way „to an archaeological network wherein the once assumed clear continuities (and unities) among differentiated knowledge items are displaced onto fissures, mutations, and subterranean genealogies, the totality of which can never again be mapped out in taxonomic certitude and coherence‟ (Chow 2006: 81). As such, any knowledge establishment, any construction, even any comparison, must henceforth become „an act that, because it is inseparable from history, would have to remain speculative rather than conclusive, and ready to subject itself periodically to revamped semiotic relations‟. This is so because „the violent yoking together of disparate things has become inevitable in modern and postmodern times‟. As such, even an act of „comparison would also be an unfinalizable event because its meanings have to be repeatedly negotiated‟. This situation arises „not merely on the basis of the constantly increasing quantity of materials involved but more importantly on the basis of the partialities, anachronisms, and disappearances that have been inscribed over time on such materials‟ seemingly positivistic existences‟ (81). And all of this bears directly not only on the history but also one the method of Adrian Rifkin, both in terms of its theoretical and empirical justification and its mode of enactment. Each is intimately involved in the other, calling it up and reflecting its validity and almost ineluctable appropriateness, even in its idiosyncratic impropriety. 18 Inevitably, there must be many possible histories, and many possible disputations of the epochal event of the ends of the cumulative. But Adrian Rifkin‟s account of the very first undergraduate work in cultural studies deserves some consideration at this time. As he recalls, „between 1970 and 1975 in Portsmouth … the first cultural studies BA anywhere had come into existence‟ (Rifkin 2003: 101). It emerged „through the work of a group of staff who came from the kinds of background that were themselves part of the formative myth of cultural studies, as some kind of epistemic break with previous modes of disciplinary formation. But also a group of staff working very closely with Stuart Hall, who came down and helped design the courses and who was himself the first external examiner of the course‟ (101). Rifkin‟s discussion of this emergence of cultural studies is itself far from being a simple recounting of a chronology. Rather, it is a reflection on emergence itself. As he notes, one of the things that was most striking about this first cultural studies undergraduate work was that „the kinds of words which students had used in their essays in the 1970s were words like “articulate” and “mediate”‟. These undergraduate essays, he argues: orientated themselves around particular words; certain words which took a kind of distance from the materials they examined and suggested that these materials could be put together in a way which was not a question of sequence and not a question of historical temporality, but a question of the way in which ideas, the logic of ideas, and the material conditions of the society, could be mediated through each other via something which we might call „articulation‟ or a series of articulations. (102) There is an enormous amount that could be said about Rifkin‟s recollection of the place of the notion of „articulation‟ as organising of cultural studies discourse even in the early 1970s (long before, say, the first book of Ernesto Laclau [1977], the one of which Stuart Hall so approved, and up to fifteen years before Laclau and Mouffe‟s blockbuster Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [1985], which put the idea of „articulation‟ on the international academic map in a huge way, but a book of which Stuart Hall was extremely critical, and which marks a watershed dividing line between Birmingham-style cultural studies and an emergent Laclauian and protoŽižekian „discourse analysis‟ – or, rather, „discourse theory‟). But what Rifkin singles out is the way it indicates the emergence of something very important going on: 19 „something which was I suppose both “metacritical” (taking a step back from the cultural materials and historical materials with which they were engaged, and seeing them as part of a cultural process), on the one hand, and, on the other, part of a political project‟ (102): So there was a project, which was to move forward the relation between disciplinary methodologies and each other in terms of their mutual criticism on the one hand, and to move forward the role of university thinking, in terms of its hold on society, its critique of society, on the other. So if you like, if you started reading the use of the word „articulation‟ as symptomatic of what was going on you could say that what those essays symptomatized was a desire – in their discourse, that is: in the particularity of their discourse – a desire for theory to be both productive and effective – to both produce new forms of knowledge and to articulate those forms of knowledge in such a way that they were genuinely critical. (102) Rifkin repeatedly contrasts this „desire for theory to be both productive and effective‟ – which he associates with frustrated, transformative impulses – with the rather different, but widespread, desire, to „construct satisfactory historical teleologies leading up to oneself and one‟s own desires‟. The latter involves „fantasizing around categories‟, taking such forms as believing in the „otherness of the working class and the bourgeoisie to each other as being a point of non-meeting and non-touching‟. In Disagreement (1999), Rancière characterizes the object under critique here as being the geometrical conception of society, wherein each type of social identity is regarded as having – and having to be in – its own proper place. Rancière‟s work has consistently problematized such a conception. In Rifkin‟s words: Put very crudely, this is the burden of those early articles of Rancière: that, if what the worker desires is to be a poet, rather than to be on the barricade, in a sense that desire presupposes a dissolution of the whole social relations upon which the concept of the poet itself has become constructed – if you like it‟s a kind of Kantian category. So this bringing of a kind of neo-Kantianism into the political field, which