Some recent-ish publications

Experimental Publishing Compendium

Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers (book series)

How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’.

'Experimenting With Copyright Licences' (blogpost for the COPIM project - part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books pilot)

Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum

Contribution to 'Archipiélago Crítico. ¡Formado está! ¡Naveguémoslo!' (invited talk: in Spanish translation with English subtitles)

'Defund Culture' (journal article)

How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities (printable poster), Partisan Social Club, adjusted by Gary Hall

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' (journal article)

'Writing Against Elitism with A Stubborn Fury' (podcast)

'The Uberfication of the University - with Gary Hall' (podcast)

'"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall']' (press interview in Colombia)

'Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers', with Janneke Adema and Gabriela Méndez Cota - Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 (blog post)

Open Access

Most of Gary's work is freely available to read and download either here in Media Gifts or in Coventry University's online repositories PURE here, or in Humanities Commons here

Radical Open Access

Radical Open Access Virtual Book Stand

'"Communists of Knowledge"? A case for the implementation of "radical open access" in the humanities and social sciences' (an MA dissertation about the ROAC by Ellie Masterman). 

Monday
May232022

The Culture War and Attack on the Arts

This is an 'author's cut' of the first section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy.

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For more than a decade the British Conservative Party, supported by the country’s right-wing media, relied heavily on a hostility to one of the mainstays of the post-war liberal world order, the European Union, to help win elections and remain in power. Aware that it’s far easier to unite people as an imagined community around what they are not than what they are, they achieved this by linking the grievances of a number of different sections of society – about immigration, national sovereignty, the loss of secure jobs, the metropolitan liberal elite – at least enough to be able to form a government.

After Britain’s January 2020 withdrawal from the EU, however, Brussels and its professional class of political technocrats can no longer be blamed quite so convincingly for the UK’s problems. What we have seen since is the Conservative Party devoting more of its attention to the wider ‘culture war’ it began during the vote leave campaign of 2016. Research reveals that the total number of articles published in the UK press each year concentrating on the ‘existence or nature’ of the culture war increased from a mere 21 in 2015 to 534 in 2020. This was followed by another huge rise in 2021 to 1,470.

Yet this conflict is far from confined to the pages of newspapers and magazines. It’s also being conducted on the battlefield of the country’s elite institutions. Witness the reaction to:

  • the National Trust heritage charity acknowledging in 2020 that almost a third of the stately homes it owns, including Winston Churchill’s country estate Chartwell, have links to slavery and colonialism. Sir John Hayes, a former minister and the founder and chair of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, has gone so far as to tell the House of Commons that ‘defending our history and heritage is our era’s Battle of Britain’. (Subsequently, a group of ‘anti-woke’ insurgents called Restore Trust was established to fight this particular aspect of the culture war by seeking to have its candidates elected to the National Trust’s governing council.
  • the decolonisation agenda within the country’s museums and galleries. In 2021 Dowden was involved again, this time in the vetoing of Dr Aminul Hoque, a lecturer in the Educational Studies Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from being reappointed to serve a second term as a member of the board of trustees of the Royal Museums Greenwich because of his backing for decolonisation.

Declaring war on the ‘wokeism' that is held as leading to the removal of statues (such as that commemorating Bristol slaver Edward Colston) or to the renaming of buildings (including Edinburgh University’s David Hume Tower because of the philosopher’s writings on race), has several other advantages. It distracts from the UK Government’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus contagion and Omicron wave, as well as Afghanistan, Brexit, the Ukrainian refugee situation and the economy: rising energy prices, food, labour and petrol shortages, and the cost of living crisis. And that’s without even mentioning the revelations concerning cronyism, corruption and the Partygate scandal. The 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia and its domination of the news cycles saw the Conservatives calling something of a truce in the culture war. Yet, as with so much of what they do at the moment, this was less an indication of a change of ideological conviction on their part and more a matter of political expediency. As such, it was always going to be temporary – especially when Nigel Farage and his allies are in the process of opening a new post-Brexit front around net zero that is designed to oppose action on the climate emergency. Sure enough, at the Tory’s party’s 2022 spring conference the war in Ukraine was positioned as necessitating an end to criticism of British history and debates about statues: ‘we don’t need to be woke, we just want to be free’, prime minister Boris Johnson emphasised in his keynote speech.

