I cite

Theory and Event 12.3

Introduction 12.3
Jodi Dean and Michael J. Shapiro

The articles in 12.3 suggest a political-theoretical topography marked by the prominence of Freud and Deleuze and traces of Benjamin and Derrida. Screened of proper names, the features contouring the political are swamps and fissures, shifting edges, unstable sprawls and impossible spaces without centers. There are subterranean forces threatening to rupture or exceed the unstable structures unsuccessfully attempting their containment. How one or how we—itself the name of a problem and an aspiration—might make it through or even reside in such a terrain thus becomes the question (dis)orienting this issue of Theory & Event.

In "Freud and the Political," Mladen Dolar opens with an anecdote about Freud in a cave, a hidden encounter with political resonance. Rather than coinciding with the social surface, the political takes the form of a more fundamental fissure. Psychoanalysis describes and dissects this crack of the political, a point Dolar explores in relation to the psychoanalytic institution, drive, and the opposition between the artificial and the primary masses. Too often, Dolar explains, psychoanalysis's relation to the political is misread as the Oedipal familial drama (as in the critique presented in Anti-Oedipus). He offers an alternative reading that addresses the subversion of roles and positions, the untying and undoing of relationships, central to psychoanalysis's circumscription of the political.

James Martel ("The Messiah who Comes and Goes: Franz Kafka on Redemption, Conspiracy and Community") argues that we only clumsily make our way through the political. Most of the time we misrecognize what's going on, who's here and who's there. Most of the time we fail to do what we intend. But, by reading Kafka with Benjamin, Martel demonstrates that not realizing our intentions is not so bad after all. Failure and misrecognition disrupt the narratives of authority to which we subscribe. Martel writes, "Such disruptions produce less a sense of our own 'agency' than a sense of participation in an ongoing conspiracy, one that formally excludes us even as it serves as the means for our (potential and only partial) redemption.

Laura Penny's "Parables and Politics: How Benjamin and Deleuze & Guattari Read Kafka" is also concerned with Benjamin's reading of Kafka, which she compares with that of Deleuze and Guattari. For Penny, at stake in this comparison is judgment and its refusal. Thus, she endorses the Deleuzian rejection of judgment insofar as judgment can neither sense nor summon new possibilities for life.

If the Kafkan messiah who only comes the day after his arrival features largely in the articles by Martel and Penny, then the specter of a future to come animates Antonis Balasopoulos, "Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia." Balasopoulos introduces the term "apparitional unconscious" as a way to open up utopian discourse to theoretical appraisal. He focuses on Jameson and Derrida, staging a disagreement and disjunction at the site of the (non) site/future of utopia. Moreover, he emphasizes an affirmation that is also necessarily a critical selection, that is, a decision.

The final two articles return to the psychoanalytic themes with which 12.3 begins. Joanne Faulkner considers the place of disavowal in Hobbes, particularly with regard to its exclusion of those positioned as other. Exploring the fantastic position of the other as repository for the citizens' jouissance, Faulkner gestures toward a Lacanian response to a politics of fear and security—traversing the fantasy. In contrast, Michael Williams ("A Traversal Beyond the Pleasure Principle: From Pervert to Schizophrenic") suggests an even further traversal, from Lacanian perversion to Deleuzian schizophrenia.

Issue 12.3 also includes an interview and several book reviews. Keith P. Feldman, Anoop Mirpuri, and Georgia Roberts interview geographer Derek Gregory. This interview, "Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War," grows out of the work of the research collective, "Public Rhetorics and Permanent War," work strongly influenced by Black British Cultural Studies.

Alexander D. Barber's "Lessons from the Grand Inquisitor: Carl Schmitt and the Providential Enemy" is a review essay discussing Kam Shapiro, Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics and Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory. Upenda Baxi reviews Francois Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics. Finally, Kara Keeling's The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense is reviewed by Nicole Ridgway.


