On Not Writing Accessibly - with David Graeber and Rebecca Solnit

In an extract from her foreword to David Graeber’s new collection, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, Rebecca Solnit writes that Graeber:

wanted to put [ideas] in everyone’s hands … Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that … was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too.

…. A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: 'To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.'

Yet isn’t this itself an example of not thinking, and instead of merely going along with received knowledge, with 'widely shared assumptions'? As is pointed out in the Robot Review of Books #11, which looks at Feeding the Machine by James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant, advocating for accessible writing is far from neutral; it’s often wielded by journalists and others to criticize certain works as too academic or overly intellectual. Here, "'accessible' and academic”’ are  shorthand for '“good” and “bad'", as Rachael Allen, poetry editor at Granta, observes.

What’s needed, to quote feminist sociologist Rachelle Chadwick, is a certain ‘epistemic generosity’ and openness to different ideas, positions, and problems, as well as to ‘difficulty and friction’. Such a different form of critical engagement requires ‘a commitment to thinking rather than the easy repetition of accepted ideas (which often reproduce privilege) or a stubborn and defensive clinging to unexamined attachments and assumptions. Privileged persons are unfortunately prone to the latter. Comfortable social positions (and the desire to maintain them) often breed "willful ignorance".'

Besides, if they were really serious about placing their ideas in everyone’s hands, wouldn’t these thinkers make their books available on a free/libre basis, instead of selling them for £25/£10.99 each? ('It does not have to be this way', indeed. We don't have to accept it. This is only one way of doing things. There are others. This, too, can be made differently; these assumptions and values changed.)

Unfortunately, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the liberalism of Graeber, Solnit et al., far from being the solution to, say, the illiberalism of Trump, Badenoch et al., is actually part of the problem.

The Pluriversal Politics of Radical Publishing's Scaling Small

Enjoying the Publishing After Progress special issue of Culture Machine, edited Rebekka Kiesewetter, now that it’s online.

I've been re-reading Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr’s ‘Committing to Decolonial Feminist Practices of Reuse’. I particularly like the suggestion Snelting and Weinmayr make regarding the Non-White-Heterosexual-Male License: ‘What if this licence would have pushed its point even more clearly, suggesting, for example, that privileged reusers should not use their natural name for attribution, or remove any credits altogether?’

I've also been re-reading Jefferson Pooley's 'Before Progress: On the Power of Utopian Thinking for Open Access Publishing’. In the following comments on 'Before Progress' I'll only speak to some of the radical open access publishing projects I'm most closely associated with: Culture Machine, Open Humanities Press, Radical Open Access Collective, COPIM ... But my experience of these projects is that, to recast Pooley’s words, scaling small does believe a ‘viable alternative’ system to the extractivism of the for-profit oligopolists is possible (contrary to Richard Poynder's impression of it), and so does have an aspect of utopianism.

The scaling small element of these radical publishing projects, being an ethico-political stance, is not indicative of a retreat from such a progressive political vision of something better: it is the political vision. It's just that the emphasis on diversity means the politics of scaling small is better understood less in terms of universalism and perhaps more in terms of something like, say, pluriveralism, in the sense of the anticapitalist, antiracist, antiheteropatriarchal politics of certain Latin American activists and theorists.

Scaling small is thus very much concerned with enacting – and even telling a utopian story about – a shift toward a diverse, commons-based and postcapitalist (and, contra Poynder again, non-niche) way of living, working and thinking that is concerned with the principles of degrowth and postextractivism, not least as a way of addressing the environmental devastation caused by late capitalist society’s consumer culture.  

I also wonder if what I'm characterising as the (more pluriversal) politics of scaling small is not so very far away from Erik Olin Wrights' own utopian politics, as referred to approvingly by Pooley. If so, then for me this is perhaps better illustrated by a book of his Pooley doesn’t have space to mention in 'Before Progress'.

In How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, Wright argues that political change requires a combination of at least four strategic logics:

1) Resisting Capitalism

We need some actors to build reimagined trade unions and social movements (such as the radical publishing movement?) capable of eroding neoliberalism by resisting the constant surveillance, performance monitoring and behavioural control that’s being normalised by Silicon Valley and its platform capitalist, gig economy and now AI-as-a-service companies. (The latter is what many of the large, profit-maximising, academic-publisher-turned-data-analytics-businesses are surely also in the process of becoming.)

2) Escaping Capitalism

We need others to experiment with means of escaping neoliberalism: through ‘community activism anchored in the social and solidarity economy’ (Wright), such as those campaigning to abolish the police or those self-organising groups that responded to the pandemic by plugging the gaps in care left by the market and state; and through the development of a range of cooperative, collaborative and commons-oriented initiatives of the kind associated with the radical open access publishing community.

