Research Fellow, Centre for Postdigital Cultures

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) is a new Faculty Research Centre at Coventry University. We are looking to recruit a developer with knowledge of new technologies such as Xtended Reality and those associated with open access publishing. Our Research Fellow/developer will be equally happy with building platforms as they are with contributing to funding bids and academic papers. The person we employ will be involved in all technical aspects of the Research Centre from uploading website content to creating virtual reality scenarios and will have the people skills to work with those at all levels of technical understanding.

You will be qualified in object oriented programming languages such as c#, c++, Java, Java scripts and swift with proven experience of development in modern web development languages like PHP and HTML5. Plus you will possess some experience in 2D/3D modelling using software such as 3DS max and Photoshop and Maya for digital asset creation and Unity 3D or Unreal game engines for developing game-based and immersive experiences.

This is the chance for you to join the CPC team in the early stages of growth and to play a significant role in the development of impactful research activity within the emerging field of postdigital cultures. Led by Professor Gary Hall, the Centre explores how innovations in postdigital cultures can enable 21st century society respond to the challenges it faces at a global, national and local level.  

• how we receive, consume and process information
• how we learn, work, and travel
• how we engage and regenerate our communities and cities  

 What Do We Mean By Postdigital Cultures?

"The digital" can no longer be understood as a separate domain of media and culture. If we actually examine the digital - rather than taking it for granted we already know what it means - we see that today digital information processing is present in every aspect of our lives. This includes our global communication, entertainment, education, energy, banking, health, transport, manufacturing, food, and water-supply systems. Attention therefore needs to turn from "the digital", to the various overlapping processes and infrastructures that shape and organise the digital, and that the digital helps to shape and organise in turn.

The CPC investigates such enmeshed digital models of culture, society, and the creative economy for the 21st century "post digital" world.

Research Areas covered by the centre include:

• Post-capitalist Economies
• Post-humanities
• Affirmative Disruption and Open Media
• Immersive and Playful Cultures, Creative Archiving and International Heritage
• Digital Arts and Humanities
• The 21st Century University and Art School

Members of the CPC include Janneke Adema, Adrienne Evans, Valeria Graziano, Kaja Marczewska, Marcel Mars and Miriam de Rosa. 

The role of the Research Fellow Developer is to plan, develop and manage collaborative and individual research projects, using their specialist technical skills. 

This will include implementing new technology platforms and applications integral to the research projects of the CPC (for example, those associated with open access publishing and immersive XR technology) which address issues at an international scale using research as a driving force for global change.  It is also to develop ideas for generating income and to seek funding opportunities for routes to disseminate research findings that inform teaching and build the reputation of the University whilst advancing knowledge in the field.

The Job Description and Person Specification is available here.

On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene

Many thinkers are currently attempting to replace the tyranny of the human with an emphasis on the nonhuman, the posthuman and the Anthropocene. Yet as I showed in Pirate Philosophy, such post-theory theorists continue to remain bound up with the human in the very performance of their attempts to think through and beyond it. Regardless of the anti-humanist philosophies they profess — be they inspired by Deleuze, Kittler or Latour  — in their practices, in the forms their work takes, in the ways they create, publish and disseminate it, in their associated upholding of notions of individual human rights, freedom, property and so on, they continue to operate in terms of a liberal, humanist model of what it is to be a theorist. 

What forms is critical theory to take then if, in its performance, it is not to be simply liberal and humanist – nor indeed human — but something else besides? To put this question another way: what are the possibilities for inhuman modes of theory? By this I mean theory that is able to take account of and assume (rather than ignore or otherwise deny) an intra-active relation with both human and nonhuman others, be they animals, plants, objects, technologies, the environment or the cosmos?

Bacteria on mobile phones

Why ‘inhuman’? My use of this term is intended to emphasise that the human cannot be simply contrasted to the nonhuman. There is no such thing as the nonhuman – nor the human for that matter. The nonhuman is already in(the)human. Each is born out of its relation to the other. The inhuman is thus a mode of being, thinking and doing with the nonhuman. It follows that any such inhuman theory could also be understood as an instance of the inhumanities. For if the inhuman equals the human intertwined with the nonhuman, then a humanities with this intra-active inhuman figure at their heart must become the inhumanities.