Rancière achieved I think, was one of an immense metacritical potential, and a potential to disrupt the ways in which studies can settle down into their own genre of becoming themselves, and becoming consolidated. I think that this has largely happened with cultural studies. (114) 20 In Rancièrean terms, Rifkin rejects the police dimensions of disciplinarity, the way disciplinary structures, categories, fantasies and discursive fetishes work to partition and to police and discipline the perceptible and the sayable. Rather than this, Rifkin deliberately privileges approaches which demand the „reconstruction of something in its difficulty‟, the refusal of simplification, and in a sense of conclusion, if only to „disrupt the ways in which studies can settle down into their own genre of becoming themselves, and becoming consolidated‟: Rancière‟s work of that period enabled me to precipitate and consolidate the kind of ideas which I was beginning to develop myself. I was not thinking in terms of „the relative autonomy of the superstructure‟, or in terms of the way in which forms of figuration then levered out, utopianly or dystopianly, or whatever; so that, for example, the political cartoons of the Paris Commune (which is what I was then working on) become a register not of a kind of treasury of socialist history and its tragedies and its ups and downs, but a site on which we can historically represent the impossibility of reading things in that „clean way‟ – that way in which one can construct satisfactory historical teleologies leading up to oneself and one‟s own desires. So it is a way of taking oneself out of condensation and displacement and daydreaming about one‟s politics through cultural materials, and thinking of history not so much pessimistically, but in a way in which, if you like, the hyper-metacritical position has to win out over the archive in the end. You have to precipitate situations in which the metacritical wins out over the potential of the „satisfactory‟ or „whole narrative‟ coming out of the archive. (113) The archive is thus never the repository of the proof of the theory, but rather the source of potentially interminable demonstration or verification of if not the undecidability of the demonstration or verification then certainly at least the impossibility of establishing „satisfactory whole narratives‟ that are actually reliable or based upon attentive readings. „Satisfactory whole narratives‟ are then not only imaginary or phantasy gratifications but also actually symptomatic of the enactment or embodiment of a police logic that takes place in the mode of a kind of self-blinding. Satisfactory whole narratives are not based on reading, but are rather produced from condensations, displacements, daydreams and desires. So, rather than this, rather 21 than basing or orientating research on some fantasy of completion, completeness or completability, Rifkin instead follows what he calls a paratactical „method‟: It‟s a kind of, not a diagramaticising (that‟s too simple) but a topological analysis of quite tiny elements of theory against quite tiny or sometimes quite extensive figures taken from other forms of culture, and (in the Kristevan terms) a listening to the dynamics in such a way as not to say „this one has authority over that‟ or „this one is the subject of that one‟ or „the material for that one‟, but in such a way as to listen to the figural densities of the dynamics of the texts which I am setting alongside each other. So the method is one of parataxis. It essentially works with very tiny units of theory, such as a paragraph of Lacan, say, on the formation of the unconscious, a paragraph of Kristeva, on the double disabusal of the young girl with the phallus, in terms of which she talks about the feminine, therefore the concept of the feminine in Kristeva; and the allowing of the configurations of these materials to lie alongside materials so that one begins to make unexpected kinds of readings of or listenings to those materials. Now this means creating new kinds of objects of attention. In terms of the culturalhistorical narrative, I call it anahistorical. This is a historical equivalent of anamorphic – it‟s a kind of historical object pulled out of shape by its framings, which might be Lacan and Saint Augustine. But equally, those framings pulled out of shape by the object, and a reading of the suppositions which we bring to it. (121-22) This method therefore involves acknowledging that any object must necessarily exist „in increasingly complex place‟, made up of such coordinates as „the textual interpenetrations, the complex textual formations, the processes of listening to the text, listening to yourself listening to the text, and producing a text which is your own text out of that process‟ (122). Such a methodology has its historical and philosophical antecedents and precedents, of course. Rifkin‟s anahistorical method certainly comes close to what Rey Chow discusses in terms of that „materialist though elusive fact about translation‟ that Walter Benjamin proposed: namely, that „translation is primarily a process of putting together‟. As Chow explains, for Benjamin, translation is a process which „demonstrates that the “original,” too, is something that has been put together‟ – and she adds, following Benjamin: „in its violence‟ (Chow 1995: 185). 22 Rifkin‟s method, whether thought of as anahistorical, or as materialist cultural translation, or indeed as an autodidactics of bits, certainly has a relation to violence. One if its many virtues is the ways that its theoretical force does a violence to all scientistic approaches to historical or cultural study of any kind. This theoretical force derives from its facing up to all of the nigh-on impossible complexities implied in academic endeavours, rigorously conceived: the impossibility of omniscience, of encyclopaedic knowledge and mastery of a field, of the existence of a field that is one, of the ability to enclose, pin down, and establish facts or unequivocal connections; the impossibility of taking into consideration all of the things that would need to be taken into a consideration were anything like a compelling „objective‟ or even „satisfactory‟ account of anything to be possible – in other words, a facing up to the impossibility of