Academia « activism: what might they offer each other?

Fluke Collective

 

In March 2004, a number of ‘academics’ and ‘activists’, ‘academic-activists’, and ‘activist-academics’ spent a long weekend in the west of England, talking shop. This was part of a series of four weekend ‘talkshops’ supported by the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR), University of Warwick, which attempted to offer a space for a group of ‘activists’ and ‘academics’ to talk with each other on a range of issues relating to contemporary radical politics and theory. As an initiative, it started from an affirmation of the role(s) of theory/ideas/reflection/philosophy/writing in effecting and contributing to radical politics; and from a position that resistance politics also is, and requires, a ‘revolution’/rebellion of ideas.

In other words, it was a place for people who desire engagement with theory/philosophy as both a practice that informs radical politics and as a locale for activism. Of course, this is not at all the same thing as saying that this is the only space for activism that ‘we’ might value or engage in. Further, a hope was for the initiative to provide an opening where it might be possible for people to communicate across - and unravel - both disciplinary divides and the activist/academic boundary.

While something of this did happen, the first talkshop, involving 18 participants, was surprisingly fractious. ‘The academics’ felt accused of not being hardcore enough when it came to activist practice. ‘The activists’ felt alienated by the poststructuralist jargon and perceived pretensions of ‘the academics’. Tears were cried, corners were sulked in, jokes were interpreted as insulting attacks, and insecurities were heightened as egos were dented. But there also was a lot of laughter and late nights, and an emerging closeness through the year as those who stayed with the process began to know and respect each other as simply fallible friends.

In this contribution, we offer some notes taken from a long meeting exploring relationships between academia and activism. The notes are ordered from multiple flipcharts and include some direct quotes (in italics) from these charts to provide something of the dynamic flavour of the discussion. Our intention is multiplicitous – to use current jargon. It is to make a note of one ephemeral attempt at conversation between activists and academics, in a context of some anti-intellectualism in the UK political scene. And it is to highlight the conflict that can emerge in such discussion across boundaries, as insecurities morph into accusations and attack. It is to emphasise that opening up to each other requires safety and softness, although defensiveness and deepened identities frequently are what arise instead. And it is to nevertheless affirm a challenge to keep placing ‘ourselves’ in the presence of different views; to keep learning and unlearning, in our attempts to disperse boundaries and enclosures, conceptual and otherwise.

18 activists and academics ‘talk shop’ in March 2004: notes from a meeting

On academia and activism

Is there a ‘radical activist’ out there who is doing any better?

All of us are located in different spaces in relation to both activist and academic practice. So how do these spaces contribute to our political engagement - and to how we see and identify ourselves as, or as not, activists?

This discussion opened with the observation that academia and academics present structural limits in relation to radical/activist potential. Should those of us currently located in academia leave our jobs so that we can do the things we talk/think/write about? Can we ‘talk the talk and walk the walk’? Or, by staying within ‘the system’, are we just knocking at the system’s edges with our work without contributing meaningfully to socio-political change? For example, our ability to infect the particular academic institutions in which we work always is going to be constrained by the broader structures - particularly funding structures - within which these are located. Alternatively, the pedagogical spaces offered in the academy provide opportunities for ‘outreach’, via which some of us validate our teaching and writing as possibilities for radical/activist practice and engagement.

In other words, for those of us attempting to utilise and practice academic/teaching/writing/theory spaces as spaces for radical and critical engagement, these in themselves constitute activist practice. But distance from this view was apparent from the comment, midway through this particular meeting, that ‘we’ve hardly talked about activism at all’! In return, several people articulated their problems with a sense of the moral burden and high ground assumed by ‘activists’. This generates insecurity about being ‘hardcore’ enough in relation to the ‘hierarchies’ of activist engagement. Some also felt that the moral high ground assumed by some activists can become a mask for other problematic behaviours (as someone said, ‘I know a fuck load of activists who are assholes’; obviously, the same is true for academics … ). Plus, as commented on in relation to Reclaim The Streets, people become involved with activist groups and networks for a whole host of reasons (social contact, desire for community, something to do, a space for the expressing of anger with multiple causes .. etc. ). Thus it might be problematic to privilege the moral as driving and explaining peoples’ (including our own) activist engagements over other reasons.