But we also need some actors to go through the traditional democratic channels of political parties and government legislation:

3) Taming Capitalism

We need them to do so in order to tame the excesses of neoliberalism: by restoring to gig economy and other precarious workers the rights to sick pay and maternity leave they have lost; or by establishing new twenty-first century institutions such as the ‘data trust for digital workers’ proposed by economist Francesca Bria.

4) Dismantling Capitalism

We also need them to do so with a view to dismantling neoliberalism and helping transition 21st century society into something more socially, epistemologically and cognitively just. This could involve lobbying for the overwhelming dominance of Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis et al. to be brought to an end, and for scholar-led communities (including, say, the likes of the Radical Open Access Collective and ScholarLed) to be able to generate, capture, control, store, publish and share their own research, information and data on a self-managed social and ecological basis.

Still, Pooley may be right about a certain kind of exhaustion in the radical open access world. If he is, I agree it’s not the Richard Poynder/Peter Murray-Rust version, where lobbying government and funders only leads to open access being co-opted by neoliberalism, but taking an alternative route is too niche, offering little hope of systematic change. So the solution becomes giving up and waiting for the end of capitalism - which is less likely, or, as we know from Fredric Jameson/Slavoj Žižek/Mark Fisher, at least harder to imagine, than the end of the world.

I suspect it’s more akin to the kind of wearyness that, in Doppelgänger, Naomi Klein attributes to Greta Thunberg.  Klein suggests that Thunberg ‘no longer believes in that theory of change’ where delivering a speech to centrist political leaders about the climate crisis, the green economy and achieving net zero by 2050 will lead to meaningful action on their part. Thunberg, like many of us, has come to ‘the realization that no one is coming to save us but us, and whatever action we can leverage through our cooperation, organization and solidarities.’ Instead, Thunberg has found a way of ‘saving her words for spaces where they still might matter’, where they can be aligned with ‘principles and actions’, where people are not merely saying the right things (in the case of OA, say, about books having to be open access in the UK’s next REF?), and making promises with little or no intention of following through on them.

(The above was initially written as a Mastodon thread: @garyhall@hcommons.social. Jeff Pooley's response to it can be found on his blog here and on Mastodon here.)

'Publishing After Progress' special issue of Culture Machine

Dear all,

We are pleased to announce the release of Publishing after Progress, a special issue of the open access journal Culture Machine, guest-edited by Rebekka Kiesewetter:

https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/

Culture Machine • Vol 23 • 2024 • Special Issue: Publishing after Progress

Contents:

Kiesewetter, R. (2024) ‘Guest Editorial Notes (after Progress?)’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/rebekka-kiesewetter-guest-editorial-notes/

Kember, S. (2024) ‘Householding. A feminist ecological economics of publishing’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/kember-householding/

Pooley, J. (2024) ‘Before Progress. On the Power of Utopian Thinking for Open Access Publishing’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/jeff-pooley-before-progress/

Godínez-Larios, S. & Aguado-López E. (2024) ‘Publicación digital y preservación de los communes: una apuesta tecnológica latinoamericana’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/godinez-y-aguado-apuesta-tecnologica-latinoamericana/

Kolb, L. (2024) ‘Sharing Knowledge in the Arts: Creating the Publics-We-Need’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/kolb-sharing-knowledge-in-the-arts/

Kiesewetter, R. (2024) ‘Experiments towards Editing Otherwise’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/kiesewetter-experiments-toward-editing-otherwise/

Adema, J. (2024) ‘Experimental Publishing as Collective Struggle. Providing Imaginaries for Posthumanist Knowledge Production’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/adema-experimental-publishing-collective-struggle/

Magazine, R. & Méndez Cota, G. (2024) ‘Reverse Scholarship as Solidarity after Progress’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/magazine-mendez-reverse-scholarship/

Snelting, F. & Weinmayr, E. (2024) ‘Committing to decolonial feminist practices of reuse’, Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/snelting-weinmayr-decolonial-feminist-reuse/

Groten, A. (2024) ‘Designing sideways. Inefficient publishing as mode of refusal’ , Culture Machine Vol. 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/groten-designing-sideways-2/

Mussio, V. (2024) ‘Tus libros y poemas bailan y se besan en Internet: Matrerita, la edición digital y su potencialidad para emancipar cuerpos en peligro’, Culture Machine 23.. https://culturemachine.net/vol-23-publishing-after-progress/valeria-mussio-tuslibrosypoemasbailan/

 
About Publishing After Progress:

Publishing After Progress brings together a series of reflections and discussions that illuminate the current state of scholarly publishing. It highlights the field's ongoing commercial and technological consolidation, evolving under the rhetoric of internationalisation, excellence and modern capitalist progress as an unequivocal benefit. The issue includes analyses of the wide-ranging geopolitical, epistemic, social and cognitive effects of this evolution, marked by a focus on quantifiable outcomes, productivity- and visibility-driven metrics of success, and individual achievement.