Of course, such an intra-active understanding of authorship and subjectivity could be gathered under the sign of the posthuman and posthumanities. As Janneke Adema and I have shown, however, approaches to the posthumanities have been dominated by the ‘posthuman humanities’ of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and others. My proposal is that the above transformative conception of the human and the humanities can therefore on occasion be more productively articulated in terms of the inhuman. The idea is that such a rhetorical and conceptual shift might enable us to better challenge to the self-identical, liberal humanist subject that serves as a blind spot or datum point in so many theories — not just of the humanities, but of the posthuman and posthumanities too. Indeed, building on the argument developed by McKenzie Wark in ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, could we go so far as to characterise the inability of so much contemporary theory to operate according to a more inhuman mode of philosophy as a sign of its obsolescence? (1)

Wark’s text on the bourgeois novel was published on the blog of Verso Books as an addition to the collection of critical appreciations he provides in his 2017 volume General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers For The Twenty-First Century. While the chapters in General Intellects offer succinct analyses of individual thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Timothy Morton and Quentin Meillassoux, Wark’s focus in ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel’ is The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by the writer and novelist Amitav Ghosh. In this non-fiction book Ghosh contemplates the environmental crisis and global warming from a literary perspective that has origins in the Indian subcontinent. As far as he is concerned, it is not just about ecological problems, or even capitalism and its carbon-based political economy. Climate change is about empire: it is about imperialism. Above all it is about climate justice. Providing an account of Ghosh’s influential lectures on the great derangement thus enables Wark to conceive of a geo-humanities project that brings earth science into contact with ‘post-colonial voices that have pushed back against imperial mappings of the world.’ At the same time, he acknowledges that approaching climate change in terms of social justice brings with it a conceptual challenge. As Wark articulates it when quoting from The Great Derangement:  ‘One has to avoid excluding the diversity of human voices, and yet at the same time avoid excluding the non-human world and rendering it a mere background, or "environment." One has to voice “the urgent proximity of nonhuman presences”’.

Ghosh approaches this conceptual challenge as a literary problem. The difficulty, however, is that climate change goes beyond what can be expressed in the form of the bourgeois novel. The issue for Wark is summed up by the fact that ‘fiction that takes climate change seriously is not taken seriously as fiction’. Hence, for him, some of the best responses to the Anthropocene have been provided by science fiction. Hence, too, Ghosh’s concern that we are now ‘entering into a great derangement’. Wark describes this as ‘a time when art and literature concealed rather than articulated the nature of the times and the time of nature.’ Instead of dealing with the Anthropocene, novels become choked with what, following Franco Moretti, can be termed ‘filler, the everyday life of bourgeois society, its objects, decors, styles and habits'.

The reason the bourgeois novel is obsolete, then, is because it has not ‘adapted to new probabilities.’ Nowhere is this more apparent according to Wark than with respect to the ‘centrality of the improbable’, by which he means the Anthropocene as an epoch  that ‘alters a predictable one’ so that it is no longer about either gradual or catastrophic time, orderly or apocalyptic change, but rather a temporality of a third type. (It’s here he sees Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence as coming into play.) Instead, Wark characterises the bourgeois novel as ‘a genre of fantasy fiction smeared with naturalistic details — filler — to make it appear otherwise. It excludes the totality so that bourgeois subjects can keep prattling on about their precious “inner lives.”’

Yet critical theory has not adapted in the Anthropocene either. In fact, to include contemporary theory seriously in the argument Wark makes about literature and art only serves to place further emphasis on the idea that we are arriving at ‘a great derangement’, a period when no element remains in its original place. For ours is a time when theory too can be said to obscure rather than express the changing nature of the times and the time of nature. As with the bourgeois novel, it’s a derangement that works through formal limitations – and this despite the fact that one of the reasons critical theory continues to be important is because of its ability to denaturalize the parameters within which our professional forms, methods, and procedures of knowledge operate. In the case of theory (and both literary and genre fiction, I might add, although this seems to be something that the commercially-minded, liberal humanist professional in Wark prevents him from seeing, at least in his essay on Ghosh),(2) these limitations involve the named individualistic human author, the codex book, the fixed and finished text, originality, authenticity, copyright and so on. And as with the modern novel, the screening out of this scaffolding — this ‘faded frame’, as David Theo Goldberg has referred to it — ‘“continues to be essential”’ to the functioning of what we might now rather teasingly refer to as bourgeois theory. To further paraphrase Ghosh by way of Wark, here then is the great irony of theory in the Anthropocene: ‘the very gestures with which it conjures up’ nonhuman actors, objects and elements ‘are actually a concealment’ of them.