Introduction 12.3
Jodi Dean
Michael J. Shapiro

Essays
Freud and the Political
Mladen Dolar

The Messiah who Comes and Goes: Franz Kafka on Redemption, Conspiracy and Community
James Martel

Parables and Politics: How Benjamin and Deleuze & Guattari Read Kafka
Laura Penny

Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia
Antonis Balasopoulos

The Eternal Jouissance of the Community: Phantasm, Imagination, and 'Natural Man' in Hobbes
Joanne Faulkner

A Traversal Beyond the Pleasure Principle: From Pervert to Schizophrenic
Michael Williams

Interview
Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory
Keith P. Feldman
Anoop Mirpuri
Georgia M. Roberts

Reviews
Lessons from the Grand Inquisitor: Carl Schmitt and the Providential Enemy
Alexander D. Barder

Reading 'Terror': Reflections on François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics
Upendra Baxi

Rethinking the Politics of Visibility through the Black Femme Function
Nicole Ridgway

More comments on the communique

Another section of the communique:

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning.  We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt.  We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.  Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood.  This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society.  Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

If the university is already dysfunctional, then preventing the university from functioning IS participation in the status quo. Indebted students, underpaid teaching-assistants, over-worked adjuncts, collapsing infrastructure, dissolving libraries--this is the current dysfunction. What about making the university serve another function? What about making it function for common ends, for common futures? This is the more vital task--and it is so much harder. It requires discipline and sacrifice, not the affective intensities of manifestoes and blockades.

Yes, calls for unity are empty. But working to forge a commonality, a solidarity, a collective is the only way that a taking that is not empty is possible. The university is more than a set of crumbling buildings. What if part of the real dysfunction of the university has been the way its capitalist subsumption has prevented students (and sometimes faculty) from valuing ideas, history, theory, thinking. What if part of the crisis is the crisis of imagination--students are captured because they don't read, don't think, and we (faculty) aren't teaching them to do so.

The real destruction of the status quo involves more than occupying buildings. It involves reclaiming the capacity to think critically and becoming disciplined enough to do so.

Comments on the communique

Here is a passage from the communique:

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education.  They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past.  But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone.  We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society.   The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system.  We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded.  The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

There are problems with this argument. The first is the claim regarding social programs that depended on high profit rates and vigorous economic growth. The public university system in the US did not depend on high profit rates and economic growth. Rather, the system depended on high levels of taxation and limited expectations regarding growth. High taxes helped decrease short-term incentives for gain and helped equalize opportunity. They also funded those enterprises deemed publicly important. In fact, part of the economic crisis of the seventies was brought about by capitalist sectors tired of their declining rate of profit. Those capitalist sectors are the ones that have inculcated US society with suppositions regarding high profit and economic growth rates.

The second problem concerns the autonomy of the university under capitalism. Much rides on what autonomy means. If it means completely outside capitalism, then of course there is no autonomous university. If the lack of autonomy means that the completely dependent on capitalist economic incentives, then that is also false. One of the ways that capitalism insures its success is by allowing for areas of life that are not immediately subject to its logics and demands even as they support it--the family, religion, leisure time, art, and, yes, parts of the university.

Third, the function of the university has not 'always been to reproduce the working class.' In the US, only approximately a quarter to a third of high school graduates get a BA degree. The university here is supporting an elite, a managerial class, a technological class, a class of symbolic knowledge workers, medical scientists, legal experts to manage the affairs of the rich etc. The university, then, isn't reproducing the working class--it's reproducing the bourgeoisie. The crisis of the university is their crisis--they are the one's whose life and future is deeply threatened. Their fear is of becoming-worker, of the loss of what was supposed to be guarantees of quality of life and security. Workers in the US only briefly had these guarantees--from the forties through the seventies.

So, again, the students' fear is correct: that they are not needed or will not be needed--perhaps they should connect this with current and idiotic calls for Free (as in free labor and free consumer goods)--Free means no one gets paid, no one is needed on the job because of the reserve army of the unemployed. But this is not a crisis of the working class. It's the crisis of the middle class--and we do well to remember what happened in various "Third World" countries as structural adjustment policies wiped out their middle classes, sending millions into poverty--back to the working class and peasantry (itself actually becoming decimated through export oriented corporate agriculture) now configured as the un and underemployed--a tiny elite with everything and an enormous all with nearly nothing. That's the crisis of the US middle class, the crisis of the universities.

How to free the university? Fund it. Fund it with taxes. Fund it with the collectivization and nationalization of banks. Fund it with the end of insurance companies and the beginning of singular payer health care. Fund it by dissolving the debts of individuals and families. Fund it by ending financial support for militarism and weaponry. Fund it by defunding the prison-industrial complex. Fund it by letting people with skills in building and carpentry and electronics and plumbing teach students how to repair our collapsed cities and having students work and learn and help. Fund it by turning off so many screens and computers and energy sucking devices and sending students into archives and libraries.Fund it by capping senior faculty salaries, by paying everyone in the university within the same salary rather than letting markets drive up salaries.