The reason political outliers such as Farage are contributing to the culture war, even when they are not members of parliament themselves, is because doing so enables them to help shift what is considered to be politically impartial and ‘balanced’ a notch or two to the right. This is another of the culture war’s advantages for conservatives. The Department of Education’s new rules concerning the teaching of imperialism, racism and, indeed, the climate emergency in England’s schools provide further evidence of this rightward drift. But the culture war also helps to create an environment in which it is acceptable for the Government to reduce the amount of support it provides to those sectors that are liable to be critical, both of its socially conservative politics – on asylum, the right to protest, secrecy laws and so forth – and of democratic capitalism’s constitutive inequalities (in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality etc.). Public, local government and business investment all having fallen since 2008, many arts organisations have been left struggling to survive during the pandemic due to a lack of a public funding package. (Which isn’t to say the Conservatives can’t still get things badly wrong. A 2020 Government-backed advertising campaign encouraging ballerinas to retrain for jobs in cybersecurity had to be quickly withdrawn after it generated a barrage of protests.)

Nor has the antagonism toward those areas of society perceived as fostering critical thought and dissent been confined to the arts, heritage and media sectors. It is now a decade since Michael Gove, as education secretary, excluded the creative arts from the core school curriculum. A lot of institutions have subsequently scrapped their art, music and theatre programmes. At the same time, well-off private schools have been able to invest in substantial arts centres so their alumni can continue to lead the field.

Yet if the Tories are not committed to protecting the creative industries, they are in favour of introducing the teaching of Latin. In 2021 the Department of Education announced a £4m Scheme to do just that, with plans to roll it out across 40 schools as part of a four-year pilot programme for 11- to 16-year-olds, beginning in September 2022. It’s a prospect that returns us to an era when, as Richard Beard shows in Sad Little Men, his book about the institutions that shaped both Conservative prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson, Britain’s private schools were quite explicit in placing greater emphasis on the ‘development of character’ than on the ‘acquisition of knowledge’. Traditionally, such schools taught very little history, geography or even science, focusing more on sport to exhaust and distract their pupils so they wouldn’t be tempted to have sex with one another. ‘Compliance was more important than critical thinking’, writes Beard. When it came to academic subjects these schools concentrated mainly on the classics and religion. Along with their nostalgic instinct to ‘hide in a glorified’ – and often fictitious – past, evident right down to their ‘almost accurate historical costumes’, and associated aversion to new ideas and to difficulty and complexity, this goes a long way toward explaining why so much culture in England, in particular, has tended to be rather safe, homogenous and anti-intellectual.

The withdrawal of support from the creative subjects by successive Conservative governments is also having an impact on universities, and specifically on what courses are available for students to take at which institutions.  Again, arts and humanities education – including media studies, philosophy, history of art, music, dance and performing arts – can continue (in some form at least) at the kind of wealthy, ‘global-brand’ institution that admits a lot of private school pupils in a manner it cannot so easily at others. The result? Between 2009-10 and 2019-20 the number of university students enrolled in humanities courses in the UK declined by 18%.