The performance of serious theory today is thus as formally limited to liberal humanism as the novel. (As Wark says in his essay on Moretti: ‘It is about making something of this world, not transcending it in favor of another.’ So there is no adventuring into the unknown, ‘no spontaneous bravery’, ‘“few surprises”’. It might be ‘hard work’, being a bourgeois writer or theorist, ‘but it’s a steady job’.) This means it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for even the most radical of theories to do anything other than exclude the diversity of human and nonhuman presences. To resample and remix Wark’s text on the novel in the Anthropocene as a means of further undercutting notions of the author as self-identical human individual: anything that would actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it’s created, published and circulated, is regarded as not proper, experimental, odd, and risks banishment. ‘But from what? Polite bourgeois society?’ The for-profit world of Verso books and Routledge journals where proper theory can be found?

In this way theory eliminates the ‘improbable’ — including non-humanist, non-liberal, non-grammatological, non-rivalrous or non-commodifiable ways of being and doing — ‘from serious consideration’. 

(As examples designed to provoke further speculation I could refer here to the fact that the Amazon has recently been declared a 'subject of rights' by Colombia’s supreme court in a bid to protect it from further deforestation; that the Whanganui river in New Zealand has been given the same rights as a human person; and that an orang-utan in Argentina called Sandra has been declared by the courts there to also have legal rights. If nonhuman things can now have rights and be the party of interest in administrative proceedings, can we envisage reaching a point in the future where a work of critical theory can be legally and professionally recognised as having been co-authored by an ape, a river, a forest, an ecosystem, even by nature in general? If so, what then would the consequences be for our notions of the author, originality and copyright? Does even asking such improbable questions not involve us in imposing legal and professional strictures designed for humans onto nature?) Certainly, from the point of view of bourgeois theory, that which is outside its inherited liberal humanist frame in this respect can only appear as ‘strange’, ‘weird’, ‘freaky’. Any such ‘strangeness’ emanating from an actual engagement with the implications of the Anthropocene  can thus be kept in the ‘background’, the unmarked environment in which theory takes place, or moved into it. 

Like the bourgeois novel, such theory — with rare exceptions — ‘draws a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman’, not to mention the ‘collective and collaborative’. Here, too, the actions of individual human agents are treated as ‘discontinuous with other agents’, elements and energies (including ‘the masses, peoples, movements’), even though ‘“the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities…”’.

We can thus see that bourgeois theory clearly ‘isn’t working’. The nonhuman, climate change, the Anthropocence in general, all exceed what the form of proper theory can currently express. Like the novel, it has not adapted to the new reality ushered in by the Anthropocene, including all those laws and legal decisions that are starting to pile up around the question of the rights of nature. Certainly, the last thing such theorists want is for any of this to actually impact on their own ways of performing as authors. Instead, theory ‘imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value’. Just as ‘serious fiction, like bourgeois culture, now seems rather unserious, indeed frivolous’, so too does serious theory.

The nonhuman may be what a lot of contemporary theory studies and writes about, but it cannot take seriously the implications of the nonhuman for theory. As a result, the current landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism smeared with nonhuman filler — objects, technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, stones, geological formations — to make it appear otherwise. 

Endnotes

1) I should stress that my understanding of the inhuman is somewhat different from that of Wark. For him, the inhuman is ‘an apparatus of labor and technology. Indeed, the inhuman is the zone where the partition between the human and nonhuman is negotiated, at the expense of rendering the inhuman labor in between invisible. There is no such thing as a "history of ideas," only of the labor and technics of producing them’ (McKenzie Wark, ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, Verso (blog), August 16, 2017:  https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3356-on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the-anthropocene).

2) Wark comes a little closer to doing so in his earlier text on Franco Moretti and the bourgeois novel, 'The Engine Room of Literature'. Here he suggests that 'Moretti’s evolutionary model for thinking about the novel', in which the:

tree of literature is constantly sprouting new branches, but some die off, taking their place in the fossil record of 'the great unread.' … explains very well ... how the market feedback loop exaggerates differences in success between the more and less fit kinds of literary form.

 It is a ‘matrix of bourgeois culture’ in which ‘all of literary criticism participates’, according to Wark, regardless of whether it does so consciously or not. In the higher echelons ‘it may be all high-minded talk of resistant readings and counter-canons, but down in the engine room the business of literature is all about making variants on products for a panoply of markets.’ 