The only autonomy lies in getting beyond capitalism--it doesn't exist yet.

Communiqué from an Absent Future « we want everything

From the UC strike:

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university.  Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties.  We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments.  Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt.  The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do).  Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities.  Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords.  We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved.  We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project.  University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers.  Even leisure is a form of job training.  The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office.  Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work.  We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym.  We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle.  “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk.  A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow.  And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have.  Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation.  Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.  We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around.  Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color.  Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003.  What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.  What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest.  Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school.  Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.  No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition.  On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum.  And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement.  Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit.  But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them.  And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers.  Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for.  It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things.  One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience.  First we pay, then we “work hard.”  And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed.  It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience.  Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system.  Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here:  was the course easy?  Was the teacher hot?  Could any stupid asshole get an A?  What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes?  Who needs memory when we have the internet?  A training in thought?  You can’t be serious.  A moral preparation?  There are anti-depressants for that.

via wewanteverything.wordpress.com

Best of APSA

I've been at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. A friend told me that this sounded as exciting as a convention of dentists. Actually, I had a great time. These meetings are fun after the first 10-15 years of annual misery and abuse. Maybe because the abuse constitutes a new submissive subject, a subject capable of enjoying sitting through hours upon hours of panels? At any rate, I am that subject. I like seeing what folks are doing, what direction their work is taking, the little shifts in argument that appear over time. I also very much like seeing friends I haven't seen for a year or two.

Now, all sincerity aside, I will list some of the papers I didn't hear. I list these because political theorists are criticized for not talking to the rest of the field, for using jargon that no one else understands. But what about these guys?

"Using the Zero-Inflated Ordered Probit in  Pooled Cross-Sectional Time-Series Setting to Clarify the Political Economy of the Ratification of, and Compliance with, Human Rights Treaties"

"Correct Confidence Intervals for Time-Invariant and Rarely Changing Variables in Panel Data: A Boostrap Approach"

"Testing Copula Functions as a Method to Derive Bivariate Weibull Distributions"

On Being Postacademic

On Being Postacademic: Kenneth Mostern (an excerpt)

The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the “need to produce” and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the “mentorship” of an experienced scholar.  Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship.  Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed.  The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. .  The mentor, especially when well-intentioned, may be the model for what is wrong, not an aid in coping.  Indeed, if the mentor is really similar to the young faculty member in terms of ideology or social identity, the mentor may be a model for what the young faculty member does not wish to become.

The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department.  This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join.  And while there is a relationship between micropolitics and geopolitics, it is far more tenuous, far more mediated by local institutional conditions, than the new faculty first imagines.

Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it.  For those in power, and for those who hope to attain power, the arrival of a new junior faculty member is to be watched closely for his/her schmoozing choices. As a result, it is not simply the case that junior faculty fear senior faculty, but that the senior faculty fear the junior faculty, walking around wondering whether this new person will contribute to their already hatched plan to take over the curriculum.  The fact that the new person was hired with accomplishments and expectations much higher than so many senior faculty members does not help this form of fear, of course.

While it remains true that the power differential between tenured and untenured faculty makes the ubiquity of fear particularly threatening to the careers of junior faculty members, the longer one stays the more one discovers that one’s unhappiness is simply an example of the larger misery of faculty members.  Senior faculty don’t exactly help or support one another either.  Tenure might lead to a sense of security; it surely does not breed happiness.

The net that academics are ultimately caught in, regardless of the structure or the “progressiveness” of the specific department, is the net of personal power. Within the capitalist professional class, the criteria by which alliances are formed and judgments made is generally limited by an abstract and objective, rather than personal, question:  did you make money for the shareholders?  Even where personality or group dynamics dictates one or another poor relationship, there is some criteria of performance evaluation outside of academia’s twin criteria:  personal alliance and ideology.  In truth, it takes an incredible number of hours to evaluate adequately any individual’s research.  For all but a handful of us, the number of people who have given our work that kind of attention is miniscule.  We are tied to those individuals not the way a consultant is tied to a client’s account books, but the way we are tied to lovers and friends — and ex-lovers and enemies.  Obviously, I am aware that markets create winners and losers, and also, that there is no “free market” unconstructed by the intervention of human psyches.  Yet at least within the bourgeoisie the existence of a monetary reference point provides some resistance to personal power, while the structure of institutionalized intellectual work permits no such outside reference point — not community service, not ethics, not, in light of the inability of humanities scholars to agree about what such a concept might mean, truth.  Academia has neither capitalist forms of abstraction nor socialist forms of solidarity to recommend it.