objectivity, and the absolute textuality of texts, through deliberately staging encounters, and listening to the dynamics and the evental character of the encounters. Now, arguably all academic approaches involve such staging. But few openly acknowledge this. Rifkin, however, has the courage to face up to the inevitability and the contingency, the reality and the artifice, the facticity, fictionality, factionality, and the awareness that the full implications of such staging are ultimately unmasterable. The question is what would happen if others had the courage to follow suit. References Bahti, Timothy (1992), „The Injured University‟, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London. Bewes, Timothy (2001), „Vulgar Marxism, The Spectre Haunting Spectres of Marx‟, McQuillan, Martin, ed., parallax 20, „the new international‟, Volume 7, No. 3, JulySeptember. Bowman, Paul (2008), „Alterdisciplinarity‟, Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 49, No. 1., pp. 93-110. Chow, Rey. 1995. Primitive Passions. New York: Columbia University Press. Chow, Rey (2006), The Age of the World Target, Durham and London: Duke. Docherty, Thomas (2003), „Responses: An Interview‟, Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Bowman, London: Pluto. 23 During, Simon (2011), „Postdisciplinarity: A Talk Given at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU. May 2011‟. Unpublished paper. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel (1977/1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage, London. Kilroy, Peter, Rowan Bailey and Nicholas Chare, eds. (2004), parallax, „Auditing Culture‟, vol. 10, no. 2. Laclau, Ernesto (1977), Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, New Left Books, London. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Lyotard, Jean-François (1979/1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Mowitt, John (1992), Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object, Durham and London: Duke. Rancière, Jacques (1987/1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques (1999), Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Rifkin, Adrian (2003), „Inventing Recollection‟, Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Bowman, London: Pluto. This text is also online here: http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/AdrianRifkin/Papers/323032/Inventing_Recollection Weber, Sam (1987), Institution and Interpretation, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Young, Robert J. C. (1992), „The Idea of a Chrestomathic University‟, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London. Bio Paul Bowman teaches cultural studies at Cardiff University. He is author of Theorizing Bruce Lee (Rodopi, 2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2008), and Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2007), editor of Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), co-editor of The Truth of Žižek (2006), Reading Rancière (2011), and numerous issues of Parallax, most recently Jacques Rancière: In Disagreement (2009). He is also editor of The Rey Chow Reader (Columbia UP, 2010) and issues of Parallax, Social Semiotics and Postcolonial Studies. 24 Notes This paper is online both at the journal website, of course, and (open access) here: http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Papers/9926/Alterdisciplinarity 1 As Young explains: „The difficulty for literary theorists, when faced with a new “technologicoThatcherite” assault on the humanities, was that the terms by which their subject was established historically, and the only effective terms with which it could still be defended, were those of cultural conservatism and humanist belief in literature and philosophy that „literary theory‟ has, broadly speaking, been attacking since the 1970s. When theorists found themselves wanting to defend their discipline against successive government cuts they discovered that the only view with which they could vindicate themselves was the very one which, in intellectual terms, they wanted to attack. One might say that the problem was that the oppositional literary or theoretical mode was not the oppositional institutional one – a situation that in itself illustrates the limitations of oppositional politics. In short, for theorists the problem has been that in attacking humanism they have found themselves actually in consort with government policy. This has meant, effectively, that it has often been left to those on the right to defend the study of the humanities as such: symbolized, perhaps, when the University of Oxford, traditionally, as we have seen, the main object of utilitarian hostility, refused to award Margaret Thatcher the customary honorary degree given to British prime ministers‟ (Young 1992: 113). 2 The whole paper is online at the open access resource of academia.edu, http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/AdrianRifkin/Papers/323032/Inventing_Recollection 3 4 here: Simon During (2011) has recently proposed that the new phenomenon of the borderless free flow of academic fashions – in which people working in all manner of nominally different fields all over the university and all over the world will all of a sudden start taking seriously the work of this or that theorist – indicates the extent to which academic disciplines are in fact post-disciplinary. „Disciplinary‟ knowledge is less and less bordered and bounded; scholars are less and less disciplinarily hidebound, less and less invested in their own putative fields. Although, since drafting this sentence, an external examiner at an exam board for the BA in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies on which I teach at Cardiff University raised a range of „criticisms‟, among which was the fact that many modules did not demonstrably test or assess each and every one of the stated learning aims and outcomes on certain modules. And this was not the least of his criticisms and suggestions for „improvement‟. All of them amounted to suggestions for increasing panopticism, standardization, regularity, disciplining and policing within, across and between every module. … Despite this, I have decided to let the sentence stand. The reader can decide whether my argument could or should perhaps have gone the other way instead. 5