It would be interesting to pursue this line of thought in the context of Isabel Waidner’s argument about experimental literature in the U.K. and elsewhere being extremely white and middle class, to the exclusion of queer, working class and other nonconforming voices. See her introduction to Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature. Suffice it to say for now that it leads Wark to conclude that: 'It must surely pass through the minds of many professional readers of Moretti that our works, too, are just variations of forms, thrown on the market, where a fickle readership — mostly of grad students — decides for itself whether the form addresses the actual tensions they experience in everyday life.'

Suspended Sentences: An Interview with Stelarc

'Suspended Sentences: An Interview with Stelarc', conducted by Joanna Zylinska and myself, has been published in Stelarc's Stretched Skin: Obsolete, Uncertain and Indifferent Body (Oslo: PS Media, 2018).

Stretched Skin: Obsolete, Uncertain and Indifferent Body, by Stelarc is a beautifully bound book with 200 pages containing stunning images from various photographers and informative texts about Stelarc’s suspension performances. In addition to texts by the artist, it include articles (some previously printed, others newly commissioned) about Stelarc and his work by writers including Darren Tofts and Shannon Bell.

For over 40 years, Stelarc has been pushing the physical, conceptual, and technological boundaries of the body. His work has inspired and awed people the world over, and given many a new perspective on what the body means, where it begins and, indeed, ends. His first book Obsolete Body was published in 1984 as a compilation of Stelarc's suspension performances, it is now a very rare and expensive book to come by. But Obsolete Body, while the source of many people's inspiration, does not tell the whole story or contain a complete record of Stelarc's suspension performances. After its publication, Stelarc continued and expanded his work, and those performances have never been seen in print.

Stretched Skin focuses on all of Stelarc's suspension performances—from the very first in 1976 to the most recent in in 2012, including the collaborations with Håvve Fjell and Wings of Desire in 2012 and 2013. The book also contains some of Stelarc's other performances; where they have direct relevance to, or lead up to, the suspension series.

Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene

We're delighted to announce the first book in our new Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility series:

Bernard Stiegler's The Neganthropocene.

As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap—Bernard Stiegler here produces the first counter-strike and moves beyond the entropic vortex and the mnemonically stripped Last Man socius feeding the vortex.

In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end 'banality' of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in. Understood as the reinscription of philosophical, economic, anthropological and political concepts within a renewed thought of entropy and negentropy, Stiegler’s ‘Neganthropocene’ pursues encounters with Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon, Peter Sloterdijk, Karl Marx, Benjamin Bratton, and others in its address of a wide array of contemporary technics: cinema, automation, neurotechnology, platform capitalism, digital governance and terrorism. This is a work that will need be digested by all critical laborers who have invoked the Anthropocene in bemused, snarky, or pedagogic terms, only to find themselves having gone for the click-bait of the term itself—since even those who do not risk definition in and by the greater entropy.

Like all the OHP books, The Neganthropocene is freely available for download from http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-neganthropocene

It is also available in paperback. If you would like to support open access publishing, please consider ordering a copy for your library.

Warm wishes,

Sigi, David, Gary

Registration Now Open for Radical Open Access II – The Ethics of Care

Radical Open Access II – The Ethics of Care

Two days of critical discussion about creating a more diverse and equitable future for open access.

The Post Office

Coventry University

June 26-27, 2018 

Organised by Coventry University’s postdigital arts and humanities research studio, The Post Office, a project of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures.

Find out more at: http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/roa2/

Attendance and participation is free of charge but registration is mandatory. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/radical-open-access-ii-the-ethics-of-care-tickets-44796943865

Co-curators: Culture Machine, Mattering Press, Memory of the World/Public Library, meson press, Open Humanities Press, punctum books, POP.

Speakers: Denisse Albornoz, Janneke Adema, Laurie Allen, Angel Octavio Alvarez Solís, Bodó Balázs, Kirsten Bell, George Chen, Jill Claassen, Joe Deville, Maddalena Fragnito, Valeria Graziano, Eileen Joy, Chris Kelty, Christopher Long, Kaja Marczewska, Frances McDonald, Gabriela Méndez-Cota, Samuel Moore, Tahani Nadim, Christopher Newfield, Sebastian Nordhoff, Lena Nyahodza, Alejandro Posada, Reggie Raju, Václav Štětka, Whitney Trettien.

Radical Open Access II is about developing an ethics of care. Care with regard to:

• our means of creating, publishing and communicating research;
• our working conditions;
• our relations with others.