Beyond its diagnostic and analytical scope, Publishing after Progress explores the tension between contemporary institutional expectations related to publishing (including research, writing, editing, reviewing, designing and licensing), and how individuals and communities actually want to – or already do – engage in their work, based on their values, expertise and understanding of their writing's needs in light of persistent inequalities in scholarship and scholarly publishing, as well as planetary crises and emergencies.

Publishing After Progress tentatively maps out emergent types of 'resistant' research, publishing and scholarship, unveiling diverse and ongoing stories from activist, artistic and academic authors. These contributors have begun to address the conflict between institutional expectations and their own situated visions of what their work requires in an increasingly troubled and troubling world. Collectively, the articles grapple with the possibility of a politics of engagement in publishing beyond a prevailing capitalist ethos of competition and individual performance evaluation – celebrated by many contemporary institutions as 'progress' – while practically facilitating spaces to experiment with what such politics could entail.

In guest-editing this special issue – at a time when disparities in academia and scholarly communication persist alongside environmental and humanitarian emergencies – Kiesewetter has endevoured to underscore the importance of continuously rethinking the value, scope and purpose of scholarly publishing as well as scholarship more broadly, while remaining committed to fostering intellectual questioning, rigor, debate and the radical democratisation of knowledge creation processes in the sake of knowledge equity and diversity. In this spirit, Publishing after Progress invites its readers to engage with their own writing, editing, review, design and publishing activities: not merely as competitive producers of knowledge, but as active participants in collaboratively shaping the present and future conditions of academic publishing and academic work more broadly. 

Please share this special issue with anyone who may be interested in it.

On Es Devlin and Ekow Eshun's Congregation

Last night caught Es Devlin’s Congregation installation, curated by Ekow Eshun, and the related talk with them both, Entanglement. If you’re in London, today’s the last day to see Congregation at St. Mary le Strand church. It’s worth a look – but be prepared to have mixed feelings.

On the one hand Congregation is making it possible for its refugee 'co-authors' to be seen and heard. And – as with Herndon & Dryhurst’s The Call at the Serpentine – choirs are used to help further convey the collectivity of the portrait.

On the other, the whole thing rests on the telling of the biographical stories of individuals, with Britain and London especially too often being cast as the saviour in the narrative.

Who is Congregation for really? In Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad writes that the most we can hope for from novels is ‘not revelation, the dawning of knowledge, but the exposure of its limit. To realise you have been wrong about something'. Congregation may have the potential to challenge the ‘stop the boats’ crowd in this respect. But do conservatives and right-wingers really constitute the main audience for such a piece? Are most of those left-liberals who are likely to make the effort to see it not already aware of these issues?  Nevertheless – and to borrow once more from Hammad – it feels like pressure is being placed on those who have experienced forced displacement to yet again ‘tell the human story that will educate and enlighten others and so allow for the conversion of the repentant Westerner, who might then descend onto the stage if not as hero than perhaps as some kind of deux ex machina.’

As for Entanglement, held at King’s College London, it was disappointing. Devlin and Eshun are prominent cultural movers and shakers. So it was surprising – and rather sad – to encounter such a lack of intellectual curiosity on their part. By now there has been decades of work on the ethics of hospitality and on recognising the stranger, of which Hammad’s is only a recent literary example. But apart from a cursary – and somewhat confused – mention of Levinas (which consisted in the main of the retelling of his biography as a displaced person himself!?), none of it was referenced here, let alone built upon or engaged with. Why is English culture so anti-intellectual? All in all, very much a missed opportunity.

What If Marx Had Had ChatGPT?: Revolutionising Philosophy Just Like the iPhone Transformed the Telephone

The musician Will.i.am has launched a new interactive radio platform powered by AI. The platform, called ‘RAiDiO.FYI', features AI presenters and aims to revolutionize radio in a way similar to how the iPhone transformed the telephone.

Unlike Spotify's AI DJ, which uses AI to suggest songs based on your listening habits, RAiDiO.FYI allows for two-way communication, enabling users to engage with AI personas by pressing a button at any point to ask questions or start discussions. These AI hosts interact directly with listeners, encouraging them to ask about music, song history or even discuss topics like news, sports, culture and fashion, making listeners ‘active participants’ in the listening experience.

But that’s radio. What would the equivalent be for philosophy, I wonder?

Or might the more intriguing approach be to move beyond using AI merely as a tool to complement, augment or enhance human creativity like this: even if it involves using small language model AI trained on a corpus of ‘meaningful’, subject-specific data to enable readers to enter into a form of personalised Socratic dialogue with an otherwise conventional human-authored book in which they can ask it questions and the book can reply.

(It is something of this kind the e-reading platform Rebind is offering with regard to classic works of literature by Austen, Conrad and Kafka.)

Would it not be more interesting to explore the potential of an AI platform for creating radical new forms of philosophy altogether - forms that may no longer even be recognisable as philosophy as we currently understand it?