In fact, universities are an explicit target in this culture war: for their supposed left-wing campus politics, ‘no platforming’ and ‘cancel culture’. (What’s more they’re a target despite research showing that ‘there’s not a great deal of awareness or particular focus among the UK public about universities being in the front line’ of the culture wars, or of being particularly left-wing.) Within this there has been open government hostility toward the arts and humanities due to their assumed teaching of ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘critical race theory’, and ‘low value’ and ‘dead end’ degree courses. (Again, this is in spite – or is it because – of the fact that, across the West, younger people today are actually quite radical and left-wing.) Just as many cultural organisations and venues have suffered from a lack of financial aid during the pandemic, we now have the arts and humanities being deliberately defunded because they are not considered ‘strategic priorities’. According to the University and College Union, the cuts ‘halve the amount of money available for creative and arts subjects’ from the beginning of the 2021/22 academic year. ‘The reforms are part of government plans to prioritise funding for “high-value” courses like STEM and medicine.’

 

Friday
Mar182022

Art & Knowledge

This is the abstract for a talk I am due to give with Mel Jordan as part of the programme of events (also featuring Emily Seghal and Joanna Drucker) organised to accompany the Bibliotech exhibition, Liverpool, May 5, 2022. The exhibition includes installations by Erica Scourti, Anna Barham, Silvio Lorruso and Diagonal Press.

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Mel Jordan and Gary Hall, Art & Knowledge

For us, the arts and humanities are a site for the invention and testing of new knowledges, new practices, even new subjectivities, not least for the artist and author. Working with a range of different collaborators we carry out such tests in spaces traditionally associated with the institutions of the university and art school. We do so by reimagining various media-material aspects of the creation, circulation and sharing of art and knowledge, including books, journals, pamphlets and presses. See the Freee art collective’s choral reworking of pre-existing manifestos, or the processual texts of Open Humanities Press's two liquid and living books series. But we are also concerned to conduct such tests in the public sphere by collaborating on the reimagining of galleries, libraries, archives, museums and other elements of municipal infrastructure. In both cases we operate very much in terms of those social movements dedicated to radical open access, peer production, internet ‘piracy’ and the anti-privatised knowledge commons. We are now working on the following question: can the collaborative, performative approaches to art and knowledge we have developed with initiatives such as the Partisan Social Club and Media Gifts be translated to cities? The idea is to help reinvent them, too, through the provision of a diverse repertoire of counter-institutional alternatives to those galleries and libraries that are currently being provided by the state and corporate realms, often under the rubric of 'smart'. In the era of AI, blockchains and NFTs, do such counter-practices have the potential to generate a more socially just and environmentally sustainable way of living and learning in cities in the future?

 

Wednesday
Mar022022

Announcing the Open Humanities Press reading group

We are currently in the process of organsing an Open Humanities Press reading group. The idea is to gather a group of people who are interested in discussing continental philosophy and critical theory. The group will meet every month via Zoom. We will host two meetings per text: the first with the author present to discuss their work with the reading group's participants; and the second to discuss material related to the primary text, this time without the author present.

 

 

 

The programme, put together and led by Slyvie Makower,  currently includes:

Claire Colebrook discussing Death of the PostHuman;

Daniel Ross, discussing The Neganthropocene;

Nathan Jones discussing Glitch Poetics;

Noah Roderick discussing The Being of Analogy.

Details of more names and texts will follow soon, along with conformation of dates and times.

The reading group is open to anyone who is interested. If you wish to join please enter your email address here.

Thursday
Feb172022

Más allá del derecho de autor: Otros términos para debatir la propiedad intelectual 

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication, in Spanish only, of Más allá del derecho de autor: Otros términos para debatir la propiedad intelectual (Beyond the Author's Rights: Debating Intellectual Property in Other Terms)

editado por Alberto López Cuenca and Renato Bermúdez Dini

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Más allá del derecho de autor is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/mas-alla-del-derecho-de-autor/