Radical Open Access II aims to move the debate over open access on from two issues in particular:

THE QUESTION OF ACCESS. At first sight it may seem rather odd for a conference on open access to want to move on from this question. But as Sci-Hub, aaaarg, libgen et al. show, the debate over access has largely been won by shadow-libraries, who are providing quick and easy access to vast amounts of published research. Too much of the debate over ‘legitimate’ forms of open access now seems to be about how to use the provision of access to research as a means of exercising forms of governmental and commercial control (via audits, metrics, discourses of transparency and so on).

THE OA MOVEMENT’S RELUCTANCE TO ENGAGE RIGOROUSLY WITH THE KIND OF CONCERNS THAT ARE BEING DISCUSSED ELSEWHERE IN SOCIETY. This includes climate change, the environment, and the damage that humans are doing to the planet (i.e. the Anthropocene). But it also takes in debates over different forms:

• of organising labour (e.g. platform cooperativism);
• of working – such as those associated with ideas of post-work, the sharing and gig economies, and Universal Basic Income;
• of being together – see the rise of interest in the Commons, and in experiments with horizontalist, leaderless ways of self-organizing such as those associated with the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Dakota Standing Rock Sioux protests.

Background

In 2015 the inaugural international Radical Open Access Conference addressed an urgent question: how should we set about reclaiming open access from its corporate take-over, evident not least in the rise of A/BPC models based on the charging of exorbitant, unaffordable and unsustainable publishing fees from scholars and their institutions? The conference saw participants calling for the creation of new forms of communality, designed to support the building of commons-based open access publishing infrastructures, and promote a more diverse, not-for-profit eco-system of scholarly communication. With these calls in mind, the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) was formed immediately following the 2015 conference as a horizontal alliance between like-minded groups dedicated to the sharing of skills, tools and expertise. Since then it has grown to a community of over 40 scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other projects. The members of this alliance are all invested in reimaging publishing. And what’s more, are committed to doing so in a context where debates over access—which in many respects have been resolved by the emergence of shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub—are increasingly giving way to concerns over the commercial hegemony of academic publishing. So much so that the issue addressed by the 2015 conference—how can open access be taken back from its corporate take-over? —now seems more urgent than ever.

In June 2018, Coventry University’s postdigital arts and humanities research centre, The Post Office, will convene a second Radical Open Access conference, examining the ways in which open access is being rendered further complicit with neoliberalism’s audit culture of evaluation, measurement, impact and accountability. Witness the way open access has become a top-down requirement - quite literally a ‘mandate’ – rather than a bottom-up scholar-led movement for change. Taking as its theme The Ethics of Care, the concern of this second conference will be on moving away from those market-driven incentives that are frequently used to justify open access, to focus instead on the values that underpin many of the radical open access community’s experiments in open publishing and scholarly communication. In particular, it will follow the lead of Mattering Press, a founding member of the ROAC, in exploring how an ethics of care can help to counter the calculative logic that otherwise permeates academic publishing.

What would a commitment to more ethical forms of publishing look like? Would such an ethics of care highlight the importance of:

• Making publishing more diverse and equitable - geographically, but also with respect to issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality?
• Nurturing new and historically under-represented cultures of knowledge - those associated with early career, precariously employed and para-academics, or located outside the global North and West?
• Ensuring everyone is able to have a voice – not least those writing on niche or avant-garde topics or who are conducting hybrid, multimodal, post-literary forms of research, and who are currently underserved by our profit-focused commercial publishing system?

Indeed, for many members of the ROAC, a commitment to ethics entails understanding publishing very much as a complex, multi-agential, relational practice, and thus recognising that we have a responsibility to all those involved in the publishing process. Caring for the relationships involved throughout this process is essential, from rewarding or otherwise acknowledging people fairly for their labour, wherever possible, to redirecting our volunteer efforts away from commercial profit-driven entities in favour of supporting more progressive not-for-profit forms of publishing. But it also includes taking care of the nonhuman: not just the published object itself, but all those animals, plants and minerals that help to make up the scholarly communication eco-system.

Radical Open Access II is community-driven, and is being co-organised and co-curated by various members of the ROAC in a collaborative manner. It includes panels on topics as diverse as: Predatory Publishing; The Geopolitics of Open; Competition and Cooperation; Humane Metrics/Metrics Noir; Guerrilla Open Access; The Poethics of Scholarship; and Care for the Commons. The conference is free to attend and will also be live streamed for those who are unable to be there in person.