Who Controls Journals? - Inside Higher Ed

News: Who Controls Journals? - Inside Higher Ed.

At the same time Sage was landing a prestigious batch of journals, it was trying to reassure political scientists who have been trying to figure out what was going on with the leadership of Political Theory, a key journal in the discipline and one published by Sage. The political science blogosphere has featured unconfirmed reports that Sage replaced the editor in what some have called a coup. While Sage officials insist nothing of the kind happened, and the original editor is in place, another political scientist has confirmed that he was offered and accepted the editorship, then withdrew when he learned of the controversy.

While Sage officials will acknowledge only some sort of "misunderstanding," they admit that whatever it was they were were trying to do was done without consulting the scholars on the editorial board of the journal, and they are apologizing for that.

Needless to say, having respected editors removed from their positions at journals without any consultation with editorial boards is exactly the kind of move scholars fear when they consider corporate management of their journals. While some have speculated that Sage was taking sides in some kind of philosophical battleground, many have said that the problem here isn't one of philosophy or of one editor or another, but of academics not making the decisions.
...

Exactly what took place at Political Theory remains murky -- in part because Sage won't provide details. Most members of the journal's editorial board who could be reached declined to comment, with several saying that they did not want to hurt their relationships with Sage.

What is clear is that in the last 10 days, rumors started to circulate that Sage had ousted Mary G. Dietz, a political scientist at Northwestern University, from the position of editor. The rumors appeared to have substance when Mark Bevir, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, posted an online notice that he had been offered and accepted the editorship of the journal but had then withdrawn.

Bevir wrote: "I am posting one message here to state facts now that I am no longer bound by confidentiality. Sage approached me about the editorship of PT. They asked me to submit an application, which I did. They offered me a contract and I accepted. Throughout I had no knowledge that this procedure was at all unusual. Once I knew it was unusual, I asked Sage to explain their position. I understood that Sage had reasonable concerns about existing editorial practices. But I had no desire to be stuck in the middle of that dispute. I therefore offered Sage my resignation. The future of PT now depends on Sage and the existing editorial team."

Bevir could not be reached for comment. Dietz, via e-mail, said that she was still the editor and that "since the situation with Sage has been resolved to our complete satisfaction, I don't see any need to comment further on it."

One editorial board member who did respond was Terrell Carver, a professor of politics at the University of Bristol, in Britain. He said via e-mail: "Sage has apologized in an e-mail to me for breaching academic protocols and necessary consultation with the editorial executive committee of Political Theory. They have expressed their full confidence in Mary Dietz's ability to continue to edit the journal and are giving their full support in going forward productively. Sage reports that it has severed any connection with any third party in the matter of the editorship."

Carver also posted a notice on one of the online discussions of the matters, urging colleagues to move on to other issues and saying that "members of the Editorial Board have emphasized the importance of vigilance in defense of academic freedoms, principles and protocols in relation to commercial interests, where they are sometimes not fully understood ... which is what happened in this case."

Jayne Marks, vice president and editorial director of Sage, said in an interview that there had been "a misunderstanding," but that Dietz had never stopped being editor of the journal. "It's all been cleared up and everything's back to normal." She hinted that Sage's view is that it was trying to line up a successor to Dietz by saying that it was appropriate for publishers to engage in "succession planning."

But she declined repeatedly to explain what took place, or to acknowledge that anything had happened. Asked explicitly about how another political scientist said he signed a contract for an editorship that wasn't apparently open, and that many political scientists were expressing concern about the lack of information, Marks repeated that everything has been "sorted out" and that she wouldn't say more.