More broadly, wherever we are located, the ‘busyness’ of feeding ourselves/making a living constrains our potential for ‘making revolution’ (i.e. it is not only in academia that this happens). (Although maybe we could also say that it is in the ways in which we feed ourselves and get by that we make revolution). As we moved through the discussion we arrived at a clearer position that ‘criticising the academic world ¹ criticising individuals, i.e. is not intended to imply guilt by association’. And also that there is a corresponding problem in cynical dismissals of the genuinely felt passion of activist praxis.

So, then, what is activism?! Is it participation in an event .. ‘an action’? Or is it a more diffuse orientation to the ways that we do things and engage with the world? Or both? And how do we find ways of bridging the assumed divide between folk who think, and folk who do. More accurately how do we get beyond presumptions that folk who think don’t do, and vice versa?

A problem with the academic/activist dichotomy is that it reproduces alienating ‘us’ and ‘them’ categories (‘labels/categories - we hate ‘em’). It thereby fosters a dualistic structuring of social worlds that is consistent with modernity and that surely is part and parcel of what ‘we’ are contesting. In other words, these categories, and ‘our’ various identifications with them, do not in and of themselves make for radically transformative political engagement, and may even work against this. (Indeed, this talkshop initiative began as an attempt to unravel these problematic categories, not to reproduce them! .. in the hope that by making a space for communication and collaboration we might do something collectively that assists with shifting the hegemonic conversation in a funky direction .. ).

theory«practice

Intellectual jargon, or beating up cops: which discourse/practice is more alienating [or empowering]?

What’s the radical value of theory? How can theory be applied, giving currency to the notion of ‘performativity’, i.e. such that expressing something makes it actual. More to the point, how can theory be accessed and accessible - and thereby perhaps inspire and affirm radical practice - given that so many people feel alienated by the language used as well as by the styles of discussion and debate that permeate academia? Obviously this is a longstanding problem, the dynamics of which relate to things like: the divergence between an intellectual vanguard and ‘the proletariat’ in building ‘class consciousness’; the privileging of ‘expert’ knowledges in environment and development initiatives which acts to exclude and disempower local knowledges and experience; and the implications of what can been framed as a constructed gendered/masculinised style of debate in academia that has tended to valorise adversarial and interrogative practices.

Conversely, it might be that ‘demoting’ the validity of theory and intellectual engagement is itself an exclusionary stance; one that is not consistent with a radical political orientation that emphasises (rhetorically at least!) inclusion and diversity. To think, to theorise, to write, to read etc., are all verbs too, i.e. they are modes of constitutive engagement with the world. For academics desiring socio-political transformation it’s the institutional structures within which we work that are problematic, not necessarily the actual work/research/writing etc. that we do and like to do.

transformations?

How do u act when you don’t even know what social change looks like?

All this predisposes that we share an idea and coherence regarding what transformation might and/or should look and feel like. But we rarely communicate with each other about what our visions and desires of/for social change might be. On the other hand, do we actually want ‘grand narratives’?

We need to talk with each other about the ideas we have for how social change can happen, and how we desire the world to be/become. In particular, how do we get beyond dead-end (and boring!) dichotomies such as reform versus revolution, capital versus resistance, academia versus activism, theory versus practice ...? And also, how do we find ways of coherently tracking and thinking through the (scale)relationships between micro and macro, personal and political, local and global, private and public, etc.?

Touching nerves is a good thing

Why can’t we hug our head of department?

One specific point raised was the political significance of our affective, i.e. emotional and felt, experiences. This is in relation to both understanding the ways that Empire’s biopower is variously sustained; as well as in terms of being able to draw in and validate affective domains in articulating our politics and in driving our political engagement. This means that peoples’ personal histories and experiences are important politically; particularly those that become the moments when we make conscious and embody a sense that something is not right, and that something different is possible. It perhaps even creates a radical role for the disclosure and sharing of our individual ‘stories’ in relation to our political desires and engagement, as a ‘bottom line’ for the emergence of political community. Although, ‘we’ also face a challenge in engaging with these realities if we don’t want our political encounters to become some sort of therapy group or lapse into excessive New Age self-indulgence. Here we encountered something of a perhaps predictable gender component to peoples’ appreciation of this area of discussion.

dreams and desires ….

To construct and participate in ‘a self-managed collective of intellectuals who love each other’.

To integrate socialising with activism and intellectualising to build relationships and trust.

Doing actions.

Finding ways of accessing financial and intellectual resources to create an autonomous education institution.