El 1 de julio de 2020 entró en vigor una reforma a la Ley Federal del Derecho de Autor (LFDA) en México que respondía a las exigencias prioritariamente económicas del renovado tratado de libre comercio con Estados Unidos y Canadá, el T-MEC. Frente a estas reformas, un conjunto de colectivos, asociaciones e individuos mexicanos e internacionales levantaron la voz por las numerosas implicaciones que suponían para la libertad de expresión, el debido proceso judicial, el acceso a la cultura y a la educación, la soberanía tecnológica y el impacto medioambiental, entre otras. Para rastrear el profundo alcance que en nuestros días tiene la LFDA en detrimento de otros derechos y prácticas ya afianzadas, desde el Centro Cultural de España en Ciudad de México nos propusimos inscribir estas preocupaciones y debatirlas en un plano sociocultural más amplio, a partir de cuatro nodos conceptuales: 1) saberes originarios; 2) conocimiento abierto; 3) autoedición y reescrituras digitales; 4) hacktivismos. Este libro reúne contribuciones de Alberto López Cuenca, Anamhoo, David Cuartielles, Diana Macho Morales, Domingo M. Lechón, Eduardo Aguado-López, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Irene Soria, Leandro Rodríguez Medina, Marla Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, Mónica Nepote, Nika Zhenya, Renato Bermúdez Dini y Víctor Leonel Juan-Martínez.

On July 1, 2020, reforms to the Federal Copyright Act (LFDA, for its acronym in Spanish) entered into force in Mexico responding to the primarily economic requirements of the renewed free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, the USMCA. Facing these reforms, a group of Mexican and international associations and individuals raised their voices due to the numerous implications that they entailed for free speech, due judicial process, access to culture and education, technological sovereignty and their environmental impact, among others. In order to trace the deep reaching that the LFDA has today to the detriment of other rights and already established practices, from the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City we proposed to inscribe these concerns and debate them on a broader sociocultural plane, starting from four conceptual nodes: 1) native knowledges; 2) open knowledge; 3) digital selfediting and rewriting; 4) hacktivisms. This book brings together contributions from Alberto López Cuenca, Anamhoo, David Cuartielles, Diana Macho Morales, Domingo M. Lechón, Eduardo Aguado-López, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Irene Soria, Leandro Rodríguez Medina, Marla Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, Mónica Nepote, Nika Zhenya, Renato Bermúdez Dini and Víctor Leonel Juan-Martínez.
Sobre los editores

Alberto López Cuenca es profesor titular de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México), donde imparte teoría del arte contemporáneo. Sus intereses de investigación son la teoría del arte contemporáneo, la propiedad intelectual y las nuevas formas culturales, y el trabajo creativo y el posfordismo. Ha publicado y dictado conferencias sobre estos temas, especialmente en América Latina. Sus contribuciones han sido publicadas, entre otras revistas, en Afterall, Parse, Culture Machine, Third Text y Revista de Occidente.

Renato Bermúdez Dini es maestro en Estética y Arte por la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México). Sus investigaciones giran en torno al activismo artístico y los estudios visuales en Latinoamérica. Actualmente se desempeña como profesor de arte latinoamericano contemporáneo en la Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla (México) y es estudiante del doctorado en Filosofía de la Universidad Iberoamericana (Ciudad de México).

Friday
Feb042022

This City Does Not Exist

Back in December Mel Jordan and I gave a joint talk called ‘This City Does Not Exist’ at the City, Public Space & Body conference, Institute for Creative and Culture Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London.

‘The city’ for us (as for this conference) is not something that can be known in advance and thus taken-for-granted. Each city contains a pluriverse of cities. In this sense, the city does not already exist, having been created by architects and planners, say. Such an approach risks limiting responses to the city to critiquing or otherwise tactically engaging with it – as famously with the flaneur, the derive, and the male citizen who psycho-geographically walks through a pre-given urban space. The city, for us, is neither mass nor abstract, formal nor technical. Instead, we see the city as something that has to be invented and called forth in relation to specific contexts and situations: artistically, practically, theoretically.

For anyone interested, Mel and I are in session 11: The Making of Cityness, which is here and below:



But you can now access all of the recorded sessions and presentations of the conference here

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