Theory and Event 12.1

The new issue of Theory and Event is now available through Projet Muse. Here is the TOC:

Interviews

Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler
Pierpaolo Antonello
Roberto Farneti

Symposium

40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play
Ryan Bishop
John W P Phillips

Centre-piece
Sarah Wood

“Living and Dying by the Event”
Shaoling Ma

Extraordinary Rendition: Derrida and Vietnam
Martin McQuillan

365 Holes
Graham Allen

Method, Techne and Auto-kinesis
Ryan Bishop

Structural Reject
Irving Goh

The Magic Center: Matrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu
John W P Phillips

Essays

Interrupting Mythological Politics?: On the Possibility of a Literary Intervention
Aukje van Rooden

Pragmatism, Pluralism, Politics: William James’s Tragic Sense of Life
Jonathan McKenzie

Aesthetic of Strength: the Air Force Memorial and Virilio’s Last War
Char Roone Miller

The Becoming of the “Event”: A Deleuzian Approach to Understanding the Production of Social and Political “Events”
Tom Lundborg

Reviews

Again and Again and Again: Real Materialism
Jodi Dean

Ethnic Inheritance and Negotiating Multiple Identities
Joseph Wiebe

Deadly Aversion Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Judgment
Keally McBride

The Consolation of Unsettling Accounts
Jennifer L. Culbert

Paradoxes of Punishment
Leigh A. Payne

Graduate students? No, thanks! I've got minions!

Class War in the Academy

IT posts disturbing news from the UK. Universities there are required to participate in a detailed assessment that determines how much money they will get. The underlying promise was to reward results: schools producing high quality research would received more funding. Recent results showed that quality research was taking place throughout the British system; despite all the weight given to the prestigious universities, despite the advantages with which they begin, they did not demonstrate superiority in research. Nonetheless, the Universities Secretary (I think this must be something like a Secretary of Education) had announced that the government will continue to concentrate research funds in a small number of elite schools.

infinite thØught: 'The Government is determined to concentrate research funding on a small elite of institutions despite the fact that the 2008 research assessment exercise revealed that excellence is spread much more widely throughout the sector than previously thought' (From this week's THE). Jesus. I mean, I doubt anyone expected the RAE to produce the results it did, revealing that some of the better research in the country was produced by massively overstretched teaching-heavy departments but to the just ignore the results and do what you were always going to do anyway. Well, how much more blatant can you make it? What else is being said here other than: we don't give a fuck if you produce excellent work against the odds, it's not about that, it's about old-boys-networks and keeping things as they are, ensuring the 'right' people attend (and teach) at the 'right' places. I bet, too, that this'll all get justified in the name of the crisis: 'now is not the time to be taking risks with new places!' The RAE has accidentally revealed that in many places, 'elite' departments are carrying tons of 'deadwood', those people who don't do any research, but are relatively protected by the reputation of the place. At the same time it showed that however much you try and give people ridiculous teaching-loads, beat them down with nu-language and force them to weasel up to business in the name of 'Enterprise', you can't stop clever people writing clever things. (Incidentally the percentage of our workload that counts for research was recently cut so as to introduce 10% for enterprise - getting corporate sponsorship for conferences and that sort of thing. Fucked if I'm going to grovel to business for £20 for coffee and biscuits). If this is how it's going to be...it's time for some serious CLASS WAR IN THE ACADEMIES, I think.

More from Times Higher Education interview with the Universities Secretary:

He made it clear that continued concentration of research funding was the key to ensuring that the UK's university system remained "world class".

The most surprising element of the 2008 RAE, whose results were published in December, was that "world-leading" research was identified in 150 of the 159 institutions that entered, at least in small "pockets of excellence".

So, there is no dispute over the quality of research. The excellence of the research carried out at non-elite schools, schools that teach immigrants, working class kids, the less well off, is not being disputed. Rather, it's not going to be rewarded despite the fact that it is as excellent as the research from the 'elite' schools. Bluntly put: the money goes to the privileged. And, it goes to the privileged only insofar as they are privileged--this is the meaning of 'concentrated.' "World class" means elite concentration, not mass privilege. De-concentration hurts world class status because it presents a blow to elite privilege, to the very distinction between elite and non-elite. It dissolves the distance necessary to maintaining the elite schools as elite.

And the context: the global economic crisis. How is the UK preparing? By tightening class privilege, leaving the proles out to do the best they can with the little they have. We should expect to see this more and more, increased reinforcement of privilege, increased concentration of resources.

What, then, are the ways to fight back? Particularly in academia? Do we fall for the indicators of privilege, agreeing that the best must be those who come from and/or are employed by the best schools? Do we measure success in elite terms? Do we look at rank and titles as indicators of excellence or as degrees of complicity?